Microsoft's full update "Windows 11, version 25H2" froze the computer at the beginning of the restart process, forcing a hard reboot. Recommend waiting a few days before attempting this update on other machines. Except for those of you who enjoy living dangerously.

NCR air quality is maxing out the existing measurement and reporting systems today, which don't report anything above 999, so we don't know how polluted it is once it exceeds that extremely hazardous level and becomes immediately dangerous to life and health. Map source: AQICN․org (Free -- try it!)

Today's nightmare. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/o...

The RIAA was suing teenagers. We had to sit through ⬇️ this shit anytime we wanted to watch a DVD. A whole generation shamed for using Limewire and torrents. Only for these silicone valley assholes to now find copyright infringement a necessary evil they shouldn’t have to answer for

Sixties Surreal show at El Whitney looks at the distorting effects of the American dream. 1/

baseball is the best preparation for death because it does not come with a clock that tells you when your suffering will end one way or the other

We're told there's a war on cars, and there certainly is a war, but it's the other way around. For the automobile drivers running the light here, might makes right. Photo outside the PRC’s NYC consulate on 42nd Street and 12th Ave yesterday, showing a cabdriver being cut out from his car.

"Today is THE day to be here," a teenager tells his friend on the opening day of NYC's Comic Con, which runs through Sunday. Restrained crowds & costumes inside, but a bit of a zoo outside with streamers & influencers jostling for spots on the pavement. Marvel is making a lot of noise.

Cabdriver being cut out of his car on the West Side.

Syrian civil war art, displayed alongside ancient pottery from Raqqa. The surveillance camera is not out of place in our world today. The Brooklyn Museum's blurb starts out referencing how the pottery was discovered by refugees from an earlier conflict.

Friend․com launched their ad campaign and their product way too soon. I recommend looking at the video on their homepage before reaching conclusions. They are targeting young women but their biggest potential market is seniors living alone. Fortune finds issues: slashdot.org/story/25/10/...

The author is dead, but somehow the reader never seems to take responsibility

Fewer VC funds are being raised this year compared to 2022. Most of the VC money now being raised is going to AI projects, especially projects undertaken by large companies. Such funding distortions pose risks for long term economic stability. techcrunch.com/2025/10/04/i...

we have trained your company's accounting software on 6 million reddit shitposts and it is accurate 55% percent of the time. please clap.

DJI's USA flagship store on 5th Ave is showing off new models blending an aggressive Star Wars aesthetic with Ukrainian use cases. 1/

Home fallout shelter from the Reagan era of the Cold War, at MoMA. Owners are instructed to hunker down "during times of international tension." More water & wastewater containers would be needed IRL, and a sewer-line shutoff valve to prevent sewage from backing up into the basement. 1/

Noire et blanche, Man Ray, 1926 "Frequently cast as an emblem of modernism's appropriation of African art, it has more recently been read within the context of the French Surrealist movement's interwar anticolonial stance and Man Ray's position as an outsider in Paris." At @metmuseum.org 1/

What Gen AI has done, like social media before it, is to turn every human interaction and communication into possible spam that needs to be mentally filtered out of our personal sensorium—which take a lot of work and leaves us not wanting to deal with any of the authentic stuff

“The history of China’s future: Lessons from the CIA” finds US IC predictions range from imminent collapse to indomitable ascent. Similar extremes are found in Indian predictions for PK. Best predictions are based on correctly ID'ing next gen leaders & their policies. www.jstor.org/stable/resre...

I know for a fact that Antifa is not an organization because I don't get emails from them asking for money.

US revanchism against Venezuela (the politics of revenge) is driven neither by drugs nor immigration. Nationalization of the Ven. operations of ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and Chevron in 1976 isn't something those companies have forgotten, given that Ven. has the world's largest proven oil reserves.

At a party with bankers in their 30s. They survived the long hours that washed out many of their batchmates or sent them sailing off to the calmer waters of boutique banks, but not without a cost. "What about meth?" a woman banker shouts defensively & aggressively, in reply to her friend's teasing.

Philly VA's study on chronic pain finds that pain isn’t just in the body, but shows up in the brain too, where it may be more effectively controlled by repurposing existing medications such as anticonvulsants, beta-blockers, and calcium-channel blockers. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

At the climate forum being held today in the public lobby of an AI behemoth, participants are urged to write & vote. Let's see how that works out for them. As long as the host's rapidly accelerating emissions are never mentioned, it should all be sweetness & light, capped by a "celebration of joy."

FAANG freshers traversing a social lab.

Making the identity of the accounts behind ‘saves’ invisible firms my belief that saves, like bookmarks at the other place, are the tools of people keeping dossiers.

i cant believe a country that has spent decades measuring success purely by the accumulation of material wealth has lost its moral compass

Chatbots killing their users suggests that big tech has transitioned from simple parasite to parasitoid, indicating that keeping the host alive is no longer essential for their evolutionary strategy

Success consists of going from failure to failure with great aplomb.

Every day is a struggle to remain fun and flirty as events continue to occur

Aligns with what I've heard in various circles

"Consonance is a form of rhyme involving the repetition of identical or similar consonants in neighboring words whose vowel sounds are different (e.g., coming home, hot foot). Consonance may be regarded as the counterpart to the vowel-sound repetition known as assonance."

The New Uniform — Saks' latest brand exercise—conveys minimalist authority, evoking a militaristic sense of order — suggesting casual wear can be elevated to a daily standard of style: “It’s not just clothes; it’s a code.” Lack of loud logos shows a shift to stealthier signaling of wealth & status.

Center of gravity for petit bourgeois culture in NYC has shifted from SoHo & the Village to BKLYN's Greenpoint & Bushwick. If you're in a band or theater group and want to maximize attendance at your shows, these're the best places to perform. Saturday market for clothing & jewelry, Greenpoint. 1/

In his 1973 book The Pleasure of the Text (French: Le Plaisir du Texte) Roland Barthes describes how readers of scriptible (writerly) texts shoulder some of the work of creation, alongside the artist, by imagining the full scope of what a text suggests. At the Metropolitan Museum.

Extended look at China’s big recent military parade starts with missiles and then shows off some amazing robot helicopters, subs and tanks. Lots of counter-drone hardware too. In English from CNA: www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/c...

Google acknowledges a “rapid decline” in the open web (which Google itself is accelerating) in defending against anti-trust efforts to split off portions of its business. www.theverge.com/news/773928/...

Ads on LLMs is inevitable, given their burn rates. Their best training data comes from Reddit & Wikipedia, so we'll see more energy put into contaminating them with product & brand recommendations. Sharing one’s deepest hopes & fears with LLMs could make one particularly sensitive to ads on LLMs.

Wow! "Whether as infrastructure in our educational system or as guide in our daily lives, AI, with its sleek reordering of time, narrative sequence, and attribution, is creating new challenges to historicity and truth."

The Google Building, formerly the Port Authority building, is an art deco behemoth completed in 1932. It has 2.9 million square feet (270,000 m2) of floor space, more than the Empire State Building behind it. Google has >14,000 employees in NYC and is continuing to expand.

In graffiti, outlining allows the artist to more easily go and come back. The form produces "throw ups." Here's an artist at noon on a Brooklyn bound 2 subway.

Just an article full of impossible sharp analysis, it's hard to pick just one section to highlight

Before services, the parishioners eagerly lining up down and around the block are predominantly women in their 40s and 50s, heavily made up and wearing short skirts. Non white. In far Queens, just beyond Ridgewood, which is gentrifying.

This article is misleading because it omits the 6-year maximum that H1-B visa holders can spend in US, including vacations. These two simply ran out of time. H1-B holders in the IT sector spend their peak-productivity years here and are then swapped out for young fresh faces.

Cyclists, don't forget to wear hi viz!

This site tonight is like that goddamned New York Times election night needle

High Line. 1/