Social sciences: “Many academics—especially those concentrated on Bluesky and, I suspect, those who are completely offline—are in complete denial about what’s already happening.”
https://alexanderkustov.substack.com/p/academics-need-to-wake-up-on-ai
I think the denial is fading fast though.
“Carter is one of nearly 50 teens nationally who have died by suicide during a sextortion case”
https://www.startribune.com/sextortion-suicide-high-school-athletes-carter-bremseth/601538737
Support teaching about extortion and teach your children. Don’t keep guns at home.
Disappearing Generals in China and America - Dyer's theory.
https://gwynnedyer.com/2026/the-curious-case-of-the-disappearing-generals/
We know of the purges, but we don't know why. Dyer thinks the Chinese purge is because they are preparing for Iranian style mass killings to suppress unrest -- even if that seems very unlikely to outsiders.
The American purges is presumed to be a contingency plan for something like that here.
Musk Moves Against the Russia: “SpaceX, the company that operates the Starlink network, then developed a whitelist of Ukrainian users”
https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/02/elon-musk-ukraine-russia-starlink/686155/
“Ukrainians have advanced. In the first three weeks of February, they seized more than 300 square kilometers of land from the Russians,”
A Guide to the big 3 consumer and professional AIs: models, harnesses, tools, agents
https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/a-guide-to-which-ai-to-use-in-the
Major change every 2w now
A single web page on an exotic topic will be trusted by most ai
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/02/poisoning-ai-training-data.html
“Claude …wasn’t fooled.”
Partly this reflects the poor state of the web.
Fukuyama on Iran and Israel.
https://www.persuasion.community/p/fukuyama-8
The free part of the transcript is quite good on both Israel and Iran.
Chaos is very Trump.
“Gulf Arab states eager to curb Iran’s power “have generated extremely generous packages of compensation for companies associated with Trump personally and with members of his family.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-28-2026
Operation Epstein Fury is also a work for hire.
Caterpillars mimic ant communication to parasitize the nest
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/science/caterpillar-ant-language.html
“Once in the nest, either the caterpillars are fed by ants, or they eat the ants’ young.”
Block Lays off 40%: “absurd over-hiring in the last 5–10 years”
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/02/27/block-layoffs
“AI” is just a convenient scapegoat.”
“mechano-antiviral response system” (MARS) may well be a type of innate immunity that we have been completely overlooking”
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/feel-antiviral-vibrations-seriously
Massage therapy for viral infections is very 2026. From anyone but Lowe I’d ignore but …
Review of AI use in China’s state propaganda
https://toosimple.substack.com/p/ai-tell-story-well
Bari Weiss wants this.
The history and technology of macOS system updates
https://eclecticlight.co/2026/02/28/explainer-macos-updates/
Apple seems positively bad at macOS software these days, but this work was impressive.
Anthropic v Trump: “using these systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values. AI-driven mass surveillance presents serious, novel risks to our fundamental liberties”
https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war
OpenAI has indicated it will do the mass surveillance.
“once people are wedded to a strongman, they will cling to him ever more tightly as his behavior becomes more and more erratic.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-25-2026
“This loyalty is in part to demonstrate their own devotion to the cause, and in part to justify their own attacks on those the strongman has given them permission to hurt.”
In China: “Scale, low-cost talent, and in-house manufacturing account for most of BYD’s cost gap with Tesla.”
https://restofworld.org/2026/why-are-chinese-evs-cheaper-than-tesla/
“Chinese state subsidies account for just 5% of BYD’s $4,700 per-vehicle cost gap with Tesla”
The Subnational Levers Constraining ICE
https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/a-federalism-bottleneck
There are many ways for both states and non-US businesses and governments to make MAGA brutality more expensive.
Released Epstein files omit 1980s rape of 14yo by Trump
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/us/politics/trump-epstein-files.html
“alleged incident would have occurred in the mid-1980s when she was 13 to 15 years old, but they do not include any assessment by the F.B.I. about the credibility of her accusation”
“Justice Department had also not provided them to the Oversight Committee”
The standard lies Trump will tell
https://www.ms.now/opinion/trump-falsehoods-state-of-the-union-speech-fact-check
Bingo of course. From a fact checkers library.
The Evolution of Eyes: the first version was monocular
"In 1994 he and Susanne Pelger, a colleague at Lund, concluded that an image-forming eye could evolve in just a few hundred thousand years."
