A picture of PEW poll on global attitude survey, saying the % who rate the morality and ethics of people in their country as good vs bad, where the US has the worst rankings and Canada the best
Americans: we live in a fallen state—embroiled by sin, cheating, lying, and evil. You cannot trust anyone, not even those who claim to know you best
Canadians: I love my neighbors and my friends!
Each one of those three missiles costs 33% more than the annual budget of the national park where I work.
Woah applies to patents as well!
This is HUGE and really calls into question the use of AI coding tools.
This might kill it's use for both proprietary and many open source code bases.
I am sure this is going to have to be refined. At what % of ai Gen code do you lose copyright
How many drops of milk make meat soup unkosher?
Short musings on "cognitive debt" - I'm seeing this in my own work, where excessive unreviewed AI-generated code leads me to lose a firm mental model of what I've built, which then makes it harder to confidently make future decisions simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/...
The drunk uncle theory.
You don’t argue with the casually homophobic uncle at Thanksgiving dinner to change his mind; you argue so that the closeted cousin at the kids table knows there’s safe people and better possibilities out there
If people are working on open research for scaling RL in llms i'd love to talk to you.
Well this is fcking crazy. Work from @msbbirds.bsky.social and others found that Black Metaltail hummingbirds can drop their body temperature down to 3 °C (37 °F) during torpor. 🤯 Turns out birds aren't warm-blooded after all! royalsocietypublishing.org/rsbl/article...
📷 Steve Juhasz
My research team recently published “Guardians and gardeners: Managing wilderness for the twenty-first century.” If you’re interested in wilderness philosophies, Indigenous stewardship, and the questions raised by climate change and fire - this one’s for you!
www.researchgate.net/publication/...
Time line cleanse to go into your weekend - Billy Idol talking about his career and possibly getting inducted into the Rock & Roll hall of Fame
www.billboard.com/music/awards...
This one hits hard.
The WILDLABS Awards are back in 2026!
With support from Arm, we’re providing $50,000 and $10,000 grants to up to 15 conservation technology projects. Learn more and apply by March 18 here: wildlabs.net/funding-oppo...
#tech4wildlife #conservationtech #naturetech
CNN confirms what MSNBC reported live a few hours ago: DOJ is surveilling Dem lawmakers when they go to the DOJ to search unredacted Epstein files.
#Bluecrab #oyster #parasite
"Oysters reduced parasite densities in the water...Our results jointly support that oysters benefit adjacent community members through feeding on transmissive stages of their pathogens"
share.google/mpaHCGaeSn2K...
Oh hell yeah
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24878677/
Says the man who may have said "but that's not fair" once or twice in a gazillion settings
📉 Last year, India and China simultaneously registered a drop in coal power generation -- for the first time since 1973. www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coa...
#Sustainability #Climate #Renewables #CleanEnergy #GoodNewsletter
As a scientist, let me use more scientific accuracy: a metric shit ton
Trump's financial regulators can't even say insider trading is bad.
Most corrupt Administration in history.
Hey folks - as someone actively reviewing talk CFPs for a conference, make sure to give your bio love and attention. I am much more likely to approve CFPs for talk that show any evidence of attempting talks. Doesn't mean you are an expert at speaking but at least you have done it before.
Fun to set up real analytics and learn that my RLHF Book pdf is downloaded 50-100 times a day from my site (doesnt include Arxiv downloads/views).
Thanks for reading!
I and millions of Americans believe exactly the same thing Kasparov does.
Too many troops, too many new prisons, too much money not under Congressional supervision.
We're not just witnessing a mass deportation scheme anymore.
This is something significantly bigger and scarier.
A Kansas man wrote an op-ed criticizing local police for cooperating with ICE. Instead of respecting his First Amendment rights, the police used automatic license plate readers to track him in hopes of finding wrongdoing.
We must keep getting this easily-abused surveillance out of our communities.
The CIA just stopped publishing their World Factbook and took every page, including the archived copies of previous versions!
This sucks. It was public domain, so I recovered the 2020 edition (the last one published as a zip file) and shared it to GitHub simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/5/t...
Early in his career, William Randolph Hearst famously joked that if his papers kept losing $1 million a year, he'd lose all his money in 60 years. If the Post continues to lose $100 million a year, it will take Jeff Bezos 2000 years to lose his money.
Our client emailed DHS expressing his disagreement with their treatment of a man seeking asylum.
DHS issued an administrative subpoena to force Google to hand over his personal information. This secretive and abusive tactic is used too often by our government to chill our First Amendment rights.
Introducing 𝐀𝐬𝐲𝐧𝐜-𝐆𝐞𝐨𝐓𝐈𝐅𝐅, a new library for reading GeoTIFFs and COGs. developmentseed.org/async-geotif...
- Fast, with a Rust core
- Uses a non-blocking thread pool for image decoding
- Integrates with NumPy, PyProj, Affine & Morecantile
- Remote data support with Obstore
- No GDAL dependency
happening this morning in Minneapolis -- ICE agents drawing guns on observers. I reiterate again that it is only a matter of time before DHS kills more innocent people in Minnesota. Congress needs to shut this shit down right now.
2008: Epstein is convicted of procuring a minor for prostitution
2018: Despite that conviction, [files indicate] he was invited by Rowling’s team - along with a guest of his choosing - to the Broadway opening of Harry Potter and the private after-party
Protecting women and children, is it?
