C'est moi

Silicon Valley, 1990s: Free and open access to all the world’s knowledge will usher a new utopian age of information! Silicon Valley, 2025:

Hold up

I hate that AI has made me approach cute animal videos with an air of suspicion. I resent having to harden my heart to the possibility of an unlikely friendship between a very large dog and a very small one

maybe JD Vance has never taken ibuprofen, assuming that pounding in his skull is just the normal consequence of attempting a thought at all

Despite the ravages of age and an internet steeped in misinformation, your eyes – in this one case – do not deceive you: Website different. It’s taken an immense amount of time and effort, but welcome to Aftermath version 2.0: aftermath.site/aftermath-rela...

huh

i guess Black Friday is just November now

This is fucking brilliant, and you should read it: lithub.com/maybe-dont-t...

Newsletter: Sam Bankman-Fried makes his case for a retrial and aspiring crypto banks hit roadblocks

I love that the Boston cop slide never got fixed and now people just willingly go down it in tribute. It’s basically a national landmark at this point

thanks Google AI!

Newsletter: Sam Bankman-Fried makes his case for a retrial and aspiring crypto banks hit roadblocks

thank you Anthony Scaramucci for this extremely relatable analogy about people buying bitcoin on margin

i'm being personally attacked by @bft.wtf

great day for the legal theory of "not guilty if it's funny enough"

The jury — which feasted on sandwiches for lunch on Thursday, according to a person familiar with jury lunches

i love that they call it a "romp"

my only complaint is that NYC could only elect one mayor

A big result: Maine voters have rejected the conservative ballot measure that'd have restricted ballot access. The measure was going to impose voter ID, and restrict mail voting significantly. It lost easily, a year before the crucial midterms there. Our coverage: boltsmag.org/maine-questi...

If there was such a rich person, I run an underfunded media org that would love to be able to hire more people to cover issues related to democracy. *hint* *hint* www.techdirt.com/2025/03/04/w...

Newsletter: Faced with blowback over his pardon of Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, President Trump has offered a curious defense: he doesn’t even know the guy.

I want to see Mamdani win in NYC tomorrow for a lot of reasons, but one of them is absolutely to watch Bill Ackman crash out

Newsletter: Faced with blowback over his pardon of Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, President Trump has offered a curious defense: he doesn’t even know the guy.

From the House Oversight Committee report published last week: “The authority to grant pardons is not provided to the president’s inner circle. ... The president must make the decisions, and the courts can hold pardons void if the decisions are made by others.”

The full CBS interview with Trump about the pardon of Binance's Changpeng Zhao is shocking. "Why did you pardon him?" "I have no idea who he is. I was told that he was a victim ... They sent him to jail and they really set him up. That's my opinion. I was told about it."

Missed my reading wrap-up for September and have been too busy to read as much as usual, so here’s a combined September/October wrap-up. Lots of litRPG, and James S. A. Corey’s Caliban’s War (The Expanse #2) was definitely a highlight!

“I have a great and considerable fear that people will freeze to death in their homes this winter if we do not turn this around quickly.” themainemonitor.org/people-freez...

I’m crying www.semafor.com/article/10/2...

Now that it's been over half a year since I went all-in on the newsletter, here's a status report on the state of BLOOD IN THE MACHINE: Some stats, learnings, and thoughts on leaving legacy media to build an independent publication.

how many cumulative hours will i spend infuriated at the loose connection on my keyboard before i finally spend the ten minutes to resolder it? stay tuned

Excuse me? So the company the President currently owns is teaming up with a cryptocurrency company to create a prediction market, which will take bets... on things the President himself has quite a lot of control over? Gosh, I'm sure nothing bad will happen. www.ft.com/content/4855...

You want to democratize "going to therapy"? Make it "free" as in paid by socialized healthcare. You want to democratize "making art"? Give people money and free time to express themselves.

We keep seeing startups who want to replace something valuable (therapy, counseling, tutoring, artistic expression) with some tech bullshit under the banner of democratization. But why do we need to invest so much in bad tech that doesn't work instead of just giving people access to what they need?

Innovate NY is headed by Edward Cullen of Tennessee, who is also the CEO of a company that plans to issue The Catholic Token™.

Newsletter: Binance’s Changpeng Zhao earns a gold-plated pardon as other industry figures fund Trump’s $300 million ballroom www.citationneeded.news/issue-95/

fixed that for you

self-employed, and I'm counting myself lucky that my premium for the same plan will be "only" 30% higher

wow a lot of you watch baseball huh

One of Elon Musk's big gripes with Wikipedia is that his entry there has a whole section on his salute during his inauguration speech earlier this year. His Grokipedia entry doesn't mention it at all, but the "Nazi salute" Grokipedia entry says this:

looking forward to reading the 5,000 word Wired profile about me where they "reveal" that i secretly hold cryptocurrency and then spend 20% of it quoting that one bitcoiner who really hates me

beside the point, but can you imagine how mad SBF will be when he hears the news? he's sitting in prison for another 20 years, but the President just pardoned the other crypto criminal who he blames for his own company's collapse

Donald Trump has pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao. Binance has been a major supporter of Trump's crypto projects, and Trump has already made millions after Binance accepted a $2 billion investment from an Emirati fund denominated in the Trump family's USD1 stablecoin.

"In the two years since the state started charging a 4% surtax on incomes over $1 million, the effort has created a $5.7 billion windfall, with the surplus being used to fund bridge repairs, bolster literacy programs and address the transportation system’s budget deficit." Taxing the rich works!

i guess Cuomo is just using Mamdani's campaign design now

By popular demand: I've opened a Kickstarter for a HOP T-shirt! If I get 50 preorders I'll do a print run! www.kickstarter.com/projects/201...

what i wouldn't give to see that prompt

making the world a better place by turning credit card debt into a cryptocurrency casino