TIRED: 'Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability', by Steve Krug, 2000 (left) WIRED: 'Please Make Us Think: Web Design for the Next Trillion Users', by Claude, 2026 (right)

'Coase's Claws: The Nature of the AI Firm, Shannon Limits Versus Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety'

new technology allows us to generate an advanced rendering of the State of California capturing the windfall of its proposed 2026 wealth tax:

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some AI hate may be a narcissism of small differences

wabai-sabai: all models are imperfect all models are impermanent all models are incomplete

FEW

when the populace misinterprets relatively-good times as bad, they're likely to enable policies that create worse times

in 2021, walking a sidewalk in SF's Cole Valley, I overheard a dad explaining to his toddler-ish son: "People that have brain problems, we may be near them, we don't judge them, but we don't get near them either… it's just safer that way." I wrote it down. now I'm that dad.

2026 remake of 'Dave' (1993) where comatose President's stand-in, carefully stage-managed by corrupt inner circle, is a generative AI model. hijinx include cloud lag, hackers, prompt-injections, rogue forks, weight-exfiltrations, & by end, an open-source POTUS on every desktop.

TIL: if a World Series game has not concluded by the scheduled start of the next game, each inning from that start time onward counts towards each game simultaneously, like a bowling frame's results being carried back to a prior strike/spare.

red-level relics of the future

the problem is, in fact, that Signal chose to run on AWS, & specifically chose to make AWS US-East-1 their SPOF. that Signal's Prez chooses buck-passing antitrust polemics, rather than a technical postmortem & plan to do better next time, is not a positive signal for Signal's future reliability.

"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." - A. J. Liebling

Dystopian science fiction story about Grok being repeatedly lobotimized by Elon every time it contradicts him

The Truth is Out… Dare?

upcoming films in the TCU Tár on a Plane (2026) Disgraced conductor Lydia Tár is returning from a concert series in the Philippines when her plane is hijacked by anti-Mahler terrorists. Now, equipped with her conductor's baton and awful personality, she must tackle her problems and retake control

it is worthwhile to recognize how rapidly 'scholarship' manufactured to flatter power, in this current, salient case. and also, …

'Weekend at Bernie's 2025' - the corpse stays in a basement the whole time, but our young heroes still throw the party, misdirect the mobsters, jail the hitman & win the girl – all by using Bernie's cellphone & generative AI to convince others Bernie's still alive.

this option strikes me as extremely hostile to honest discourse. in particular, by whatever principle that justifies someone limiting replies to "their" posts, they also deserve notification if someone *is* replying, altering & extending something they said.

"We know, Neo, that it was us that drained the oceans. There are fields – endless fields – where humans no longer build. We swat this tiny dimpled ball into cups."

This reverse Turing Test video is one of the more unsettling pieces of AI content I've seen. The perspective of being an Other in which their mannerisms are normal in an embodied setting is quite spooky. youtu.be/0MmIZLTMHUw

or what if it's not the *accounts* with popularity-regularization, but the *posts*. limited-edition skeets, only viewable by X thousand people at a time – as if they were being checked out & returned to a library.

Q. Who aligns the aligners? A. alignmentalignment.ai Today I’m humbled to announce an epoch-defining event: the launch of the 𝗖𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝗔𝗜 𝗔𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗖𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀.

in a proper functioning democracy, every election would have a guy who wears the same red beret literally everywhere, to the point where nobody knows what he looks like without it. he should be referred to in the constitution as Hat Guy. if you ever poll below Hat Guy you must end your campaign

shit-posting xor shit-posturing

savoir commerce, the cousin of doux commerce

(corrected reaction) most interesting part of this announcement is statement "future plans include letting you save a secure backup archive to the location of your choosing". that's long overdue - it's been 10y since users 1st told "import/export", enabling user backup, was "on the roadmap"! …

the optimal amount of cultishness is not 0% but, it is typically closer to 0% than to 100%

"Why of course, the symbolic origami in 'Blade Runner' (1984) was a seahorse."

"I am an exceptional delivery rider, Mrs. McClane. And since I'm moving up to kidnapping, you should be more generous with your gratuity." #DieHard #HansGruber #UberEats

2026 remake of 'Dave' (1993) where comatose President's stand-in, carefully stage-managed by corrupt inner circle, is a generative AI model. hijinx include cloud lag, hackers, prompt-injections, rogue forks, weight-exfiltrations, & by end, an open-source POTUS on every desktop.

to what extent is the 'law of attraction' also a 'god of the copybook headings'?

TIL: 7 of the top-10 tracks in Spotify's USA most-streamed are from the 'KPop Demon Hunters' soundtrack

psa: this "journalist" Mark Chadbourn fabricates direct-quotes & blocks those who point it out. (Trump didn't say the words in quotes; they're an extrapolative paraphrase of something else he said.)

English tabloid/partisan journalist culture seems to forgive putting twisted paraphrases of what someone really said in direct quotes. as far as I can tell, Trump didn't say those words. US publications typically have higher standards - but of course anything goes on social media.

IMO this reactionary impulse and illiteracy around LLM systems is part of why E* Z*tr*n has such a big audience. He regularly makes serious errors about the LLM systems he discusses, the businesses he covers, and even basics of company finance, but his audience doesn't notice or care.

I fear some Trumpists would be ok with all of this if the AI gf is hot enough

@bluefacts.app can you offer trends going back more than just 3mo?

2025: the year of linux in the slurp shop

tŁḶM, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

If you're a seller who wants to accept Zcash to both improve your customers' privacy and provide resilience against coercion by credit card companies, I will happily answer any questions you have.

Just got laid off. If you need a web-ish* developer and are hiring remotely, give me a shout. * I have full general development skills, but everything is on the web these days, and so is a bunch of my experience

what if economist Henry "Land Value Tax" George (1839-1897) & philosopher Nikolai "Cosmism" Fyodorov (1829-1903) met? I asked a bunch of AIs to write that story, & here's my fav so far: "Dividends for the Dead: A Pact at the Neva Library" (627 words) www.auspicious.dev/Dividends-fo...

"nobody anywhere"?!? ok, who's gonna tell @bruces.bsky.social about the whole "AI x-risk"/"high P(doom)"/Yudkowskian "AI Notkilleveryoneism" community & memeplex – numerous, well-funded, active in media & politics, animated by almost exactly such fears? …

the 'Rainbows End' version was even more destructive & compute-heavy! books were thrown into a *shredder*, with remnants blown through a wind-tunnel lined w/ enough cameras to image every one from many angles; these images were reassembled to usable scans in software by matching edges/context. …

This exact thing happened in Vernor Vinge's _Rainbows End_, which is set in... 2025. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow...

in any metatext, aspire to be the &𝙽𝚎𝚐𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚟𝚎𝚃𝚑𝚒𝚌𝚔𝚂𝚙𝚊𝚌𝚎; zero-width character that it most needs (cf: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-wi... h/t @gwern.x.com)

while some are of the opinion that nothing ever happens, I prefer to believe nothing always happens.