Happy New Year! If you read on Kindle, now is your chance to snag my books free for the next few days. Links in thread:

I think “tech journalism” doesn’t really do justice to the function the majority of tech reporting is providing—maybe “gullibility as a service”?

Happy New Year! Zohran Mamdani is the mayor of New York City, and some of his most high-profile aides were among the most effective members of the Biden administration. I talked to them about their plans for this, the first story at @prospect.org for 2026: prospect.org/2026/01/01/m...

Ping pong balls: cut them in half, paint a pupil and iris on each and screw them in, nobody will know the difference.

new quarter century more art more good

My New Year’s resolution is to be even more of a hater to “A.I.” A soul-murdering scam to create a generation of dead-inside drones - if you use it on the reg you’re a clown at best and if you promote it you’re lower than the shit on Satan’s hoof, sorry I don’t make the rules etc.

My 2026 advice is cross somebody in The Discourse off the list as soon as you catch them pretending not to understand something they understand fully.

Happy. New? Year!

Last book of 2025:

The Democratic Party is structurally organized to ensure the continued viability of the Republican Party and its own junior status.

I am being served ads for an AI service that takes your text and adds relevant citations, presumably for an academic context. “You already know what to say, our tool finds support for it.” The perfect encapsulation of how idiot tech lords think intellectual work is done.

We know exactly how technological adoption happens: a bunch of CEOs and VCs make it a mandatory part of any experience.

Each time we refuse, we make it easier for others (and ourselves) to refuse again. We can also make positive statements about what we value: authenticity, accountability, human connection, and credit where credit is due (e.g. to artists for their work). >>

It is funny that nobody ever acknowledges this

What I look for most in a coding tool is for it to manipulate and gaslight me into total psychosis.

UK Labour doing exactly what Nate Silver wants it to do has led it becoming the 4th most popular party in the kingdom.

What I look for most in a coding tool is for it to manipulate and gaslight me into total psychosis.

It's astonishing how a technology called artificial intelligence has revealed the actual stupidity of so many people. This tweet hasn't been bettered

I don’t know man if capitalism has just resulted in a small network of pedophiles destroying all life on earth then perhaps we should consider that it is a complete and utter failure as a system

~ancient art historian voice~ “You know who else liked to show off their bubble butts while playing sports?”

Institutions obviously matter, but if we don’t collectively reject the ideas that immigration is a national security threat new institutions will eventually perform the same functions.

GenAI is an issue on so many levels that it can become overwhelming to unpack it and address it, but as a person whose job it is being pushed to radically transform, it’s as easy to deal with as anything else from a craft perspective: if it was the right tool for the work, I’d use it. And I don’t.

also this bsky.app/profile/donz...

A programmer relying on the plagiarism machine is someone who's not, at all, thinking about how to make maintainable code. They're not thinking of what happens 6 months later when someone needs to change it. You can tell, because they didn't bother writing it in the first place.

One more time for the afternoon crowd.

There is nothing Silicon Valley can’t make worse.

Happy Marlene's birthday!

If enough legal scholars and judges take a legal position then it is a serious one.

Ok who signed me up for the DailyWire??

I've started to see arguments that we have to get used to AI Slop coding even if it isn't great, because it's fast. Humans could go faster, too, if they're allowed to turn in stuff that only sometimes works. Such a fascinating double standard that will in no way come back to haunt, naw.

My whole life we’ve been told that The US is simply too big to have high speed rail

You can do a lot locally with a dedicated group of 15 to 40 people. Regular people should be thinking at that scale rather than at the scale of thousands.

A second installment of my collaboration with artist Mark Mastroianni. #FridayIceArtAndPoetry Here in the days after the longest night we wonder in ice and in poetry what we will find as the light returns. “What’s out there?”

I think we are going to have to scrap it all and start fresh.

A second installment of my collaboration with artist Mark Mastroianni. #FridayIceArtAndPoetry Here in the days after the longest night we wonder in ice and in poetry what we will find as the light returns. “What’s out there?”

Shout out to my road dogg Pot Bear

This idea is so behind the times and inadequate it’s like we are still talking about phlogiston.

If someone says to you, "what are you doing about students' use of AI?" ask them, "do you think that this should be my problem? How good do you think my response can be? Should it not be up to legislators & administrators to defend against a commercial industry's attack on your child's education?"

Neoliberal centrist dipshits: what is your plan for that Me: [Outlines plan] Them: no your only plan possibilities are nonrefundable tax credits or corporate subsidies

Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software. Just fuck you. Fuck you all. I can't remember the last time I was this angry.

Merry Christmas

thomas chatterton williams, whose main literary output is three memoirs of declining quality, and who has written the same essay ad nauseam for 10 years, nonetheless has a sinecure at the atlantic, a teaching job at an elite college, and a nice handful of prestigious fellowships

Why yes we could add more parking fees to support free buses, our, you know, we could mildly tax the 1%.

Merry Christmas from Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet

“Empower“ is one of those words HR people came up with to make it sound like you won something when you’re being given a bunch of shitty new work to do for the same salary

All the kids are doing heroin, so it only makes sense that teachers do it too

Covid mitigations have to fail because otherwise our active choice not to seriously apply them in sensible ways would be barbarous and stupid, and we can’t admit that.

The main problem with Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey movie is that Christopher Nolan is not a good director.