PhDs Can’t Find Work as Boston’s Biotech Engine Sputters
The Wall Street Journal reports that Boston’s once-booming biotech sector has hit a sharp downturn, leaving newly minted Ph.D.s struggling to find work as venture funding dries up, lab space sits empty, and companies downsize or relocate amid rising costs and policy uncertainty. The Wall Street Journal reports: Boston’s biotech sector, long a vital economic eng … ⌘ Read more

MIT Grieves Shooting Death of Renowned Director of Plasma Science Center
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) community is grieving after the “shocking” shooting death of the director of its plasma science and fusion center, according to officials. Nuno FG Loureiro, 47, had been shot multiple times at his home in the affluent Boston subu … ⌘ Read more

Top Consultancies Freeze Starting Salaries as AI Threatens ‘Pyramid’ Model
Major consulting firms including McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group and Bain have frozen starting salaries for the third consecutive year as AI reshapes how these companies think about their traditional reliance on large cohorts of junior analysts. Job offers for 2026 show undergraduate packages holding steady at $135,000-$140,00 … ⌘ Read more

More Than 60 US and Canadian Police Units Now Use Boston Dynamics’ Robot Dog
Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot is now deployed by more than 60 bomb squads and SWAT teams across the US and Canada. The 75-pound four-legged machine starts at around $100,000 and has been used in armed standoffs, hostage rescues and hazardous materials incidents since its commercial debut five years ago. The Massachusetts … ⌘ Read more

Airbnb Rival Sonder Abruptly Shuts Down, Orders Guests To Leave
Sonder, a short-term rental company and former Airbnb rival, abruptly went out of business after Marriott ended its licensing deal on Nov. 9 – leaving guests scrambling as they were told to vacate their rooms immediately. From a report: Paul Strack, 63, visiting Boston from Little Rock, Arkansas, told CBS News he received an email from Marriott on Sunda … ⌘ Read more

Here’s an interesting thought/angle on this topic:

gemini://gemini.conman.org/boston/2025/08/21.1

A further check showed that all the network blocks are owned by one organization—Tencent [4]. I’m seriously thinking that the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) encourage this with maybe the hope of externalizing the cost of the Great Firewall [5] to the rest of the world.

Implementing DOES> in Forth, the entire reason I started this mess
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How big is VMS?
This question was asked during my Boot Camp presentation last fall in Boston, and over the past 35 years dozens of times people have asked, how big is VMS? That translates into “how many lines of code are in VMS”? I thought it was time to at least make a stab at pursuing some insight into the answer. I wrote some command procedures to count the number of source lines in .B32, .B64, .C, .MAR, .M64, and .S files. Not counted are blank lines and lines beginning with the standard comment characters and m … ⌘ Read more

This farmer never planned to grow asparagus — now he’s putting it into ice cream
While he grew up on an asparagus farm, it took a pandemic-era career shift to turn Markum Boston into his home town’s first grower of white asparagus. ⌘ Read more

A machine-executable plan to install a self-supervised reinforcement learning system on all instances of the spot robot from boston dynamics, described step by step | posted on art station

Automating Boston Dynamics Spot Robot - Computerphile ⌘ Read more

Peter Saint-Andre: MLK and Personalism
In my recent post on idealism and identity, I mentioned my attraction to the philosophy of personalism, with its emphasis on human dignity. It is perhaps a little-known fact that Martin Luther King, Jr., was greatly influenced by that very philosophy. Early in life he ventured north to study at Boston University, then the center of personalist thought in America, where he completed his doctorate under theologian Edgar Sheffield Brightman. We can see the deep influence of personalism on King’s … ⌘ Read more

“What are robot dogs actually being used for?”
Many people have seen the videos of Boston Dynamics with their robots. While watching the videos, I always wondered what the possible use cases for such robots (dogs) are? Just millitary? But now Tom Scott clarifies it with a new video: Hydroelectric power plant inspection for example! With the robots it is cheaper and easier to monitor the power plants centrally. ⌘ Read more

Listening to Modern Lovers for the first time https://www.mmone.org/modern-lovers/ #rock #70s #boston

The Philosophy of Our Time | Boston Review http://bostonreview.net/philosophy-religion/ronald-aronson-philosophy-our-time

Grace v. Glamour: The Duality of Sailor Moon (Anime Boston 2016 Panel) - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVehcW4fC1g

No Collision | Boston Review http://bostonreview.net/science-nature-politics/bonnie-honig-no-collision

Assert yourself - The Boston Diaries - Captain Napalm http://boston.conman.org/2018/11/06.1

Computers can solve your problem. You may not like the answer. - The Boston Globe https://apps.bostonglobe.com/ideas/graphics/2018/09/equity-machine/

A Time-Twisting Visit to the Museum of Capitalism - Atlas Obscura https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/museum-of-capitalism-boston

Managing TLS connections using Lua and Lua coroutines - The Boston Diaries - Captain Napalm http://boston.conman.org/2018/07/23.1

Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans | Boston Review https://bostonreview.net/literature-culture/henry-farrell-philip-k-dick-and-fake-humans