On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], "Pray Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. Charles Babbage 1792-1871

Some people really do the work to make you feel wanted 😉 kiddcommander.com

they're calling it "the greatest city in america" dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blo...

SEVER & PIERCE - Page 70 Read more at severandpierce.com Webcomic by myself and @benfleuter.bsky.social

Only 10% of Americans live car-free, but 40% are curious about car-freedom. Remember that the phrase "American love affair with the automobile" was invented by a car-industry copywriter for 1950s spon-con.

this comic(???) is my gentle reprisal for anyone who ever told me “it’s not that deep”

This is me showing my age as a webcomic granny, but I still believe that being a digital homeowner and owning your own webcomic site + supporting each other via web rings and collectives is the best way to go. I've always been wary of comic hosting services, they will always lead to censorship

Some people pay 1 million dollars just so people will look at their trailer in the game awards. Amateurs! This is how you do it: please look at my trailer. Please! Pretty please! I worked so hard on it. PLEASE just look at it. I only have 51 wishlists I NEED THIS JUST LOOK AT IT PLEASE PLEASE OH PLE

The only real solution to "people keep killing people in cars" is "give people ways to get around that don't require driving machines that kill people" but not investing in infrastructure is apparently worth dozens of thousands of deaths a year ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

It’s a wonderful life 1/2

the people of this great republic yearn for locomotive transport

Everybody better get real comfortable with markdown if we're going to get a decent chance at a good web 4

This is why I say that the p*lice are defunding YOU

doom creator id software just became the latest microsoft studio to unionize. though the neutrality agreement that has allowed CWA to organize so many studios recently lapsed, id devs told me that only applies to activision blizzard for now aftermath.site/id-software-union-doom-microsoft-cwa

MAGNETS

Time to get my day on, but I'll bless your skyline with this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMY4...

We weren't in the game awards, but here's our game about being a CEO and also you're a baby

I love Divinity 3, but not because it's the sequal to Divinity 2 or Divinity Original Sin 2 but because it's the third Divinity 1

Sample slides that convey what I believe I am alas obliged to call the Teaching Philosophy behind the course.

Kind of interesting: I thought the thing where the word "capitalism" is so vague it can mean anything from consumerism cronyism to the right to own private property was relatively recent, but here's Chesterton complaining about it in 1927

Just discovered an insane new form of co-intelligence where you briefly share the mind of a great thinker in history and then a portion of their mind travels in yours for the rest of your life. Calling it a "book."

Sometimes I catch myself "driving manually" and I'm reminded of how little thought I usually put into driving an hour to & from work, instead of listening to blog posts (shout-out to @agreatdivorce.bsky.social for all the acoup vocalizations)

Players. Let the games be made for no one 🔥🔥🔥

"I'm not in denial, I'm in open rebellion" damn that quote goes hard

Contextless math lesson! If letters were numbers (i.e., a=1, b=2, etc) who can tell me what 1312 would mean?

The book that means the most to me from a moral/ethical standpoint is probably Carpe Jugulum by Terry Pratchett, but that doesn't quite feel appropriate. And if i'm not going to be appropriate anyway, i may as well just go with a @ryannorth.ca classic...

google maps (punching me in the stomach): fastest route is uber me: but i want to take the subway google maps (throwing me across the room): 2 buses and a transfer would save 4 minutes me: i like subway google maps (kicking me in the head): biking is 45 seconds faster me: underground choo-choo

I love doing physical work on actual objects while listening to a 2 hour meeting where people brag about an agentic AI that can write SQL that runs 80% of the time

3v3p 5 January 2026 www.rice-boy.com

Guys the old site is having a hell of a lot of fun with a Somalian Minnesota t.co/JN8Gv8snST

Imagine if people built software this manageable

Hey Powers that Be (the atproto collective) my heater cut out and I'm considering the pros/cons of trying to fix it myself; what's the best way to diagnose a problem in a big ol central heater?

We gotta do something about metaphors

ordered pasta with a gorgonzola sauce for lunch and reminded of the fact that my way of doing that dish - melting literally half a block of blue cheese per person - is not in fact what you'd call industry standard* *because they're cowards

I'm not sure exactly what I'm learning, but it'll be lovely context next time I run into another conversation about poetry syllable structure

I fucking love memes you can understand through the language barrier, holy shit

I think anyone who makes over a million dollars a year should be hunted for sport. Also we need more public transit and arts grants. Vote Xavier 2028.

If you're in a position to be setting the boundaries and constraints around what other people do at work -- you do developer experience, you pick tools, you are the voice of 'the engineers' to bosses, you do platforms, etc etc -- these are *your rules* to learn. Psychology isn't optional anymore!

There's gonna be Video Essays (or their equivalent) in 2085 that are about "did you know people used to believe that their doctors could teleport them to fantasy worlds???"

I will never understand the appeal of software that "adaptively shapes itself." Software is a tool. Humans are tool users. It's the one thing that we're uniquely good at. If the tool changes every time you use it, you can't learn to use it better, which makes it a bad tool.

HELLO don't forget to read BARBAROUS, for free, any time, at your leisure 🌌

"All is lost" narratives are popular because people generally do not want to take action. Taking action is tiring so if all is lost, you are off the hook. Nothing is more seductive than not having to do anything.

I'm at the ADHD leftists meeting. Every week we get together and try to organize.

RAT!!!!!!

"Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail. Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade."