Related to my last post: please let 2026 be the last year I have to suffer through misguided posts about banned books like “This looks like a great summer reading list for my kids.” “Being banned is a great honor!” “Read the books they don’t want you to read.” I’ll explain.

When it comes to natural language tasks, LLMs are brilliant at the kind of tasks that you could outsource to a team of 5,000 fourth-graders. Turns out there's lots of tasks like that. But many tasks are not. Drafting contracts is one of them.

We got a DM the other day with a fun request from a local family: Could we find this nice BART train operator who always waved and beeped at this special little rider? And if we found him, could we deliver him a thank you card!?  So we got to work …

This pox of "metaphor-challenged people who act as if skepticism is all that is needed to acquire knowledge, which allows them to circumvent the requirement to learn by simply demanding the right to ignore truth." But ignorance doesn't make you an expert. www.the-reframe.com/your-ignoran...

I met Ryan Coogler at TED in 2016(?) (and I said "you got something right in Black Panther" and he was all "excuse me?" and I said "I map and ancient sites from space+ there are dozens of unmapped ancient civilizations beneath African rainforests. So core premise of BP was 100% right.... cont

🚨 Do not do this! 🚨 “Amateur archaeology” without someone actually trained in the field is just digging, y’all. Let professionals do what they were trained for many years to do. Also these object aren’t “ancient”—they are 18th century. people.com/amateur-arch...

as someone who monitors right wing media, its under discussed right now but i can tell you conservatives are absolutely terrified of the way talarico is using religious messaging against them

leaders like trump are why sun tzu had to write a bunch of advice like "don't write your enemy a letter detailing what tactics you really don't want them to do"

The trailer for EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU FOR MONEY. In select theaters starting April 17th 🍿🤑🤣

10/10 take. no notes

twice a year i have to blow off all my tasks for the day in favor of going for an Extra Long Walk. i never know when those days will be i just have to feel it in the air. they come irrespective of weather or responsibilities

Commentary: Anyone Else Have Those Weird Dreams Where Sobbing Future Generations Beg You To Change Course?

Just overheard in the blue room, where a customer was observing how many very full bookcases we have: "This is the best ten-pounds-of-s***-in-a-five-pound-bag job I've ever seen." Why, thank you 😂 We do indeed have 48,000 books in 2700sq.ft., and I'm over here trying to figure out how to add more.

hey i wrote about this yesterday and compared our tech oligarchs to the planter class of the South pre-civil war www.patreon.com/posts/152399...

to write in long form is to reckon with yourself

This reminds me of something Toni Morrison wrote.

How book promotion can go horribly wrong even when the PR firm isn't an out-and-out scammer janefriedman.com/i-hired-a-bo...

When someone says „Scientists do not want you to know“ you can dismiss everything from there on. Scientists want you to know. They are desperate that you know. They can’t shut up about what they found out and want you to know.

The reason why some people think the New York Times is a liberal paper is because in like 1986 a far right wing talk radio simpleton called the New York Times a liberal paper. Most American political thought is based on scenarios like this

Regret to announce that we’ve reached Wrong Coat season. Every coat you wear from now til mid April will be The Wrong Coat for the weather

re: hockey, Muhammad Ali, one of the greatest boxers ever to live, gave up three years in the prime of his life — years in which his fighting would have been at peak; actual money incalculable — rather than fight in an unjust war, so noping out on grandpa’s burger bash should be an easy choice

Trump is bragging about working to eliminate fraud. Most of his presidential pardons have been for people convicted of money laundering and fraud to the tune of over $1 billion.

“Pope Leo XIV has urged priests to not to use artificial intelligence to write their homilies or to seek ‘likes’ on social media platforms like TikTok.” “‘To give a true homily is to share faith,’ and artificial intelligence ‘will never be able to share faith,’ the pope added.”

I had to call my wife over to watch this with me again.

This a great piece of investigative journalism. @rollingstone.com This should be required reading for scientists and ethicists. Ethics matter, especially in science. www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

Scholarship that challenges white supremacy, colonialism, or state violence is labeled as divisive. Programs rooted in Indigenous, Latinx, and Black knowledge are consolidated, put under review, or dismantled. The result is not balance—it is containment.

I am never going to get over the fact thar so many Americans died that corpses stacked up in nursing homes and hospital morgues, that refrigerator trucks had to be brought in for the overflow, and that the big takeaway from Important Pundits is there should have been *less* mitigation.

LLMs are a force multiplier for the already existing Brandolini's Law: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."

Even a chicken got enough sense to get out the rain Can’t soar with the eagles if you’re up all night hootin’ with the owls. Remember now, if that mountain was smooth, you couldn't climb it.

Hey, guess who's got no thumbs and turns fourteen today? This furry little asshole.

Franzi Schimmer captured this Grizzly bear in Brooks Falls, Alaska just floating along, tippy-tapping down the river, browsing the salmon. Prior to hibernation, up to 40% of a bear's body mass is fat, which is less dense than water (~0.9 g/cm^2), so the murder-monster is also a floaty-boaty.

But I do think most people CAN learn—this, or tons of other crafts, sports, games, practiced, whatever. I have taught people who swore they couldn’t to sing, read music, read English. And it’s not because I am some great teacher, but because I don’t let people I work with declare it’s a waste.

A historian colleague of mine once blew someone’s mind after he asked “can’t you just look that up online?” and she replied “who do you think finds that stuff and puts it online?”

The best part of this lie is that "computer" was a grunt-work position for women that involved hand-calculating a *lot* numbers. When computers became machines, women suddenly couldn't math because math jobs paid actual money. Weird how that happened.

GM: Charisma check. Mamdani: [rolls natural 20] GM: that’s a d6 how did you Mamdani: [direct to camera] Did you know you can check out board games at your local public library? 😊

Child at the podium: “A woo woo woo.” Mamdani: That’s how I felt when we came up with this plan. Together, we will expand the idea of what is possible in our city—and what sounds and noises we can make at a press conference.

I am tired of bending into knots to understand the evolution and motivation and pathos of men who hurt people. There's a line from a Doubleclicks song that I come back to: "I don’t care if you are happy now I just hope that you are victimless"

"Musk was quite lucky that just as his previous recklessness was about to catch up with him, he stumbled into the AI bubble, and another attendant geyser of gullible investor cash. If and when that bubble pops, a true reckoning may be at hand for the first time in his life." — @ryanlcooper.com

Live your life so that: -Isaac Chotiner never asks for an interview -Ronan Farrow never investigates you -Tressie McMillan Cottom writes an OpEd about your myopia -Tanehisi Coates never has to come on your podcast to tell you how exactly you're a moron

"Liberals need to get out of their media bubble." Motherfucker, I cannot get you right-wing morons to stop talking. I cannot get you to shut up. I hear every fucking conspiracy theory, self-serving lie, and cruel grift. I'm not in a leftist bubble, I'm fucking *handcuffed* to far-right media.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: With the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, "Trump has clarified an inconvenient fact—the culture war is an actual war"

My wife has been begging me to create Book It for Grown Ups for years, so here we go! Pizza Hut Retro Style, we doin' Black History Month Book It!

There is a good chance that some day you will develop a problem that doesn’t currently have a miracle, silver-bullet cure. I hope it doesn’t but when that happens, remember that there’s a good chance that there would have been a better option (& more affordable) if not for the Trump administration.

The Nobel Peace Prize becoming so prestigious that wars are fought over a head of state coveting it is some real monkey paw stuff for Alfred Nobel.

I drove a LOT the last two weeks. Through WA, OR, ID, NV, CA, & AZ, down into Baja & back. I repeatedly saw graffiti in different states: Jude 1:2. Didn't know that Bible verse, so I looked it up. "May mercy, peace, and love be yours in abundance." I'm not religious but that's a nice blessing.

“Leave Greenland alone!” Heckler interrupts Star-Spangled Banner at NBA game in London, wins cheers from crowd. (Video via Reddit)

Feels like just in my lifetime the tech industry went from solving problems to pretending to solve problems, to creating problems

hard not to notice that as trump's polls crater and gop gets crushed in election after election, news orgs are not racing around hiring progressive commenters and boasting about how they're reaching out to real americans by following the will of the volk.