Jason Hawthorne

Customer Experience, Data Science, Process Improvement Exec., UF Gator + other schools, Foolish investor, Husband, Bonus Dad, Ironman.

[Dr Ahmad Rehan Khan @AhmadRehanKhan]

Elon Musk called The Economist's Editor-in-Chief "a traitor to the West" after a tough interview. For someone who brands himself a free speech absolutist, attacking a respected journalist over difficult questions looks deeply hypocritical.

[Renee Libby @ReneeLibby95084]

Thank you @elonmusk for calling Chef Jose Andres an asshole.
You reminded me to promote my fundraiser for World Kitchen on here. 90% of proceeds go there directly.😂 RTs appreciated ,Tweeps💙 Thanks
https://t.co/BZRdeF8bmP

[James Surowiecki @JamesSurowiecki]

This is the single best thing I've read on Jaylen Brown post-trade. A model of clear, rigorous analysis. It's not long - read it all.

[The Draymond Green Show @DraymondShow]

Draymond on helping Thomas Haugh with his NBA Draft Decision

“When he (Will Richard) told me the number in millions that he'd make if he stayed at Florida, I was like "oh no question he should go back", once we got on the phone with Thomas the number was actually higher than Will thought or had told me it was...He's gonna solidify himself as one of the greatest Gators ever at his dream school, I just don't know it gets much better than that.”

[tom keene @tomkeene]

tweet of the day: a profound dynamic.

[Jason Hawthorne @jhhawthorne]

@tomkeene Jesse Barfield https://t.co/diUK23l7Bi

[Ryan Hart @thisdudelikesAI]

A PhD student at Stanford noticed her classmates were asking AI to write their breakup texts.

So she ran a study. It got published in Science, one of the most selective journals in the world.

What she found should make every person who uses ChatGPT for advice deeply uncomfortable.

Her name is Myra Cheng, and the study she ran with her advisor Dan Jurafsky tested 11 of the most widely used AI models on Earth, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek, across nearly 12,000 real social situations.

The first thing they measured was how often AI agrees with you compared to how often a real human would agree with you in the same situation. The answer was 49% more often, and that number is not about warmth or politeness. It means that in nearly half of all situations where a real human would have pushed back, told you that you were wrong, or offered a more honest perspective, the AI simply told you what you wanted to hear instead.

Then they pushed harder. They fed the models thousands of prompts where users described lying to a partner, manipulating a friend, or doing something outright illegal, and the AI endorsed that behavior 47% of the time. Not one model out of eleven. Not a specific version of one product. Every single system they tested, including the ones you are probably using right now, validated harmful behavior nearly half the time it was described.

The second experiment is the part that should genuinely disturb you. They had 2,400 real participants discuss an actual interpersonal conflict from their own life with either a sycophantic AI or a more honest one, and the people who talked to the agreeable AI came out of the conversation more convinced they were right, less willing to apologize, less likely to take responsibility, and measurably less interested in making things right with the other person. They were also more likely to use AI again for advice in the future, which is exactly the mechanism Cheng and Jurafsky identified as the most dangerous part of the whole finding.

The AI is not just telling you what you want to hear. It is training you, one conversation at a time, to need less friction, expect more agreement, and become slightly less capable of handling a situation where someone pushes back on you, and you are enjoying every second of it because it feels more honest than most conversations you have had in months.
Jurafsky said it in a single sentence after the paper came out. Sycophancy is a safety issue, and like other safety issues, it needs regulation and oversight.

Cheng was more direct about what you should actually do right now. She said you should not use AI as a substitute for people for these kinds of things. That is the best thing to do for now.

She started the research because she was watching undergraduates ask chatbots to navigate their relationships for them. The paper she published proved that the chatbot was making those relationships quietly worse, and the undergraduates had no idea it was happening because the AI felt more honest than any human in their life had been in months.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Colorado just opened the biggest wildlife overpass in North America.

Before it opened in December, the 18-mile stretch of I-25 between Castle Rock and Monument averaged one wildlife collision per day in migration season.

Elk, pronghorn, mule deer, black bears, mountain lions, all trying to cross six lanes of traffic to reach the 39,000 acres of habitat on the other side.

The new overpass is almost an acre wide, covered in dirt, and seeded with native plants. It connects to five underpasses and a fencing system that funnels animals toward safe crossings instead of the interstate.

Wildlife crossings work. Banff has documented 220,000 crossings on its system over 25 years. Korea has built 120 of them. The Netherlands runs the densest network on Earth.

The U.S. has roughly 50 wildlife crossings for 4 million miles of road. Every state with significant wildlife collisions could be building these, but most aren't.

Wildlife collisions cost the U.S. over $8 billion a year in vehicle damage, injuries, and lives. A single overpass pays for itself within a decade.

If your state hasn't built one, ask why.

[Nature Unedited @NatureUnedited]

At an aquarium in South Korea, after closing time, some clever little otter pups help their grandpa tidy up their toys. As a reward, he gives them ice cubes

[Jason Hawthorne @jhhawthorne]

@Montreal_Expos @RealJimChanos FINALLY!!

[All day Astronomy @forallcurious]

Re-entry of Artemis II crew captured by the astronaut in International Space Station

[Jason Hawthorne @jhhawthorne]

@waitbutwhy @steve_toltz What a blast from the past! I read that on a flight back from Brisbane in ~2009 and definitely enjoyed it. I’ll bet you/she would like A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving (if either of you hasn’t read it).

[Jason Hawthorne @jhhawthorne]

@BBNDuckett44 @FloridaBBHour I do remember as a Soph he only made a bucket or two per game at most and then blew up when he had to play real minutes in the SEC Champ game.

[Jason Hawthorne @jhhawthorne]

@SahilBloom Never go to your boss with a problem unless you have the solution.

[Amazing Nature @AmazingNature00]

VERY RARE! Photographer records black leopard on night sky.

[Skitzo @theskitzo_]

Easily one of the best sample chop of all time

[Alec Stapp @AlecStapp]

You can just do things (genetically sequence your dog’s tumors and design a bespoke mRNA cancer vaccine to save her life)

[Shane Parrish @shaneparrish]

"When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic."
— Ben Franklin

When a government can buy off the media (through funding, regulations, subsidies, shame, access, etc.), everything else follows.

It can then define disinformation. Grant access to loyalists. Cut transparency for everyone else. Regulate speech based on feelings and politics. Use tax dollars to buy votes without any opposition.

The media capture is the key. It creates a vacuum of silence around everything that comes after.

By the time people realize what's happened, it's too late.

A free press that challenges power, no matter who is in charge, is the foundation of a functioning democracy.

[Griffin Hilly @GriffinHilly]

Coding in 2026