Dr. Angus Andrea Grieve-Smith

Finally listening to Dan Carlin's interview with Alex Wallerstein, author of The Most Awful Responsibility, and it's fascinating.

Wallerstein says the record never shows that Truman was asked whether or not the US should drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The only question we know he was asked was whether to drop an A-bomb on Kyoto, and he said no.

Truman spent the rest of his presidency making sure that the President had to approve future nuclear strikes.

https://www.dancarlin.com/product/ep-34-atomic-accountability/

That city job I applied for? They got 2800 applications for 30 jobs. That means I'm competing with 93 people. Thanks, Mamdani!

https://www.amny.com/politics/mamdanis-tech-pit-crews-2800-applicanants/

Paris Baguette is a Korean chain of (sorta) French pastry shops. Today I noticed the tagline "One s'more bite" on one of their posters.

Is this a second language error, or are native English speakers who were never told that "s'mores" is named because children who ate it kept asking, "Can I have some more?"

Interesting job at the ACLU:

"the NLP Specialist will be responsible for evaluating proposed uses of generative AI and non-generative natural language AI systems, providing recommendations on whether AI tooling is appropriate or ill-suited for various tasks, and when appropriate, contributing to the development and implementation of AI-based solutions to support the organization’s mission."

cc @alex@dair-community.social

https://www.aclu.org/careers/apply/?job=8501473002&type=national

So many shocking things in this thread where @jonny@neuromatch.social digs into the leaked source for Claude Code. I want to focus on one: it's written in Typescript.

As I understand it, "vibe coding" is presented as an escape from the rigorous demands of an interpreter or compiler. But Javascript was also supposed to be that, and Typescript was supposed to restore some of the rigor.

So why not just have the LLM generate assembly language?

I'm guessing because it didn't work. At all.

@jonny@neuromatch.social

Facebook reminded me that I made this three years ago

The New York State department of Labor is being audited by the feds. So of course they send ME two questionnaires that I have to complete within the next two days!

Including this one that asks me to list all the jobs I've applied for since I was denied unemployment (I got a severance payment), and the last 9 jobs that I've held.

Through the magic of the internet it's relatively easy to apply for jobs, so I've applied for at least 24. Fortunately only 9 since my unemployment claim was denied!

Orphans, by Benjamin Rosenbaum - a different perspective on Babar and Curious George:

https://benjaminrosenbaum.github.io/stories/orphans.html

"A leaked document shows the spread of surveillance and investigative capabilities that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials have access to agency wide, from location data harvested from smartphones, to facial recognition apps that can reveal someone’s identity, to tools that let the agency stay anonymous online and approach people undercover. The document covers everything from monitoring social media to tracking the movements of vehicles."

https://www.404media.co/leaked-document-shows-the-surveillance-tech-at-ices-fingertips/

Happy #TransgenderDayOfVisibility #TDOV - Beautiful day for a salad outdoors!

I'm thinking I want to write a whole blog post about how slippery the word "reform" is. Here, New York Focus reporter Melissa Manno uses it to hide her bias.

When David Lombardo presses her, she admits that there is evidence supporting both the holistic and "Science Of" (also weaselly) approaches to reading and math.

But by unquestioningly repeating phrases like "Science Of" and "reform," Manno signals her support for the memorization and practice-heavy approaches.

https://soundcloud.com/user-18109193/07-01-26_cpseg4

How many conversations have you had like this recently?

Them: As a trained musician, I would never ask [an LLM] to write music. But it's great for research!
Me, a trained researcher: 😬

I got a new Garmin bio-tracker, because my cardiologist recommended going above 120 beats per minute for at least 15 minutes a day, and my Fitbit was reporting that my heart hardly ever gets above that.

The Garmin confirms that I did get above 120bpm, but only really when I was going over the Brooklyn and Queensboro Bridges!

In the meantime, I biked 39.75 miles - Maspeth, Bushwick, Flatbush, the edge of Bay Ridge, Park Slope, Greenwich Village, Turtle Bay and back home!

Seems to me like the epistemology is backwards here

Bizarre to see someone advertising large language models with the promise of turning mess into structure. That was the whole promise of formal, deterministic science and technology!

At best, the value of stochastic models, when you actually want to accomplish something, is to look at something that's overwhelmingly messy and fit a model that's slightly less messy.

They can produce something that looks like a rigid structure, but there's no reliability. If you adopt it, you do so on faith.

Today I learned about something called the "entry fiction" where someone absolutely physically does enter the country, but because certain elected officials and courts don't like the obligations that the entry places on them, they PRETEND that the entry was fictional. What the fuck, people?

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-making-of-the-deportation-machine/

I thought I had the wrong video. It was the Bad Company version, but maybe Backstreet did cover it!

This was printed on the outdoor table at the Your Way Cafe in Bushwick, where I ate lunch today. A very poetic way of saying "your way" in Spanish, but maybe it's just a coincidence?

I learned a ton from this writeup about why Claude is not to blame for the bombing of the girls' school in Minab, and Kevin Baker has convinced me that a large language model wasn't the problem.

That said, the things Baker describes sound a lot like the culture that keeps shoving large language models down our throats: moving fast and breaking things, mistaking the map for the territory, and overarching belief systems divorced from reality.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blame-for-the-iran-school-bombing-the-truth-is-far-more-worrying

Ten years ago I wrote this, and I still stand by it:

I'm thinking we need a Genderfluid Day of Visibility, where every genderfluid person presents as a gender different from the one they did on the Transgender Day of Visibility...