Today is the 40th anniversary of the publication of NEUROMANCER, William Gibson's (@GreatDismal) debut novel. Nobody asked me, but I've written an essay commemorating the occasion, complete with pretentious title. profbootyphd.wordpress.com/2…

1 modular R01 in 1995: - Buy latest equipment - 7 postdocs - 3 grad students - Lab manager - 2 technicians - Tenure - Cover good % salary 1 modular R01 in 2026: - 1 postdoc - Consumables

It is frankly embarrassing that a sitting U.S. Vice President is unaware of one of the most elementary facts of World War II. Nazi Germany did not negotiate an end to World War II. The war in Europe ended with Germany’s unconditional surrender after total military defeat and the collapse of the regime in May 1945.

I still find it baffling that Berkeley gave up its cheat code of admitting really smart, hardworking students who couldn't play the Ivy admissions game. The theme of California public institutions seems to be: Try to kill the golden geese!

Idaho adopted no-excuse mail-in voting in 1972. Washington did it in 1974. California in 1978. Iowa in 1990. Arizona, Wyoming and Vermont in 1991. Nebraska in 1997. Oregon in 1998. Wisconsin and Florida did it in 2001. NC in 2002. Ohio in 2005. Georgia, Illinois, and NJ in 2006.

Yeah, that’s just flatly false.

Can you imagine how stupid the students in their classes have to be for the woke faculty of the University of California to beg the UC Academic Senate to bring the SAT back?

This is a deeply frustrating conversation. Samuel Moyn wrote a book about gerontocracy. Derek Thompson interviews him, and opens by telling us that 50% of the federal budget is shoveling money to old people. Yet across the entire conversation, neither the host nor guest advocates cutting Social Security and Medicare. They talk about politicians and professors being too old. Ok, but 99% of people will never be Senators or professors. They also focus on issues that indirectly favor the old over the young like NIMBY. But they never go: "You know how half our federal government is about shoveling money from young people, who have less of it, to old people, who have more of it? Maybe we shouldn't do that!" In fact, Moyn says the opposite! Give old people more money, and then they'll have less political power. Let's walk through the logic here: 1) Old people use political power to rig the economy in their favor 2) Let's just give them all the money in the hopes they'll stop doing that. I'm amazed by this. The most direct way government can advantage group X over group Y is to take money from Y and give it to X. Everything else is much less efficient in terms of adjusting people's material conditions. So Moyn is advocating continuing to give direct transfers to old people, even increasing those transfers, in the hope that the political system will lead to policies that indirectly help young people. By way of analogy, imagine you're worried about someone robbing you. So your plan is "I'll give him all my money. Then, there's a chance he might stop harassing me and do something that indirectly benefits me in the long run." This is not serious analysis. It's a desperate cope from someone who sees that we've become a gerontocracy and refuses to believe that the entitlement programs he likes are the main causes of it. Entitlements are headed toward a crisis, and we're going to have to make a decision soon about whether or not the federal government should exist mostly to make old people wealthier, crowding out everything else. There is no serious approach to tackling gerontocracy without pushing entitlement reform. Yes, it's politically difficult, but what's even the point if we're going to cower in fear from the actual issues facing the country?

Another Berkeley professor told the author: “In my second-year engineering class, a student asked me to explain why 1/2 1/3 = 5/6…. The lecture had to stop while I explained fractions.”

I fully despise Musk, but this is the correct take.

I have issues with Musk, he seems like a real psycho actually, but the world was asking for electric cars, better batteries, better lower and upper orbit tech, satellite internet…governments were failing to develop these things themselves, his companies (with govt help, yes) pulled it off, now these companies are as valuable as like the entire Iberian Peninsula. He’s invested in his companies so their valuation makes him a “trillionaire”—but that’s simply because he did the thing that government and markets asked him to do. Virtually all of that money flows back into the companies which he was asked to build, and built. He couldn’t cash out and build a private army even if he wanted to. Ultimately he is a servant of the state. I get more pissed off when I read about some billionaire divorcee donating 10M to an NGO which everybody has voted against over and over.

Berkeley math professor: “Today, the more successful a public high school is at preparing its students, the lower its graduates' chances of getting into top UC campuses like Berkeley and San Diego.” Berkeley admitted 45% of applicants from a high school where nearly 94% of “students failed to meet the state standards in mathematics.” It admitted less than 14% of applicants from a school where “nearly 100 percent of its students in AP Calculus BC pass the national exam with a perfect score of 5.”

Been brushing up on the discourse and I’ve decided that every single person is richer than me is a greedy bastard and every single person poorer than me is a loser. I and only I have the exact right amount of money.

Anniversary of one of the funniest tweet sequences I've ever seen from @jdcmedlock

I dunno, Elon's companies do good stuff. On the other hand, he's a weasel who spreads political garbage. It's also not ideal for one man to have that much political power. I'm open to reasonable ideas to trim his wealth a bit. I just don't want to kill the goose laying the eggs.

It's not just that virtue signalling is obnoxious; it's that so much virtue signalling is done to reinforce narratives that are utterly, empirically false. We spend billions and billions on feeding people and programs for the homeless. The problems aren't about money.

I don't have any moral objection to trillionaires, but does it have to be a whack job obsessed with white identity politics and conspiracy theories

Dems support policies that inflate Elon Musk's wealth then complain when he gets wealthy.

Medicine discovers the bitter lesson: frontier LLMs (here GPT 5.2, Opus 4.6, Gemini 3.1) outperform specialized "clinical AI" (e.g. OpenEvidence) in a blind test. Even funnier that hospital IT are more likely to approve the *specialized* versions despite them being worse.