Awful.

Ruined my life by going to gym + sauna every morning - now by 9:15am I've accomplished too much and am too relaxed to work

Wow is cinema back??? Screenings tonight at the PFA in Berkeley, Grand Lake theater in Oakland, and the Roxie in San Francisco are all completely sold out. Happy about it, but what about moi?

Because Wikipedia content is openly licensed for anyone to reuse for free, its servers are currently being hammered by AI scrapers. This enterprise deal gives the companies access to a high speed feed, a privilege they pay for. That’s all. No AI content in Wikipedia. techcrunch.com/2026/01/15/w...

For the past year, I've been quietly doing all sorts of experimenting with different form factors of AI decision legibility. Like all infrastructure-type things, it's just not that interesting when there's so much hype surrounding what's happening.

One thing giving me a grim chuckle these days is that after years of "LEARN TO CODE" snark from smug SWEs who hate reading, wordcels can now create software without ever touching a command line, while software engineers are the ones perhaps most in need of an alternate career path.

damnnnnnnnn www.kqed.org/arts/1398535...

Iran's internet shutdown is systematically crippling Starlink, the satellite internet service from Elon Musk that is said to be almost impossible to jam restofworld.org/2026/iran-st...

Jointed the YMCA and there’s a sauna so I can go to the sauna every day and now my life is too good

I've put together a list of the most helpful activities/visualizations/tools I've found for introducing students to the mechanics of LLMs (which I do every year). miriamposner.com/blog/introdu...

Bill Ackman has now confirmed what I first reported yesterday morning, that he donated $10K to the GoFundMe for Jonathan Ross, in a tweet.

Startup guys once again validating my theory of combinatory slop and cultural stagnation!!

NEW: It appears billionaire Bill Ackman has donated $10k to a GoFundMe for Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who killed Renee Good. Ackman has reposted the fundraiser but hasn’t posted about his own donation.

AIER’s finest weighing in.

they think we're fucking stupid www.404media.co/dhs-is-lying...

This is a direct result of living in such a post-information fascist cyber-fantasy world. The conspiracist disinfo and networked harassment couple with the performative reaction videos and social media amplification to create a never-ending justification for extra-legal violence and dehumanization.

BREAKING: OpenAI is predicted to buy Pinterest, $PINS, in 2026, per the Information

Stop saying needle drop!!!!!!!

This ICE post is a reference to a Rhodesian Army recruiting poster ("Be A Man Among Men") that's very popular with white supremacists.

Already seeing this CFP inspire a bunch of dipshit pontificating from people who have no business talking about aesthetics let alone attempting to define a new one

<$250k grants from Tyler Cowan and the Stripe founder guy if you can come up with a “new aesthetic” for the 21st C. Hmmmmm ok! Hope one of my friends gets this weird money. newaesthetics.art

I hated every pop song in Marty supreme! Tortured anachronism. Wow u got a choir of children to sing Forever Young by Alphaville?? Should we throw a party? Should we invite the PS22 Chorus???

Rush hour at Berkeley Bowl

Longest night of the year, new moon, earthquake storm, nearly half of sf is without electricity. It’s a night of great power

I do not welcome The Big One!!! 🪨⚡️🚫

Funny to me how much juice and staying power the idea of "slop" has had (ie just read the new max read on slop maxread.substack.com/p/what-is-sl...). Slop is a useful concept, I guess! Anyway I made another brief note on some of my thoughts on slop, stagnation, and taco bell

The US TikTok sale has been signed. The company will be controlled by a joint venture including Oracle, Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz, Abu Dhabi-based MGX. Adding a UAE company really makes it clear that this was never about national security concerns. www.axios.com/2025/12/18/t...

Fact is, I don't want to be looked at by machines

Recent editorial exchanges remind me to broadcast: I maintain a small freelance editing practice, and will have some space free for new clients in the new year. I help writers both scholarly and otherwise, as well as institutional clients. A short description here: benwurgaft.org/editing/

Vital new scene reporting from Jimmy Wu at Bay Area Current: on the rise of the EA, rationalist, and right-leaning journo/writer scene in the Bay Area. I unwittingly attended one of these happy hours ("writer and publisher meetup!") and met Curtis Yarvin's ex. bayareacurrent.com/meet-the-new...

Bay Area folks: it's time to buy your tickets to my favorite month-long charity rummage sale (Oakland Museum White Elephant Sale). I volunteer here and it's the joy of my life haha. Tix do sell out, so buy now and put it on your calendar: www.whiteelephantsale.org/tickets

New project alert -- me and @annapendergrast.bsky.social having fun and learning things in 2026 www.everyobject.org

Damn, big gossip in the Bay Area dork ass woodworking community -- Jay van Arsdale's legendary Japanese Joinery program is not being offered by Laney College wood tech department next year, for the first time since 1999. Pretty much the only course of its kind on the West Coast!

This OpenAI employee merch website is such a rich text, truly a tryhard mashup of about 8 different design and apparel and retail trends of the past decade. supply.openai.com

Kind of impressed at the longevity of the current extended wave of riso print zine/poster culture. For the past few years I’ve thought “damn this shit must be almost on its way out” every time I go to a small press sale or art book fair but no it’s only intensifying!! www.404media.co/404-media-is...

We're hosting a zoom info session today at noon ET! Registration info in the doc below!

Just pulled out a time capsule from 2003

The way Peter thiel is fixated on Greta as the biblical antichrist when this man is right here!!

For the past 5 years we've been sadly planning to get rid of our 1991 volvo 240 wagon which is increasingly unreliable but has valiantly served ~350k miles, and get a Prius or Honda Fit or something. But I just saw this mint 91 Subaru on FB with only 114k miles and now I'm like hmmmmmm

so many newsletters so little news

If you would like to read more from the already-existing field of maintenance studies, The Maintainers Study Guide is a great place to start. I am proud to have contributed editing + design labor to this project!! themaintainers.org/study-guide/

hahahahahaha Some might say that the existence and expansion of the billionaire class is antithetical to the maintenance, flourishing, and survival of our planet and people, but NOT STEWART BRAND!

Only 56 years after Mierle Laderman Ukeles (and 10 yrs after the establishment of The Maintainers), Stewart Brand comes out with his own maintenance manifesto, exploring "the insights that can be gleaned from the maintenance of sailboats, vehicles, and weapons" ok🙂 press.stripe.com/maintenance-...

organizing my archives (aka deleting old screenshots) and finding some good stuff. never did figure out if Christo is cool.

Really not enjoying the way various tech-adjacent thinkfluencers are deploying Ozempic as an imaginative tool // futuring technology // rhetorical cudgel.

Good old Woz. Good for him.

I need my esteemed colleagues at the intersection of art and technology to start being more discerning about where they publish. Asterisk? Palladium?? Either you're a credulous rube or you're showing your true colors ... no thanks.

Goo goo Dolls Iris was corny as hell when it came out in 1998 and I never once imagined people would be moved to tears by it 27 years later!! Good for them I guess

the protein-bro-ification of greek yogurt is severely funny to me. why does this look like a barrel of whey protein... is regular yogurt too femme?

Realizing how accustomed I’ve become to modern machines that don’t want you to access their innards, bc I’m trying to troubleshoot this serger and it’s like …what, do they think I’m a mechanic or something???