Christopher Mims

Please enjoy this home security footage of an oddly human-like bear raiding a fridge in Lake Tahoe www.wsj.com/us-news/blac...

NEW: buried in anthropic's hefty ipo documents released yesterday is an interesting admission: the company's increasing reliance on dirty gas to power its data centers is actually exposing it to financial risk wrote about it for @wired.com www.wired.com/story/anthro...

weird thing i have tried to describe before where LLM mistakes are simply inhuman. like they are entire types of mistakes that were unfathomable previously, literally could not have been made because the specific mix of competence and stupidity necessary was impossible

a haunted house, but it's just various pieces of corporate software encouraging you to "get into the holiday mood" and take a minute to "have some spooky fun" as you desperately try to get work done

The FEC compiles campaign finance data. It plays zero role in administering elections

why does AI work better now when you talk to it like you're Mike Ditka

In the last few weeks i've been bombarded with emails from people who have minor tech support problems. ChatGPT is telling them to email me, writing their emails, and compiling "evidence packets" after convincing them they have stumbled on a major story: www.404media.co/chatgpt-keep...

“This is the first time ever that we have had to engage in scenario planning to safeguard against potential federal interference in elections. It seems like the federal government is now adversarial to the states.” www.nytimes.com/2026/10/27/u...

“Billionaires who popularized stock-based lending include Larry Ellison and Elon Musk. Both borrow to avoid having to sell shares—which could trigger a taxes and dilute their voting rights—in companies they founded.” www.wsj.com/finance/the-...

A reminder, because it is almost that time of year: More children are killed by cars on Halloween than any other day of the year, by far. www.vox.com/future-perfe... If you're a parent, I hope you'll do what you can to keep kids safe. If you're driving on Saturday, PLEASE exercise extra caution.

“I think they’ve been watching what has been happening under this administration, realizing that they’ve been completely duped,” said Abdul El-Sayed. The MAHA-MAGA marriage is tenuous, and Dems sense an opportunity: www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

seems Anthropic has figured out how to make money

The 5-year cancer survival rate is up to 70% SIDS deaths have decreased by over 50% 89% decline in tornado deaths All thanks to federal investment in science and OUR tax dollars at work!

Great read from @mims.bsky.social about taking a cheap EV through states that aren't exactly bursting at the seams with public chargers—and why it's easier to do now than many folks think: www.wsj.com/business/aut...

NEW: A bird flu outbreak has been raging uncontrolled on a Utah mink farm for two months. Flu experts fear it could spark a devastating human pandemic. But officials haven’t acted — instead prioritizing the financial interests of the fur trade.

The Immortal Jellyfish Cheats Death by Reverting to a Polyp When Injured or Stressed www.discovermagazine.com/the-immortal...

Ukraine learns to fight without Starlink as Musk plays politics with satellites arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026...

Woah - boards of service in the Marines and the Navy are ignoring Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth's order to purge transgender troops from the military. "Navy and Marine Corps boards have voted to retain trans members in nine of 12 cases." www.nytimes.com/2026/10/23/u...

Wall Street is bailing on the AI trade. “Signals from Meta that it could soon go on a cash-raising spree helped trigger another massive rotation trade on Thursday, with investors dumping stocks connected to the AI boom and piling into almost everything else“ www.wsj.com/finance/stoc...

Trump Called Musk and Asked Him to Lift Ukraine Starlink Restrictions Military-grade system appeared to be working more normally on Thursday, soon after the call www.wsj.com/world/trump-...

Just as a private equity firm buys out a corporation and strips it for parts, a consultant class is raiding the Democratic Party and getting “generationally wealthy” along the way New from me and @adambonica.bsky.social newrepublic.com/article/2163...

Voters who Googled how to donate to Talarico got an AI answer that led them to give to a different senator. A network of fake news websites seeded messaging about state & local candidates that AI answers picked up on. My story on how the AI midterms are going: www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

Amazing how quickly we went from "oh no LLMs are going to flood the Internet with insecure code" to "oh no LLMs have discovered the internet was already flooded with insecure code"

New: We found cops who kept using Flock to spy on women after they left the force. One used it for five years after retirement, tracking his wife during a custody battle. Another ran searches while he was suspended (and later fired) after killing a 15-year-old boy. Free to read: wapo.st/3UEwWU7

We were investigating Wedgewood for faking their data and emailed them for comment this morning, ahead of publishing the findings tomorrow. They are now trying to cover up their fraud with the "we were doing a social experiment" excuse. Full story here: blog.fiftyplusone.news/p/fiftypluso...

A small town in Kansas sued its own residents when they tried to block a data center being built by a Trump-linked investor from Dubai. Trump said onstage at Mar-a-Lago that the developer's data center projects would secure expedited reviews. www.wsj.com/us-news/the-...

Breaking: Elon Musk ordered the Starlink slowdown that blindsided Ukraine on.wsj.com/4sgcxkt

Oct. 10: Musk responds "Zelensky has gone too far" on X to Trump comments about Ukraine hitting Russian refineries Oct. 14: Ukrainian drone operators lose unrestricted access to Starlink for strikes; Musk posts that any slowdown is POTUS's decision. But actually:q www.wsj.com/world/ukrain...

Three-byline alert: 🚨 “.. Last week, Musk capped the speeds at which Ukrainian hardware could stay connected to the satellite-based network .. .. One of the people also claimed Musk and Trump discussed the matter prior to the decision ..” @wsj.com www.wsj.com/world/ukrain...

Anthropic's S1 just dropped, thanks to my colleague Anissa Gardizy www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anth...

Hey, it’s the official release day for Seeing Like a Supply Chain! And of course I’m swamped with grading and lesson-planning, but maybe I can say a little about the book and the process of researching it. yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...

My new book, Co-Existence, is out today. It is a guide to how to live and work in a world where AI is sometimes, but not always, better than you. (And, for the release, I worked with Opus 5.5 to make a quite interesting experience for the book's new website: co-existence.ai)

the advent of AI tools has led us to create a whole new category of posting

NEW: Lindsay Graham and Jim Clyburn were under FBI investigation for bribery. Then Trump dismantled the DOJ & FBI public corruption units. The investigation died. We unearthed it: www.propublica.org/article/nava...

at the risk of hypocrisy, just want to say that almost never posting (just retweets and replies) for awhile has fundamentally reset my feelings about social media, what it's capable of, what it's for, how the medium itself both embiggens and besmalls us all. will say more sometime in the future

This article quotes a sociology professor, a lawyer, and an architect who reject the notion that housing prices are set by supply and demand and do not believe that building more homes reduces rents. It is the housing policy equivalent of platforming climate change deniers.

In AI’s developmental years, its network architecture created a bottleneck that limited its capabilities. Then researchers tried a mathematical operation referred to as “attention,” and everything changed. https://www.quantamagazine.org/is-attention-the-essence-of-intelligence-20261012/

i love when subscription services send me those coy emails like ‘the price of your subscription is changing.’ yeah? it’s changing? in what way? what sort of personal growth will this already expensive subscription undergo?

A lot of AI assistants seem to have been built around the assumption that the rest of the world is not actually real nymag.com/intelligence...

New open-access paper: Direct File showed that govt could build its own user-centered platform without relying on contractors. But the product was killed after a DOGE lead spoke with the private tax preparation industry lobbying against a private option. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Holy slime mold! This is tomorrow, 10/6!! See you soon!

journalist request: Are you, like me, ever annoyed that your work accounts are the one place you can't use AI to automate precisely the kind of tedious, soul-sucking tasks where it could be of the most help? If so, I would like to hear from you. (DMs open)

Good news everyone: AI is *not* going to kill us all! But don't take my word for it -- I talked to (real) experts, and dug deep into the logic of an "AI apocalypse" and found it wanting. That doesn't mean AI companies are off the hook, though. (gift link) www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-a...

Good news everyone: AI is *not* going to kill us all! But don't take my word for it -- I talked to (real) experts, and dug deep into the logic of an "AI apocalypse" and found it wanting. That doesn't mean AI companies are off the hook, though. (gift link) www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-a...