As big of deal as AI is now, it seems a little odd there hasn’t yet been a big recent movie which makes contemporary AI tech a major part of its plot, or at least no movie which permeated culture enough for me to be aware of it. That shows how certain kinds of cultural production can stagnate & lag.

ok one last post -- oldheads are always going to "why is the web dying.... how can we get the kids invested in the free and open web" bro the kids can't read. that's why the web is dying. first things first

Great piece on some interesting finds from a study. Obviously there’s a different equity angle (recommended states likely run into federal/state lands or farms or indigenous lands and water rights/use issues) but I get it

"This is the pt of the 'gaslighting' origin story that ppl who haven’t watched Gaslight don’t tend to know abt: the part where the gaslit victim pushes back." @noragilbert.bsky.social on the lost ending of Gaslight in @publicbooks.bsky.social. A must read! www.publicbooks.org/the-lost-end...

The distance in time between now and when Microsoft Office replaced drop down menus with the ribbon bar at the top is the same as the distance between then and the fall of the Berlin Wall

Just 45 cooling towers left in Britain, all but one in the process of decommission and demolition. If, like me, you are fond of these silent sculptural giants scattered across the landscape, you will love @c20society.bsky.social supersized new book.

I think what is going to happen is that lab-grown meat will gradually catch up with real animals and when that happens we will all quietly admit that the vegans were right about factory farming

Hate it, but slowly coming to the opinion that college freshmen should have a course teaching them how insurance works and what private equity is so that they can understand our current social reality 😩

everyone knows Richard Scarry's "Very Busy Surveillance State." classic.

I think we all sorta knew this, but it's amazing to now have all the minor and local roads added to the maps. I've walked a bunch of these over the years.

Should we kill trees because they're ugly? At one point, the National Park Service did just that. Modern conservation is loaded with value judgments.

me at the end of class: here's a little speculative exercises; imagine you wake up from cryosleep in 2085. what's the kind of tech-society r/ship you'd like to see around you? students: no AI I honestly think students' views are missing from the 'should AI be integrated in classrooms' discussion

These are 1930s/40s level human rights violations happening here in the US right now, and the people responsible seem unlikely to face any consequences.

I still think the spatial aspect of Mamdani’s campaign hasn’t been as fully discussed or interpreted as it could be. ie. a politician using the visual rhetoric of being in the city and immersed in it, and going to many different places on the subway. It’s a close-up instead of distant use of scale.

Feel like I remember seeing a particular image that circulated online a few years ago of a suburban neighborhood where you had to travel a long distance to get between two nearby points that were separated by a cul-de-sac. Does anyone remember what the image/story was?

How do you figure out whether or not you still exist? What are some ways of testing your continued existence? (Metaphorically speaking of course.)

Design is the most important part of any project and the thing we breeze past immediately. It is also the step that AI is really bad at doing.

“For kids it is also a valuable lesson: Sometimes the only candy available will not be a glorious full-size Twix bar, but rather a strange shapeless globule of taffy with only a rudimentary owl face on its packaging, and you can choose to have this or no candy at all.”

the thing most americans seem to forget and ignore when they’re talking about AI and whether or not it should exist is the fact that US tech companies are not the only ones developing AI — we can’t control china and other countries

OH: “real XML has never been tried”

Data physicalization!

Was excited yesterday to go to the launch event for my former architecture professor Madeline Schwartzman’s new book, Alive: Synthetic Cells, Feral Robots, Rebellious AI, and the Design of Radical Life. It shares some provocative projects and ideas! www.thamesandhudsonusa.com/books/alive-...

Interested in data centers? In critical data center studies? Here's an open biblio -- anyone can add or borrow from it. Please do add anything that's missing. Enjoy! docs.google.com/document/d/1...

“…when Dr. Gorbunova and Dr. Seluanov inserted the bowhead CIRBP gene into human cells, the rate of DNA repair in those cells doubled.” If we had hunted them to extinction, we wouldn’t have learned this. I’m feeling grateful to all the 1970s “save the whales” activists.

Does anyone know why Waymo turns the steering wheel when their robots turn? Is there an FMVSS requirement? I've suspected it was cheaper/default and perhaps to give riders some feedback/clue, but I don't recall Waymo explaining it. Waymo robots do not "talk to each other." They are AVs not CAVs.

Set it to “hide and seek” mode. It scoots under your bed, LED pinpoint pupils giving it away in the dark. “I give up!” you shout. It crabwalks from under your bed, dusty but victorious, logging your defeat for calibration, emotional tone for training, and household sentiment for targeted ads. :D

When humanoid robots arrive, what are people going to do with them in their homes if they don’t feel like running them all the time? It’s going to be weird to look in your closet and see a person-shaped object being stored there.

This might be a long shot but: I'm looking to speak with architects/developers who have worked on affordable housing projects that required (or got feedback to include) some type of 'historic complement' aesthetic—massing, materials, etc—for a story. Recommendations appreciated! thanks!

Took the A-train Car-specific wayfinding!

I almost wish there was a way to put a little label or flag on your social media profile indicating you were open to networking with other people, since these days not everyone is. But it might quickly lose its meaning from people feeling implicitly obligated to put it up.

Do flavourings have representational content? For example, does ethyl methylphenylglycidate (commonly used for strawberry flavour) *represent* strawberries?

Whenever I see Mamdani say something rhetorically impressive, I feel a tinge of disappointment that he couldn’t ever qualify to run for president. He fits into exactly the slot of the kinds of leaders Democrats need now, and I wonder if any fractions of his impact can be replicated in other places.

ordinary americans are filming ice agents and trying to save their neighbors. for all the hemming and hawing during 2024 about how democracy was an elite concern, the elites gave up far more quickly than average people.

always slightly weird when architecture is in the news

was thinking about the temporal resolution of display surfaces for synthesizing information, and how the thing you only need to look at once a day (or week, or month, or whatever) is actually kinda noise relative to the thing that matters from one minute to the next

This exhibition - "City in the Cloud: Data on the Ground" - about the geographies and architectures of data also offered a great selection of books (I've only taken pictures of those I don't own yet) ⬇️

Generally speaking if satellite before/after photos are proliferating something very bad has happened

One way the Epstein Ballroom has changed since it was announced is the addition of a first floor passageway on top of the discreet colonnades added by Thomas Jefferson in 1805. As you can see in the photo below, Jefferson’s east colonnade is gone.

VR tech appears to be inducing a new kind of labor exploitation, as offshore robot teleoperators restocking Japanese convenience stores report motion sickness from their abnormal patterns of headset use. Is VR really needed in these situations? restofworld.org/2025/philipp...

Intriguing idea discussed in this thread, though I’d be curious how it actually works out in terms of efficiency/power consumption. Is it worth reusing older hardware with higher power needs if it requires more supporting infrastructure in terms of solar panels/batteries than newer tech would?

In case you’re in the mood to read about indiscriminate demolition of our heritage.

Assuming the White House ballroom is completed, we’ll need to figure out what happens to it next in a post-Trump world. Are there ways the building could be modified and re-purposed that would erode his legacy and make the space more useful, without consuming too much taxpayer funding?

Inspiration for anyone who might want more multi-functional geometry in their life (I know I do).

Realized while working on one of my writing projects that I probably need to explain what hyperlinks are, because some of today’s younger readers might not be familiar with the term.

Mute-uals: you both follow each other and both have each other muted.

I'm laughing out loud because, *twenty years ago*, a friend in robotics told me that showing off a dancing robot is what you do when your robot sucks, and a *group* of them even more so.

This is because dancing, for robots, is something that looks hard but is actually easy. It looks hard because it's hard for humans! But as robot tasks go, it's a pre-scripted set of motions in a totally controlled environment. You program it and test it over and over until it works right.

Feels like in the 2000-2010s there was this sea change in academia where young scholars were supposed to brand themselves in this or that way to be competitive on the market, but 3 market collapses later it feels like the pivot simply led to atomized individualistic approaches to illegible fields

It feels in a way like Bluesky is less social than old Twitter was, even though it’s a smaller community, and I wonder what mechanics of feed construction cause that. I think the non-algorithmic feed places more general mainstream content in my timeline, which I scroll past more often w/o engaging.

It’s funny how nostalgia leads us to see things in a positive light. Gateway’s branding was striking and this image delivers a first-impression mood, but I also remember specs where Gateways were noticeably underpowered vs competitors. It’s another layer to the impossibility of this idealized image.