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Varun

@varunr.bsky.social
459 followers 553 following 490 posts

Data scientist at Slack (my views don't represent those of my employer, obviously). Based in Queens

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Varun @varunr.bsky.social · 3h
For some reason the data science rate is quoted as daily. Wonder how many hours of work they expect
Mercor cold email, offering $1500/day
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Mark Harris @markharris.bsky.social · 16h
Sharing this because NYers who are unenthusiastic about casting a vote for Kathy Hochul need to know that the alternative, Bruce Blakeman, is a genuinely evil piece of shit. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/12/n...
nytimes.com
Blakeman Launches Graphic Attack on Mamdani in Meeting With Hasidic Jews (Gift Article)
While seeking support from Hasidic leaders, the Republican candidate for governor, Bruce Blakeman, said Mayor Zohran Mamdani would not act if riots hit their community.
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Varun @varunr.bsky.social · 5h
Was wondering what happened with all the lawsuits against them for preying on kids, I guess they got settled before this bankruptcy: www.cbsnews.com/news/charact...
character.ai
character.ai | AI Chat, Reimagined–Your Words. Your World.
Chat with millions of AI Characters on the #1 AI chat app. Where will your next adventure take you?
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Spooky Snigdha @snig.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
In India the leaders of the Cockroach youth movement have been arrested, along with more than 1,000 protesters, opposition politicians, journalists, student union leaders & lawyers; New Delhi is in lockdown. The police have prevented mass protests against the country’s election chief taking place.
aljazeera.com
India’s ‘Cockroach’ leaders detained; New Delhi in lockdown
Indian police crackdown appears to have prevented mass protests against the country's election chief from taking place.
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Taniel @taniel.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
El-Sayed’s response to Kennedy:
El-Sayed: “That’s rich coming from someone who wears his bed sheets out at night.”
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Blake Emerson @blakeprof.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
It’s striking that the GOP has a massive cash advantage even when Trump is currently causing lasting harm to the US and global economy. What does that say about the interests of capital?
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Varun @varunr.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
www.wired.com/story/ice-ag...
wired.com
ICE Agent at NYC Shooting Has History of Alleged Violence and Illegal Arrests
Brenden Cuni, an ICE supervisor, has been accused of excessive force and tackling a pregnant woman to the ground. Several of his arrests were later found to be unlawful in federal court.
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Varun @varunr.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
huge surprise
https://www.wired.com/story/ice-agent-at-nyc-shooting-has-history-of-alleged-violence-and-illegal-arrests
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Charles Johnson @charles.littlegreenfootballs.com · 08/10/2026
I know everyone’s jaded and exhausted by the continual parade of madness, but this is the president of US openly inciting racist violence against an entire community of immigrants. (w/ alt text)
The once Great State of Minnesota is being taken over by Somali Immigrants. There is Violence, Murder, and Mayhem all over the State. The people of Minnesota must fight back. You have been robbed, and abandoned by your State Government. Your Governor is an incompetent thief who doesn't want to get involved. He just wants to get out of town with as much as he can steal, and then, lead a quiet life. The Somalians should not be allowed to get away with what they are doing.
They view you as weak and stupid people. Fight back Minnesota, fight back! If you need, the Federal Government will come to your rescue.
Governor Tim Walz, and Mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, must immediately ask for Federal help — and leave the rest to us! President DONALD J. TRUMP
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Patrick Cosmos @veryimportant.lawyer · 09/10/2026
There should be a political party that wants to stop this and punish the people doing this
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Varun @varunr.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
There are several reasons that productivity gains for product development, broadly construed, might be much less than productivity gains for individual coding sub-tasks.
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Varun @varunr.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
I wrote about AI and the barriers to productivity growth at my workplace: varunprajan.github.io/blog/product...
varunprajan.github.io
What are the barriers to productivity growth at tech companies?
Introduction
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Dave Itzkoff @ditzkoff.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Oh brother.
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Steve Vladeck @stevevladeck.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Justice Alito devotes an entire chapter of his new book to the emergency docket—and to responding to people like me (“the most prolific academic critic of the emergency docket”). As I explain over at “One First,” it … didn’t go well: www.stevevladeck.com/p/256-so-une...
In the pre-publication galleys to his new book, So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country, Justice Alito spelled my last name inconsistently. This is, I suspect, the pettiest possible point on which to open in discussing a Supreme Court justice’s new memoir, and I would never have mentioned it except for the fact that inconsistency turns out to be the organizing feature of the chapter in which I (“the most prolific academic critic of the emergency docket”) repeatedly appear.The central inconsistency of Chapter 8, which is devoted to the emergency docket, is structural: Rather than tackle the subject holistically (as one might expect in a book), Alito mashed together the speech he gave five years ago at Notre Dame Law School with a “postscript.” The former was deeply flawed even at the time (among lots of other things, Alito repeatedly insisted that there was “nothing new” about the Court’s behavior on emergency applications during the first Trump administration and COVID); and the latter tries to move the goalposts away from the specific phenomena to which critics like me have actually objected.The result is to leave readers with a disjointed, inaccurate, and misleading sense of what the debate is even about—to say nothing of how the Court’s own behavior since September 2021 (including Alito’s) has only further undermined the already-flawed claims Alito made back then. Somewhere between the galleys of Alito’s book and the final product (which hits bookstores today), someone apparently figured out that my last name should be spelled the same way (and correctly!) throughout. The other, more significant inconsistencies were, apparently, harder to fix.
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southpaw @nycsouthpaw.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
I despise seeing what’s really going on stuffed into a “but critics say” clause.
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 05/10/2026
what an asshole
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Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 04/10/2026
this kind of chart doubles down on the dumb in “social science” and economics. the dumb comes from lossily compressing complex phenomena into rankable scalars, then using arithmetic and ranking to launder claims into “scientific” truths. 1/
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Varun @varunr.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
apnews.com/article/trum...
apnews.com
A gut punch in Ohio: Nearly 1,400 laid off at truck factory just days before Trump rally
President Donald Trump is trying to rally voters in the Dayton, Ohio, area on Saturday. But days ago, 1,400 workers were laid off from a truck factory there.
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Varun @varunr.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Better late than never
 Sipping tea from beer mugs with his co-workers, Kyle Bos listed the ways his life is changing.

Bos has two daughters, with a third due in January. At the grocery store, five items cost as much as a full cart once did. And on Wednesday, Bos and nearly 1,400 other people were laid off from their jobs at what had been the Navistar truck factory in southwestern Ohio.

The layoffs — occurring just three days before President Donald Trump’s rally on Saturday at a nearby high school — were large enough to basically erase an entire year of job growth in the greater Dayton, Ohio, area. And they are one reason why Bos, 30, plans to spend the final weeks before the November election canvassing votes for Democrats.

Asked how many times he had voted for Trump, Bos held up three tattooed fingers. But he said he’s done with the president.

“Something has to change politically in this country,” said Bos, a member of the United Auto Workers who identifies as a centrist. “Seems like it just kept getting worse and worse and worse.”
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Colin @colin-fraser.net · 30/09/2026
I really wasn’t trying to start a fight with Prof. Bender but now that she has created a long thread subtweeting me and her disciples are all yelling at me, let me just say that this is the crux right here. She seems to respond as though I am describing something a priori impossible.
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Ben Casselman @bencasselman.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
One of the dominant narratives about the labor market over the past couple years has been that it's a "good time to have a job but a bad time to be looking for one." I think that's only half true. A quick 📈🧵: #EconSky #NumbersDay
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Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
GATES: “.. I almost can’t believe you’re asking that.” @ezraklein.bsky.social @nytimes.com www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/o...
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Varun @varunr.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
It's interesting that Anthropic will reach 100 billion in annualized revenue in late 2026 *without* making a dent in Google search revenue For some of these companies the real opportunity is X% of all software eng salaries, or X% of all knowledge worker salaries (trillions)
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Varun @varunr.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Reminds me a little of this (from an Anthropic blog post about self-serve analytics)
How important is a correct answer today vs. in the future? AI models are progressing at a rapid pace. We often see companies building a significant amount of infrastructure to account for current model shortfalls that become moot once those models improve. Knowing where models fall short, and waiting for model improvements to fill the gap has significantly less overhead, but may not fit your company’s risk tolerance.
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Carl Zimmer @carlzimmer.com · 27/09/2026
Four days ago, a scientist was surprised by the news that Anthropic discovered new virus genes for making DNA. He says he’s been studying them for years—and feeding his data to Anthropic’s AI as part of his own research. Coincidence? Here’s my story. nyti.ms/3VSWayc
nyti.ms
Did Anthropic’s A.I. Really Make a Scientific Discovery on Its Own? (Gift Article)
An expert at the University of Copenhagen said his team had been sharing its research with the company’s A.I. model, Claude, and that its new finding matched their work.
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Varun @varunr.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Good times
Bessent shitposting about US treasuries 9 months ago
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Julian Sanchez @normative.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Glad about the result, but I don’t think it speaks well of us as a country that after two years of human rights violations, war crimes, naked gangster corruption, and contempt for the Constitution, he’s finally unpopular because gas got expensive.
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the beggars out of here getter @milesklee.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
malpractice story packaging in that the more pertinent details are: this guy is a bodybuilder promoter who killed his own son with a $100K divorce on wheels but is crowdfunding his funeral on a page that just says he was “accidentally struck by a moving vehicle” and they’re close to half that amount
latimes.com
Young boy killed after father backs Cybertruck into him, police say
A California man accidentally hit and killed his 6-year-old son while backing out of the family’s driveway near Temecula in a Tesla Cybertruck, according to police reports.
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Nicole Marie @nicolemarie.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
What have we been telling you? Dems aren’t going to do anything. www.c-span.org/clip/public-...
c-span.org

SEPTEMBER 22, 2026
Sen. Duckworth Urges Democrats to Not Impeach Anybody and "Get Back to Work" If They Win Majority
Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) says Democrats should not impeach "anybody" if they regain control of Congress and "get back to work" on issues like funding of USAID or easing tariffs, which she says are hurting Illinois pork and soybean farmers who trade with China. "I would rather move the ball forward to the benefit of the American people, and if we can do it in a way that allows him to save face, and he doesn't stop us, then that's better for everybody all around," she adds.
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Varun @varunr.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Previously, he would have had to spend 3 minutes writing 3 emails you wouldn't respond to. Now he spends 0 minutes. That's efficiency!
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Cristian Farias @cristianfarias.com · 18/09/2026
In a Manhattan federal courtroom today, a lawyer for the Trump administration argued that Article II of the Constitution lets the president fire a federal employee because he’s Black, and there’s nothing a court can do about it. www.politico.com/news/2026/09...
politico.com
DOJ says recent Supreme Court ruling shields Maurene Comey firing
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Paul Kiernan @pkwsj.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Polymarket’s compliance team was floored by CEO Shayne Coplan’s response to their discovery of rampant fraud on the platform in February: Just keep growing and pay a fine if regulators ever find out. www.wsj.com/business/pol...
wsj.com
Polymarket’s Rush to Grow Left a Door Wide Open For Fraudsters
CEO Shayne Coplan brushed off concerns about a scheme involving stolen debit cards. Now the prediction market is bolstering its executive ranks as it eyes an IPO.
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Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Now this is the situational awareness I’ve come to expect from an OpenAI employee!
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Razzball @razzball.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
lmao
Bill Mitchell ®
@mitchellvii
X.com
With regards to beef prices, have you ever tried a veggie burger?
They're actually really good. A little lettuce, tomato, pickles, a portobello mushroom, slice of Swiss cheese. Excellent.
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Varun @varunr.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
I've seen this quote about bananas floating around but he didn't actually say it, right? He said, "If we lose 50 billion dollars a year with a country, and we say we're not gonna trade with them, then we don't lose 50 billion dollars a year" (which is also dumb, to be clear)
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Mike Konczal @mtkonczal.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
The Tax Foundation argued recently that we should think of the falling labor share as making a 'round trip' back to 'historically precedented' values. I disagree and walk through how the argument is weaker than it seems. Plus we dig into NIPA flat files! newsletter.mikekonczal.com/p/i-disagree...
newsletter.mikekonczal.com
I Disagree With The Tax Foundation, Labor Share is Collapsing
Getting into the guts of NIPA and what prop income really does when you include it.
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Aaron Sojourner @aaronsojourner.org · 17/09/2026
These people have too much money. They have all the personal stuff and experiences they want. All that's left for them is trying to seize control of public power to force their tastes and delusions on us.
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Varun @varunr.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
He didn't actually say the thing about bananas, right? The quote was, "If we lose 50 billion dollars a year with a country, and we say we're not gonna trade with them, then we don't lose 50 billion dollars a year" (which is also dumb, to be clear)
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Brian Beutler @brianbeutler.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Fail. (Big piece on this tomorrow.) www.politico.com/news/2026/09...
politico.com
Democratic advisers are warning their candidates not to go too hard at AI
Democratic consultants are warning their candidates in some key races not to lean into AI regulations out of fear that powerful tech groups could spend heavily against them.
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Varun @varunr.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Great opportunity to work with Daniel Penny
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 15/09/2026
when Republicans are on the wrong side of a 60-40 issue they double down over and over and over, it becomes the center of political debate, and more often than not the numbers move. when Democrats are in that position they immediately give up
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Cameron 🇺🇸🗽🦅 @cameroncorduroy.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
dunno if it can get more on the nose than "condemning racism makes you a cuckold"
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Justin Fox @byjustinfox.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
What the Trump administration has been doing to the federal government, in one chart. Gift link: www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...
Nondefense agences with 2,000+ employment decline since Jan. 2025
Department, agency or subagency	Employment change	Percent change
Internal Revenue Service	-29,985	-29.4%
Veterans Health Administration	-26,347	-6.2%
Social Security Administration	-7,934	-13.8%
Forest Service (since July 2024)	-7,268	-17.8%
Transportation Security Administration	-6,481	-9.8%
Federal Emergency Management Agency	-5,759	-22.1%
Bureau of Land Management (since July 2024)	-5,274	-47.6%
Veterans Benefits Administration	-5,198	-15.0%
National Institutes of Health	-5,052	-23.5%
Agency For International Development	-4,739	-95.4%
Food and Drug Administration	-4,700	-22.4%
Army Corps of Engineers	-4,563	-11.8%
Environmental Protection Agency	-4,476	-26.4%
Department of Energy	-3,976	-24.8%
Centers For Disease Control and Prevention	-3,649	-28.6%
Small Business Administration	-3,480	-40.6%
National Park Service (since July 2024)	-3,469	-15.4%
Department of State	-3,158	-21.8%
Natural Resources Conservation Service (USDA)	-3,002	-25.3%
Fish and Wildlife Service (since July 2024)	-2,803	-30.8%
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Admin.	-2,575	-20.8%
Geological Survey	-2,572	-30.5%
Citizenship and Immigration Services	-2,514	-11.0%
Public Buildings Service (GSA)	-2,452	-43.8%
Census Bureau	-2,436	-18.3%
Agricultural Research Service	-2,325	-32.7%
Bureau of Reclamation	-2,207	-38.0%
Bureau of Prisons/Federal Prison System	-2,175	-6.0%
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Varun @varunr.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
gothamist.com/news/as-nypd...
gothamist.com
As NYPD cracked down on quality-of-life violations, nearly half its 98K civil tickets got tossed
Unlike other city ticket-writing agencies, the NYPD still writes 100% of its civil tickets by hand.
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Varun @varunr.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
???
half the nypd has terrible handwriting and/or can't spell
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🎃🎃🎃Michael Scare-anicolas🎃🎃🎃 @karanicolas.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Democrats should be targeting crypto, as a Republican constituency, with the same zeal that Republicans targeted universities for being liberal-coded. But they won’t, because it might jeopardize the crumbs that industry throws their way.
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Financial Times @financialtimes.com · 13/09/2026
Days after an investigation into the party’s finances was expanded, crypto billionaire Ben Delo said he was giving Reform £36mn. Fellow crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne said he would match it: ft.trib.al/mfvakFN
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Giles Wilkes @gilesyb.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
aleximas.substack.com/p/will-ai-so... The best blog ever written on AI and growth, by a clear margin. By @aleximas.bsky.social
aleximas.substack.com
Will AI soon lead to double-digit growth?
Probably not. Here is why.
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FactPost @factpostnews.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Don Jr complains of “enriched elites” who benefit while normal people suffer
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