Copy, copier, copiest.

"Background" is an observation about your depth perception, not about the world.

Choices.

AI slop made this less fun that it usually is, and I don't know about next year, but one more time at least: open.spotify.com/playlist/54P...

You can tell a company is sincerely concerned about Your Experience when the announcement of a new-feature that is initially only available in New Zealand is prefaced by a bunch of unrelated global market claims and some total bullshit about a "new chapter".

Scamming normal people trying to do normal things is actually fairly hard, because normal things usually have protections and recourses. But a scam nominally aimed at normal people exists to attract wannabe scammers to be the unprotected and recourseless victims of the actual scam scam.

If you knew a guy totally obsessed with tennis, to the extent that he went to great expense to play tennis multiple times day, owned a private tennis island, set his friends up with rackets...but he would only ever play with people who were VERY new to tennis. Would you guess he was good at tennis?

I'm looking forward to Cory Doctorow's book, but "reverse-centaur" is a weak image. What we want is levers we can hold in our hands. What we get is sockets for plugging in meat-sticks, and the meat-sticks are us.

"The data science behind the feature is predictably thin." The official explanation insists it's not as thin as average(song ages in years)+16 but...

Information systems should be valuably enhanced memory, not summarily outsourced judgment. www.theguardian.com/music/2025/d...

I look forward to my Year in Food telling me that I liked Noodles and Dessert.

You own anything and everything an "AI" does in your name.

If you can channel enough old-fashioned seriousness to snort automatically at the idea of using "Nano Banana" for "work", consider that a gift.

AGI: not quite yet.

It's OK to make people hit Enter.

Etiquette tip: when invited to a formal dinner with a wannabe autocrat to honor an actual autocrat, the proper RSVP is no.

If you have a task that you believe does not need to be done with any kind of inspiration or innovation or specific empathy, then having AI do it for you is almost as good as not doing it at all, and almost as fast, and better for filling the world with routine joyless disdain.

There will be no $1b one-person vibe-coded startups. There *might* be $1b ideas that could be vibe-coded, but if so they would immediately be vibe-cloned by a thousand other people, most of whom would then give their probably-better versions away for free.

The histronic threat of superior intelligence rendering humanity moot is there to distract from the mundane but far more likely possibility of simulated intelligence replacing human progress with clever recombinations of whatever we already had. Not skynet terminators, just 2025 forever.

The problem with imagining that the Epstein files are going to reveal Trump's secret vices is that Trump has no inner life with which to take pleasure from things in secret.

Distrust anything that purports to tell you how to "stay ahead". You probably aren't ahead, and you probably don't NEED to be ahead. Be conscientously and curiously where you are.

Epstein introducing you to a 28-year-old: the Nordstrom Rack of underage sex-trafficking?

Another podcast-episode's worth of me talking about music and my book, but with Jessica Brown at Music Education New Zealand Aotearoa, who asks me much less industrial questions than some other hosts have, and thus leads us into interestingly different conversations. www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YrQ...

CSV is a fine tool, and I trust myself to know when to use it and not you, and probably vice versa. For anything else machine-directed, use JSON. Do not try to save tokens. Do not waste your time *counting* tokens, which you're probably doing wrong anyway. Improve something else.

I am convinced.

Just a reminder that FIGHTING is super-effective against ICE. This has been your morning note about Pokémon types. PS: DOUBLE-super-effective against DARK + ICE.

Gamification is the opposite of learning to appreciate the thing for its own qualities.

draining the swamp. Back into the public water supply.

It would be delicious if the "builder" (sic) president were impeached for permit violations.

Our Lady of Vigilance

Nobody voted for a ballroom.

Today's BlueSky vibe summary via furia.com/skyq/skyq.html:

A. And yet, B. I don't feel like I'm being unreasonable.

"...brain the size of a planet, and a bridge is a structure built to span a physical obstacle. Were you asking about bridges in a specific context? I need to think carefully about this. 'Take me to the bridge' is an iconic James Brown call-out. [generating Python artifact]" Great.

Without context, this looks metaphorical. With context, same.

Rights expressed without corresponding responsibilities can maybe be poetry, but not policy.

I rarely claim any kind of prescience, but I gave up moving pictures because of manipulative backgrounds even before the foregrounds became manipulated.

Scroll flicks until I feel disgusted by humanity: Twitter: 0-1 CNN: 1-2 MSNBC: 2-3 LinkedIn: 2-3 Threads: 2-3 TikTok: 2-5 Facebook: 4-10 (usually 4-5, but at the moment I'm getting a lot of pickleball highlights) YouTube: 4-10 (same) Bluesky: 2-* The Guardian: usually * Reddit: NA I Love Music: NA

I did not think Trump would bring peace to Israel and Palestine, and I will be happy to be proven wrong. I also do not think he will bring peace to Ukraine, or restore a functioning democracy with a dedication to human rights and equality in the US, and please can I keep being wrong.

I do not want to read the Epstein files. I want competent non-partisan professionals trained in criminal investigation and law enforcement to do their jobs upholding laws that exist to defend the vulnerable against abuses of power.

understands only one problem, which is that he is looking at something and his name is not the biggest thing on it.

I hope you already listened to anything from last week enough. open.spotify.com/album/1CxJmF...

Risk, doubt and failure are human traits, but not the ones that *make* us human. You are not less human when you succeed, or even when you know you are going to succeed before succeeding. The thing that makes us human is *intent*.

As a Swift fan I do not claim to rate "super", but even so, listening to Taylor talk to Seth Myers about bread and Travis and music made me feel better about the world and humanity in exactly the way that listening to Oompa Limpa or any of his orcs talk about literally anything makes me feel worse.

I think I could get a Nobel peace prize for proposing that we give Trump a Nobel peace prize in return for him declaring victory and resigning and leaving and taking all his hats and medalions and orcs with him.

when the only groups you understand are current enemies and people you haven't turned on yet, and some of the former are bad people but all of the latter are.

I talked to PJ Wehry on the Chasing Leviathan podcast, and now you can hear us: www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCTd...

In principle I am in favor of having government. But with this particular government, shutting it down might actually be better.

Temporary Speedboat!!

The nihilist idiocy of nationalism is grimly encapsulated in Trump telling the UN that all the countries in the world are simultaneously going to hell by accepting people from each other.