Happy Valentine's Day to everyone who isn't a Nazi, and especially to the trekkies.

If you don’t love me at my “Horkheimer and Adorno predicted Anakin Skywalker’s fall to the dark side”, you don’t deserve me at my “Is Yoda a bug or an insect?”

The trick to making perfectly poached eggs is always using at least n+1 eggs. Follow for more cooking tips.

Epstein’s economic power among academics was made possible by a capitalist system that makes higher education dependent on the charity economy rather than a public good supported by taxing the rich

bars

Hello again, everything is still scary and hard and the tech job market is wild right now, so here's my semi-regular thread of open jobs I've found where your work could make the world better (or at least, not make it worse)

hey Mom can you come pick me up. yeah everyone on the niche microblogging website is arguing about who has the correct emotional posture to the unknowable future again

To mark 25 years of Drowned in Sound I’m doing a series of interviews with some of my favourite acts of the 21st century Was thrilled to finally interview the techno / ambient / electronic icon Kelly Lee Owens about class, community, and clever ideas to save grassroots music #music #depechemode

Bandcamp bans AI music

Here is the wonderful dorky talk of Astrid Bin with which she was closing the 2025 edition of Berlin. Watch “Dork Patterns: The Story of Little Character” and kick off this week in the right way. youtu.be/6MYyRuSaNSY

it sucks that being a woman talking about this puts a target on me, but i‘ve had my head put on nude bodies that weren’t mine as retaliation before so whatever: if it happens to you, do not panic and definitely do not isolate yourself from friends and family. talk about it with someone you trust.

Pluribus poignantly explores the idea that “No one has to be able to work with everyone, but […] if we do not challenge ourselves to navigate some amount of discomfort, our political reach will have terminal limits.” (Let This Radicalize You by @mskellymhayes.bsky.social, @prisonculture.bsky.social)

Verschlimmbessern is German for making something worse while intending to make it better, and by introducing inherently non-deterministic tools like ChatGPT to problems where deterministic solutions already exist, you’re doing exactly that.

With a knock on your door, a kindly wizard invites you to join us on Shelved By Genre's LORD OF THE YEAR, in which we will consider the popular but contested works of JRR Tolkien, kicking things off with a long rumination upon the first four chapters of THE HOBBIT: rangedtouch.com/2026/01/02/t...

I like when a villain in a story says “my powers are stronger than ever before”, so that we know their powers are stronger than ever before

The belly rubs will continue until morale improves

The idea that autistic people lack empathy is still depressingly prevalent, partly because people conflate 'caring about other humans' wellbeing & wanting them to be happy' with 'reliably able to infer a stranger's motivation & emotional state based off observing a few external nonverbal clues'.

SCOOP: Flock left at least 60 of its AI-powered, people-tracking surveillance cameras exposed and livestreaming to the open internet. We tracked ourselves. The exposure highlights the power of these cameras and types of things they're tracking. Not just cars. www.404media.co/flock-expose...

Most of us did not choose to write or draw or design so that we could put products on the shelf. We chose to do it because it’s a set of skills we enjoy exercising, that give us fulfillment. It’s like asking a pro pitcher to just let a machine pitch for them. Fuck off and give me the ball.

we have a really good dev rel engineer here throwing himself to (i would say) a small number of very loud, hungry wolves because the new ceo did (i would also say) a very weird announcement that sounded like it was written in 2024 by an ai startup

To the person who came up with the idea to replace the knobs on a stovetop with a single touch panel, which is mounted flush with the same surface on which pots of boiling water are heated up; where are you, I just wanna talk!

A few notes on organizing: mattdpearce.substack.com/p/an-unsenti...

the way they’re also literally taking the place of the actual laborers who built this shit is quite on the nose

Most discussions about “misinformation” treat the problem as if people simply don’t have good enough critical-thinking skills. It sounds intuitive, but it’s not entirely accurate. The problem isn’t just individual ignorance, it’s the structure of the information environment people are placed into.

Developer attempts to replicate "Liquid Glass" in CSS, and once finished realizes what she'd actually created is an exploit for a fundamental, previously unknown, and rather serious browser vulnerability lyra.horse/blog/2025/12... "CSS hack accidentally becomes regular hack"

Cinema is great because we just watched First Cow (2019) and there’s a guy who finds a salamander lying on its back, picks it up, and turns it the right way around, and it tells you everything you need to know about what kind of guy he is.

Episode 3 of Gate Crashing is out now! Tune in to our conversation with @jasonkoebler.bsky.social of 404 Media and @davidjroth.bsky.social of Defector about finding a new path forward for journalism: youtu.be/19pQAkStncI...

“‘This ruling is a clear affirmation that AI cannot be deployed as a shortcut around union rights, ethical journalism, or human judgment,’ said Ariel Wittenberg, unit chair of the PEN Guild.” GOOD AFTERNOON TO ORGANIZED LABOR www.niemanlab.org/2025/12/poli...

One day, Apple Inc. will be held accountable for the thousands of hours their users have to spend manually reversing the autocorrection of “omw” to “On my way!”

“In many ways, understanding how things work is the antithesis of generative AI.” New post about preparing for the post-bubble-era: fmarx.com/journal/the-...

The advocacy and work of accessibility continues, regardless of anti-DEIA. But the work can be harder, less resourced, more diminished. Oppressive systems weigh heavily on the advocates still advocating. So if you can, take the weight off us by helping where you can, regardless of your job title.

Me reading your posts

I think the shortest version of why LLMs are an anti education technology is that education is fundamentally about making shared context to understand ourselves, each other, and the world And by design LLMs destroy shared context

"If you don't nurture the soft parts of yourself that made you show up in the first place, you will become hard, you will stop feeling things." - @mskellymhayes.bsky.social on the importance of taking time for your grief amidst the work.

powerful opening

if i've learned one thing from doing union stuff while also doing other forms of organizing, it's that you're better off with people you disagree with who are nevertheless trying to do the same thing as you than with people you agree with who aren't trying to do anything

It’s widely known (and, I think, pretty uncontroversial) that learning requires effort — specifically, if you don’t have to work at getting the knowledge, it won’t stick. Even if an LLM could be trusted to give you correct information 100% of the time, it would be an inferior method of learning it.

👩‍🌾 Grab your tools

“GitHub no longer uses toasts because of their accessibility and usability issues.” Music to my ears! primer.style/accessibilit...

If you tell me you’re hungry and I then walk up to another person, punch them in the face, take their sandwich, and hand it to you, the appropriate response is “What the hell is wrong with you?”, not “Thank you for the nice sandwich”. New post about the rudeness of AI: fmarx.com/journal/pink...

"Like capital punishment, torture, and slavery, deportation is wrong. Always, all of it, no exceptions. People of conscience must not let ourselves be pulled into line-drawing between acceptable and unacceptable instances of this violence" littlevillagemag.com/letter-to-th...

reading theory

“My personal website is not an emergency service, so I’ll optimize the CSS when I get to it. Which is never.” — @ohhelloana.blog reminding us to set realistic expectations for our side projects #btconf

It’s @bell.bz reminding us that developing strong communication skills is more important than worrying about the latest tools or technologies. “Get the core right, and resilient code will follow.” #btconf

“If the first generation of the Web gave us villages, and the second generation gave us unlivable megacities, I want the third generation to have neighborhoods again.” — @sachajudd.com #btconf

Good things are possible and we don’t have to settle.

“Writing a useful encyclopedia entry does not mean “putting down random facts in no discernible order.”” “Real humans with real taste and real thoughts and real perspectives discuss and debate the types of information that should be included in any given article” www.404media.co/grokipedia-i...

The violence of policing is proportional to the inequality it maintains. Our current level of inequality requires constant, shocking violence.

Finally bought my ticket for #btconf Berlin next week. Who else is gonna be there? beyondtellerrand.com/events/berli...