Yesterday Cory Doctorow argued that refusal to use LLMs was mere "neoliberal purity culture". I think his argument is a strawman, doesn't align with his own actions and delegitimizes important political actions we need to make in order to build a better cyberphysical world […]

We had to make sure this is real. This is real. www.richlandsource.com/2026/02/18/b...

“So I guess what I’m trying to say is, the new workday should be three to four hours.“ Yup! That's what every worker knows and should have been fighting for with solidarity for decades. Every neurodivergent person knows that we can't do concentrated work for more than 3 hours, and that extended […]

So You Want To Write An Open Source Discord Replacement Things you don’t need: - federation/distributed systems - multiparty end-to-end encryption - an entirely new operating system kernel specially designed to— Things you DO need: - a user interface that is Normal - the ability to use […]

I want to put Joan Jett and Seven of Nine in a blender and snuggle them

Kipo's clever plan is sure to hide her from the cleaners!

@saraislet More cool uses of a bunch of mercury! “Split Rock Lighthouse used such a lens. While literally floating in 250 pounds of liquid mercury, it became possible to rotate the mammoth, 1,500 pound apparatus fast enough so that only two lens panels were necessary to produce a frequent […]

My wife doesn't want me to make a fountain out of mercury I was starting to come up with a great plan! Estimating about 30 liters, which is about 400kg, which our floors could handle, and the price would be comparable to a bathroom remodel

The people claiming software engineering is over should try bringing about even a minor process change in an organisation with more than a handful of people in it lol

My wife doesn't want me to make a fountain out of mercury I was starting to come up with a great plan! Estimating about 30 liters, which is about 400kg, which our floors could handle, and the price would be comparable to a bathroom remodel

I think the other piece of this that comes to mind for me is that, by and large, software developers as a culture lack class consciousness. If you're pulling down a mid six-figure tech salary, you're rich *and* you have more in common with someone in homelessness levels of crushing poverty than […]

I tried taking a selfie with a wide angle lens but it keeps coming out like this

The street, as they say, finds its own uses for technology. The battle against bodywarn cameras was lost when they could be concealed within the very weave of fabrics (spectacle wearers were secretly thrilled that they could resume wearing their anachronistic prostheses without risking a punch […]

@saraislet , professionally trained knot theorist: "well topologically, of course, all knots are just … fucked"

This isn’t new news as such, but people keep being surprised by it, so it’s worth repeating. Substack hosts, profits from, and promotes explicitly Nazi content, and if you are adding value to that network, you are helping them to do so […]

Several Android apps have made sounds in the last few weeks while all sounds have volume at zero (ringer, text, media, etc) I gave volume override permissions only for alarms, CGM, and PagerDuty I didn't love that an embedded video in Chrome played a sound when my low glucose alarm went off […]

New rule: you can’t own precious metals unless you wear it or otherwise employ the resource. Want to speculate on gold and silver, you gotta bling up or build a cyclotron.

A recent cartoon for @newscientist.com. p.s. my new book of science cartoons, ‘Physics for Cats’ is out now. Links at www.tomgauld.com

An iconic story and idea that sticks with me over the years is Isaac Asimov's classic tale that introduces the 3 Laws of Robotics, "Runaround" I'm about to spoil the dilemma (not the solution), but it doesn't ruin the value of the story Robots must obey orders, and secondary to that, robots […]

the eight stages of grief: - Prefetch - Fetch - Align - Decode - Queue - Register - Execute - Write

I wonder if Larry Niven's writing aged well I bet Arthur C Clarke didn't Heinlein and Asimov sure didn't (their sexism was always cringy)

Want to be my new section lead? These jobs don't come up very often, but if you want to work with a friendly and diverse bunch of scientists at the leading edge of high resolution regional climate and climate services development, give it a look. 🇪🇺🇩🇰🇬🇱🌍🇦🇶 […]

Me: "wow I have surprisingly little reaction to eating gluten this week" Also me: "the brain fog and achiness from the COVID vaccine sucks, but why do I have all this acne suddenly"

Q: If you steal someone's "world's best thief" trophy, does that make you the world's best thief? A: No, because the world's best thief isn't the world's best defense against thieves. Q: If you steal someone's "world's best defense" trophy, does THAT make you the world's best thief? A: Still […]

Is anyone else experience this thing where your fellow senior engineers seem to be lobotomised by AI? I've had 4 different senior engineers in the last week come up with absolutely insane changes or code, that they were instructed to do by AI. Things that if you used your brain for a few […]

I wish we had more people writing more sophisticated concerns about the harms of AI. "Slop" criticism is important because I think many of us feel we are being gaslit into believing that generative AI is currently creating quality creative output, while Al (henceforth Alfred) is overwhelmingly […]

A few days ago, a client’s data center "vanished" overnight. My monitoring showed that all devices were unreachable. Not even the ISP routers responded, so I assumed a sudden connectivity drop. The strange part? Not even via 4G. I then suspected a power failure, but the UPS should have sent an […]

Just saw someone speedrun employment. 5 days is a solid effort, but the field is very competitive.

You can tell from the web design of the GPS Operations Center that it's foundational infrastructure for the entire modern world. (Via @berthub.eu) gwcc-ws.cce.af.mil/gpsoc/

TIL that of course it was a woman who first figured out how management is supposed to work: Mary Parker Follett. Summa cum laude from Radcliffe (Harvard) in 1898, she did groundbreaking research and wrote in the early years of the 20th century (while of course caring for her invalid mother). Her […]

For my newsletter this morning, I called for a ban on Grok after X, the child porn app formerly known as Twitter, started removing the clothes of women and girls in photos posted on the site. www.burnsnotice.com/grok-the-chi...

Are there any people who are currently working on the unix 2038 problem, I have a colleague who needs info for an article.

tl;dr Block these domains and you’ll have broken several links in this attack’s kill chain: Webhook[.]site My-board[.]org ngrok-free[.]app rf[.]gd If you followed @badsamurai ‘s advice and used his block lists, you’d have already blocked a couple of them […]

Please — and I can't believe I have to say this — please do not lick your employees.

Low-key one of the best lines in the Murderbot Diaries: >> “It was just an energy weapon,” Amena muttered to herself, in a very bad imitation of my voice.

This article by @anildash squarely hits in the feels, names and articulates what's happening in the tech industry, and points towards pragmatic things we can do. Notably — and I cannot sufficiently underscore how crucial this is — Anil spells out that power by its very definition is […]

One of the strongest factors in building and motivating an organization as a leader is saying out loud regularly that you care about people. As Alicja frames, it's the difference between knowing what ice cream tastes like and actually eating ice cream. It is so SO meaningful to tell people […]

Got stuck at Donner pass. Anyone know any good parties around here?

Chain Control to Major Tom Chain Control to Major Tom Take your protein pills and put your snow chains on (Ten) Chain Control (Nine) to Major Tom (Eight, seven) (Six) Commencing (Five) countdown, engines on (Four, three, two) Check ignition (One) and may snow's love (Lift off) be with you

@sue "a team of people worked for a year on a thing, and now that we've fed the thing to a code generator, it takes an hour to spit it out again" is what I'm getting from this.

On the viral tweet about claude generating in an hour what a team at google had apparently built in a year, the OP provided more context which.. of course it was a misrepresentation of what had actually happened

Oh no: "‘Foldy Bird’ uses your foldable hinge to play Flappy Bird, and it hurts my soul" "If you don’t end up breaking your phone from a low-stakes rage quit, playing this game enough will surely do that for you." https://9to5google.com/2026/01/03/flappy-bird-clone-for-foldables/

I'm anticipating a lot of grief in 2026 after a hard end to 2025, so I'm not looking forward to the many January conversations about everything to look forward to in 2026 You can't skip processing grief and jump straight into hope. The grief will consume you and turn into despair, or you'll […]

The “Just coffee, black” meme brutally deconstructed: https://knowyourmeme.com/videos/433740-just-coffee-black h/t @gruber

me: "git confit ..." shell: "does this look a kitchen?"