This is true. It is the best email I got this year.

RSS rules. RSS never became less relevant. RSS is a way to claw your agency back from silicon valley algorithmic timelines. That said if you use it you really are a sicko

I love this one a lady did about punctuation marks

I’m gonna be using “a big question asked in a small way.” Star stuff.

ChatGPT’s signature writing style is everywhere now, and I hate it. It reminds me of when we tried mixing all the beverages at the soda fountain in middle school. We didn’t actually create the perfect drink, we just made a cloying monstrosity that lost everything good about its constituent parts.

Some people are motivated by fear. Tell them a bad thing will happen - but here is something you can do about it! - and they'll spend lots of money on that survival kit or window hammer or whatever. Oddly enough, they don't like being told they HAVE to do something for safety. They need to choose.

Specifically, they like quick, easy solutions. ✨Magical✨ solutions. One simple trick! One little pill! Masking for months and vaccines? Nah. Horse dewormer? Sure! They want the clever angle. The secret only smart people get. Because that means *they're* smart and important, right?

“Short bursts indicate an ICE sighting. Long whistles indicate agents making arrests. If you hear the whistle and you’re undocumented, said [Whitney Hu, a community activist and organizer with South Brooklyn Mutual Aid], ‘you hide. And if you’re somebody who’s not, you go to the street.’”

she’s a 10 but Excel thinks she’s October

Literally every rahaeli thread is fifty naive people lining up to go “but have you thought about—” and she goes “YES WE SETTLED THIS IN 2005 WHILE YOU WERE LEARNING TO EAT SOLID FOOD.”

Most people intrinsically want to have meaningful work and be of service to each other. But those who don’t or can’t should still be able to live a comfortable and dignified life at society’s expense.

We (the world at large) are making enough fucking babies. We're cool on the babies. We need to start FEEDING the babies and VACCINATING the babies and WELCOMING the babies to various places, but we have babies out the wazoo. They just might have different melanin levels

For a book that concerns itself centrally and explicitly with the concept of “imagination,” I am really irked by how little of it there is to be found in The Rose Field.

Here is my Bond idea: I'm imagining a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead treatment, where the Bond movie is background to two hapless MI5 newbies.

I’m honestly trying to keep an open mind but I just don’t buy this. People are starving because Republicans chose to starve them. It’s on them by default. I can’t see any political upside for Democrats to *voluntarily* assume responsibility in whole or part.

The lesson Dems just absolutely refuse to learn here is that more of the voting public respects villains than cowards.

You ever notice how many indie-darling and it-girl actresses suddenly had late stage career revivals after he got hit with that lawsuit and his power started waning? Sean Young, Winona Ryder, Robin Wright, Jennifer Connelly, bunch of people suddenly reappeared

A comment on "intelligent agents" from Donald Norman, written in 1994, still relevant in all aspects today. It's like we learned almost nothing about how to build, use, or govern software in 30 years. Except this time the anthropomorphizing is intentional. From dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

THIS IS SO GOOD

Democratic party leadership has been on autopilot for ten years, they weren't losing to fascism, fascism isn't popular enough for them to lose to fascism, they were allowing it to fill the void where their leadership should have been. Tonight we're seeing that we have other options. They should too.

Non-zero chance that Trump has asked his staff how he can get on the ballot in 2026.

This victory speech from Zohran Mamdani is the most profound Dem speech of its kind since Obama at the DNC in 2004.

I’ve got that feeling you get when you just saw something that history books are going to spend a lot of time talking about.

If you’re wondering what the future of the Democratic Party looks like, watch the young, brown democratic socialist on the TV right now.

For work I am watching a YouTube thing on ai coding and it’s honestly sickening how the very senior developers appear to be pulling up the ladder behind them even more. I can believe it’ll work well enough until it doesn’t. It kind of feels like financialuzation and private equity in that way.

This is why I have a website. It’s also why everything I’ve ever written has appeared on my website with *very* few exceptions Having a single domain name that’s YOU is invaluable. My website gets lots of compliments on its branding and appearance. My slides borrow that appearance, too It matters!

so the process of writing is a process of realizing how imperfect and incomplete that idea was, and actually working out all the rest of it. writing, in other words, is a process of thinking: a particularly disciplined one, that takes you from a warm feeling to a genuine reality.

It’s a prime case study in the power of our dumb animal brains. We know that Trump is shredding our democracy, but that’s a fundamentally abstract thing, a words-on-paper thing. The world still looks (literally *looks*) the same. As bad as it’s gotten, you always sort of think the grown-ups… 1/

Here's a T. Rex bored to death trying to bite their own tail. My partner asked me to animate it in stop motion, after she watched a video about the very important topic of "could T. Rex chew its own tail like a dog". The puppet is still a work in progress 🦖

CHOTINER: So this movie, you already had it on bluray? ME: That's correct. CHOTINER: And you've bought it again. ME: Not exactly. I bought a 4K bluray of it. CHOTINER: Superior? ME: Yes. CHOTINER: Perceptibly superior? ME: The resolution is...look, on an OLED- CHOTINER: Do you have an OLED?

Apropos of nothing: It is vitally important to always have a person in your life that will not hesitate to, honestly and kindly, tell you when you are completely full of shit.

I don’t have a deeper theory beyond the fact that the core paradox of “how do we run a pro-democracy campaign that appeals to anti-democracy voters” is triggering a kind of cascade failure in establishment Democrats’ brains right now.

It’s funny how I swung from “every issue is complicated and it’s important to explore all of the subtleties” in my 20s to “some moral clarity is sorely needed” in my, uh, later years

The Democratic primary in this race will be held fully eight months from now in June 2026, there are nine active Democratic candidates, and there could be more! Even the filing deadline is still months away (March 15, I believe). I don’t get the PSA crew adopting a bunker mentality this early.

Does seem like there’s a non-zero chance that the shutdown never really ends and that Congress has already abolished itself.

it always makes me feel like I'm losing my mind whenever some absolute monster says "well ALL men do this evil thing so why are you mad at ME, it's just in our MALE NATURE to be hateful rapist Nazi homophobes" or whatever the thing is I'm always like, the men around him should feel insulted by that

Genuinely, I think that’s a standard we need to adopt across the board, both legally and culturally. If you use AI’s work, it’s your work. If you use AI’s words, they’re your words. Responsibility belongs to the last human in the chain.

“Why did you lie to me, Greg?” “Well I asked ChatGPT and it gave me the wrong answer.” “Right. So why did you lie to me, Greg?”

vote rubber not glue (is this anything)

I was raised on Rugrats and three decades later the naming of famed child psychologist Dr. Lipschitz climbed out of its well to punch me right in the face.

Okay, for the folks who asked: here's the majority AI view, writing up the reasonable, thoughtful view on AI that the vast majority of people in tech hold, that gets overshadowed by the bluster and hype of the tycoons trying to shill their nonsense. anildash.com/2025/10/17/t... Please share!

This bit from Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (1999) has stuck with me after a recent re-read.

Easier to list the issues that this *isn’t* the ultimate, obvious response to.

I write because I love writing. I love writing even when I'm struggling with a writing problem that is killing me. Finding a way through that problem is both intensely rewarding and also helps me become a better writer. There is no reason for me to ever outsource that.

I once started writing an assignment in high school *during* the class it was due. Five pages. Cranked out in ten minutes. Then I printed it to the class printer mid sentence from the teacher. The entire room froze as the phantom fuckin printer started shitting paper…

Incredible paragraph 👏🏼

Same. And more importantly, the legal/academic question of what qualifies as “genocide” doesn’t constrain any of us from knowing it’s wrong and saying so.