Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Sam Tobin-Hochstadt

crimson quarry @crimsonquarry.bsky.social · 11h

www.idsnews.com/article/2025...

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS: IU fires student media director after he refused to censor the IDS

Indiana University directed the IDS to stop printing news.

www.idsnews.com

4 9

Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 13h

I don't think any of this is about monetization in the usual sense; they plan to take over everything to a degree that makes monetization pointless.

Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 13h

The stability during the war was a combination of more than full employment plus repression; the postwar Soviet threat was probably a real factor.

1

Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 15h

But also if you look at any event where they talk to regular users (eg a Reddit AMA about coding) tons of people show up to ask when they can have their AI boyfriend back.

1 1

Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 15h

It's actually much more depressing that they clearly didn't want to do this and are doing it because of intense user demand.

Tuffy @smtuffy.bsky.social · 16h

The pivot from “I’m building god” to “I’m building a jerkoff tool” is pretty funny

Reuters @reuters.com · 16h

OpenAI to allow mature content on ChatGPT for adult verified users starting December reut.rs/3J8NTAi

2 1 3

Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 1d

Jesse, what the hell are you talking about

1 19

Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 4d

I try to do that by building things and just generally trying to get the chatbots to do things for me, which they keep getting better at.

1

Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 4d

For programming, cli tools are very useful but I'm skeptical that any of the others gets better results than just the $20/month subscription.

1 1

Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 4d

Roll on, Columbia, roll on!

Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 6d

I agree that framing and wording and intent are important but the fact that they are fiscally the same is also an important fact!

1

Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 6d

So we agree that the two policies involve every taxpayer paying the same thing in each, but you think they are functionally different policies because they imply something different about "baselines"?

1

Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 6d

For which taxpayers do they result in a different tax bill?

1

Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 6d

Right but a "$500 tax credit for parents" and a "$500 tax penalty for childless adults" are exactly the same policy.

1

Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 6d

The problem with the quoted proposal is that there aren't new parents for the kids to be assigned to. It's like how a legal right to housing doesn't help if there are no homes.

3

Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 6d

My impression is that decline in marriage is responsible for maybe half the decline in fertility (with the other half being decline in how many kids married couples have and how many unmarried people have kids).

8

Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 6d

A different way of putting it is that expressed in wheat prices, Cratchit is making the equivalent of $18/week(!) today, which is close to the "extreme poverty" line used to describe the developing world poorest.

1 8

Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 7d

lol

1

Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 7d

Depressingly, this turned out to be too optimistic.

1

Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 8d

The actual number of hours that Americans work hasn't changed much over the last 20 years.

3 1 2

Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 8d

The stability of modern democracy was a feature of the postwar boom not something about the institutions.

"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 8d

An interesting range of interpretations here but what jumps out at me most is that sharp economic downturns seem to be associated, with some lag, with the far-right cannibalizing the center-right and thereby threatening democratic systems.

Some implications, perhaps, for democratic system design.

Marios Richards @mariosrichards.bsky.social · Aug 12

In our - very limited - historical experience of democracy,

(i) states rot from the centre-right
(ii) and it's contagious (via geography/powerful exemplar states)

1 1 5

Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 8d

As with other famously dunked on Pelosi quotes, she was obviously correct here.

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 8d

this feels like forty years ago but it was 2023

www.newsweek.com/nancy-pelosi...

1 1 6

Reposted by Sam Tobin-Hochstadt

Racket @racket-lang.org · 9d

Hope everyone had a great RacketCon. Many thanks to the presenters, participants in-person and remote, the organisers and UMass Boston for hosting us.
Please send feedback to the team at [email protected]

Racket

Videos about or related to the programming language Racket, mostly drawn from RacketCon presentations. This channel publishes videos from Racket events and may also re-publish video from other places.

www.youtube.com

1 2 2

Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 9d

Many people dislike the large impersonal scale of modern life and the resulting rules-based bureaucracy required to administer it, and they mostly pretend that the challenges involved don't exist.

1 23

Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 9d

The Maple code is quite related to Rust, since it's about aliasing.

The other things are about lower level control in other ways, I would say.

1

Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 10d

For a lot of these things we already know how to make it nice, the answer is Garbage Collection. In general the decorated types are about having all of high performance, direct style, and statement-oriented mutation. If you just give those up it's easy. :)

1 5