I'm not going to make this about me

Broadly: the danger of nuclear risk and escalation with AI is not concentrated in giving presidents a bad machine advisor urging escalation. Instead, that risk is in automating any Stanislav Petrovs out of the chain of launch, as you need *restrain* to respond to sensor error indicating odd launch.

It's 9am somewhere

AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations Leading AIs from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google opted to use nuclear weapons in simulated war games in 95 per cent of cases

You're telling me that word association tools trained on internet comments don't know how to deescalate?

www.newscientist.com/article/2516...

20 years of GWOT has left a sense that uncontested air power is how wars work. But it's not war. These are all launchers. It's bombardment for bombardment's sake. We're getting ready to bomb the hell out of a country, but there's no war plan, no real goals.

Scoop: U.S. and Russia agree to observe New START nuclear pact after expiration New START is the last major guardrail constraining the nuclear arsenals of the two countries that together hold some 85% of the world's warheads.

I do strongly empathize with the experience of being a few hours late on your response to New START expiration www.axios.com/2026/02/05/n...

I've said this before, but it's worth repeating: the Biden nuclear policy team bears a huge amount of responsibility for normalizing this nonsense. What was once a fringe right wing position became the settled wisdom of Vipin Narang and Jake Sullivan, and now here we are.

Texas A&M, Under New Curriculum Limits, Warns Professor Not to Teach Plato

We are descending ever faster into a period of violence & epistemic collapse from which we may never emerge, but on the other hand I've got plenty of material for the course on modern misinterpretations of ancient & Classical history I teach in the spring: www.nytimes.com/2026/01/07/u...

Definitely having a ghost of Christmas future-type reaction to 2026 as a number

The hype around new nuclear tech, & the well-publicized shift toward a more tech-industry model for military production, along with the crippling effects of haphazard cuts to federal gov't capacity has made me worry the Trump admin might reduce nuclear safety standards w/ long-term consequences

How Americans View AI and Its Impact on People and Society Americans are worried about using AI more in daily life, seeing harm to human creativity and relationships. But they’re open to AI use in weather forecasting, medicine and other data-heavy tasks.

Looking at polling there seems to be a sort of sighing acceptance: www.pewresearch.org/science/2025...

Are people actually excited though? I find it almost impossible to tell what's an effect of massive funding/PR and actual reception of AI, + an Iraq War-bred skepticism of the idea that I live in a basically airtight cultural bubble while the rest of the world putters on happily with whatever horror

Clocking in for my server shift at the restaurant of success

My villain origin story is having to wait two months for a high-quality audio copy of Daniel Deronda

Doing a career pivot to become the guy the public library sends around to make sure you're actually listening to the audiobook you checked out

The default logic around AI seems to be built, tragically, on carefully cultivated low expectations: it's not just "we can't have nice things," but "we can't take the obvious action to avoid a totally unnecessary, avoidable bad thing"

What are we doing here folks

To the extent that it viewed the natsec state politically, rather than as a character--as the products of a set of behaviors and decisions rather than a perfect, if tragically flawed, system--it made a pretty good case for ending presidential sole authority to order a nuclear strike

Portraying rapid-fire shop talk among people who share a very specific outlook and set of expectations is hard, but a lot of the characters seemed strangely green rather than having spent years or decades in contexts where emergencies like this are extensively discussed as possible and urgent

It did seem unrealistic in that a Secretary of Defense would almost definitely not be learning basic facts about missile defense after a nuke was already in the air (unless there's a particular backstory about this administration--which, again, the film didn't seem that interested in!)

I finally watched House of Dynamite, and it was okay! I enjoyed it. It didn't do much with its structural conceit--maybe it would have it it were more interested in the human characters who animate the lumbering national security state, the closest thing it has to a main character with a personality

Ending my Keynes lecture before I refer to him as a noted bisexual

I saw somewhere on the Internet someone doing an advent calendar but it was just 24 arduous life-management tasks

The Return of Nuclear Proliferation A recent article in the establishment security journal Foreign Affairs makes the case for nuclear proliferation among America’s allies. Not only are its arguments unsound, but they also understate the...

For @jacobinmag.bsky.social, I addressed a recent article in @foreignaffairs.com arguing that the U.S. should give nuclear weapons to Germany, Japan, and Canada: jacobin.com/2025/11/nucl...

The Return of Nuclear Proliferation A recent article in the establishment security journal Foreign Affairs makes the case for nuclear proliferation among America’s allies. Not only are its arguments unsound, but they also understate the...

Good @emmaclairefoley.bsky.social piece pushing back against a recent Foreign Affairs article:

"Below the confidence in America’s power to shape the global status quo seems to lurk a quiet admission that the American empire is fracturing" jacobin.com/2025/11/nucl...

Did I miss hottest country discourse?? When did this happen???

The Cloud of Unknowing | Emma Claire Foley Any hope for nuclear disarmament is on hold—if not totally dashed. But we can’t lose track of the real stakes in contemplating annihilation.

Donald Trump recently announced that he’d ordered the Pentagon to resume nuclear weapons testing after three decades. As @emmaclairefoley.bsky.social explained last year, Americans we sit closer to nuclear annihilation than we like to imagine.

Many are talking about the city's influential anarchist crawlspace

New York's social-democratic foyer