Randall Monroe's #xkcd comic has the power to make you laugh, to make you think ... and sometimes to make you cry. For the right reasons. * Posted in Nov 2012: Two Years * Posted in Dec 2017: Seven Years * Posted in Nov 2020: Ten Years * Posted yesterday (Nov 2025): Fifteen Years […]

i am enjoying Pluribus a lot and i recommend it if you like thoughtful scifi! but also, watching something that was filmed very nearly in the neighborhood i grew up in is a little disconcerting. i keep getting distracted from the story by trying to figure out something tangential, like exactly […]

My cat Rainbow likes to sit in this basket in my bathroom. My daughter painted a portrait of Rainbow in the basket. I hung it in the bathroom, naturally. Then I got a photo of Rainbow sitting in the basket underneath the painting.

You’re not ready to see a sphinx stand up

Gemini 3 came to me in a dream last night and said, “sorry that I’m such a disappointment”

my whole smart home setup relies on IR lights and switches hooked up to a flipper zero that i'm pretty sure my cats stole so i guess we just live in the dark now

using AI to speed up the construction of nuclear power plants? well, it’s been nice knowing you all 😬 https://mastodon.social/@404mediaco/115549364008098533

There's a lot of talk of treating LLM-written code as code written by a junior developer, but it's almost more like code written by an extremely stoned senior developer.

Good news, my man Gödel out here still going hard. I'm not sure I agree with the conclusion but there's some interesting stuff here phys.org/news/2025-10...

i happened to be at the nail salon (the only place where i nonconsensually watch TV) at exactly the right time to see one of Trump/RFK’s medical ghouls keel over on live TV! dude straight up passed out and they cut the live feed.

Suck it Andrew Cuomo

This is sometimes read as "look 'AI' isn't working". But the opposite is true. _This_ is what "AI" is _for_. Push down labor power, push down wages, make employment more insecure. https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/29/forrester_ai_rehiring/

The neighborhood Halloween decorations are good.

Good sticker

“the goal is liberation, not celebrity” 👏👏👏 https://adhd.irenes.space/@ireneista/statuses/01K8CEQA2EKMGQYD5Z53MABYCC

Grinch-level of hatred here. You gotta just tip your beret to it. Andrew Cuomo, your soul is an appalling dump heap overflowing with the most disgraceful assortment of deplorable rubbish imaginable. Between the two of you, I'd take the seasick crocodile.

I don't normally like seeing animals dressed up, but this Halloween costume stood out 🤣🤣

Remembering that I had this weirdass dream last night where (I assume I was watching a movie?) and Leonardo DiCaprio had been kidnapped by a gang of hyperintelligent dogs and made to do their bidding, and he finally outsmarted them by using a sign to ask for help because the dogs couldn't read. Huh.

i can’t stop laughing at the phrase “don’t fuck with me, i can be noodles” i love it here in the land of dumb little text posts. it’s the only social media i need https://mastodon.social/@DaddyJew/115400973524176619

Hey Blue Prince is available for Mac now! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1569580/Blue_Prince/

Hacker gets annoyed at Amazon’s Kindle apps, reverse-engineers the Kindle web reader’s protocol (which basically sends each page as a set of glyphs in a deliberately broken variant of SVG). Such obscurity, much security. https://blog.pixelmelt.dev/kindle-web-drm/

Last night I dreamed that I went back to my 20s. Somehow. That all my siblings had done it, and I never had taken the trip. I'd put it off. But I wanted to go back to Spain, which I haven't returned to since college (after I spent a year studying there, I was sure my future was somehow […]

not all heroes wear capes

people keep sending me this link and a poll of my friend group is so far 100% in favor of me buying an animatronic triceratops for my yard. i’m not sure if this says more about the sort of person i am or the sort of people my friends are 🤔 https://mstdn.social/@hkrn/115296573662939893

Eschatologists gonna manifest the eschaton

#TodayInHistory: #OnThisDay in 2012, arguably the biggest quirk of the #NYCsubway system was resolved when an uptown transfer finally opened between the 6 train at Bleecker Street station and the B/D/F/M trains at Broadway–Lafayette Street station. The uptown transfer was completed in 2012.

My personal rankings are 4, 1, [gap] 5, 3, [bigger gap] 2 in that order. If you're bigger or taller, 1 is the better seat. To me, 5 and 3 are interchangeable and really awkward if you don't know the person sitting in the one you don't pick. 2 is an objectively terrible seat.

Mr. Sliwa, your answer please.

Biblically Accurate "Bob" https://www.SubGenius.com/

okay but this has me stumped, philosophically. if a pool is cracked beyond the point of functionality (it can no longer hold water), and then submerged (and floods), is the pool still “full”? i would consider the pool “still full” if it held its original chlorinated water (did they do that in […]

LOOK AT THIS FUCKING CAT

@chris hey!! that’s wild, did you inherit and revive the old nutmeg instance? or did you buy the domain and start fresh? i’ve been curious what happened to our old admin

wow #hugops to whoever pushed a bad update to the Google Maps platform SDK today 😬

One of the ways that LLM-authored code improves productivity is by merely SAYING it does things. It's way faster than the whole time-consuming process of actually doing things. This is real code someone sent to me for review.

Train Station Now Has Seats, News at 11.

And again, I'm going to shout this: THE CURRENT SITUATION IN AMERICAN CITIES DOES NOT AT ALL WARRANT ILLEGALLY MOBILIZING THE NATIONAL GUARD AND DEPUTIZING FBI AGENTS TO OCCUPY ANY CITY WHATSOEVER.

You have to keep telling people that the discourse is based on BS and worse and not reality. Being afraid of someone experiencing homelessness isn't the basis for sound policing policy.

In addition to Blair's points in this thread, I do think it's important for rational sane people to continue to point out the discrepancies between reality (crime stats) and fantasy (culture war) because it keeps pulling malleable folks to reality.

One of the troubles with LLMs is that bad output is worth *literally less than nothing.* It is *costly* to triage and double-check their work when it's wrong, and the uncertainty becomes a psychic burden of vigilance that lingers even when it's *right*.

My girlfriend's totally real, you just haven't met her, she's from New Jefset.

the technology is bad and I will defend my belief that it is bad on the merits, but the fact that so many of its vendors are constantly resorting to lying, bullying, dark patterns and coercion to get us to use it makes it impossible to even maintain some level of respectful détente while we all […]

This guy at this #chatgpt 5 live stream literally just said, after it made a mistake, "You know, sometimes it's not great."

1) The Terror S1 was a fantastic tv show 2) i slightly preferred the book, which was also riveting 3) i just realized it is a gothic romance, and then i remembered Frankenstein also involved the northwest passage and much of it was set in the arctic 4) the arctic is a fascinating metaphor for […]

is there a webpage yet that lists AI-free software? i don’t mean written without the use of AI, but apps that don’t, and have no intention of, shoving useless AI “features” into something that was working perfectly fine without them.

You (racist Nazi): The white peoples in the rendering don’t have blonde hair and blue eyes. Me (a tolerant train nerd): Why is the D train so long?

i usually love doing computers but when everything starts breaking i sometimes feel like i've lost confidence that anything will ever work again. honestly, the most surprising thing to me is that things work as well as they do most of the time.