Righting Czech dams your ass can't, Cash

Better Off Ted.

I discovered early that it’s usually impossible for me to even find HOW INFRASTRUCTURE WORKS in a store without help, so there is zero secrecy and many delightful conversations with booksellers — every part of the interaction is lovely, and leaving them with signed books is such a win for everyone.

Today's Love Letter is from the unstoppable @shing.bsky.social. Shing's ode to Making Little Guys is one of the single most nourishing pieces of nonfiction I have ever read. Maybe you need this one as much as I do.

This is so crucial. When people think about these land comparisons, they don't think about the entire sprawling infrastructure behind FF.

This entire thread is amazing, but when I got to this one I thought it was a good place to repost the pointer to the thread, because this song is one of the most triumphant ones I know. And the story about saving a life is true -- Bob Cusick. It's in the Wikipedia article for thems as are curious.

I said something last week that is more broadly applicable today: Calling for empathy is not neutral or apolitical when only one group of people have been socialized and brutalized into having empathy.

Working with so many friends and strangers to build a durable sense of what is happening across—so far—eight zones of American life bc of the administration’s demolition of democratic governance at @unbreaking.org. unbreaking.org

I always love those lists of "35 under 35," but as I get older, I find that I would love to know about innovations/art from people over 65. "65 over 65" please. Elders have incredible ideas that are the result of having seen the full lifecycle of previous ideas and learned from it.

This broadside was printed by Benjamin Franklin Roberts, a Black printer who sued Boston after his 5yo daughter, Sarah, was excluded from her local elementary school. Roberts lost the case, but was part of the movement that succeeded in integrating Boston's public schools in 1855.

Looking up something in the Boston census of 1900, and these are just other families on the same pages. 2 children surviving out of 14 1 child surviving out of 5 0 children surviving out of 10 3 children surviving out of 4

The thing about investing in public transit is that it *scales* — the more people use it, the better it gets. For everyone. Whereas the more cars there are, the *worse* everything about driving gets. Traffic. Parking. [Ever noticed that in just about every car ad it’s alone on the road? Yeah.]

Writing for my first promotion case where the CV includes multiple NIH grants labeled "Terminated by the Trump Administration." Unprecedented doesn't even come close to describing this destruction.

Inside you there are two wolves. One is active, the other one is on hot standby and becomes active if the first one fails or is taken down for maintenance. Add more wolves as necessary for increased redundancy load balancing. A quorum badger can be added for environments with multiple active wolves.

My statement on Ai from the mini-comic as syllabus i made for new class I'm teaching that starts tomorrow! It robs you of your decisions & struggles - and the joy of being surprised. We won’t to be robbed of our learning - this is essential. This & the full mini at post: bsky.app/profile/nsou...

"Pat, why do you carry that ridiculous 600mm lens on long hikes?" Buddy, I can see mountains reflected in the eyes of a trailside pika.

One easy way to tell seals apart from sealions is that the latter have a different number of electrons

Students really loved getting a minicomic. And they were so excited to see this page addressing our current political situation. Very encouraging all around!

hear me out: netflix series. team of sewer maintenance pros. uses tunnels to traverse time, but only to and from the year the stretch of pipe was built. “Sewer Age”

We are living in an era where we all—as citizens, employees, creators, fans, whatever—understand, value, and care far more about the larger things we are involved with than the people in charge of them, who as often as not distrust or even disdain our commitment.

this will never stop being my favourite @theonion.com article theonion.com/millions-of-...

@darthbluesky.bsky.social TIL: a) it’s National Potato Day, and b) a ‘sea potato’ is a kind of sea urchin — look at this adorable fuzzy bb!

Now is the time to be curious about our universe, to be imaginative about all its possibilities, including the potential for humans to live in good and sustainable relations with each other and the ecosystems that we depend upon. This is a time of stubborn freedom dreaming.

A fantastic discussion last night about climate change, how nice it is to NOT be at war, found & built family & community, queer culture & robot culture, for Automatic Noodle @annaleen.bsky.social Already planning the next Phil&Scifi syllabus, feeling lucky to live in hopepunkville AKA Vancouver

Been saying for awhile that a good project for the public power movement would be for cities and other regional governments to build publicly owned batteries and provide storage as a public good. Here's some good analysis on the economics of this. pv-magazine-usa.com/2025/08/13/g...

Look at this fucking tomato we ate for dinner. It's four dimensional. Hypercube ass tomato

my statement on Ai from the mini-comic I'm making as syllabus for a new class I'm teaching this fall. It's simple, but I pretty much said all I have to say on it - it robs you of decisions and struggle - and the joy of being surprised. It robs you of learning...

This is probably a good time to mention that I’m on a research leave from my college from now to August 2026 (and possibly longer) to do more work in this space, starting with rebooting my newsletter It also means I have more capacity for projects, collaborations, and speaking at events.. debcha.org

And the reason why I keep banging on about it is because the politics we get if more of us understand this technological shift and its implications is a hell of a lot better than what we get if we think that we have to protect ourselves from privation and suffering, even if it means dooming others.

My level of optimism or pessimism about whether any particular group of humans will get their act together and actually do it varies by the day. But that it’s now physically and technologically possible to transition to renewables and to use that energy to close materials loops isn’t in doubt.

The actual physical reality of the planet is that incident solar is abundant. The new technological reality is that we can now harness renewables at scale, opening up ways to limit extraction + pollution. We are not just making shit up to feel good. This is the world we want to build and live in.

The actual physical reality of the planet is that incident solar is abundant. The new technological reality is that we can now harness renewables at scale, opening up ways to limit extraction + pollution. We are not just making shit up to feel good. This is the world we want to build and live in.

it’s almost like those of that say things like talk about hope and people and the future and the places we care about aren’t stupid girls who want to sugar coat shit but actual professionals that care about data and how people’s brains work

I listened to this interview while driving across Illinois but I did *not* expect that the last 20min would be about US railway infrastructure. www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/bro... [also, @billybragg.bsky.social , I think you’d like my book HOW INFRASTRUCTURE WORKS and I’d be happy to send you a copy!]

I think there’s a big difference between “all hope is lost” and “I have lost hope” and in climate it is really important to distinguish between the two. My personal feelings, your personal feelings are not the limits of our collective politics.

Don't miss this @forbes.com article by @shalinjyotishi.bsky.social on our brand new searchable inventory of contract provisions from over 175 union agreements that address workplace technologies, protect worker rights, and shape technology adoption, use, and oversight. www.forbes.com/sites/shalin...

Most of the internet used to be like this. This is actually the default, it took companies enclosing the internet and adding weird, soul-killing incentives to make people behave the way they do now. In a way, there is truly nothing special about Wikipedia except that it survived longer.

Starlink's connection speeds drop below the federal definition of "broadband" at a density of ~7 customers per square mile, according to recent research. The more the customers in an area, the slower everybody's connections get. Data shows that 83% of US Starlink customers get sub-broadband speeds.

Whenever I hear tech execs talk about creating superintelligence, all I can think about is the movie Demon Seed, where a dude invents a superintelligent computer and it imprisons Julie Christie in a smart house, impregnates her, and forces her to become a tradwife. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lrhr...

A really beautiful Long Now insight: "Fossil fuels are a transition phase, not something we want to or even can rely on indefinitely. Our civilisation is up and running, and now it’s time to throw the switch."

Also, of course, the reason why we have super-efficient and pleasant LEDs is because of a sustained international push to replace incandescents — halogens (REALLY hot), compact fluorescents (terrible), white LEDs (pretty great!). It took a time and money and global cooperation and it totally worked.

Same thing with heat! I touched an old desk lamp and was shocked it was HOT and then found myself explaining that light bulbs used to be so inefficient that you could build an Easy-Bake oven around them and make cookies. Never mind setting things on fire to get forward motion.

somebody once told me about a book they were reading (i think it was about going deaf?) that had a whole thing about how noise betrays an inefficiency because whatever is being loud is necessarily spending some of its energy making the noise instead of doing whatever it's nominally supposed to

This is what I mean when I say we're looking at the problem at least partially in the wrong way. We're going to have to deal with huge disruption, & instead of thinking about how to cushion people through that, techbros and govts keep looking for ✨technology✨ to solve everything with no effort

I think of fossil fuels as humanity’s “black start” — they bought us the ability to figure out renewable energy technologies. But it’s just dumb — expensive, polluting — to keep the diesel generator running once the lights are on. [last few paragraphs of this] www.theguardian.com/news/2023/no...

Why can’t all phone calls begin with handshake data like dial-up modems? Who is this? How fast can you talk? How will I know what you have said is accurate after you say it?

Unsolved Physics Problems xkcd.com/3115/

I'm currently researching a new book that was just announced. Looking at waste and recycling along with materials and supply chains to visualize the life cycle of objects. send me your questions and favorite rabbit holes!

As always, "people used to be fine without" (and its close cousin, "people elsewhere are fine without") only works when you decode "fine" as "the suffering is invisible to me, which must mean it did not/does not exist."