Peter Côté

Thanksgiving sunset. Manchester Harbor.

Excellent perspective or observation of how our mysteries have disappeared as we increased scientific knowledge and how it affects the perceptions of gods.

Every American should watch every second of this video. Thank you, @BenSasse.

Trump just fired all 24 members of the National Science Board. Every single one. By email. No warning. No reason given. The board has existed since 1950. The National Science Board is the independent body that oversees the National Science Foundation, the agency that distributes $9 billion in research grants every year. Its members are scientists and engineers from universities and industry. They serve six-year staggered terms specifically so they cross presidential administrations and stay independent of whoever is in power. On Friday, every single one of them got the same boilerplate email from Mary Sprowls of the Presidential Personnel Office: "On behalf of President Donald J Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as a member of the National Science Board is terminated, effective immediately. Thank you for your service." That's it. That's the whole letter. For 76 years of institutional independence. The NSF funds the basic science behind MRIs. Cellphones. LASIK eye surgery. GPS. The internet itself. The Antarctic research stations. The deep-space telescopes. The research vessels mapping the ocean floor. Every breakthrough that made America the world's leader in science for the better part of a century traces back through grants this agency made and this board approved. The board chair, Victor McCrary, was actively advising Congress on Trump's proposed 55% cut to NSF's budget. The board was helping fight back. So Trump fired the board. Marvi Matos Rodriguez, one of the fired members, told reporters she had been reviewing an 80-page report as part of her board duties just days before being terminated. Keivan Stassun, a physicist at Vanderbilt, said NSF's leadership had already stopped responding to board oversight requests months ago. "We would ask them, 'Are you following board governance directives?' And their answer would be, in effect, 'We don't listen to you anymore.'" Now there's no board to answer to. Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, the top Democrat on the House Science Committee, called it "the latest stupid move made by a president who continues to harm science and American innovation. Will the president fill the NSB with MAGA loyalists who won't stand up to him as he hands over our leadership in science to our adversaries?" That's the actual question. Because while Trump is firing American scientists, China is building research universities at a rate we cannot match. The CDC just buried a study showing vaccines work. RFK Jr. runs HHS. The EPA is gutted. The Forest Service is being broken. Half of American children are breathing dangerous air. And now the people who decide what gets researched in the United States have all been fired by email on a Friday afternoon.

@duncanreyburn @CathyYoung63 Isn’t it true that if you define what “machine consciousness” is, it becomes a thing? It doesn’t need to match our understanding of what consciousness is. What matters is what it’s capable of. A new definition will help society understand what we’re dealing with.

No decent philosopher believes ‘machine consciousness’ is (or ever will be) a thing.

@theQpond @MrGlobal2025 Sure as long as they fully commit to a 50yr JCPOA agreement.

@MrGlobal2025 A 1% toll based on the value of the cargo seems fair for war reparations for Iran.

A blockade is basically a game of chicken. Check Trumps record on games of chicken.

@robert_zubrin @ylecun Havent we all learned by now that that what Putin wants Trump provides, which is the weakening of the USA from within.

Here is the list of NASA science missions that the Trump administration proposes to terminate. Note that it includes many missions that are already in space, fully operational. This is a wrecking operation against America.

@JimW1776 @JessicaTarlov You ignorant shit.

@NoLimitGains Way overdone Maybe startups will use Claude from the ground up? But for ERPs, HRIS, PSAs no way. Good SaaS firms are more than just buckets of software code.

This is all happening because of one company.

@DeItaone why is the market not crashing based on these comments?? What is keeping oil prices from spiking?

🚨 *HASSETT: HORMUZ CAN BE OPENED WITHIN TWO MONTHS

@Mayhem4Markets Absolutely noticed this especially in the past court of weeks. The quality of responses have been slowly degrading. And my experience is on an Enterprise account. I now feel like I need to tune my prompts to get back that initial quality.

If Claude's felt different to you lately, you aren't alone. One examination showed that the the depth of thinking has dropped by 67% sometime in February. This is typically what happens if an inference provider is compute starved. They'll reduce the quality of the model to reduce strain. It also suggests that Anthropic may be closer to pivoting away from the more generous levels of API access that the Pro and Max subscriptions offer while they prioritize more profitable enterprise customers. This is one of many reasons that I consider local AI to be a valuable resource. You never know when your provider is going to reduce the quality of the model you're working with and all of a sudden you find yourself wondering if you're doing something wrong, if it's the tools you're using or the provider itself.

@tenobrus We need a constitution-like document that ensures AI tech at all levels of govt and private companies is used only for the public good.

maybe this is not yet clear, so let me state it plainly: as of right now Anthropic, and really a small number of individuals at Anthropic, has the capacity to directly attack and cause major damage to the United States Government, China, and generally global superpowers. government agencies like the NSA do not have internal models or defense capabilities that outclass frontier models. if they chose to do so, they could likely exfiltrate top secret information from government systems, gain control over critical infrastructure including military infrastructure, sabotage or modify communications between members of government at the highest level, and potentially carry on activities for some time without detection. the thing about having access to a huge number of zerodays your adversaries don't know about is it gives you a massive asymmetric advantage. they did not exploit this to gain power or destabilize the world order. they publicly released the information that they had these capabilities and worked to mitigate these flaws. you should be grateful american frontier labs have proven themselves remarkably trustworthy and concerned with the public good. but it's critical you understand we are in a new regime. private entities now have power that directly rivals and impacts the government's monopoly on influence and violence. and anthropic is certainly not the only one, there's little chance OpenAI's internal models are far behind. this trend will accelerate on virtually every dimension, not slow down. my prediction for how it plays out is the relatively imminent seizure and nationalization of labs by the US government, sometime over the next two years. it's very tough for me to see how they accept the existence of this kind of threat. but this adds a whole new class of governance issues, as then we've handed these extremely wide-reaching capabilities from private entities to public ones.

@NASA Cannot wait to see your photos of the eclipse with the earth-lit moon!

🌞🌕🧑‍🚀 Right now, the Orion capsule is passing behind the Moon, so the Sun is entirely eclipsed from their perspective. During this time, they will view a mostly darkened Moon and will use the opportunity to analyze the solar corona.

LIVE: Watch with us as the Artemis II astronauts make their closest approach to the Moon, traveling farther from Earth than ever before. twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1…

Given Trump’s Easter threats to carry out new war crimes in Iran, we should think one or two steps ahead about a coup attempt connected to the war. And then deter it. (1/17)

I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. Take a moment and listen to this 81 second response from Victor Glover after being asked if he had any thoughts leading up to Easter. I don’t quite think it can be overstated how perfect this crew is for the job.

Absolutely breathtaking view of the Artemis II launch. Wow.

@MikeLevin Exactly what Putin wants.

This is absolutely infuriating and completely idiotic. An estimated 95,000 scientists and researchers have left federal agencies since Trump returned to the White House. These are the people tracking hurricanes, studying pediatric cancer, and modeling the climate tipping points that determine whether we can still prevent catastrophe. We lost them because this administration defunded their work, shuttered their offices, and made clear that finding out the truth is no longer a government priority. NASA’s own administrator just said studying climate change isn’t part of NASA’s mission. The agency that first warned Congress about global warming in 1988 now treats that work as a distraction. Meanwhile, China and Europe are recruiting our scientists, funding their labs, and making long-term bets on the industries of the future while we gut the research infrastructure that took generations to build. We are surrendering global scientific leadership voluntarily, deliberately, and one resignation letter at a time. nytimes.com/2026/03/25/cli…

@DecodingFoxNews @duty2warn Talking about 26,000 casualties is now “getting in the weeds.” Just a minor detail for the Gut-less POS

Jessica Tarlov pointed out that President Trump might have paused strikes in Iran to help boost the stock and bond markets which his allies and supporters might have manipulated for financial gain. Greg Gutfeld rudely interrupted her as usual.

@MrGlobal2025 But I thought Trump was a 4D chess master?

If they had no idea Iran would strike other countries can you just imagine what else they didn’t think of?

@MrGlobal2025 There are also many dumbasses that pretend to be meteorologists! Some folks with degrees in meteorology do specialize in weather impacts on energy supply and demand which is legit.

I don’t talk about weather because I’m not a meteorologist. Why does a meteorologist think he’s an oil and gas expert? STFU.

He’s going to be hearing this “stupid” question over and over again. Nonstop m-fkr!