sometimes i wonder if my kids wish they'd grown up with a mom/dad that had normal conversations around the dinner table, instead of the conversations we have

is this in St Louis

for easter this year, we all painted pictures of our ugliest hen

chris and i got a new thing going manifesto not quite finished, but the vignettes will help illustrate the viewpoint we're writing from

it is very important that once in a while i eat a bowl of salsa so hot it makes me cry

really love reading stuff like, "he started this business in his garage! ... his parents invested $250k in the business in the first year"

chris asked what we were doing on the internet in the 90s and i was like, "oh reading The Onion, The Brunching Shuttlecocks, The Spark (which later turned into OKCupid and SparkNotes), stuff like that" absolutely nothing serious i'm sure we did something serious, but Brunching is what stands out

finally finished one of my many drafts, because my older son recently reminded me one of his earliest memories is from the Missoula Art Museum

i don't know if this is true or not, but it would make sense because the chatbot is "touching grass" (making contact with concrete reality in order to add new meaning to a system, not just repeating abstract signs that refer to nothing) approximately as often as any user of social media

I tell my students that writing is an exercise in figuring out what you think; it's not a place to deposit what you've already worked out. If you step on a frictionless surface, momentum takes over and you just slide; there's nothing to interact with, which means there's nowhere to stand.

the norman borlaug documentary, "The Man who Tried to Feed the World" is pretty well done. surprised to hear borlaug himself admitting that his work bought humanity 20-30 years to get the population under control. i assumed he was as blind to the longterm effects of it as everyone else still is.

o lawd they breakin crypto www.quantamagazine.org/new-advances...

my parents have only one child, and most of my adult life i have not had a job where i paid FICA chris's parents have two children, both work a normal FICA-paying job none of our parents still works, even though all are capable of it between four retirees, there are *two* FICA-paying workers

yeah it's irrevocably changed everything about my online presence. one of the worst things about what Online has come to mean is that no one is safe from becoming the object of parasocial relationships. it used to be that most people who became famous at least wanted to become famous. no more.

"Thought has become an extremely rare commodity, prohibited and prohibitive, which has to be cultivated in secret places following esoteric rules." - The Perfect Crime

it's true

you traveled to Copenhagen to eat at Noma a couple of times in your life. you write lovingly about Noma's devotion to "sense of place." you, the traveler. the cosmopolitan. the connoisseur of the world's most expensive meals. what the hell do you know about "devotion to sense of place"?

THE MEMORY LEAK WAS NOT THE FUCKING HASKELL PROCESS

"S&P 500 futures and oil futures flashed an unusual burst of activity early Monday minutes before a market-moving social media post from President Donald Trump." when your economy is definitely real and extremely strong and for sure not corrupt www.cnbc.com/2026/03/23/v...

i have lived here

this is an important essay i feel like i should be more HYPE about how good it is, but the topic makes that difficult

I live in the Flathead Valley, and an interesting feature of this geography is that 1. The valley is large enough that it is easily identifiable on even a fairly small globe 2. The valley is small and flat enough that there are vistas all the way across it and I often stare across them, and […]

> After reaping the benefits of that public infrastructure and investment, Andreessen went to the private sector, where he developed Netscape Navigator, eventually selling his company to AOL for billions of dollars. another banger from @adamgurri.liberalcurrents.com

you say something about the internet having some ill effect on the culture, and people go, "people used to say that about the printing press, too" and i'm like, "hi, hello, i would love to talk with you about the thirty years' war"

i've been making a ceramic teapot

tbh i sort of hate this guy (i live in montana) but this is wonderful, A+, no notes during covid, there was a fundraiser for healthcare on the navajo nation and donations were flooding in from ireland, people saying "we remember," it was so beautiful

It's like a kind of tiered anti-humanism. Defense in depth for ideology. The kind of thing forums like slate star codex and the like would train up in this sphere, primed for folks caught on the treadmill of continual optimization culture.

i didn't know that enthusiasm for semicolons was genetic, but my younger son has definitely inherited it from me

i keep wanting to buy one of these halva cakes, so in order to justify that to myself, i'm going to need a lot of you to come over www.seedandmill.com/collections/...

numbers were one of our worst ideas

it's exciting and cool to talk about "model collapse" when we talk about LLMs, but i posit we have already reached a state of discourse collapse in which there is mostly already only nonsense on offer thestore.substack.com/p/discourse-...

this video is so perfect, and now around the house we keep saying "this whole thing could have been one perl script and a cron job" www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE9W...

I think people who like being highly productive are extremely prone to mistaking the feeling of productivity with something of value to anyone outside their own heads. Which is why, for us non-coders, we get whiplash seeing testimonies about productivity but seemingly without any verifiable changes.

first Hoare, then Habermas, someone clearly has it out for people with surnames beginning with H

one of the companies i buy spices from is suing the president so obviously i must buy more spices right now, and maybe you need some new spices too? libertyjusticecenter.org/cases/burlap...

"Stop spending money on Claude Code. Chipotle's support bot is free." www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

the convenience of LLM interactions has made me utterly unwilling to deal with everybody's software's petty bullshit anymore. oh you wanted me to type "OPTIONS_GHC" instead of "GHC_OPTIONS"? Fuck you, just understand it!

> Most students give up on trying to complete their work quickly, because they realize they are forbidden from doing so. even before it was a software problem, being forbidden from doing work they were capable of is a big part of how i ended up homeschooling for...uh... 16 years now, i'm so tired

such a great summary of what "poverty of the stimulus" means and the kicker: > That the model, training within a restricted hypothesis space, requires as much data as it does is an indictment of the commonsense view of the POSA and the usage-based response via LLMs.

I don't love that some high-paid, public-facing careers essentially have no standards attached to what they do other than "never acknowledge mistakes or limitations."

murderers still sailed on

i know they kept some gibbons awake playing basketball for five days straight without any ill effects but at this point i would do virtually anything in order to get some sleep (reading hemingway was not enough)

remember you can always burn Shein clothes for petroleum

i think this could have been a lot more fun if it was samples of haskell code written by people vs those written by claude. to make it the same, you have to take haskell code written by *really good* but very distinctive* haskellers. *blood meridian? come on man

"educated professionals" are plenty dumb about a lot of stuff, and the "dumb" people they laugh at are quite smart about some things, just things the "smart people" don't happen to care about. only being smart in the approved ways counts for anything. it's a significant problem with the culture.

hospitality isn't only a matter of obligations for the host; the guest also must be appropriately responsive to hospitality. one reason it has become impossible these days to be casually hospitable is no one can be relied upon to eat whatever food is given to them.

steve daines has decided not to run for reelection as a senator from Montana, and i like to think it has to do with the number of times i have called his office in anger, please do not disabuse me

trying so hard to get this guy to start a philosophy of technology newsletter with me

last night when i went to bed, i was tired and i was also sleepy. i had exercised and been out in the sunshine during the day. i had not been looking at my phone near bedtime. &c. yet i did not fall asleep. at all. all night. how does this happen? how can my body simply fail to do this thing?