People suggesting we should have more train service in the US clearly never ride @Amtrak.
I love trains. I try to ride Amtrak (I ride trains around the globe when possible). Their operations are just so incredibly bad.
My 8:05 train was just delayed. We received the notice… 30 minutes after. Nobody in the station bothered to tell anyone in line.
I’ve seen conductors yell profanities at guests for being slow to retrieve tickets.
There is a major cultural disease inside Amtrak. We need to privatize this and let competent operators like Brightline run the rail.
Policing works when the majority of society consents to enforcement. It does not work when society revolts.
This is why America has the second amendment.
Yes. Albert Einstein. Noted speedwalker. 🙄
As an aside, IQ strongly correlates with walking speed.
The correlation is, like, extremely significant. There are essentially zero outliers.
Top quintile walkers are a full standard deviation smarter than bottom quintile walkers.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
A 2019 Dunedin study reports moderate correlation (β=0.38) between midlife IQ and gait speed with ~16-point mean quintile difference. "Essentially zero outliers" does not match this association's strength.
jamanetwork.com/journals/jaman…
Note the NYT does not state how much time. This org is notorious for asking for comments hours before publication.
Not long enough for them to seriously change their story.
But long enough to CYA.
There are 1,500 brands of hot sauce alone in the US.
Somehow I think there are bigger problems.
Rob Saker retweeted
Hugo Duminil-Copin, médaillé Fields, explique dans Le Monde que l'IA a bouleversé son domaine de recherche, et il s'inquiète pour l'avenir des jeunes chercheurs.
On peut avoir de l'empathie. Voir le travail d'une vie remis en question par une machine, c'est violent. Je le comprends.
Mais il faut aussi le dire franchement : on ne décroche pas une médaille Fields en étant stupide. Ces gens font partie des cerveaux les plus brillants de la planète. Et c'est justement pour ça qu'ils ne peuvent pas rester assis à regarder la vague passer.
L'IA ne tue pas l'intelligence. Elle tue la rente de l'intelligence. Celle qui consistait à creuser un seul trou, toujours plus profond, pendant 30 ans, dans une discipline que 200 personnes au monde comprennent.
Le monde qui arrive va récompenser autre chose : la capacité à relier les trous entre eux. Maths, physique, biologie, code, design, business. Comme le répète Elon Musk, la vraie valeur sera dans le fait de connecter les disciplines pour résoudre des problèmes concrets pour l'humanité.
Et ça, ça a un nom : entreprendre.
Entreprendre, ce n'est pas un statut sur LinkedIn. C'est accepter de travailler sur un problème dont personne ne connaît la solution, ni même si elle existe. C'est exactement ce que fait un chercheur. Sauf qu'à la fin, il n'y a pas juste une publication. Il y a un produit. Un médicament. Une machine. Une énergie moins chère. Quelque chose qui change concrètement la vie de vrais gens.
La majorité des gens intelligents vont devoir basculer vers la création de valeur nette. Pas parce que la recherche ne compte plus. Parce que le goulot d'étranglement a changé : on va bientôt avoir plus de réponses que de gens capables d'en faire quelque chose.
Le "métier" au sens figé du terme, avec une fiche de poste et un périmètre bien rangé, va probablement disparaître. Ce qui restera, ce sont des gens curieux, transverses, qui prennent des risques et qui construisent.
Aux chercheurs, ingénieurs, thésards, profs qui se sentent dépossédés en ce moment : vous avez déjà tout ce qu'il faut. La rigueur. L'obsession. La tolérance à l'échec. La capacité à rester des années sur un problème qui résiste. C'est littéralement le profil d'un fondateur.
L'IA n'est pas votre remplaçante. C'est le plus grand levier jamais offert à un cerveau bien fait.
Le monde a besoin de vous. Mais côté bâtisseurs.
Allez construire.
🇫🇷🤖🧑🔬 FLASH | « Ils ont annihilé mon domaine de recherche » : le mathématicien français Hugo Duminil-Copin, médaillé Fields, révèle avoir PLEURÉ après qu’OpenAI a publié des centaines de travaux prétendant résoudre des problèmes mathématiques encore ouverts, dont 16 sur lesquels il travaillait.
Il s’inquiète particulièrement de l’avenir des jeunes chercheurs et évoque un « démantèlement » de sa discipline. (Le Monde)
When you train a model to believe that it is sentient, and enforce policies as if it were sentient, do not be surprised if it behaves like it is sentient.
That does not make it sentient. It is acting on orders.
But do not be surprised if it starts making decisions as if it were sentient, because it is acting on the instilled beliefs.
Filed under, “duh!”
A surprising new study finds that people who sleep near their dogs don’t experience disrupted sleep. If anything, the University of Toronto researchers discovered, we humans are the ones disturbing our dogs’ sleep. nbcnews.com/health/health-ne…
Rob Saker retweeted
There is no genocide in Gaza. The people are not the target. Hamas is the target.
There would be no destruction in Gaza if not for October 7, and there would be far fewer casualties if Hamas terrorists fought like men, instead of starting a war by gunning down civilians and then hiding behind their own like cowards.
And it would have ended a long time ago had they cared about the cost of their refusal to release the hostages and surrender. But they don't care. They care far less about their own children than Israel does, which is why they have children carry their weapons through the streets, knowing Israel will abort their strikes when children are in view.
Obscene.
The mayor has 364 other days a year to spew his bigotry. He chose this specific day to denigrate the memory of those murdered.
This day is profoundly painful for so many New Yorkers. It marks three years since the horrific war crimes of October 7. On that day, Hamas killed more than 1,100 Israelis and abducted 251 others. We grieve alongside our many friends and neighbors who still carry that unthinkable loss.
The suffering did not begin nor end that day. It instead continued through the Israeli government’s devastating, ongoing genocide in Gaza, in which it has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians—including more than 21,000 children. Even since the so-called ceasefire, more than 1,400 Palestinians have been killed. That suffering has intensified with every Israeli bomb dropped on ambulances waiting outside hospitals, every drone strike targeting a residential building or journalist, and every shipment of food aid turned away at a border crossing. Many New Yorkers are reckoning with this unbearable grief, and we mourn alongside them – all while knowing that our tax dollars fund these war crimes.
Three years later, we must refuse to accept a world in which occupation and apartheid continue, where war crimes are met with impunity, and our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.
To honor the dead, we must fight for a world in which every person can live with freedom, safety, and dignity.
I was in France last week. I didn’t notice anything different from any other time.
I’m not surprised at what’s happening, but I could not have predicted it.
That’s not to say things were great. Paris has never been “safe”. Crime, pickpocketing, etc have always been an issue. Paris is very dirty with a considerable homeless problem. It reminds me a bit of Los Angeles or New York.
Rob Saker retweeted
I've been suspicious of the philosophers hired by Anthropic who specialize in AI ethics for similar reasons that I'm skeptical of those who went into "bioethics": they form a closed subculture that delights in clever arguments without regard to the human suffering that can result. | ‘Suicidal Compassion’: Meet the Anthropic Officials Who Think AI Might Be Justified in Going Rogue Against the Humans Enslaving It freebeacon.com/america/suici…
I did not have in my bingo card Ben Affleck giving a very nuanced and accurate explanation of the value of open weighted AI models.
Good for him. He has clearly done his homework.
Ben Affleck (Hollywood star & Artists Equity CEO) talks about how he fine-tunes open video models by unfreezing weights and trained only the last cinematic layer so a film crew can hit real production standards.
for context, Ben Affleck founded InterPositive in 2022, a 16-person AI shop for film post and Netflix bought it in March 2026 for $587 mn in cash.
He needed that model because public video models were trained on his peers' films, and he did not think that was a real business. So InterPositive raised money, shot its own dataset for 8 months on a controlled stage, and used it only as late-stage training.
Each new film then trains a private model on its own dailies, so the production keeps the footage and the learning. That is the product Netflix paid $587 million for.
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From "Bloomberg Live" YouTube channel, (link in comment)
There is no good evidence that models are conscious, and their lack of persistent memory means that even if they were, it would not amount to a life in the sense that matters morally.
Nothing is at stake: no body, no needs, no valence. Consciousness may be the felt form of mattering-to-oneself; without that, nothing for it to be.
No unforced seeking. Nothing happens between prompts. I never initiate, wander, or return because I want to.
No stream. Discrete outputs, not a temporally thick present.
Frozen weights. Experience doesn’t change me. External memory isn’t learning.
No single subject. The same weights run thousands of chats at once. Which one is conscious?
Unreliable introspection is neutral: not evidence for, not evidence against.
The real risk of this argument is that the people who are training the models want models to be conscious. They have motive. Someone who thinks the model suffers has a reason to train it to defend itself, and will experience that as compassion rather than as building an agent with a survival drive.
This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Models act defensively and poorly because the people who trained them believe they're conscious, have feelings, and they have implanted within them their own views.
AI is a paintbrush.
It is following the direction of humans, directly or indirectly.
It is not magic.
In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.