This is horrifying. Please sign and share. #academicbluesky #classicsbluesky 🏺

People of Virginia: Go ahead with the 10-1 Dem-Rep gerrymander of your commonwealth. It's the only fair thing to do. It's your duty to history. (My home state of Calif pioneered non-partisan re-districting commissions, but that was then.)

Team #Tinderbox: there's a new backstage release!

Team Tinderbox: there's a new backstage release

Team #Tinderbox: a new backstage release awaits.

Trump Administration bizarrely demands the University of Pennsylvania hand over "names, phone numbers and physical addresses" for anyone who "belongs to Jewish clubs or groups on campus, and anyone who works in the university’s Jewish studies program"... www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/u...

Team #Tinderbox: a new backstage release awaits. Good news for Zotero fans!

Team #Tinderbox: there's a new backstage release!

The AI doesn't like my writing. That's OK, the article is about how I don't like how the AI writes.

Team #Tinderbox: there's a new backstage release!

I miss the FDA

THE OFFICIAL COVER REVEAL! Pre-order your copy so you'll be the first to get it: www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/804471...

Team #Tinderbox: there's a new backstage release

Book launch, funeral, gala, date night, dinner party, deadline. Life.

Coming in May... Preorders are open! There's a cover & a sell page & everything! www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/804471...

One year ago

NEW: NBC News confirms that the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden, on the east side of the White House, has been destroyed as part of the demolition of the East Wing. (📸 Getty Images)

Remember “The web is dead, long live the Internet”? We’ve been down this road before. 

TONIGHT in PVD: Join me to celebrate the publication of Guardians & Saints: Stories, just out from Cornerstone Press. Where: Riffraff Bookstore & Bar, 60 Valley St., Providence RI When: 6 pm Read more about the book and the launch here: heyrhody.com/stories/a-ni...

Parents, please check your kids’ candy this Halloween. I’ve just found an ancient metal whistle with the inscription “QUIS EST ISTE QUI VENIT" inside a Snickers bar. I blew it and heard a note of infinite distance, and now I’m haunted by a figure in pale, fluttering draperies. Be safe.

Just got Tinderbox (www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/) talking with Gemini-CLI. The two seem to get along pretty well :)

While Hitler plotted and Europe crumbled, a motley crew of mathematicians, philosophers, architects, and economists met weekly to invent Computer Science. Mark Bernstein mines this forgotten history for lessons that just might save today’s web from its worst impulses.

alistapart.com/article/desi...

@jilltxt.bsky.social Happy birthday, I believe.

Speaker after speaker at this memorial is explicitly likening him to Jesus Christ. (Slain in early 30s, etc.) Don't know how this goes over with people raised in other faiths. Having been raised as a church-going Protestant Christian, I say: What the hell! This is not how Christians talk.

The distilled essence of America in late August 2025.

Yesterday's watercolor practice: winter evening at Black Rock Beach.

Speaking of the Summer Festival of Artisanal Software, here's Andy Brice (Easy Data Transform) on 20 years of successful software. @andybrice.bsky.social successfulsoftware.net/2025/02/21/2... artisanalsoftwarefestival.com

The constitutional order I was taught in law school—which was only six years ago—is largely gone

Generosity and abundance are wonderful virtues. For a time, it seemed that the Web and the Internet were exemplars of these virtues. That turned out to be a mistake: the Web lent itself to villainy. from my new book THINKING WITH TINDERBOX eastgate.com/Tinderbox/Th...

From a reader on my THINKING WITH TINDERBOX: I just finished Thinking with Tinderbox and wanted to say: what a joy to read! ....One idea that stayed with me is the notion of generosity in software — that great tools sometimes surprise us, go beyond the expected. eastgate.com/Tinderbox/Th...

Software should be: ❧ Built for people ❧ Built by people ❧ Crafted in workshops ❧ Savage ❧ Inspired from the artisanal software section of my new book THINKING WITH TINDERBOX eastgate.com/Tinderbox/Th...

THINKING WITH TINDERBOX:Generosity & Abundance “Tinderbox aims to be a maximum viable product, the most capable and flexible system we can manage to support and maintain. This stance was, in part, forced on Tinderbox by its natural audience of writers and researchers.” eastgate.com/Tinderbox/Th...

😡😡😡😡

From my new book THINKING WITH TINDERBOX “In this chapter, we turn from notes acting on other notes to examine how notes act on us — how we can design an environment that serves us well, promotes our well-being, and perhaps encourages us to be better.” eastgate.com/Tinderbox/Th...

My Sydney paper is available at last! Amiability and the Web: Lessons from Red Vienna and the Origin of Computing dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Breaking: HHS is canceling a $600 million contract with Moderna to develop, test, and license vaccines for flu strains that could trigger future pandemics, including the dangerous H5N1 bird flu virus.

HOLY SHIT. The ban on any federal funding gender-affirming care includes stripping ACA plans of covering it as the essential care it is. I have an ACA plan. I live in a blue state, but I am about to lose access to treatments I need. We told you this was coming www.advocate.com/politics/ant...

Belgium’s Royal Palace says Princess Elisabeth is waiting to find out whether she can return to Harvard for her second year after the Trump administration revoked the university's ability to enroll international students.

“Two naturalists might not share a common language, but both will know that a Cyanocitta cristata is a big blue bird, though one thinks of it as a Blue Jay and the other has always known it as a Blåskrikje.” from THINKING WITH TINDERBOX (Ch 9: Streams) eastgate.com/Tinderbox/Th...

“New software is fun to write. Everything is possible, the sky is the limit. Working with old software can be stressful, because old software brings with it a legacy of old decisions.” Chapter 11 of THINKING WITH TINDERBOX talks about Staying Young. eastgate.com/Tinderbox/Th...

PBS executives forced the makers of an Art Spiegelman documentary to cut derogatory mentions of Donald Trump from the film before it could air. “If PBS isn’t going to stand up for free speech, who is?” [documentary.org]

Stream operators in Tinderbox transform text into a form that is more useful for you. They have been unloved, because they touch on questions of language that have puzzled thinkers for a very long time THINKING WITH TINDERBOX chapter 9. eastgate.com/Tinderbox/Th...

“The placement of notes in a Tinderbox map often suggests not only how notes re- late to each other, but also how subsequent notes might be added to those already present.” Maps that rearrange themselves is the topic of Ch. 8 in THINKING WITH TINDERBOX. eastgate.com/Tinderbox/Th...

from THINKING WITH TINDERBOX: 19th-century mathematics discovered a strange but consistent form of geometry: as things get more and more distance from the center, they get smaller and smaller....This geometry works well for visualizing big link networks. eastgate.com/Tinderbox/Th...

from THINKING WITH TINDERBOX: how to tidy actions: • replace comments with code • extract duplicated code to functions • extract magic numbers to variables, functions • move connected vars to configuration note • simplify conditionals • extract conditions to dictionary eastgate.com/Tinderbox/Th...

Many of the unsolicited pizza deliveries have gone to judges presiding over lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s policies.

Thread

Latin translation: “He has eaten our dogs”

Chapter 6 of THINKING WITH TINDERBOX takes up “tidyings” — small refactoring moves advocated by @KentBeck (Tidy First?) for programming, but easily applied to notetaking. I kick off with some common cases: • Extract Attributes • Clarify Symmetries • Magic Numbers eastgate.com/Tinderbox/Th...