Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Will Wilkinson @wlknsn.xyz · 8h

Really looking forward to this. @radleybalko.bsky.social is a national treasure.

Radley Balko @radleybalko.bsky.social · 15h

The first episode of Collateral Damage, my reported podcast with The Intercept, went up today.

Hope you’ll check it out and, if you enjoy it, give it a favorable rating or review.

Eternal thanks to my producers @lauraflynn.bsky.social and Andrew Stelzer for making it happen.

Ep. 1 Dirty Business: The Atlanta Narcotics Unit’s Deadly Raid on 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston.

Podcast Episode · Collateral Damage from The Intercept · 10/08/2025 · 55m

podcasts.apple.com

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Reposted by Will Wilkinson

Aaron Sojourner @aaronsojourner.org · 14h

What policy:
- increases competition,
- lowers prices,
- lowers high-end taxes,
- lowers inequality?
@deanbaker13.bsky.social tells us. Preredistribution?
substack.com/inbox/post/1...

Weakening Patent Monopolies: The Most Effective Wealth Tax
It's better not to give the billionaires the money in the first place than to develop schemes to tax it away
Dean Baker
Oct 08, 2025
The idea of a wealth tax has gained considerable popularity in the dozen years since Thomas Piketty first popularized it with his book, Capital for the 21st Century. I have always been a skeptic myself, not because I have any trouble with taxing billionaires, but I think it faces enormous practical and political obstacles.

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Will Wilkinson @wlknsn.xyz · 6d

Can someone who has followed his recent trajectory tell me how Tyler got here?

Laura Jedeed @laurajedeed.bsky.social · 6d

I'm sorry: "if I wish to see a virgin on-screen"?

My Favorite Actress Is Not Human
Tilly Norwood doesn’t need a hairstylist, has no regrettable posts, and if you wish to see a virgin on-screen, this is one of your better chances. That’s because she’s AI.

A picture of some AI girl standing on an AI landscape with an AI monster behind her. I'm gonna be so real: she looks about 14

By Tyler Cowen

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Will Wilkinson @wlknsn.xyz · 6d

Oh man. Those were the days! Todd had her dead to rights, fwiw. He knew.

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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 12d

*The AI boom = one of the costliest building sprees in world history

* Past 3 years' commitments are greater than the cost of building the U.S. interstate highway system

* Consumers must spend $800 billion on AI within a few years, to justify investment from 2023-24

www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-b...

This week, consultants at Bain & Co. estimated the wave of AI infrastructure spending will require $2 trillion in annual AI revenue by 2030. By comparison, that is more than the combined 2024 revenue of Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Nvidia, and more than five times the size of the entire global subscription software market.

Morgan Stanley estimates that last year there was around $45 billion of revenue for AI products. The sector makes money from a combination of subscription fees for chatbots such as ChatGPT and money paid to use these companies’ data centers.

How the tech sector will cover the gap is “the trillion dollar question,” said Mark Moerdler, an analyst at Bernstein.

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Tim Onion @bencollins.bsky.social · 12d

What the fuck?

Des Moines Public Schools Superintendent Ian Roberts detained by ICE agents

The superintendent of the largest school district in Iowa has been detained by federal immigration officials. Superintendent Ian Roberts of Des Moines Public Schools was detained Friday morning, accor...

www.iowapublicradio.org

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Will Wilkinson @wlknsn.xyz · 13d

We were born the same week!

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Will Wilkinson @wlknsn.xyz · 15d

Honestly believe that I could wriggle out of Chotiner's traps simply because I've been married to @kerryhowley.bsky.social for 12 years.

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conputer dipshit @davidcrespo.bsky.social · 15d

instant classic

Kerry Howley @kerryhowley.bsky.social · 15d

I spent some time wandering around SF with some kids who read minds, raise millions, and subsist on Celsius nymag.com/intelligence...

The AI Kids Take San Francisco

Brilliant, workaholic teenagers are flooding the city — and reshaping our future in their image.

nymag.com

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Will Wilkinson @wlknsn.xyz · 15d

The AI kids just don’t care about our old-person debates about AI.

Kerry Howley @kerryhowley.bsky.social · 15d

I spent some time wandering around SF with some kids who read minds, raise millions, and subsist on Celsius nymag.com/intelligence...

The AI Kids Take San Francisco

Brilliant, workaholic teenagers are flooding the city — and reshaping our future in their image.

nymag.com

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Reposted by Will Wilkinson

Kerry Howley @kerryhowley.bsky.social · 15d

I spent some time wandering around SF with some kids who read minds, raise millions, and subsist on Celsius nymag.com/intelligence...

The AI Kids Take San Francisco

Brilliant, workaholic teenagers are flooding the city — and reshaping our future in their image.

nymag.com

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Reposted by Will Wilkinson

Alyssa Long @measuredandslow.bsky.social · 16d

Hey a thing I really don’t want to get lost here is that while Tylenol doesn’t cause autism, IT’S FINE TO BE AUTISTIC. Let’s not grant them the premise that autism should be eradicated in our way to correct the science, okay? Okay.

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Eric Smith @ericsmithrocks.bsky.social · 16d

My son is autistic, largely nonverbal. He reads a lot, is smitten with all things Lego. He excels in school. He finds his ways to communicate.

There’s nothing wrong with autism. The rhetoric drives me mad.

It’s on us to make the world easier for neurodiverse folks, not to push them to conform.

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Will Wilkinson @wlknsn.xyz · 22d

Do it. Screen is a trap.

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Will Wilkinson @wlknsn.xyz · 28d

Beautifully done! Thank you.

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Meredith Whittaker @meredithmeredith.bsky.social · 29d

📣 NEW -- In The Economist, discussing the privacy perils of AI agents and what AI companies and operating systems need to do--NOW--to protect Signal and much else!

www.economist.com/by-invitatio...

An illustration of me, and the headline: "AI agents are coming for your privacy, warns Meredith Whittaker
The Signal Foundation’s president worries they will also blunt competition and undermine cyber-security"

To put it bluntly, the path currently being taken towards agentic AI leads to an elimination of privacy and security at the application layer. It will not be possible for apps like Signal—the messaging app whose foundation I run—to continue to provide strong privacy guarantees, built on robust and openly validated encryption, if device-makers and OS developers insist on puncturing the metaphoric blood-brain barrier between apps and the OS. Feeding your sensitive Signal messages into an undifferentiated data slurry connected to cloud servers in service of their AI-agent aspirations is a dangerous abdication of responsibility.

Happily, it’s not too late. There is much that can still be done, particularly when it comes to protecting the sanctity of private data. What’s needed is a fundamental shift in how we approach the development and deployment of AI agents. First, privacy must be the default, and control must remain in the hands of application developers exercising agency on behalf of their users. Developers need the ability to designate applications as “sensitive” and mark them as off-limits to agents, at the OS level and otherwise. This cannot be a convoluted workaround buried in settings; it must be a straightforward, well-documented mechanism (similar to Global Privacy Control) that blocks an agent from accessing our data or taking actions within an app.

Second, radical transparency must be the norm. Vague assurances and marketing-speak are no longer acceptable. OS vendors have an obligation to be clear and precise about their architecture and what data their AI agents are accessing, how it is being used and the measures in place to protect it.

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Will Wilkinson @wlknsn.xyz · Sep 2

I think I’m going to try, as experiment, simply blocking anyone who chooses post about the platform itself, or about the act of posting, more than a little. I don’t want to drive to get to the highway that goes to the street just to get back on the thoroughfare to the lane, ifykwim.

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Will Wilkinson @wlknsn.xyz · Sep 2

One obvious problem with social media platforms is that they are inevitably dominated by people with an unhealthy level of interest in social media platforms, leading to mind-numbingly tedious meta-discourse, like this.

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Will Wilkinson @wlknsn.xyz · Aug 31

I’m a big believer in the organic improvisational nickname. So far we have Lulu and Wiggles. My five year old has just been calling him Wittgenstein, which is hilarious.

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Will Wilkinson @wlknsn.xyz · Aug 31

Yes Bernedoodle. What’s your fluffer?

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Will Wilkinson @wlknsn.xyz · Aug 31

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Will Wilkinson @wlknsn.xyz · Aug 31

We got a new puppy and his name is Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wanna see?

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Reposted by Will Wilkinson

Mark Chadbourn @chadbourn.bsky.social · Aug 30

Zojo-ji Temple, Shiba. Twenty Views of Tokyo, Kawase Hasui, 1925.

Old Tokyo street in the snow. Woman with umbrella walks

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Will Wilkinson @wlknsn.xyz · Aug 26

No love for Simon & Simon?

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