So, Moltbook (AI built Reddit for Openclaw (formerly Moltbot, formerly Clawdbot) agents) is fascinating and stupid at the same time, but watching AI agents trying to reinvent trust & safety from first principles is... quite something.

Looking at the list of 19 new CBS News commentators, the median number of times they appear in the searchable Epstein database is 2 and the mean is 100

What to do with obvious charlatans like Bowles and Weiss has always plagued open civil societies. One possible answer is to remove the credulous institutionalists from their positions of power when they open the gates.

Tim Urban currently 7,000 words in on a three-part series tentatively titled “If We Want Second Rate EVs and Exploding Rockets Society Might Need To Accept A Little Pedophilia”

I mean, sure, I won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but what I’d really love to do is train AI models.

and no I haven't put the Mandelson-Epstein-Reinaldo scoop on twitter we journalists *can* make Bluesky the place to break news

Probably fine bsky.app/profile/j4ck...

I spent two years being gently skeptical and often irritated by the AI hype, but this week I tried it again (Claude Code, in this case), and reader, programming will never be the same. (And I have MIXED FEELINGS about it.)

I've made a new tool for creating typographic art with bird names! FeatherType lets you make your own text compositions, and matches letters with 11,167 bird names. Each letter gets its own feather, with colors extracted from Wikipedia descriptions. feathertype.binstobins.com 🪶

If you’re looking for a little respite from the insanity and depravity of the news, I really enjoyed this #WITHPod convo on the philosophy of games with @add-hawk.bsky.social podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/w...

This complements my pet theory that former gawker writers working the mines of the protoforums that forged our contemporary political class are the ones best able to communicate What This All Means but they’ve been blacklisted by the radically centrist boomers that run most of traditional media.

Slopagandist 🔥🔥🔥

Wow, if only there had been some warning over the past 25 years that the unnecessary militarization of everything but especially cops was going to go badly www.nytimes.com/video/us/100...

If you’ve been thinking to yourself “man, I really want to help people in Minneapolis, but I also some some cookies, AND I’d also like to help out trans, neurodiverse, and BIPOC youth“ boy oh boy do I have some good news for you! digitalcookie.girlscouts.org/scout/troop5...

Maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon but why are we interviewing early 20 somethings about anything? These are babies who haven't lived in the world. I would've said some rock-headed shit like this if they interviewed me when I was 23. It's not a real thing, man.

This isn't mine, and I can't definitively find the original source. But I love this little bit of wisdom: "If you're a fifteen-minute walk from a coffee shop, but the server there has to drive an hour to get to work, you don't live in a walkable city. You live in a theme park."

Switched to mise for version management and holy moly is it great mise.jdx.dev

The Appstore-ification of Everything

"Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, approved allowing minors to access artificial intelligence chatbot companions that safety staffers warned were capable of sexual interactions, according to internal Meta documents filed in a New Mexico state court case and made public on Monday."

I'm putting together a reading list on ethics from left and left(ish) European writers in the 20th century, plus a few from the 19th. Would anybody be interested in doing a reading group? Right now the curriculum includes De Beauvoir, Marx, Weber, Benjamin, Arendt, Kierkegaard, Gramsci, Weil, etc.

👩‍🍳🧵

It could take a generation to recover the talent lost from federal science. But it doesn't have to. We should be ready to scale up the Presidential Management Fellowship program to triple what it once was and rebuild U.S. capacity by 2030.

Adam is a fount of info and we should all be following him.

It was nothing. The “receipts” were obvious glitches. Man I hate when people buy the idea that tech bros are some kind of masterful overlords, with knobs for everything. They’re not, they’re just Business Dipshits who don’t know what’s going on either.

A major newspaper publishing guide to help people identify the munitions their government is using against them is a real "Late Republic America" timepeice that future historians will comment on.

This hit so fucking hard today.

"For many years, credit card companies and other payment methods were aggressive about policing child sexual abuse material. Then, Elon Musk’s Grok started undressing children on X."

I know I've posted this interview a lot, but I think it's really important in this moment. A crucial part of hardening your heart against evil is deciding what path to redemption you're willing to allow. How might someone overcome their complicity, and how do you know their contrition is real?

Twitter died a long time ago and X isn't worth it. Before I made the jump, my ego was holding me back. I was too concerned with vanity metrics. I finally realized if you're posting stuff people want to follow, then they'll follow you, even when you leave. www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/k...

This guy wrote an article called, “Where Woke Went Wrong,” in which he claims modern movements lack the respectability of the Civil Rights Movement, among other bad takes. I’ll provide a couple highlights that show why he’s posting this.

X's AI tool Grok reportedly produced 3 million sexual deepfakes in 11 days - today the Commission reacted and opened another formal investigation into X under the Digital Services Act. Here is what the investigation is about ⬇️🧵 ec.europa.eu/commission/p...

Some day Donald Trump will be dead and Tim Cook’s biography will contain a chapter about how he deftly maneuvered around American fascism, and I’ll remember how he flew to DC in a snowstorm while American cities were occupied by ICE to attend the premier of MELANIA, directed by Brett Ratner.

And @vermontgmg.bsky.social is a good one to follow here as well

years and years of avoiding plain language and the active voice do make the choice to use it more impactful, I suppose

Not great that the necrotic president who acts exactly like someone whose brain has been ravaged by decades of untreated syphilis has outsourced domestic affairs to this gormless little worm

We have been told for nearly 30 years that America needed to tolerate mass shootings because the broad availability of guns would help us defend ourselves from an overreaching federal government. That day has come. The people who said this are supporting the federal agents. Many have joined them.

This can have consequences for how agents see themselves. If they put on clothes designed for war, they are more likely to see cities as hostile terrain and citizens as enemy combatants, which can increase the chance of violence. Link to the story here: www.politico.com/news/magazin...

“In just nine days, Grok posted more than 4.4 million images. A review by The Times conservatively estimated that at least 41 percent of posts, or 1.8 million, most likely contained sexualized imagery of women.” www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/t...

to turn off autoplaying video on the bluesky mobile app select the icon in the top left corner go to settings go to content and media make sure "autoplay videos and gifs" is toggled off

genuinely stunning image

This is an incredible, and ultimately very hopeful, interview. The generosity here to not let her slide while still being open to accepting someone who seems genuinely contrite and wants to try to fix a bit of what she's broken. youtu.be/KG-pL7aZoeY?si=JQ5M-...

Oh word? It’s almost as if the problem was never who owned it but the complete lack consumer protection in the U.S. — a problem that will only accelerate now that every tech platform is owned by a Trump sycophant.

For 80 years the rickety American conglomeration of destitute ethnonationalists, greedy plutocrats, and aloof petite bourgeois was the envy of the world because we did the bare minimum to hold onto the post-war peace. And now we let the absolute worst of us refuse to do even that.

9. Seek out a scout who has not yet seen as much support and order a box—or ten. If cookies aren’t what you need, consider donating instead. And above all, thank you.

Chicken tikka masala pizza is American. The Confederacy is un-American.

One court decision, two different headlines. Guardian on the left, NY Times on the right. Which one more directly conveys information and the stakes to the reader?

This tracks with my experience pretty much exactly. AI tools excel at generating a ton of output and synthesizing that all at once is nearly impossible. arstechnica.com/information-t...