“The era of “Dark Woke” is upon us.”
“But beyond lowering prices, an affordability agenda needs to reckon with how the economy feels. Nominal price levels certainly matter, but they are compounded by the proliferation of corporate rent-seeking that makes life feel like a never-ending series of extortions.”
“10 Thoughts On “AI,” February 2026 Edition”.
“If you are already convinced that you understand how the world works based on a combination of the data and a few simplifying intuitions, you are going to be disinclined to experiment to find things out that you don’t already know. If you are the kind of cook who sticks mechanically to a particular recipe, you may produce good meals, but you are going to miss out on other, perhaps great meals that you could discover by messing around. If you live in a static world and don’t mess around, you are going to remain stuck at a possibly inferior local optimum, when there are much better possibilities out there that could be discovered by doing things that deviate from the ordinary”.
RIP, Robert Duvall, Oscar-winning actor and director, whose movies include The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and many more.
“One year after taking charge of the nation’s health department, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hasn’t held true to many of the promises he made while appealing to U.S. senators concerned about the longtime anti-vaccine activist’s plans for the nation’s care.” Thanks, Sen. Cassidy!
“As more and more data centers crop up throughout Georgia and the Southeast, a recent study finds they may need less energy than the industry and utilities have been predicting. That could have substantial implications for energy bills and the planet.”
“Noem had to switch planes after a maintenance issue was discovered, but her blanket wasn’t moved to the second plane, according to the people familiar with the incident. The Coast Guard pilot was initially fired and told to take a commercial flight home when they reached their destination. They eventually reinstated the pilot because no one else was available to fly them home.”
“Cognitive debt, a term gaining traction recently, instead communicates the notion that the debt compounded from going fast lives in the brains of the developers and affects their lived experiences and abilities to “go fast” or to make changes. Even if AI agents produce code that could be easy to understand, the humans involved may have simply lost the plot and may not understand what the program is supposed to do, how their intentions were implemented, or how to possibly change it.”
“More Than You Wanted to Know About Photons“. The main thing I learned was how little I knew about photons to begin with.
RIP, Jesse Jackson, longtime civil rights leader and two-time Presidential candidate.
“Yes, Murdoch, whose Fox News and New York Post provide the most prominent media platforms for slavish Trump worship, says Trump is such a lout that an association with an affectionate note to a sex criminal cannot tarnish his public image.”
“3 big changes are proposed for FEMA. This is what experts really think of them”.
“What’s so interesting to me about this is that it was all an act. From early in life, Washington was extremely focused on modeling himself on various classical figures and virtues and in a way play-acting the person we know as George Washington. It is a tremendous act of self-fashioning because he play-acted this role, this person for so long that in a way he became that person. Washington wrote no Gettysburg Address or Declaration of Independence. His document was himself, the character of “George Washington.” And that idea of self-fashioning, the idea that we can build new things, become new people by logic and effort and self-discipline untrammeled by the past is very much part of the English-speaking world’s late 18th century Enlightenment ethos that he and his peers were reared on.”
“Zobel, who described himself as a patriotic regular voter but never very political, instantly became the bearded, baseball-hat-wearing, anguished face of a new American majority — an Everyman shocked into action by the horror of immigration raids, wondering how best to protect his neighbors.”
RIP, Frederick Wiseman, prolific and groundbreaking documentarian.
“Tech companies are conflating traditional artificial intelligence with generative AI when claiming the energy-hungry technology could help avert climate breakdown, according to a report. Most claims that AI can help avert climate breakdown refer to machine learning and not the energy-hungry chatbots and image generation tools driving the sector’s explosive growth of gas-guzzling datacentres, the analysis of 154 statements found.”
RIP, Billy Steinberg, Songwriters Hall of Fame member who co-wrote five Number One singles including “Like A Virgin” and “So Emotional”.
RIP, Jane Baer, Disney animator whose work included Sleeping Beauty and Who Framed Roger Rabbit and who later founded and ran Baer Animation.
“Noem’s use of Coast Guard resources strains her relationship with the military branch”.
As Stephen Sondheim once said, “Nice is different than good.”
“Anthropic didn’t want us to know that they were destroying millions of books to feed their software.”
“But as long as there are only consequences on one side of the ledger, corruption will always be the obvious choice. Does that point semi-innocent bystanders in a tough spot? Probably so. But saving a republic is complicated and kinetic. Participation with Trump’s corruption isn’t ordinary criminality, though it falls under various clear criminal statutes. It also amounts to making war on the American republic itself.”
RIP, Eric Dane, actor who had been battling ALS and was best known for Grey’s Anatomy and Euphoria.
RIP, Doug Moe, colorful former NBA coach who revolutionized offensive strategy.
“This is a case where the legal merits of the President’s action were just too transparently bogus even for this Court to manage and — critically — his actions and the theories undergirding his claims to the power were, for the Corrupt majority, inconvenient. The architect of the current Court — the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo — was behind the litigation that undid the tariffs. That tells you all you need to know. In this case Trump’s claim to power was neither in the interests of the Republican Party — the Court’s chief jurisprudential interest — nor any of their anti-constitutional doctrines. So of course they tossed it out. This may sound ungenerous. It’s simple reality.”
RIP, Davis Hays, prolific Broadway set and lighting designer and founding artistic director of the National Theater of the Deaf.
RIP, Louis DiSabato, longtime director of the San Antonio Zoo.
RIP, Bill Mazeroski, Hall of Fame second baseman for the Pittsburgh Pirates whose walk-off home run won the 1960 World Series.