AI companies are paying screenwriters, lawyers, and other white-collar professionals to produce the training data needed to automate their jobs. I spoke with more than 30 workers about conditions inside this fast-growing and extremely secretive new gig economy.
holy shit
Current NIH leadership want you to think they are using rigorous, consistent & scientific processes to screen studies to align them with agency priorities.
But the process that they have put down on paper is a sham.
It’s important to know NIH is not following its own guidance. Here’s why:
🧵1/
see link https://www.dailytarheel.com/article/opinion-editorial-district-four-endorsement-20260302
Thanks to the Daily Tarheel for endorsing Nida Allam: In a time where congressional Democrats are flailing as the opposition party, Allam’s commitment to fight for progressive policy — often just common sense policy — is needed now more than ever.
www.dailytarheel.com/article/opin...
It seems all Kansas-issued trans drivers' licenses are invalid, effective tomorrow
It is now illegal for trans people to drive a car until they surrender their license at a DMV (that most will need to drive to) and have it reissued with the wrong gender marker
This was never about woman's sports
This a great piece of investigative journalism. @rollingstone.com
This should be required reading for scientists and ethicists.
Ethics matter, especially in science.
www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...
Screenshot of a YouTube video posted by NBC Sports titled, "Alysa Liu's FABULOUS gold medal-winning free skate, Winter Olympics 2026."
This is the Alysa Liu performance everyone is talking about, and yes, you should watch it! www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCrF...
this is exactly why I am absolutely not willing to overlook anyone who was once “advocating for ending USAID” as merely committing a little oopsie-daisy-booboo, by the way
with alt text, because everyone needs to be able to read this 😭
Cottonwood or maybe tulip tree?
Found an additional graphic that gets even more of these quotes together.
I've kept "I hate myself, I hate clover, and I hate bees" pinned above my desk since I first started studying evolutionary biology as an undergraduate. So relatable to get extremely frustrated with your study system.
A parent at my kids’ school was abducted a few hours ago.
Please help us help the family with legal expenses and care for their elementary school son (who doesn’t even know his dad was taken yet 💔):
gofund.me/20a5b26ab
I genuinely cannot believe the degree to which we are pissing away this generational breakthrough, even given the fuckmuppets who are involved www.nbcnews.com/health/healt...
Happy #SuperbOwl day to this winged bandit who stole my fungi-dyed hand-knit hat.
Holy shit: it's an RFP for the NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology (PRFB). Hello old friend www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...
Rally for Nida Allam with Bernie Sanders, Friday Feb 13, doors open 11:30 am, program at 2 PM Durham Convention Center
Politics starts local. I think NC's 4th District needs a Congressperson who isn't paid for by corporate dollars and who'll fight hard against Trump and his cronies. I'm supporting Nida Allam
Snowstorms are more than just an inconvenience for wheelchair users. Inadequate snow clean-ups means a loss of autonomy for many. New for me at @motherjones.com www.motherjones.com/politics/202...
IMAGE: a stylized cell phone with flames coming out of it. TEXT: Delete the Starbucks app off your phone. Seriously. Starbucks is the biggest violator of labor law in modern history. We have the power to tell them union-busting is bad for business. Don't shop at Starbucks until they do better by their baristas!
If Starbucks won’t respect workers at the bargaining table, they don’t deserve our clicks or orders.
Our call to action is simple:
📱 Delete the Starbucks app. #DeleteTheApp
bit.ly/deletetheapp
Rereading these two papers:
Holes in the hologenome: why host-microbe symbioses are not holobionts.
journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...
The Hologenome Concept: Helpful or Hollow?
journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...
And I still find myself in general agreement with most of the points in them
January 2026 temperature rankings compared to all Januarys since 1895.
"You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time." "Those," I said, "are the words of my friend the baker. ‘One had no time to think. There was so much going on.’" "Your friend the baker was right," said my colleague. "The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your ‘little men,’ your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?
"But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait. "But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
The parallel to this is how academics of Germany post-1933 experienced the rise of fascism & still did their research. Nazism meant new rules, new paperwork. You were just so busy, you barely had time to do research, of course you didn't have energy to protest
press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago...
notable that actual Jewish seniors get this in a way that the ersatz holocaust museum does not
Nature and Science journalists denied entry to event featuring NIH Director
Further increases in confidence for an impactful winter storm are noted across the Carolinas with greater uncertainty still farther up the coast.
Wrote myself a pep talk to get back to work tomorrow. It helped me. Hope it helps you.
BTW when I say abolish ICE, I mean abolish it entirely and replace it with exactly nothing. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. That's it.
They are never, ever going to win in Minnesota.
🚨 New from me: Grant review at more than half of NIH's institutes could be frozen by the end of the year.
That's because crucial NIH grant-review panels are slated to be empty at those institutes by Jan 2027.
A wonky bureaucratic problem with big implications.
A short 🧵
