Greg Linden

@glinden.bsky.social

1.6K followers 290 following 1.1K posts

an internet relic, linkedin.com/in/glinden

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Business 56%

Economics 33%

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Reposted by Greg Linden

Thomas Dietterich @tdietterich.bsky.social · 3h

Excellent blog post on the infeasibility of putting data centers in space.
taranis.ie/datacenters-...

Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea.

There is a rush for AI companies to team up with space launch/satellite companies to build datacenters in space. TL;DR: It's not going to work.

taranis.ie

Reposted by Suresh Venkatasubramanian, Magnus Johansson, Brian Weatherson , and 1 more Suresh Venkatasubramanian, Magnus Johansson, Brian Weatherson, Greg Linden

Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 5h

Fifteen Years

xkcd.com/3172/

Comic. Panels up to the 10-year point are grayed out. New panels since the Ten Years comic, which chronicles the first ten years of PERSON 1's journey with cancer: (1) [two people in bed] PERSON 1 (woman): One more chapter? PERSON 2 (man): Don’t we both have to get up early? PERSON 1: Nnnnnggggh PERSON 2: Sure, good point. (2) [many people wearing masks, walking while looking at graphs on their phones] (3) [birds landing on people] PERSON 2 in beanie and scarf: Hah! They like *my* seeds best. PERSON 1 in scarf holding phone with a bird sitting on it: Wait, how do I take a picture of this one? (4) [two people rowing boats with tree landscape] (5) [Person 1 carries overflowing stack of things to Person 2 in bed] PERSON 1: I brought you honey lemon tea, more pillows, a cinnamon roll, Tylenol, another blanket, a– PERSON 2: It was just Appendicitis, I’m really– PERSON 1: *It is my turn to take care of you and I am going to do it right!* (6) [Two people in car] (7) [still in car) PERSON 1: Oh my god. PERSON 2: Oh my god. (8) [car driving] PERSON 1: Pull over! PERSON 2: I am! (9) [both people get out of car] (10) [Large colored panel of aurora borealis over water with both people looking on] (11) [Person 1 sits against tree while Person 2 lies on the ground] PERSON 1: Fifteen years. No sign of the cancer. (12) I *am* having some weird symptoms. Joint pain. Fatigue. I think I’m losing my close-up vision. PERSON 2: Yeah. Me too. (13) PERSON 2: I think we’re getting old. (14) PERSON 1: I guess that’s okay. PERSON 2: It’s all I wanted.

Greg Linden @glinden.bsky.social · 6h

Entire thread is well worth reading, some interesting details in here, including that "the only non-vaporware changes to software they ever oversaw (mostly they didn't write the code themselves, just leaned on someone else to do so) were to remove 'DEI' stuff from government websites"

John Skiles Skinner @skiles.blue · 1d

Being among the first interrogated and ultimately fired by DOGE, I certainly felt we were facing the business end of a right-wing conspiracy theory 🧵

Dante Atkins @danteatkins.bsky.social · 1d

DOGE was not a money-saving effort. It was an effort to chase down and prove right-wing conspiracy theories. They went after USAID to prove conspiracy theories about foreign aid. Then they went after SSA to, again, pursue conspiracy theories about Dems paying "illegals" to vote. 1/2

Reposted by Greg Linden

Techmeme @techmeme.com · 6h

S&P downgrades the ability of Tether's USDT to maintain its peg to the US dollar to "weak", the lowest rating, citing exposure to high-risk assets such as BTC (Emily Nicolle/Bloomberg)

Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

Greg Linden @glinden.bsky.social · 7h

Interesting piece on a cheap solar panel with a mini inverter, and nothing else, that you can just put on your balcony, plug into any outlet, and reduce your electric bill. Might send power out of your place, so only legal in the US in Utah with under 1200 watts, but may soon be legal elsewhere.

David Roberts @volts.wtf · 9h

Today on Volts: I've had more requests to cover this than almost any other topic in the pod's history, so now, at long last, balcony solar! We dig into how "plug-in solar" took off in Europe & how it's making its way to the US, starting in Utah. Backyard DIY types rejoice!

What's the deal with balcony solar?

Cora Stryker joins me to explain how "plug-in" solar took Europe by storm and is finally, via Utah (?), making its way to America.

www.volts.wtf

Reposted by Steve Peers, Greg Linden, Brooke Harrington , and 1 more Steve Peers, Greg Linden, Brooke Harrington, Richard M. Carpiano

Popehat of Serious Proportion @kenwhite.bsky.social · 8h

James Bond supervillains threaten to blow up the world with their big laser unless you pay them a trillion dollars.

Real American supervillains embed themselves in the economy and threaten to cause a depression unless you subsidize their sex robots and the weird chatbots they use to avoid humans.

Reposted by Greg Linden

NY Times Pitchbot @nytpitchbot.bsky.social · 9h

(6/X) Every time you hit a narcissist, they get weaker. Sometimes they hit you back in some way that hurts you too and IRL it is sometimes best to just avoid the narcissist. But when the narcissist is president, you just have to him him every opportunity you get.

Reposted by Andréas Nilsson, Greg Linden

David Roberts @volts.wtf · 9h

Today, in Utah, homeowners *or renters* can simply buy a solar panel at Costco, take it home, and plug it in to a wall socket, like an appliance. It just sits there & trims about 15-20% off a residential power bill. If you move to another apt., you can take it with you.

Reposted by Nancy Knowlton, Greg Linden

David Roberts @volts.wtf · 9h

What's the deal with balcony solar?

Cora Stryker joins me to explain how "plug-in" solar took Europe by storm and is finally, via Utah (?), making its way to America.

www.volts.wtf

Reposted by Greg Linden

The Economist @economist.com · 10h

Recent surveys point to flatlining business adoption

Investors expect AI use to soar. That’s not happening

Recent surveys point to flatlining business adoption

econ.st

Reposted by Greg Linden

Colton Casto @coltoncasto.bsky.social · 11h

Language understanding entails not just extracting the surface-level meaning of an input, but constructing rich mental models of the _situation_ it describes. Yet, the nature of this rep., and the conditions under which it is constructed, has remained elusive.
2/n

Reposted by Nancy Kanwisher, Greg Linden, Elisa Freschi

Colton Casto @coltoncasto.bsky.social · 11h

What does it mean to understand language? We argue that the brain’s core language system is limited, and that *deeply* understanding language requires EXPORTING info to other brain regions.
w/ @neuranna.bsky.social @evfedorenko.bsky.social @nancykanwisher.bsky.social
arxiv.org/abs/2511.19757
1/n🧵👇

What does it mean to understand language?

Language understanding entails not just extracting the surface-level meaning of the linguistic input, but constructing rich mental models of the situation it describes. Here we propose that because pr...

arxiv.org

Reposted by Greg Linden, Julie Rovner

Justin Baragona @justinbaragona.bsky.social · 13h

Now we have the president calling a female New York Times reporter ugly because he's mad about a story she wrote.

Reposted by Greg Linden

Dean Baker @deanbaker13.bsky.social · 14h

Krugman nails it on collapsing bubbles, beats me to the punch. The collapse of the tech bubble in the 00s was not a single slide, but had many partial reversals. Look for the same with the AI bubble paulkrugman.substack.com/p/warning-th...

Warning: The Fed Can’t Rescue AI

Lessons from the dotcom crash

paulkrugman.substack.com

Reposted by Greg Linden

John Skiles Skinner @skiles.blue · 1d

Although DOGE occasionally pretended to modernize some computer system, the only non-vaporware changes to software they ever oversaw (mostly they didn't write the code themselves, just leaned on someone else to do so) were to remove "DEI" stuff from government websites

Reposted by Anne Applebaum, David R. Miller, Kate Starbird , and 2 more Anne Applebaum, David R. Miller, Kate Starbird, Jennifer A. Johnson, Greg Linden

John Skiles Skinner @skiles.blue · 1d

Being among the first interrogated and ultimately fired by DOGE, I certainly felt we were facing the business end of a right-wing conspiracy theory 🧵

Dante Atkins @danteatkins.bsky.social · 1d

Dare Obasanjo @carnage4life.bsky.social · 1d

All DOGE accomplished was purging critical government staff, handing private data to outsiders, and sentencing thousands in developing countries to death by gutting USAID.

I don’t say this lightly: if there were any justice in this world, the people responsible for this devastation would be in jail

Reposted by Melanie C. Green, Henry Farrell, Greg Linden

Alexis Madrigal @alexis-madrigal.bsky.social · 1d

One of the big tidal forces of the coming years is that the baseline reliability of things you see on a screen is going to decline.

I think this has not been adequately metabolized.

This is one version, but there are a bunch of them.

Davey Alba @davey.bsky.social · 1d

NEW: AI “recipe slop” is overrunning search and social. Food creators say Google’s AI Overviews and glossy fake food pics are drowning out real, tested recipes — collapsing traffic and setting home cooks up for disaster, especially this Thanksgiving.

Gift link: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

AI Slop Recipes Are Taking Over the Internet -- And Thanksgiving Dinner

Food bloggers see traffic dip as home cooks turn to AI, inspired by impossible pictures

www.bloomberg.com

Greg Linden @glinden.bsky.social · 1d

This comes in frustration after dealing with a flood of spammy crap this morning. But I do think someone who launches something like Google twenty years ago with great web search, spam filtering, shopping search, and not too many ads easily would get a flood of customers. I'd be the first in line.

Greg Linden @glinden.bsky.social · 1d

I wish the AI companies would focus on perfecting the ML in the stuff we use every day. Relevance rank in web search, non-spammy shopping search, email spam filtering, useful recommendations of what to watch next, you know, the basics. What if the internet didn't suck more and more every day?

Greg Linden @glinden.bsky.social · 1d

That certainly doesn't mean the companies aren't responsible for what they're doing. But it does mean that companies can start down this path just by picking bad metrics for what they consider the best chatbot might be. Naively picking time-using-the-product as your success metric will cause this.

Greg Linden @glinden.bsky.social · 1d

One curious piece of this is that the companies easily can develop bad AI without intending to. For example, if you are testing chatbot personalities and your success metric is how long people keep chatting, you'll tend to deploy engrossing chatbots that can have negative impact on mental health.

Reposted by Rosemary A. Joyce, Laurent Pech, Mark Rice , and 1 more Rosemary A. Joyce, Laurent Pech, Mark Rice, Greg Linden

Kevin Elliott @kjephd.bsky.social · 1d

The movement to destroy liberal democracy is international, and so must be its defense

Greg Sargent @gregsargent.bsky.social · 1d

NEWS --> BBC confirms to me that they did edit a line out of historian @rutgerbregman.com's speech. It called Trump "the most openly corrupt president in US history."

BBC also confirms this was done on the advice of lawyers. So Trump's threats worked.

New piece:
newrepublic.com/article/2036...

Trump’s Fury at BBC Gets Unnerving Results with Pro-MAGA Edit Stunner

First, British Broadcasting Corporation execs resigned after Trump complained about a segment. Now the BBC edited out a line from a historian that was critical of Trump. Where does this end?

newrepublic.com

Reposted by Dorothy Bishop, Brendan Nyhan, John Horgan , and 8 more Dorothy Bishop, Brendan Nyhan, John Horgan, Rosemary A. Joyce, Juan Cole, Laurent Pech, Scott A. Imberman, Greg Linden, Prokla Redaktion, Christina Pagel, Manisha Sinha

Greg Sargent @gregsargent.bsky.social · 1d

Trump’s Fury at BBC Gets Unnerving Results with Pro-MAGA Edit Stunner

First, British Broadcasting Corporation execs resigned after Trump complained about a segment. Now the BBC edited out a line from a historian that was critical of Trump. Where does this end?

newrepublic.com

Reposted by Greg Linden

CNN @cnn.com · 1d

Consumer confidence falls to lowest in seven months as concerns grow about high prices and a weakening job market https://cnn.it/4ririCu

Reposted by John Palfrey, Greg Linden

Kathleen Romig @kathleenromig.bsky.social · 1d

We're drowning in passwords & multi-factor authentication & chatbots & "unusually high call volume" & robots ignoring "representative!"

We should think more carefully about how Social Security uses these tools with our parents & grandparents.

donmoynihan.substack.com/p/aint-no-pa...

Ain't No Party Like an Administrative Burden Party

You are cordially invited to Admin Night - bring your paperwork

donmoynihan.substack.com

Reposted by Mary Feeney, Kate Starbird, Greg Linden

Dante Atkins @danteatkins.bsky.social · 1d

Dare Obasanjo @carnage4life.bsky.social · 1d

DOGE 'doesn't exist' with eight months left on its charter

U.S. President Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency has disbanded with eight months left to its mandate.

www.cnbc.com

Reposted by Jonathan Portes, Cas Mudde, Ben H. Ansell , and 72 more Jonathan Portes, Cas Mudde, Ben H. Ansell, Richard S.J. Tol, Dorothy Bishop, David M. Farrell, Will Jennings, Stefan Rahmstorf, David N. Thomas, Gavin A. Schmidt, Patrick A. Jansen, John Horgan, Steve Peers, Andrew Scott, Colin Murray, Mark D. White, Huw Price, Rosemary A. Joyce, Elizabeth Stokoe, Dirk Pilat, Charles West, Martijn W. Hesselink, Chris Hanretty, Simon Wren‐Lewis, Alison Phipps, Mary Corcoran, Anand Menon, Michelle Everson, Jo Barraket, Rebecca Tushnet, Ben Worthy, David R. Miller, Robert Wolfe, Gary D. Rawnsley, Aileen McHarg, Jacob T. Levy, Simon Glendinning, Scott A. Imberman, Julie Cupples, Lyndsey Stonebridge, Stephen Ryan, Samantha Brennan, Jonathan Birch, Anne Norton, Hubert Zimmermann, Leo McCann, Timothy Burke, Manuel Puppis, Graeme Warren, David Bartram, Lisa Diedrich, Brian Doucet, Ann Bartow, Stuart White, Pauline Stafford, Clayton Littlejohn, Rense Corten, Greg Linden, Jack Stilgoe, Lukas Graf, Jon Dean, Klaus Oschema, Christina Pagel, Daxton R. Stewart, Rune Møller Stahl, Olivier Mannoni, Camille Lefebvre, Aviel Roshwald, Colin Talbot, Tarik Abou‐Chadi, Nathan P. Kalmoe, Jeroen Van Bouwel, David Spurrett, François Guesnet, Speranţa Dumitru

Rutger Bregman @rutgerbregman.com · 1d

I wish I didn’t have to share this. But the BBC has decided to censor my first Reith Lecture.

They deleted the line in which I describe Donald Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in American history.” /1

Dave Levitan @davelevitan.bsky.social · 2d

Google at its peak was basically the best information retrieval system in human history and they and every competitor decided going from there to “you didn’t want answers you wanted half-assed auto-complete 80%-wrong hallucinations” in a few years was the right idea

Reposted by Greg Linden

Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 2d

“.. This is X in 2025: Potentially fake accounts crying at other potentially fake accounts that they aren’t real, all while refusing to acknowledge that they themselves aren’t who they say they are — a Russian nesting doll of bullshit.”

@cwarzel.bsky.social
www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

Reposted by Lisa W. Fazio, Jason Mittell, Jed A. Fuhrman , and 6 more Lisa W. Fazio, Jason Mittell, Jed A. Fuhrman, Peter Thorne, Jesse M. Shapiro, Benny Geys, Kevin Carey, Smith, Greg Linden

Dr. Stephanie @punkrockscience.bsky.social · 2d

Today’s xkcd made me cry.

In a good way.

xkcd.com/3172/

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