Anyway. I feel Certain People are happy to pretend the end goal of art, the universal ideal that everyone desires, is ultrarealism, cuz that's easy to judge. Does it Looks like The Thing? Great. It's good. It's good art. We won! Everyone's gonna love it. It looks like The Thing so good, you guys.

Freedom 250 Total Landscaping

Registering an E-Z Pass (the east-coast toll transponder system), their website claimed my mailing address was invalid. It turns out their website is using a deprecated USPS endpoint. This has been broken for four months.

Ya'll. I am shook. In a good way. Pope Leo XIV makes historic apology for Holy See's own role in legitimizing Slavery

In Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo apologizes for the Doctrine of Discovery, which sanctioned colonialism & slavery, to talk about AI. Here, I thought I went off the rails in Data Empire, where I insist the Doctrine of Discovery is critical to the history of data’s power www.vatican.va/content/leo-...

I nerd-sniped myself while playing with my toddler and had far too much fun: cassidoo.co/post/cluster...

A STARRED review for DATA EMPIRE from Publishers Weekly! ⭐️ “Brilliant history” & “Elegantly weaving scholarly research with trenchant political analysis, this is a must-read for those seeking to understand the deep history of the Al boom.” ⭐️ Thank you @publisherswkly.bsky.social!

The Marketplace of Ideas people immediately forcefully shut down all dissent, bought all media, sued & fired all critics & arrested & caged journalists reporting on their heinousness as soon as they got control & all of this was entirely predictable & people who warned of it were called overreactors

We desperately need to get away from arguments for the humanities that elevate them because of what they do for technology. The humanities should not be understood as service disciplines. They are an extension of us, and that is enough.

If you have, or know someone, with a Yarbo robot lawn mower... they might want to read this. www.theverge.com/tech/925696/...

I was a gifted child and all I got was a loathsome tendency toward elitism that I do everything I can to unlearn

Adulthood is just cycling between "If I don't say yes to every opportunity, no new opportunities will ever be offered to me" and "Oh no, I have said yes to too many things" over and over until you die.

It's a very odd feeling to read that the cost of your firing was $20 billion to the US economy. Studies like this are so important. It's hard to put a value on a public service. Trustworthy economic data is vital to so much economic activity in a $29 trillion economy. Worth your time to read.

In 1979, Mattel sold toy Battlestar Galactica fighter ships that fired a tiny spring-loaded "torpedo." One 4-year old choked on it, and the entire line of torpedo toys was recalled and never sold again.

"...a team of researchers at Stanford University found that frontier AI models readily generated “detailed image descriptions and elaborate reasoning traces, including pathology-biased clinical findings, for images never provided.”

This week, we have an in-depth briefing from our Data Security team and updates from Archives and History, Infectious Disease Control & Prevention, and Trans Healthcare. unbreaking.org/blog/briefin...

I hope @nickjudin.bsky.social doesn’t mind me saying this, but I got a peek behind the scenes this week and can tell you he put his whole heart—and his considerable reporting chops—into helping this family tell the world what ICE did to them. NYT repeated his work w/o care or credit. Infuriating.

✨ I just released a new (free!) tool for creating custom Bézier curves! courses.joshwcomeau.com/tools/bezier It has one special feature that I haven’t seen anywhere else, and it allows us to do something pretty cool. 🧵

(bird cracking open a cold can of worms) it's 5am somewhere

The thing I notice is that there are still t-shirts being sold today—yea, findable on Amazon and Etsy this very minute—with “86 46” on them. If that were a “threat” worthy of federal action… then… those would have been pulled down long ago. (It is not a threat.)

#ArtemisII My latest cartoon for @newscientist.com

Prediction markets, insider trading, scientists and aliens. What could be better?

There's no legal basis for these boat strikes, and US officials involved in them should be prosecuted for attempted murder and murder. The OLC memo green-lighting the strikes is still secret, but there's nothing it could say that would make these strikes lawful. www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

My mom - a geologist - gets out the embroidery that I made her every spring. Because trilobites wearing a crown of flowers are a harbinger of springtime. #Embroidery

The Best Books To Motivate And Inspire You https://theonion.com/the-best-books-to-motivate-and-inspire-you/

Exactly one (1) pledge out of 1,510 (and counting) on Iron Circus' current crowdfund is traceable to Twitter. Nothing we haven't come to expect, though. Honestly: if you think you HAVE to be over there, for business/attention reasons? Nah, you're wrong. It's literally not worth your time.

In case it's not super obvious- you...can't get doordash delivered to anywhere inside the White House fenced off complex, much less the West Wing much less the patio of the Oval gd Office. No need to treat a stunt as something real!

I suspect the Pope sounds "woke" to many Christian conservatives because the US is steeped in prosperity theology, where the point of worship is to deliver health and wealth to believers. Thus, "feed the hungry" and "show mercy for the poor" sounds needlessly political and "woke."

For more than a week, Amazon has managed to keep a death at its Troutdale, Oregon, facility out of public view. Workers I spoke to are pissed.

Frustratingly can’t find the credits for these pieces, but I promise you I will be stealing “if I hear you call this planet evil one more time I will have to learn to hold you better“ for sure.

i don't think that'll make the result any more precise, but sure

...they keep exacerbating these VCs' absurdly distorted images of themselves as the single most important, visionary human beings who have ever existed, all because they made Online Debit Card or Basic Web Browser 30 years ago. See: Andreessen, Thiel, Sacks www.thenation.com/article/soci...

I don't remember seeing an image of Earth before that captures the (thin, fragile, tiny layer of) atmosphere so clearly. I mean, look at that.

Me, joking: I can’t believe we chose “destroying the economy” and “losing wars” over “being nice to trans people occasionally” Conservatives, dead serious: it was a tough choice, but I’m glad we picked “destroying the economy” and “losing wars” over “being nice to trans people occasionally”

The horse op-ed is an instant classic. I can't tell you how much joy this piece gives me. It should be taught in every introductory writing class in no small part because the horse arguments are so compelling. "I have noticed that human children get to eat cake. But I am bigger than the children."

There was a Passover-themed haiku contest at the community seder. My entry, which received a solid round of applause: Frogs frogs frogs frogs frogs Frogs frogs frogs frogs frogs frogs frogs Frogs frogs frogs frogs frogs

Incredible footage from a United Airlines flight of the Artemis II launch.

“Demand answers” pretends that Trump could provide any explanation for any of this that would make Warner say “oh OK that’s fine then, carry on.” If Warner really believes that, he should resign. And if he doesn’t believe that, he should end this decade-long performance of Trump competency.

Sam Altman: ‘If I Don’t End The World, Someone Far More Dangerous Will’

www.microsoft.com/en-us/micros... is it good to build an entire economy and software infrastructure on this

Clippy popping up asking "are you not entertained?"

The notion that the opposition has to have some unified field theory of what they will do in office is nonsense. The primary political task of the opposition is to hold those in power accountable. Period.

In fact, from a strictly Machiavellian perspective, it's an incredibly BAD idea for Democrats to tell everyone exactly what they would do instead. It's a recipe for dividing the "sick and tired of Trump" vote.

and instead they KILLED IT just weeks after introducing version 2.0, which was absolutely certainly the death knell for Hollywood, except for the tiny problem that it was setting more money than you’ve ever seen in your life on fire every minute it was alive and it had no monetizable use cases

I think we need to celebrate the death of Sora a bit more. This is a technology that, just MONTHS AGO, we were being told was going to literally destroy Hollywood and Disney was going to give them a BILLION DOLLARS and NONE OF THAT EVEN REMOTELY HAPPENED

I'm going to come back to this paragraph from today's @craigcalcaterra.bsky.social newsletter today often. Puts into words what I feel every time I hear about someone asking AI to make every random decision for them. Just try it out! That's what being a human is for!

It’s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire Day. The fact that everyone knows about the Titanic and no one knows about the largest industrial disaster of the era says a lot about our priorities and how we view class and labor

yeah im bummed about sora. bummed i sora bunch of stupid fake videos