I really hate the phrasing that an LLM predicts the probability that a token will be next in a sequence. It assembles scores and uses scores to pick the next token. It's not a probability. ML snuck in some fake sciency-sounding stuff by calling scores "probabilities" and it's bad for discourse.

Ethanol production seems to have a roughly similar environmental impact as AI (though vastly more water). All to do something completely pointless, that doesn’t even employ many people, nor provide any discernible benefit to society

So AI is polling badly but widely used. It seems like this will end up like privacy: everyone will be bothered by it, and it have no impact electorally. This doesn't mean lobbying politicians directly for policies can't work, but like privacy it will feel like directionless chatter in aggregate

It's conventional that, given an animal that is fatally injured, we put it out of its misery. I just helped a neighbor with a bunny that her dogs had gotten. But I actually have no moral intuition on whether it is better than letting it die naturally. Or maybe there's no moral difference. No idea.

It takes me a while to notice when people stop talking about things, but I think everyone stopped talking about fine tuning a while ago…?

Listening to a talk on managing AI contributions to open source, an AI maximalist approach occurred to me: only accept bug reports, implementation guides, RFCs, that lead to a roughly canonical one-shot AI-authored implementation. The implementation is then kicked off by a maintainer

I think part of the reaction against birthrate discussions is when it's phrased primarily in terms of economics. Who will take care of the olds when there's not enough youngs?! That discussion feels like a societal entitlement to both childbearing families and to the children they produce, but...

I think the biggest issue I have with CSS is how hard it is to statically understand CSS. Lots of overlapping pieces that can only be understood in a fully realized DOM. Tailwind successfully punts on this. The term "strongly typed CSS" comes to mind, but I have no idea what that would mean

Inside our nuclear family we have been working at not taking offense, assuming positive intent, and not keeping score or inferring others are keeping score. It’s hard, we backslide, but it is very worth it! Not taking offense is a real virtue. It leaves space open

"The Ancients could do wondrous things, but often made mistakes" is a common trope in dungeon-crawling fantasy, but said fuckups are usually framed as products of hubris or madness. I want to see a setting where they messed up for the same reasons real public works often come to horrific ends. (1/3)

I've found it very effective to give coding agents lots of bureaucracy to fill out: fields to fill in, lists to follow, overzealous checkers, etc. You know who else does this? The government! How much is this like a procurement process?

My wife had setup a travel guide and wanted to make it printable. It kept leaving out the images from a PDF, and so I sternly admonished it and told it to do better. Apparently ChatGPT simply cannot include images from the web in a PDF. So instead it drew its own pictures...

"Didn’t anyone see my skeet about the epidemic of poorly thought-out return-to-office policies? The carnage that’s currently being carried out by formerly inanimate objects is the next logical step beyond all the stuff I warned everyone about." buff.ly/5tPeXxJ

this is the way. terms: the gift. open source

Seeing some “levels of AI engineering” scales, and they don’t quite fit the progression I’ve felt. One tendency is to max out concurrency, with hoards of agents or lots of sessions, but that feels a bit like a phase people go through, not an end in itself

A very common AI sci-fi trope is for it to make precise predictions like "this is 86.3% likely to succeed" I feel like we are further from this future than we were five years ago. Maybe it was always an unlikely future? Maybe it is an implausible view of probabilities?

Really the only way I can make sense of AI personalities or selfhood is as fictional characters. An LLM may author much of the character, but they are still two distinct things. We never think of fictional characters as independently conscious. Yet without authoring the LLM can’t maintain identity

I like how in 2026 a common security paradigm is writing a strongly worded letter to the guy in your computer

I've been rethinking my testing strategy for agentically coded projects (i.e., vibecoded; where I'm not touching the code directly). It's easy to just have it go and make tests, and sometimes poke it or add instructions to make more tests. I haven't seen much value from the result...

Solar power is definitely a success to be proud of… but it also points to an inability on the left to be happy or satisfied with anything. In this case not even due to any critique (solar power is pretty great all around), but an inability to let the gaze linger on success

Putting all others things aside, the AI of today is SO PERFECT for science fiction stories. These machines are so weird, and there’s so many opportunities to project this new familiar into interesting spaces

Very timely and also very not timely

I have felt this, but also have found I can change my approach as this happens. I switch to long-winded meandering voice input, and step back to giving my motivations instead of direct instruction, and it often helps me get over the hump.

I’ve been experimenting with some AI-written news briefs, and by default AI creates newsy titles: kind of click bait, teases at the subject, hides the answer in the article. I almost skimmed over it because it’s just what we expect in news. But now I’m the editor, and I don’t have to accept that!…

It’s assumed that surveillance always benefits the state. But there’s a very active citizen surveillance system growing in Minnesota (observing ICE). Without making any claims of the net effect of surveillance, this is an interesting change that deserves some discussion

This is how Tom Homan reacts to losing a court case to free a medically fragile 5-year-old who was used as bait to lure his dad so they could be imprisoned in a measles factory. Fuck any de-escalation stories that come out.

Rocks at Night by Paul Klee, 1939 https://botfrens.com/collections/212/contents/137407

Okay final thought on the opsec thing: Everyone has their own risk appetite. But if your risk appetite is too low to include “being anonymously in the same chat room as someone who is talking to a member of the press” you should probably not be doing ICE rapid response. That is too low.

Temperature going up to 20 tomorrow? Perfect for a morning block party! Starting with 8am pancakes outdoors... then scheduled for another 7 hours. I have very ambitious neighbors!

Here's something I made for my fellow Minnesotans: findyourwordsmn.org I believe it's an important political act to share your own thoughts, feelings, and stories with the people who know you, and who without you may only understand what's happening through the news...

This is frustrating. Observation alone is not effective enough to meet the moment, it can only be effective when it serves to document what’s happening for the public at large. Observing people being taken is not the same as stopping them from being taken!

One of the more depressing things people are doing in mutual aid circles is helping immigrants get their DOPA paperwork together (declaration of parental rights) so it’s clear who will care for the kids if the parents are taken

Guy on mutual support chat: where can I get #6 diapers? What does that even mean?

I’m imagining some news aggregator that, at the end of the day when we must put doomscrolling aside, offers news that isn’t so much Feel Good news, but instead news (or whatever the newsy feel is) that exists in the span of time and not just the moment.

People in the Cities have been trying to keep observation and mutual aid separate, but of course the same people want to support both so it gets mixed up. But it looks like hygiene between the two is going to become a priority as ICE agents are tracking and following the observers

"Do you know what the most popular type of art is—a genre so broadly loved that it is collected utterly apart from any market value or popular acclaim? Art made by children. Before art is visually splendid, before it is even articulate, it is valued as a connection to a consciousness in formation."

I’ve seen so much organizing, new processes and approaches being used in resistance, that at my most optimistic I think: this is going to be the least organized we’ll be from this time forward

The statement from Alex Pretti’s parents is just “tell the government to stop telling smirking, transparent lies about why it killed our son” which feels like a new low for our nation. This president and his toadies have brought us to our knees and must be driven out

I’m driving down Lake Street to pick up the kids. It’s warmed up so it’s only five below. A couple hours ago ICE executed an observer a mile from here. The news spreads fast in the network, everyone knows. There is still an observer posted at each bus stop, more walking patrols.

Generated code = soulless slop, horrifying Hand written artisanal code that creates a better queue process so health insurance review doctors who lost their right to practice real medicine deny even more life saving procedures per second = moral, upstanding, representative of the human spirit

Tomorrow’s front page of the Minnesota Star Tribune: Jan. 23, 2026

I came to Minneapolis to report on what's going on, and one of the main questions I showed up with is "just what is the scale of the resistance?" After all, we're all used to the news calling Portland a "war zone" or whatever when it's just some protests in one part of town.

The activity in the neighborhood feels like ICE is trying to create a violent situation in advance of JD Vance coming here.

The neighborhood ICE rapid response group is lit up with sightings and trackers as Greg Bovino seems to be doing some pre-constitutional-violation photo shoot at the gas station

As a point of evidence: people are discussing mutual aid and how to respond to ICE on Nextdoor.

To build on Dan’s post: we’ve come to expect that social movements try to change the status quo for the better, and that they are resisted by those who want the status quo. But now ICE is being used to change the status quo, as a force of escalating violence to create crisis.

I don’t think people quite understand that the occupation by ICE in the Twin Cities has more or less erased non-white people from public life. They cannot safely exist in any space accessible to the public and moving between private places leaves folks vulnerable to kidnapping by armed masked goons.

Evening charades with the family, now we’re only doing Shel Silverstein poems. We don’t really know the titles of any of the poems, so it’s just like “the one with the cannibals!” or “that one where everyone turns to jello!”

We could really use a whole bunch of hyperlocal news in Minneapolis right now. Every neighborhood, sub-neighborhood, and suburb has a whole host of things going on. (The suburbs here are both under attack and undergoing organization, nothing is confined to the city.)

CNN in Minneapolis: You can literally see someone is playing on the drum set right here outside the entrance of the hotel right now.