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.

ICE's murder of Renee Nicole Good was just the opening salvo in their attack on us in Minneapolis and the Twin Cities. Today they are roaming the streets harassing and abducting pedestrians, surrounding health centers, and making traffic stops and setting up checkpoints.

ceding AI to the right is a generational poltical mistake and bullying LLM researchers off bluesky to cook their brains in twitter racism is a self defeating and foolish act from well meaning people deluding themselves into thinking intentional ignorance is a valid form of critique and resistance

Rochester is under attack right now. They are staging at school bus drop offs. They told Rep. Andy Smith to “get the fuck out” of a parking lot and that they didn’t need warrants. They are literally parking in the Mayo patient lot to grab people.

Lots of people here boosting terrible mainstream news coverage, but I was looking up Renee Nicole Good's poetry and came upon this CNN article, and it's just a very nice article. www.cnn.com/2026/01/08/u...

DHS Warns Any Action By Americans Will Be Treated As Domestic Terrorism https://theonion.com/dhs-warns-any-action-by-americans-will-be-treated-as-domestic-terrorism/

An official from Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis told MPR News that armed U.S. Border Patrol goons came onto school property during dismissal Wednesday and began tackling people; they handcuffed two staff members and released chemical weapons on bystanders.

Frighteningly yesterday was just the start of what ICE plans to do to Minneapolis and Minnesota. This phase of escalation only began on January 6th.

Her name was Renee Good. She was only 37. She was a mother of a 6 year old child. And today in Minneapolis, MN, an ICE fascist shot her dead point blank. Sending all my love to her child and her family. Abolish ICE. Abolish fascism. Abolish tyranny. qasimrashid.substack.com/p/how-to-pro...

Family project tonight will be making an anti-ICE banner to hang up on the house. The standard "Fuck ICE" and "ICE OUT" messages do not seem sufficient, a bit cliche and not meeting the moment. Thoughts? Hoping for: short, aggressive, filled with loathing

The ICE escalation in Minneapolis is happening rapidly. They've murdered one observer, and as the abductions actively continue today (breaking into buildings without warrants, pulling people off the street) I am also hearing they are actively arresting observers.

For non-locals, the intersection where ICE agents reportedly just shot and killed a driver is four blocks from where George Floyd was murdered. Very bad

ICE reportedly shot someone at Portland and 33/34. Mspt saying bullets, could be less lethal 20+ agents on site, MPD and ambulances responding. Helicopters overhead

This is a few blocks from me. They have been abducting people off the street. This morning they shot an observer in the head. ICE is an active force of terror and evil in my community.

There is a Barcode web API?! I found it useful (it can detect QR codes), but its existing kind of surprising. developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/W...

For technical folks, if you were aware that Curtis Yarvin was also a programmer before he retired into this shit, you should also know his code and designs are the most hilariously stupid shit you’ve ever seen. But true to form if you don’t understand software it may look revolutionarily contrarian

“Toaster” isn’t a good metaphor. Maybe like calling up customer support, and the person on the other end has access to your file and notes, but if you ask them why a previous rep did something all they can really do is make up plausible answer. And also every turn you get transferred

Remember how Tony Blair announced minimum wage legislation in the letters column of Wehrmacht Collectibles Digest, and published the full text of his Education Education Education speech, before party conference, in Top Heavy Amateurs.

Open up this picture fully. Then look at the surface of Mars. Then look up to the top right. Spot Mars' moon Phobos high in the sky. Then notice the bright spot beside Phobos. That's Earth.

There's a lot of 80-20 issues that don't change anyone's vote. Ask about privacy and you'll get a similar response, but it means nothing politically.

i genuinely think that offering more space to write would significantly reduce the room for bad-faith reading of posts (though certainly people would still try to find a way) and improve the discourse on this app

There’s a version of Evil Wordle where it changes the target word to make it as hard as possible, but a truly evil Wordle would be 90% accuracy Wordle

I was setting up a project based around a static site mostly managed by OpenAI Codex or Claude Code, and somewhat blindly picked Astro as the framework. At first I thought Codex was dumb, then Claude Code was pretty bad, so I switched to Next.js/Tailwind/TypeScript and it was smart again…

A little Christmas music deep cut… youtu.be/chTMOuuUZi4?...

“Educational hugboxing” is a great phrase

Your students don't get paid for it, and when they graduate they probably won't be paid for it. I'm not a researcher, but I have made use of research before and after LLMs. FAR more after LLMs, because I can discover research and apply the lens of my work to that research.

Look, there are a lot of normal people hanging out at the torchlight parade and book burning. You make it sound like we’re all fascists, but we’re just there because our friends are there.

Everyone loves giving their agents personas, but I'm thinking maybe _I_ need to establish some personas for myself when talking to the AI. Like I'll pop up and down levels of abstraction like talking about specific code vs development process. It's understandably confusing for the AI

An important all-around lesson

I'm creating a Storybook configuration for a personal project. This gives me previews of stand-alone components in a website. I would NEVER have done this before. It's just me working on this, and anyway I want to be able to reproduce each state in the app by using the app. ...

It is a great board game cover. Looking through the game cupboard as a kid and looking at that cover… it did speak of mystery and power

Listening to the Feeling of Computing podcast (good if you’re looking for kind of spacey Engelbartian reflection of the history of computing) on How We May Think: pca.st/episode/26e0... I appreciate they take LLMs seriously as a new primitive of computing experience instead of debating value

Excellent use of a Shepard tone metaphor

I feel similarly. Most AI is behavioral and it acts to diminish us and remove our autonomy. That is, it analyzes and manipulates our behavior, ignoring our intention and cognition. LLMs engage directly with those parts of ourselves.

I thought that Claude Code Skills would basically be bits of instructions that were loaded in automatically at the right time, but instead they seem to be explicitly loaded in by the agent...? This seems no better than files in docs/ ...?

Claude Code has its own self-documentation index that it loads: code.claude.com/docs/en/clau... Using Markdown files with links reminds me of Gopher or the Gemini Protocol (geminiprotocol.net)

Btw the word that’s currently in my display name, sphexish, was coined by AI researcher Douglas Hofstadter to mean “behaviors that appear conscious but are in fact preprogrammed” It is taken from the Sphex wasp which exhibits some complex behaviors - which are completely programmed into its genes