Creatures of the Cambrian period!

I still can’t believe Chicago named a snowplow Abolish ICE. This truly is the shirt that keeps on giving. Bonus: $8 per shirt sold goes to the @icirr.bsky.social (and $1 of every sticker) #chicago

instantly assumed this was a kaiju situation

I'm constantly trying (/failing) to get this point across. If you're a trained expert in a field, then it may be worthwhile to question the scientific consensus of your peers. If you're not, the scientific consensus is absolutely the best you can do and it's arbitrary foolishness to disregard it.

Every 5 years Urs decides to try to get Google's tech stack to stop being an isolated island by adopting external stuff, but every time the actual result is a few new Google-isms appearing in the outside world like small new islands forming near a large existing one as an oceanic volcano chain moves

absolutely there are cases where you do the research and there shouldn’t be anything and then you dig and there is. That’s what the watching briefs exist for. But they are rare instances and they don’t generally happen when you’re building on a site called *castlegate*

very important video please watch

bsky.app/profile/lizt... this is a good example: "all future dcs need to prioritize non-evaporative cooling, and all extant dcs need to get on board within n years" sounds like ass but - can actually pass - saves more net lives than an invariably overturned "no more"

Building new housing, even at the high end of the market, kicks off a “moving on up” effect that creates vacancy in the cheapest available homes. *Not* building enough new housing to meet demand has the opposite effect, raising the price floor for even the worst housing and increasing homelessness.

I had this online exchange once: “That DC in arid, dry Spain will steal water people need” “It’s being built in a town on a large river of which it will use 0.1%” “That river water should be used for farms” “It is, a canal diverts ~10% of it 100 miles away. To grow tobacco” (silence)

These companies have made the tradeoff that it's cheaper to buy up water to evaporate than to buy power and to buy carbon offsets for the power generation. The instant they actually get charged for the water externalities, they'll shift to closed loop cooling and eat the additional energy costs.

So @railnatter.uk has posted a MUST watch video for all transport bureaucrats. Make the slow bits faster -- how fixing 1 mi of track can save the same amount of time as improving 20 mi of track. www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXsv...

“20% OFF is Hight Pcottiest”. “Onft:Offer”. AI sludge text, fake charts, nonexistent holograms. The Crystal Cabin Awards — the Oscars of the passenger experience world — has two finalists whose entries are riddled with gen AI slop. theupfront.media/the-up-front...

I’ve been talking about Alysa Liu’s story about her quitting skating only to come back and become even better because she did it for herself and this came to me in a dream…

I really regret not buying this at an Asian grocery yesterday.

the implication that cats use the metric system is somehow transcendently perfect

The first photo I captured of the 9-23-23 Ada, OK supercell (after a few test shots). Yes, all three lightning strikes were captured in a single image! From my distant vantage point, this intricately-structured supercell gracefully danced under a sky full of stars with unmatched beauty. #Photography

at last, we have invented retrophenology from the classic Discworld text Don’t Invent Retrophenology

A California agency received 20k AI-generated comments opposing heat pump rules. Staff called a sample to verify—several said they never sent comments. Raises serious questions about the opposition campaign that helped kill the clean air standards, that would've prevented 1000s of premature deaths.

i built an entire x86 CPU emulator in CSS (no javascript) you can write programs in C, compile them to x86 machine code with GCC, and run them inside CSS lyra.horse/x86css/

Did you know this bit of history about the City of San Mateo, Hillsdale Mall, and why BART doesn't go there? www.foundsf.org/Bohannon%E2%...

zohran increased the number of snow shovelers from 500 to 1,400 for this blizzard, paying them $30/hour to shovel sidewalks with at least a four-foot berth so that wheelchairs and strollers can get through. he didn't overhaul city government to do it, he just used the power given to him and did it!

Kinda fucked up that anything but closed-loop water cooling was ever acceptable to begin with. Literally the only reason datacenters continuously use water, they just fucking evaporate it because it uses a bit more energy vs closed loop.

Minneapolis isn't an especially sweary place but there are so many houses that have homemade "FUCK ICE" signs and I've had multiple conversations with parents about how we're okay with our kids using that word in this context because sometimes it IS okay to swear and this is one of those times.

In retrospect this had a way larger effect on me then I ever could have imagined.

Meta’s director of AI safety, the person at the company who is working to make sure that AI tools don’t go rogue, had to scramble to stop an AI agent from deleting her inbox. @evystadium.bsky.social has more. Story by @emanuelmaiberg.bsky.social : www.404media.co/meta-directo...

it's remarkable how widespread .webp files are on the internet while also being so loathed (by me) and insufficiently supported (by all my software)

I loved them too--illustrations and dioramas alike. Not least because they always reminded me of one of my favorite childhood books, Minn of the Mississippi, which (if a bit dated) is still a scientainment banger (as are so many of Holling Holling's books.)

They were invented in Colorado! snowproofsignals.com/education-hub/

(somebody should do a dual biography of Tom Lehrer and Henry Kissinger. They overlapped at Harvard!)

Y’all. 🤦🏼 pjmedia.com/tim-o-brien/...

Secure your own squid first before helping others. (I'm disproportionately proud of this drawing.)

Letting agentic AI fuck with systems running on COBOL would basically be kicking the entire infrastructure of the modern world square in the nuts

We got you.

what even is the fucking point

NEW: Meta’s director of AI safety, supposedly the person at the company who is working to make sure that powerful AI tools don’t go rogue and act against human interests, had to scramble to stop an AI agent from deleting her inbox against her wishes...

I’m not sure what’s better, the gibberish text in the pillars or the total resignation to even trying to fit the text in the boxes on the right

reminder another reason to do alt text is that the same good alt text also helps people who don't know the same cultural references as you look stuff up. what show is that? who is that actor? what's happening in that scene? people are here from different generations, countries, interest circles etc!

This is the most incredible footage of blue whales I’ve ever seen

If you threaten to kill one person that’s a TOS violation. If you threaten to kill a million people that’s discourse.

Remember how in the 1980s there were analog versions of video games for those of us too poor to have a video game system? Kinda awesome looking back at it, tbh.

Wagon-on-flatcar (WOFC)

It's funny that the FBI was like "no Kash Patel was NOT partying with the hockey team" and then he just posts Livestream of himself partying with the hockey team. It's the same thing trump does whenever his aides go "what he meant was" after he says something fucked and then he doubles down on it

Won't someone think of the poor retirees who only have 7,000 sq. ft. on an acre that's up a dry canyon.

Give the amount of information contained in sewage (viruses, bacteria, chemicals) and disease outbreaks occurring at other sites, I suspect there may be other reasons beyond exceeding the capacity of the municipal system that would motivate them to control what leaves the site.

Just like CECOT, the documents Social Circle shared shows they’re planning for a wastewater treatment plant on-site as well as a large water storage tank that will fill during off-peak hours (because it would otherwise depressurize the water for the rest of the town).

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people local newspaper reporters are rarified elites instead of ink-stained wretches driving their Honda Civic to a crime scene so you know don’t have to rely on Nextdoor and the police press release.

God I hate traffic

I would love an app that looks something like this.