The Taj Mahal absolutely lives up to its reputation as the most beautiful building in the world.

In traditions where presents are opened on Christmas morning, only the parents get to see them at their prettiest.

For me this was a liminal year.

I have an idea of a website I could build to crowd source a certain kind of information, but it just occurred to me that LLMs in a sense have all available information already crowd sourced, so if nothing else you could preseed the site with LLM calls.

Uh oh. I think I made my wife into a birder.

This is one of the best cross views I've taken. Merry Christmas! 🎄

yo, bro, not ten paces outside our dwelling, upon the cedar branch rests an avian of most brilliant azure plumage! i beseech you bro, make haste to witness it with thine own eyes, that you may be dazzled by that same beauty with has so captivated and moved me, bro

Excel was also one of the reasons for the success of the personal computer.

I'm still confused about how to use substack. I never, under any circumstances, want to receive an article in my email inbox, which is exclusively for organizing my life, but I would like to be able to see the articles of people I'm interested in appear in a feed.

I find "it's the phones" and "just teach phonics" to be incredibly optimistic conclusions, because they imply that these problems are solvable.

Learning evolutionary history is as revelatory as learning physics, but in the opposite direction. Instead of reducing the world to a small set of principles, you learn that the world is the tiny fingernail of a giant hyperobject.

3 cueing should be causing the same reckoning in education research that thalidomide caused in medicine. Is it happening?

It's funny that 3 cueing is how language models are taught to read.

Usually they actually mean "the passage of time," "the human condition," or "the second law of thermodynamics."

Is there a canonical free phonics website? That would both help a lot of kids and be the appropriately catty thing to reply with in cases like this.

People keep submitting my post to HN and it ends up ~1-2 votes shy of the front page every time.

The sort of euphoric revelation that a good book can build up to is really like nothing else.

My problem with the brigading isn't so much the replies themselves and their effect on me, it's that it makes me think Bluesky is too dumb/blinkered/dogmatic/hidebound to be worth trying to entertain.

Your last saved meme is your moral philosophy.

The takeover of grassland from forest during the miocene, for the first time in Earth's history, seems less known than it should be. We are grassland adapted apes.

Sent this to my Mom to try to coax her to get out more; anything from me about mingling with one's fellow creatures reads like a brief from Colonel Sanders on the joys of veganism but one must keep trying: moultano.wordpress.com/2025/12/09/t...

I'm sure they have their reasons, but every time a clade is defined as "most recent common ancestor of all extant X" it seems to both cause a lot of unnecessary additional clades and a lot of unnecessary debate about where the clade starts.

When the population was growing quickly, building temporary structures made some sense as everything was just going to be rebuilt and rebuilt. Now that it isn't, it might be the last thing you build there, so it would make more sense to build it well.

Just finished this book. Really really good. It's a bit of a seeing the matrix moment as modernity slowly falls together. Only complaint is that the mesozoic chapters were a slog. A little too much about teeth.

Awesome website. deeptimemaps.com

A lot of software engineers would feel the loss of their jobs to automation as golden handcuffs coming off.

To fly air india you must have faith that every bit of maintenance energy they could muster was put into the air worthiness of the plane and none on the interior.

The market for meal replacements is upper-bounded by the existence of the mission burrito.

Existential risk is when you have Camus sitting on your bedside table, and every night you become more and more tempted to read it.

If I ran a shipping company I would go all in on being santa. I'd put reindeer antlers on all the delivery trucks and pass out elf hats to all the warehouse workers.

Overcrowded schools would be such a blessing for any bay area community to have right now.

Just had my first turgid Li ion battery experience.

I would much rather die of a heart attack than dementia, so this seems directly actionable for me.

(Thread poll, like the reply that corresponds to your response.) AI _____ and that makes me _____.

This seems like a good map of all of ethics tbh.

The drama over having AI code videogames seems really silly right now, but if we actually reach post work where all human labor is an elaborate ceremonial ritual, this will be a load bearing part of society.

I wonder how much of the gap between education anecdotes and education interventions is isomorphic to the gap between the efficacy of masks and the efficacy of mask mandates. You can come up with something that works but you can't make people care.

It's amazing that Mandy Patinkin ended up immortalized the most in a role in which he didn't even sing, considering how heavenly his voice is.

I was doing irritating document stuff like scanning passports/signatures/photos with my phone and then cleaning them up in GIMP, then thought to try Gemini. It is just way better at all this stuff now. I'm going to miss even that.

If schools want to both improve their students' literacy, and reduce their boredom and frustration in school, an easy thing to do would be to require that none of their educational software narrate what is written on the screen.

I wonder if older text to image models understand the word "tactical" to mean "has many pockets."

Having more pockets than the limit of your short term memory seems like it is just asking for yakety sax

"The world is doomed!" – person who isn't sleeping well.

Amazing

Hypothesis: The people who want a strict chronological feed of their follows want it the way someone on a diet wants to only bring healthy food home from the grocery. The person producing the product sees them use it less and thinks they must not know what they want.

If there isn't yet a patron saint of global logistics they should retcon it to be Saint Nicholas.

It is so distracting when you have listened for a long time to the original song that a sample comes from.

I wonder what deep sea bioluminescent fish would think if they could see our Christmas lights.