Caleb Crain

The only one who could ever reach me /

Was the son of a…

Just the executive chairman of defense tech company Anduril trying to buy Wired, cool cool cool.

How much of the pleasure of reading history is a delayed gratification of the wish to skip ahead to the part where you’re just reading about it?

Samuel Delany dedicated his monumental novel The Mad Man to me without ever having met me (and in fact only because of his reaction to a chapbook of mine that I thought had gotten lost in the mail)

* when I found out, I was at work at my desk and I fainted right to the floor

Odysseus had his crew lash him to the mast to keep him from doing an interview with Chotiner.

Photo shows graves of Iranian girls killed in Minab school attack Contrary to claims from Grok and others, the image does not show grave sites in Jakarta or Brazil.

This photo shows the graves of schoolchildren killed by airstrikes in Minab, Iran — not grave sites in Indonesia or Brazil, contrary to claims from Grok and others online. Here's how we verified its authenticity. 👇
www.snopes.com/fact-check/i...

I wanna see one that begins with the Chotiner version of informed consent

Neguse demolishes Noem (2/2)

💪🫡

Gemini Said They Could Only Be Together if He Killed Himself. Soon, He Was Dead. A new lawsuit alleges Google’s chatbot sent a Florida man on missions to find an android body it could inhabit. When that failed, it set a suicide countdown clock for him.

A new lawsuit alleges Google’s chatbot sent a Florida man on missions to find an android body it could inhabit. When that failed, it set a suicide countdown clock for him. www.wsj.com/tech/ai/gemi...

Whenever Michael makes a post like this I go and check the wastewater data for Kings County. We've never had so little COVID in Brooklyn than this winter, and I think that's great!

Ah, yes, the invaluable wisdom of the markets.

Meet three scientists who said no to Epstein The warning signs included a web search, a mother’s doubts, and inklings of a “sexist attitude”

“Be careful not to get sucked up in the slime-machine going on here,” the scientist’s mom wrote back, when he asked her whether he should accept an invitation from Jeffrey Epstein.

I’ve seen enough. Not about the election. Just generally.

I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed.
Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.

Assassination never liberates, because having a dictator is a symptom—a sign that something is deeply wrong with a country—not a cause. (This is as true of America as of Venezuela or Iran.)

A Bluesky skeet from Zach Everson summarizing the profiteering by the Trump family, followed immediately by a skeet from Helen Kennedy saying yikes about the Dow’s plummet this morning

Timeline synergy

Highlight so far is this MPD officer stopping his patrol of the USIP building to grab a cooke and saying to himself, "When in Rome, man."

There’s a pretty robust case to make that the Iran Hostage crisis of 1979, the revolution itself, and the policies of the Iranian government towards the US
since, was all blowback from the CIA’s decision to overthrow Mossadegh in 1953. www.cnn.com/2013/08/19/p...

Screenshot of text: First, it’s a mistake to say that Trump got America into war on Saturday. What he did was respond to a war that Iran has been waging against the United States since 1979.

Cool hey did anything happen *before* 1979 between the United States and Iran

ML folks have known for a long time that this is why you get permission to use your training data. There is no ambiguity about what is lawful or ethical here. The only issue is whether OpenAI et al are too big and too wealthy to be held to account for obviously illegal acts.

Explaining to the six-year-old why some of the Calvin and Hobbes strips in his book are longer and in color.

Monochrome photograph featuring two women climbing on a rock face with ropes both wearing long dresses and hats

Rock climbers Lucy Smith and Pauline Rankin of the Ladies’ Scottish Climbing Club, 1908, Salisbury Crags, Scotland #WomensArt
Welcome to #WomensHistoryMonth

A metal plaque with raised lettering spelling out the phrase, "In a dream you saw a way to survive and your were full of joy."

Jenny Holzer, Untitled ("In a Dream..."), from The Survival Series, 1983–85

Normalizing assassinations of heads of state/government is not a particularly wise thing to do for the stronger hegemon facing asymmetric conflicts.

Ali Khamenei assassinated in Iran, Israeli officials told | The Jerusalem Post The body of Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader since 1989, was reportedly found under the rubble in Tehran. His death marks a major turning point for the Islamic Republic’s leadership.

"Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was assassinated in an Israeli strike on Tehran, with his body found under the rubble caused by an Israeli airstrike, senior Israeli officials were informed on Saturday evening." www.jpost.com/middle-east/...

In Iran, air power alone will not reshape the regime. Since WWI, dozens of U.S., Israeli & allied air campaigns have tried to force political change — none installed friendly governments. None! They strengthen nationalism and intensify resistance.

the guy who wrote the literal book on this stuff is dunking on the admin:

This aged well. Note the author.

The Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to decide when the nation goes to war. President Trump’s strikes on Iran are flatly unconstitutional. There’s been no deliberation, no vote, no clear justification. This is a flagrant abuse of executive power.