what if we normalized mental/emotional/social health checkups like physical checkups? just quick meeting once a year, covered by health insurance. Oh a referral for therapy? would you like maybe career counseling? you're feeling sad but you think it's reasonable level, shall we check in in 3 months?

I swear that half of my job is saying “so when you say air gapped what is the air and what is the gap exactly”

as I have often remarked, DC is an oral culture that pretends to be a literate culture.

not many people know this, but Barilla has a line of 3D printed pasta it sells mostly to the fine dining industry. I don't want the pasta. I want the pasta printer

Federal revenue idea: podcast tax per minute

Pretty damning that most tech executives (like most affluent people) generally try to protect their own children from the products that made them rich.

Nokia actually had a very logical incremental path; they built an electrical plant for the paper mill, then they merged with the neighbouring rubber company, so they were in the insulated cable business. Which meant they were in the telegraph business and everything from then on was just keeping up.

It strikes me that even in things like the Matrix where they're all in simulation, it's a shared simulation. One horror of the chatbot is that everyone is isolated into their own reality with the amplifying social permission of a group, and none of the friction

There are well established concepts in cognitive psychology that explain why certain conditions worsen when validation from others fuels delusions. But humans tend to create more friction. Ironically they’re less patient, and their empathy has limits where the affectation of empathy in bots do not.

Are there any old pushbuttons hidden behind a painted-over trapdoor somewhere, or still wired up beneath the cobwebs in someone’s attic, which you can randomly press to see if the social media machine responds? (It’s a bonus if they come with blinking lights too.)

An absolute tragedy. This country used to allow weird niche things to flourish and we will all be so much poorer for losing Hampshire. (Fwiw, for me, weird is the ultimate compliment)

These AI-generated images have indeed more in common with history paintings or movie stills than with documentary photography. Unlike paintings or movies, however, they are created instantly, spread immediately and compete with real news photos for our attention on the same channels and platforms 4/

The idea that we are trying to get students to produce mistake-free work strikes me as a deep misunderstanding of the role of mistakes in learning.

We never learn as much as when we fail. I have vivid sense memories of every time I crashed my bike and only the faintest recollections of the hundreds of hours I rode my bike successfully. I think we need to consider this when considering what we punish and reward in a learning environment.

Seems useful how this directions app centers the human user who is navigating in order to catch a specific train. It also has a distinct New York flavor with its advice to “give up” on making faraway trains.

The first time you happen upon infinity, it seems really impressive, but eventually you realize that infinities are just laying about all over the place and aren’t particularly special.

What’s going to be the next new social media format after TikTok, if there is one? Where do you pivot after pivoting to video?

I'm one of those trans women. I worked ground ops for Artemis I. I am torn between celebrating the success of my friends and peers and grieving how my dream of working for NASA was shattered by hateful assholes in Tallahassee

Bloody hell. Researchers invented a disease, published two fake papers to see if LLM’s would ingest them and kick them up as fact — and then it broke containment and all the major AI’s bought in. Information pollution. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Did u know? If you have a cattle grid close to you, install a ramp inside each subterranean compartment so that small souls like hedgehogs, mice & amphibians can escape if they inadvertently fall in. We made some simple brick steps in ours. Works perfectly. 🙏🌍🦎🐸🐀🦔

Someday our current time period may still be described as one in which there were more opportunities compared to the future, as unbelievable as that sounds. Because it already sounds unbelievable when people talk that way about the recent past.

The latest development in the trend towards soft/tactile electronics appears to be this DIY project by a Redditor who crocheted a motorized talking mouth to report PC system stats. reddit.com/r/arduino/co... (Video at the link.)

I cannot emphasize enough how demoralizing this is for everyone in the room.

the janky capitalization stuff they did in the early years of wikipedia to make links work is never not funny to me. we were just throwing stuff at the wall, no one had any idea what the internet was gonna be like long-term

It's permeated everything from our politics (there's nothing Democrats can do!) to our court system (contingency attorneys won't take cases with any risk) to our personal lives. And it's categorically, 100%, absolutely wrong. Every righteous fight is worth having, whether it succeeds or not.

There's a principle that's become embedded in the culture of the US, and it's toxic. It's basically this: it's stupid and even wrong to have a fight you know you cannot win.

Our society has a habit of throwing people away after they become inconvenient. But you never hear about it, because you never hear from any of the people whom it happens to.

I also have spicy feelings about all these cozy games that are just continual carework grinds and emotional delicacy

This article on the increasing deliverable requirements (& associated costs) of entering architectural competitions covers an overlooked structural problem. We also need more coverage of their diminished role in launching new practices in addition to growing them. www.archpaper.com/2026/03/arch...

just pre-ordered @henrysnow.bsky.social 's forthcoming book from @versobooks.bsky.social www.versobooks.com/products/312...

It never occurs to the sort of leftist that contraposes NASA against social welfare programs that the implementation of the Great Society and the peak of NASA's power, prestige, and (as a share of the budget) funding happened *at the same time, by the efforts of the same people*.

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.

Something I'm always keen to emphasize when talking about this academically is that indigenous and settler are both created categories, they both have hierarchies internally and in relation to each other, and that a group can act as both! Also, more then one group can be indigenous to a region!

Can’t stop taking pictures of Arthur Erickson’s Law Courts buildings. The ultimate achievement in leafy brutalist groundscrapers. I’ve walked past a zillion times on past visits but it really works on a gray day.

You know that scenography is important than tectonics in architecture because of how often a donor’s name on the front of a building is its whole reason for being built.

Saying this transition “came out of nowhere” sounds inaccurate, but it seems like an example of adaptation towards increased energy resilience/autonomy.

something that is particularly interesting is how much interface design relies on white lies -- computers are great examples, the icon and semiotics of "saving" a document has very little to do with what is actually happening. so cognitive abstractions for managing a ship being semi-reliable is fun

these are two anti-ai extremist factions. one is full of reddit extremists and the other is full of tumblr extremists and they hate each other. both are populated almost entirely by millenials

What do you call content that’s too well-made to be slop, but too generic to be something you electively want to consume?

This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.

Random NYC-specific nightmare future scenario that popped into my head: after the J train tracks age to the point of being unusable, the city converts all its infrastructure into a really long high line. No replacement train line is built since driverless cars are expected to take over its role.

An underrated addendum to the Bowling Alone story is that North America's largest bowling operator (Bowlero) is a publicly traded company whose business model involves buying mom and pop alleys, shutting down the leagues, and trying to attract casual, higher paying, one-off players.

Sometimes feel a bit lost because the audience for certain things I used to talk about in certain ways isn’t on here, or even on online platforms still at all. And I haven’t found substitutes to replace it. So entire categories of speech become obsolete, and perhaps influence my underlying thinking.

I do feel like we need a term for a particular type of conversion of a non-AI tool like spellcheck or Intellisense to use AI and the resulting change in quality and reliability that can occur

Starting on the academic equivalent of 3rd and making it to home plate is not, in fact, as impressive as the people who start in a rec league and somehome still make it into the majors.

It’s sad when a part of the world around you becomes a little bit less strange (by which I mean the enjoyable and desirable kind of strange), even if you know it’s happening for necessary reasons.

the amount programmers think about whitespace is like four orders of magnitude more than anyone but maybe copy editors

Yeah I didn’t know this. Dang.

Latest thing on LinkedIn is diatribes against AI written with AI. Think I'm being trolled by the algorithm.