May 11, 2026
Papers that are more difficult to read might be worth it if AI increased the amount of good science being produced. But this doesn’t seem to be the case. Organization Science is desk-rejecting (e.g., rejecting a paper before even sending it to peer reviewers) nearly 70% of manuscripts that made heavy use of AI. This number drops to 44% for papers written without AI.
Can we do this kind of analysis on grant submissions?
Without uncertainty tolerance, we risk getting stuck at what statisticians call a local maximum. Like a mountain climber standing at the top of a hill, unaware of a taller peak just out of sight, our discomfort with uncertainty can keep us wedded to a business strategy, a job, or a relationship that is safe, but not optimal. Uncertainty tolerance allows us to persist through ambiguity—and it has never been more relevant.
5 Questions to Help You Navigate Uncertainty
I refer to this kind of uncertainty as navigating with a compass, not a map. I will read How To Not Know — this post is by the author — to see if it adds to the toolkit.
Moderation is infrastructure. It must be built like roads and power grids–with deliberate choke points, fail‑safe valves, and capacity limits. In road engineering, it is the ‘design speed’ of the road that users drive, not the posted speed limit; the tighter the curves, the shorter the sightline, the more measured the pace. The same is true of platforms–architecture sets behavior more effectively than policy.
What We Will Refuse to Build Again | dangerousmeta!
How do we architect for thoughtfulness and meaningful engagement?
May 10, 2026
To the mothers who shaped me.
Especially the three in this photo.
Communities frequently fail children across five sectors of their lived experience: ages of criminal responsibility, juvenile detention, child labor, immigration enforcement, and foster care. Policies in each area combine with economic and social conditions to limit opportunity and perpetuate harm. Examining these systems side by side reveals a pattern: children most at risk are those whose families, schools, and communities cannot buffer against structural deprivation. International comparisons demonstrate that the U.S. approach is a policy choice, not an inevitability. Countries like Norway and Sweden prioritize education, family, and social services rather than criminalization, showing that alternative paths are possible, practical, and effective.
Criminalizing Childhood: When the Justice System Fails America’s Youth - CounterPunch.org
This outlines the system’s change we need to work toward.
Ultimately, why not just build a “meta-paper,” using AI, to answer any possible question about the subject area under consideration. This meta-paper would allow the reader, using AI, to make many sorts of modifications and additions to the basic work. The meta-paper also would allow the reader to add new data, to run additional robustness checks, and to do whatever else you might think of. Once again, the canonical version of the paper evolves away.
[Will AI kill the research paper? - Marginal REVOLUTION](marginalrevolution.com/marginalr…
May 4, 2026
Thoth stores durable knowledge as entities and typed relationships, not just chat snippets. It can save, search, link, explore, visualize, and export your knowledge graph as an Obsidian-compatible wiki vault, while background extraction and Dream Cycle refine duplicates, stale confidence, missing relationships, and actionable insights.
I’m using LM Studio for most of my local AI work. Haven’t quite graduated to doing anything more sophisticated.
Being successful with this approach to coding agents hinges on a rather crucial element: only a skilled developer who’s thinking critically, and comfortable operating at the architectural level, can spot issues in the thousands of lines of generated code, before they become a problem.
Agentic Coding is a Trap | Lars Faye
It’s like developers are now experiencing what anyone who has paid for a technology project feels.
May 3, 2026
More New-To-Me Photo Gear
At the East Bay Photo Collective Gear Sale, I bought a Nikon FE and Nikkor-Q Auto 135mm f/3.5 lens. It’s my second Nikon FE, the first I bought about 35 years ago. Anyway. New gear meant another photo walk. This one was in Berkeley’s Aquatic Park. I am learning the lens which requires using the depth of field lever, something I’m not used to doing. You can see the trial and error in a few of the shots.
May 2, 2026
These skills are designed to be small, easy to adapt, and composable. They work with any model. They’re based on decades of engineering experience. Hack around with them. Make them your own. Enjoy.
GitHub - mattpocock/skills: Skills for Real Engineers. Straight from my .claude directory. · GitHub
Interesting model to apply inside a workplace and in the nonprofit sector broadly.
But corruption also has a broader meaning. It can mean the malign use of power, the substitution of the public trust for your own private will, your own private interest. And that is more than anything else what is happening with the Supreme Court.
Jamelle Bouie via kottke
May 1, 2026
Advocates say that if made official, the new rule will prevent scores of unhoused transgender people from accessing safe emergency sleeping arrangements.
Trans people could be banned from homeless shelters soon
Another inhumane action.
Next time you’re in a design review, before you add your two cents, ask yourself the question: does this help the user, or does it help me?
Your website is not for you — Websmith Studio
This.
All six forms of psychological debt have the potential to cause damage to organizations pursuing AI integration strategies in a variety of ways: degrading employee motivation; corrupting collaboration and innovation efforts; and creating higher levels of stress and burnout.
The Psychological Costs of Adopting AI
Keeping team member agency while integrating and using AI is very important.
Taking human experience, which is beautifully ambiguous and nuanced and nondeterministic, and trying to fit it into a database shape, is inherently extractive. Nilay points out that it flattens people, which is totally true, but it also transfers ownership of that experience from their subjective truth into a centralized database that someone else controls, sets the standards for, and profits from.
This is balance nonprofits need to struggle with as they understand how and where to use AI. How do we keep the texture of experience? How do we keep the agency of it in our community?
Apr 30, 2026
The beautiful thing about communities and platforms like Flickr is that they remind us that not everything on the internet has to be ephemeral, not everything on the web has to be hyper-commercial.
Why are the Artemis II photos on Flickr? - Anil Dash
Flickr was — is — one of my favorite corners on the internet.
Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Alphabet collectively told investors they will spend roughly $700 billion on capital expenditures in 2026. That is nearly double what they spent in 2025. Three of the four raised capex guidance during this week of reporting.
[What I Learned about Hyperscalers
Apr 29, 2026
If you are still positioning yourself as “the person who produces artifacts,” you are standing in the blast radius. If you are the person who decides what matters, what is safe, what is credible, what is worth shipping, and what should be rejected, you still matter.
How to Survive the Agentic AI Era | HackerNoon
Also applies to organizations.
A new-to-me Rangefinder
A month or two ago, I bought a Minolta Hi-matic 7s from a street vendor in downtown San Francisco. A new battery, a working light meter, and I went on a photo walk on Alameda Island. One of the best parts of a photo walk with any fixed lens camera is the way you have to move yourself to get the frame, the photo, the focus just right. I just got this attempt back today and here are a few of the shots.
Apr 28, 2026
Microsoft released it on January 21st, 2026 but I hadn’t tried it until today.
Good post from Simon Willison on Microsoft’s vibe voice.