Studio 60 Journeyman Jericho Better Off Ted

Now this is a story all about how My boat got flipped turned upside down And I'd like to take a minute, tell you 'bout that curséd whale Which came fresh out of hell; call me Ishmael

I am incandescently angry that "AI safety" people have spent years chasing Skynet thought experiments instead of *this shit*, which has always been far more likely and far more important.

appreciating the miracles of modern technology while still understanding its limitations is one of the most important modern skills one can cultivate the "that's cool" to "that can do anything" pipeline has been weaponized, but it's not enough to just retreat to the safety of "actually, it sucks"

Lads the HONK I just honked

Happy Zero Cool Day to all who celebrate.

Dear LinkedIn: please stop trying to make me play games on your app. You are the absolute last party in the world I want video games from.

A great post and in line with my experience: *especially* the bit about chaining reliability. It has been a classic ML problem since forever and it turns out LLMs still have all the same properties of ML generally, for good and bad.

holy shit lmao

Gardetto's with just pumpernickel chips is a truly GOAT snack.

from where i am 😌

"Woah woah woah hold on a sec, Tee. Are you telling me i gotta flatline this svoluch over a few hundred creds? This gonk's connected and we don't wanna end up in the screamsheets. That ain't nova, Tee. It's straight baka, no disrespect."

Case in point: Gmail’s utility was so apparent that they literally had to limit signups and go to an invite model. Or the iPhone. So demanded people slept outside of stores to buy them.

Was going through my files looking for a Simpsons joke about the Kagans and found this so you're welcome.

amtrak’s marketing team gets it

Tried Claude Code for the first time this weekend for a side project and man, I am very impressed. A few things I found interesting, in no particular order 🧵

Master of Orion.

Oyster bar at my cousin's wedding is crazy

This is a fantastic thread, and IMO a crucial part of why BigTech struggles: it has a culture of over-reliance on trailing indicators, and a strong aversion to leading indicators. Net result: *tons* of spending building stuff and "testing in prod".

Not on my 2025 bingo card: Canadian raccoons interrupting the manufacturing of aircraft. www.reuters.com/business/aer...

UPDATE: white smoke has *also* been spotted in the city center of Avignon,,, bad news folks!!!

Ah yes, let's apply the notion of "Adjusted EBITDA" to the government. Nothing can possibly go wrong.

Hot take: "silent" codegen that happens at build-time is an anti-pattern. Code generation is great, but emitted code should be checked into the codebase in its own dirs, and should be automatically regenerated (and checked in) as needed.

A lot of the Make America Healthy Again movement makes more sense when you realize a large swath of America conflates being healthy with making moral choices, and sees being unhealthy as a moral failing

one of the defining features of the techbro dipshits now running the USA is their absolute refusal to consider that anyone, ever, has thought about problems before them time after time they come in, propose a solution that was rejected years ago because it's stupid, and call themselves geniuses

forget Deepseek, this is how you know the AI party is ending

💥 I did an explainer about how Android rendering works! This is part of a series on rendering, I’ll be showing how each platform renders so that people can learn and compare/contrast

what a grim and honestly unimaginative idea of what the future could hold www.nytimes.com/2025/01/25/o...

“Audit every single person who has claimed a G-Wagen on their taxes.” feels like a very effective strategy for discovering tax fraud.

I remember a time when tech products were so sought after that Gmail had waiting lists a mile long and people traded invites like currency. Now tech products are like “pwetty pweeze use?”

*Hideo Kojima game set during the Somme* Colonel: Tommy. This is Trench Footman. He'll be your guide when you need to patch yourself up. TF: You're holding the Synergised Hypodermic Epinephrine Limbic Loadout, or SHELL. Press R1 to use SHELL to cure SHOCK. Tommy: SHOCK?

Days since I’ve heard corporate secrets being divulged out loud on an Amtrak NEC train: 0 Why. Why do people keep doing this.

My favorite video game line of all time and it’s not close.

Modern Trek fans: Star Trek has always been political, it’s a show about daring to dream of a better future Gene Rodenberry in the 60s smoking 15 cigarettes: If this episode is just them arguing with a guy on a screen we can shoot it for like 300 bucks

And this spreads beyond the initial person it’s told to. I had a friend in high school whose father was rejected from a coveted job and was told this. The story became a load bearing part of the family mythos and radicalized the kid.

Jeff Atwood steps up to be a thing that’s sorely needed in tech right now: a leader. He actually *gives* half of his current net worth (not a pledge — he already cut checks) to 8 organizations helping the most vulnerable. blog.codinghorror.com/stay-gold-am... An inspiring move, when it most matters.

Sooooo much of this moment are people living out their unresolved childhood issues in the most destructive way possible.

Securities fraud involving a deli is the most NJ crime I can imagine.

Silicon Valley is only able to view the world through the lens of its own mythology and it causes such an interesting kind of myopia

"I looked up at the sky and saw the Iranian drone making surveillance and the surveillance looked back at me!" -New Jersey residents

Dystopia moment: NPR reporting on how tariffs will decimate consumers, interrupted by an ad read from the host about how you should go see Shen Yun.

The new Indiana Jones game is SO good. Definitely in GOTY territory for me and among the best I’ve played in years.

+1 on this rec. Also along a similar vein of optimistic-about-humanity shows, watch Shrinking if you aren’t already. In an odd way I feel like these are the closest things we have to Trek Utopianism right now on TV. Especially true since actual Trek now celebrates Section 31.

Philly slice shops be like

474. Historic protection should require historic use. An old building with historic protection should be used as a museum for the era or the significant person who passed through it whose name justifies the protection. If you run out of museums, it means you're protecting too many buildings.

One of my hobby horses is that NJ can very readily turn this entire blob into a legitimate economic powerhouse and a metropolis in its own right, rather than just a bedroom community for NYC.

what has happened is that what used to be an industry which rapidly turned out competitors to entrenched monopolies turned to pump and dump scams and the monopolies bought all of their challengers. now the money guys are increasingly spiraling into drug addiction and mad that someone noticed.