on building the now, the before, the after and hope open.substack.com/pub/valhalla...

hey so if your decentralized currency's prices are all highly dependent on the whims of The United States President is it really decentralized? is it really the future of finance? or is it just "USD but with more gambling"

re-skinned ScrollWise to use a sidebar and I like the UI/UX a lot more, even in its currently vibe-designed form. you can now add/remove tweets and posts from the sidebar that are relevant to the prompt and automatically inject that content into your prompt. still aiming for a mid-November launch!

it's good to see that in times which require at least an ounce of spine, some members of the mainstream media are still deciding to stand up.

they're using the shutdown as a weapon.

on building the now, the before, the after and hope open.substack.com/pub/valhalla...

since we're re-upping the Trade War with China again, it's important to note that CN's exports are _increasing_ while the US is tanking its relationship with CN and several of its allies.

driving a golf cart on a five lane highway is crazy southern suburbia coded

limitless potential constrained primarily by a lack of hope, imagination and willpower

Building the Before: historians and historical researchers Building the Now: activists, journalists Building the Future: ??? We need all three

We can't expect to build any system based primarily upon critique of the system we are living in now. A real victory is one wherein we convince people not just that the system we live under needs to be upended, but that they should join us in doing so in order to live under This Better One.

Graeber's The Shock of Victory essay theanarchistlibrary.org/library/davi...

today i have the day off so i am spending time with my kids and also building on some systems to decouple my media consumption from social media. probably going to use Feedly + Discord + maybe an LLM middle layer for media summarization, detection of breaking news, pattern finding, etc

getting married rocks and you should do it

this would normally be a massive, unbelievable scandal in any other administration but right now it’s “just another Friday”

this is A Very Good Video www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AEB...

a recession will be bad but it will have a more or less positive effect of killing and discouraging Very Stupid and Pointless Web App Startups that have popped up everywhere

the barriers between media and technology companies are starting to fade. Nous Research is a prominent example: they produce tech but they also produce media and an aesthetic. this isn't just marketing, it's a product in and of itself. the next shovel is building tech for media production, imho.

game dev has one of the craziest skill-to-average pay gaps I’ve ever seen

I wonder if there’s going to be a big trigger point moment and the market is going to crash or if the stock market is going to stay at or near ATH for a fair bit of the economy but bread is going to be $12 per loaf and the jobs will evaporate

In previous eras of US history, states facing illegal or unconstitutional deployments of national guard or federal agents would have already started blasting, instead of leaning so heavily on the courts and whining about the harm to tax revenue

pretty solid breakdown on the CK shooter, how he almost got away with it, and what modes of surveillance could have been used to catch him and where they failed. www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFsJ...

the next couple years are going to be defined by fracturing and balkanization. that does not have to be an entirely bad thing. politically it's probably going to be mostly bad. socially and culturally? I think it offers opportunities.

don't forget to make Making Things fun and not just a job

have started seeing liberal activists becoming increasingly comfortable with Diversity of Tactics recently, which is a step in an altogether good direction I think if the LA protests happened again right now you'd have less pearl clutching over burning Waymo's

started training for a hyrox competition next year and boy I keep having to re-learn that running <15 minute mile pace at a high bodyweight (234 at the moment) is extremely hard when you're starting out

finally letting myself do a lil game dev this week. working on some fun stuff in Godot, looking forward to writing code that doesn't sit in or interface with a browser.

lol apparently <BlueHaired Twitter> banned a black user for calling out the CEO of <BlueHaired Twitter> for following a controversial figure (not familiar with them, but apparently transphobic) that's the uh... tolerant decentralized social media app for you

I know people are cherry picking things that folks are saying about BlueSky that are lies but the culture on here really is pretty toxic, especially for folks that are into tech and AI.

in games, sidequests are things that don't really push the story/mission forward directly, but they can be used to obtain useful items, capital, skills or experience ditto software development

there's another No King's Day of Protest on October 18. you should look up the closest protest at nokings.org plan on going. everyone who is able should. make a sign, make some friends, organize. I say this as someone who doesn't have much faith in sign-holding and marching to improve things

I keep having to remind myself that you learn like 20x more when you actually publish something (anything) than when you just let a codebase sit there. valhallaresearch.net/blog/launchi...

hey so when there are a ton of calls for Red States to deploy their militias in Blue States to beat, brutalize and possibly kill people in Blue States we'd generally call that a civil war

this is, of course, not surprising, but this admin pivoting the vast weight of the federal workforce entirely to immigration to “combat child trafficking, drug trafficking and transnational gangs” is almost definitely having a negative effect on those missions.

again, they really aren't "only focusing on undocumented, violent offenders" x.com/YourAnonNews...

I've grown to more or less not have any moral issue with wallet draining malware at this point. like I'm not going to help people build it, but I'm also not going to pearl clutch about someone's gambling money getting drained so the North Koreans can buy more black market fent

there's a genre of content that's v common now that I can best describe as 'DeadBeat Maxxing' which is just content that glamorizes or idealizes being a complete deadbeat that provides nothing of value to the world. this is a genre of nihilistic hedonism that we need to exorcise as much as possible

you should launch more dumb stuff | makerlog 9 valhallaresearch.net/blog/launchi...

a call to almost any action open.substack.com/pub/valhalla...

so much of my problem with Network States revolves around “do you not understand how hard it is to do sewage and plumbing at even small-town scale”

who told all LLM's that proper web design means everything gets a glow effect and a gradient

hypermedia needs to be weaponized. slop farms have been built to pacify. the same tech can be used to organize and inspire.

the “general meeting” should be viewed as the final “jumped the shark” moment. there’s no going back. there’s no denying what’s going on anymore. there’s no intellectually honest excuses anymore. it has happened here.

this is a declaration of civil war, it's just badly worded.

to the 7 people on BlueSky who actually build things get off Vercel and go to Cloudflare

political, societal, economic and cultural instability is causing a Great Anxiety that everyone of every political persuasion is acutely feeling right now that will have an outsized effect on the Dangerously Mentally Ill this is why mass shootings will continue to increase

bout to dodge whatever draft is coming so hard

America brutalizing immigrants and then getting Bad Bunny for the Super Bowl is a bit on the nose

self-criticism that applies to lots of others: I let myself believe that design and aesthetics were less important for web apps than functionality and optimization, because I was bad at design and aesthetics extremely limiting core belief that now I'm having to play catch-up on.