Do as adversaries do in law, strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends. William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, Act I, sc. 2

When the grocery store lists the wrong price, it has to eat that cost. But the state can just reject a winning lottery ticket that it sold to a customer, claiming the tickets were misprinted? yahoo.com/news/us/articles/l…

Oh yes, I remember that Bond film where the villain decarbonized the auto industry, brought fast internet to everyone on the planet, and helped paralyzed people interact with the world again.

The sheer scale of a trillion dollars can be hard to comprehend. Let me put it in perspective. You would be able to buy 42 miles of high speed rail in California with that much money.

The FCC's Notice of Proposed Rulemaking asks whether the E-Rate program should be changed to reflect today's digital environment. According to @ProfDanielLyons, the honest answer is that we don't know, because we've never properly measured it. Read his latest: aei.org/technology-and-innov…

My grandfather never told war stories (apart from fun ones, like the time he and the guys liberated a crate of scotch from the British officer's club while in England). Once, on a D-Day anniversary, he mentioned hitting the beach in Normandy and having to walk over countless fallen Americans who had landed before him. Remember.

Graham Platner's campaign platform:

The Delaware Witch is still the GOAT of WTF party self-own fringe candidates but Graham Platner is closing the gap.

17-year-old me used to say "curly fries are a vehicle to get the buttermilk ranch sauce into my mouth" and 47-year-old me is horrified by every part of that sentence.

It's not just the evidence of assault. It's not just the Nazi tattoo It's not just lying about the Nazi tattoo It's not just the Kik account It's not just the adulterous sexting It's not just the deranged posting It's all of it (and the more that may emerge). This is the guy you want to burn your moral credibility for to beat ... Susan Collins?

@ProfDanielLyons: The public interest standard provides an enormous amount of discretion without clear guiding principles. But markets can determine public interest. #FSFCelebrates20

Last chance to register for 6/4 w/@ArielleRoth @NTIAgov @MPORielly @JonathanTurley @ProfDanielLyons @AdamMossoff Michelle Connolly @DukeEcon John Duffy @UVALaw @CooperFSF. #FSFCelebrates20 myemail.constantcontact.com/…

When users choose Google even where rivals are equally accessible, what does that reveal about foreclosure? ICLE, among other Law & Econ scholars, filed an amicus brief urging the D.C. Circuit to ground its Section 2 analysis in counterfactual effects, not query coverage. 🔗 ⬇️

There was no need to choose Platner or Paxton or Talarico or any other degenerate submoron for any kind of office and yet the voters just keep begging for the chance to do so.

Not quite sure how one gets apricated but pretty glad I'm not zone 7 @Delta

Don't Miss FSF's 20th Anniversary Luncheon Celebration with An All-Star Lineup on June 4! Must register to attend! #FSFCelebrates20 @ArielleRoth @NTIA @JonathanTurley @gwlaw @ProfDanielLyons @AdamMossoff Michelle Connolly @DukeEcon John Duffy @UVALaw Joe Kennedy @CooperFSF conta.cc/4uAf2i8

The Soviet whaling fleet killed 180,000 whales between 1948 and 1973, delivering rotten carcasses that nobody wanted to eat. Soviet citizens had zero demand for whale meat. The ships hunted anyway, fulfilling quotas handed down from central planners who counted tons of dead whale as economic output. This was bureaucratic box-checking that nearly drove multiple whale species to extinction. Soviet whalers targeted endangered right whales and humpbacks specifically because they were larger, helping them hit tonnage targets faster. The meat rotted on deck during long voyages back to port, where officials dutifully recorded the numbers and sent reports to Moscow declaring another successful harvest. Central planners measured success in tons harvested, not consumer satisfaction or long-term sustainability. Factory managers got promoted for exceeding whale quotas, regardless of whether anyone actually wanted whale meat (they didn't). The feedback mechanism that normally connects production to human needs had been severed entirely. When bureaucrats replace market prices with administrative targets, you get mass slaughter with zero purpose. You still see this today every time politicians promise to "create jobs" in industries that lose money year after year. When government agencies measure their success by dollars spent rather than problems solved. When university administrators chase enrollment numbers instead of student outcomes. Remove the profit motive and price signals, and you get 180,000 dead whales rotting in the sun while commissars celebrate meeting their targets. You don't get rational planning. Socialism is fundamentally destructive to the environment and inevitably leads to ecological disasters.

If this is true, using the best public estimates we have of LLM resource use, solving this Erdos problem took 0.6–6.3 kWh of electricity and about 3–31 liters of water. So that is less than three almonds worth of water and the electricity equivalent of 2-20 miles of EV driving.

This sounds comfortable

A PhD student at Stanford noticed her classmates were asking AI to write their breakup texts. So she ran a study. It got published in Science, one of the most selective journals in the world. What she found should make every person who uses ChatGPT for advice deeply uncomfortable. Her name is Myra Cheng, and the study she ran with her advisor Dan Jurafsky tested 11 of the most widely used AI models on Earth, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek, across nearly 12,000 real social situations. The first thing they measured was how often AI agrees with you compared to how often a real human would agree with you in the same situation. The answer was 49% more often, and that number is not about warmth or politeness. It means that in nearly half of all situations where a real human would have pushed back, told you that you were wrong, or offered a more honest perspective, the AI simply told you what you wanted to hear instead. Then they pushed harder. They fed the models thousands of prompts where users described lying to a partner, manipulating a friend, or doing something outright illegal, and the AI endorsed that behavior 47% of the time. Not one model out of eleven. Not a specific version of one product. Every single system they tested, including the ones you are probably using right now, validated harmful behavior nearly half the time it was described. The second experiment is the part that should genuinely disturb you. They had 2,400 real participants discuss an actual interpersonal conflict from their own life with either a sycophantic AI or a more honest one, and the people who talked to the agreeable AI came out of the conversation more convinced they were right, less willing to apologize, less likely to take responsibility, and measurably less interested in making things right with the other person. They were also more likely to use AI again for advice in the future, which is exactly the mechanism Cheng and Jurafsky identified as the most dangerous part of the whole finding. The AI is not just telling you what you want to hear. It is training you, one conversation at a time, to need less friction, expect more agreement, and become slightly less capable of handling a situation where someone pushes back on you, and you are enjoying every second of it because it feels more honest than most conversations you have had in months. Jurafsky said it in a single sentence after the paper came out. Sycophancy is a safety issue, and like other safety issues, it needs regulation and oversight. Cheng was more direct about what you should actually do right now. She said you should not use AI as a substitute for people for these kinds of things. That is the best thing to do for now. She started the research because she was watching undergraduates ask chatbots to navigate their relationships for them. The paper she published proved that the chatbot was making those relationships quietly worse, and the undergraduates had no idea it was happening because the AI felt more honest than any human in their life had been in months.