I highlighted a bunch of passages when I read @tricialockwood.bsky.social’s No One is Talking About This years ago, and every now and then one will pop up again and I am forced to pause and sit in awe of just how perfectly she puts her finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist.

Watching stinky baseball @jonbois.bsky.social

no one: me: funny you should mention that. I've memorized all the lyrics to Tom Lehrer's The Elements - there's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium...

Farce is one of my favorite genres because when done well, it’s superficially silly but underneath is a profound exploration of the human condition. It’s enjoyable the way people enjoy watching those intricate rolling ball sculptures. The intricate mechanics that all make weird sense together.

A type designer walks into a bar, with thick black lines accentuating her eyes, nose, and mouth. The bartender says “why the boldface?”

Why did we call it “microblogging” when “take fountain” was right there?

Ursula K. LeGuin, in the afterword to A Wizard of Earthsea. Wowee.

@visakanv.com‘s description of good work having “an idea in the car” echoes the feeling of reading a lot of AI writing. The human impulse towards efficiency strips all the dynamic life from the writing. Lots of interesting parallels between the photocopier and LLMs as well, prob not a coincidence.

Quibi never stood a chance

@visakanv.com “The lotus of my optimism grows out of the mud of my despair.” 🔥 It’s like the serenity prayer for the person blessedcursed with an overactive mind.

This reflects the difference between a “technology” and a “product.” Technology is how something functions. It’s amazing and fascinating to people who are into how things work (which is not everyone) Product is how something functions in a person’s specific context. Very different things!

meta-note There’s a lot that is tragic (in the Greek sense of the word) about what happened to Twitter, but 1 of the most profound is the lost potential for it to be the medium for something like this. Not a post with a screenshot of a book. But another strand in a great web of connected thought

(Re-)reminder to stop writing for everyone and write for someone instead, whoever that someone is for you (for me). Via @visakanv.com

Absolute gem in @visakanv.com‘s FAN. To paraphrase: Ppl who are blindly confident are unlikely to worry about being blindly confident So if you worry about being blindly confident, you likely don’t need to worry about it as much as you do (esp if worrying holds you back from doing what want to do)

plot twist: the tech CEO is the child and the venture capitalist is a hallucination, they're actually a surgeon and tech CEO is on the operating table and the surgeon is saying "I can't operate on this person, they're my child" and the surgeon is the mom

My favorites are the ones I've seen in action (coincidentally, one by kids, one for kids). Titus Andronicus put on by high schoolers. What they did with the over the top violence was 😚👌 Comedy of Errors when done right, the jokes had an audience of middle schoolers falling out of their chairs

Are we talking about people writing stuff in books today? Sweet! That means I can share one of my all time favorite poems: Marginalia by Billy Collins

being a Mets fan is enough of an adventure, thankyouverymuch

’Twas brillig, and the NPCs Did mog and rizz in their drip: All skibidi were the delulu OPs, And the looksmaxxers did simp.

Groundhog Day | noun | a situation in which the same usually negative or monotonous experiences occur repeatedly or are felt to occur repeatedly with no change or correction

Honestly saying “I don’t know” is such a power move. If you think about it, it also creates a sympathetic bond with the audience because it’s highly likely many of THEM don’t know as well. After all, you’re the one on stage and they came to watch you speak.

Cake Pop Demon Hunters

Any game designers out there? Specifically focused on deck building games?

“It depends,” is almost always the answer.

The hilariousness and brilliantness of this website reinspires my confidence in what is possible with this whole internet thing ✅✅✅

RIP Tom. You were one of the first to show me that humor and truth were great friends. Thanks for everything.

He died in 2002, well before social media transformed everything, but I know Chuck Jones would have had an account just to repost stuff like this

The “personal FAQ because I’m being milkshake-ducked by AI slop for engagement” is going to be the new “link in bio,” isn’t it?

This is an interesting angle I hadn’t considered before. One of the reasons we converse with other people is to ground ourselves in reality. It’s hard to see the truth when we only have a single point of reference, we choose another perspective to orient ourselves.

It seems like a cruel irony that when a problem in a relationship is that one person isn’t listening, the most direct way to fix it revolves around telling that person “you’re not listening.” Which would work if …you know… that person were listening.

LLMs are averagers by nature. A below average writer? It’ll help. An above average writer? It will bring you down. It pushes all writing towards the average. On every dimension: originality, perspective, syntax… Tell it to be weirder? It’ll give you the most average weirdness you can think of.

Thoughtfulness, empathy, self-awareness, and the desire to express himself clearly No one is perfect, but I have to imagine that wherever this student is right now, he’s doing ok

If you were a skilled at plumbing, electrical, or HVAC and a good teacher (and enjoyed those things), you could make a really nice business charging a premium for fixing stuff and teaching people how to do it (or even just cogently explaining what you’re doing)

Streaming show review good

Alt text won't be able to do it justice, but the italicization in this section makes @chuckwendig.bsky.social's point best. Generative AI is not writing. If you want to see what writing looks like, check this out. This is writing with a capital WRITE.

One of the funny(?) things about all this is it FEELS new and different, but it is one of the oldest human truths: it’s about the journey, not the destination. Explored in every culture for all of human history. Of course “this time it’s different, no actually it’s not” is also one of those truths

I will never understand people who make things -- films, stories, art, music -- abdicating the making of those things in favor of a machine doing it. The joy is in creating something, not in avoiding the work of creation.

This jibes with my sense that most complaints about “AI” (whatever that is) are actually complaints about the effects of capitalism. The problem is they can’t consider any alternatives to capitalism (feels too big, don’t want to, don’t know any, etc) Btw this what the Luddites were on about too.

Be wary of taking parenting advice from anyone, esp someone on the internet, but @visakanv.com is speaking to the “Not sure I’m ready” question. Whatever you think your limitations are, you’re probably wrong. Parenting shows you reserves of strength, grace, and patience you didn’t know you had.

Someone who’s lived in Chicago for a few years glancing up at any random street address

Improvement fixes and bugs

This is a cognitive bias turducken. False consensus wrapped inside attentional bias wrapped inside the backfire effect wrapped inside the Semmelweis effect wrapped inside naïve realism wrapped inside the third-person effect. That it pretty accurately describes how many people feel says a lot.

Word out with your nerd out

I think I found something by that was made in a lab specifically to appeal to @sheilakathleen.bsky.social m.youtube.com/watch?v=xYta...

Corollary: you finding out about a thing ≠ no one knows about a thing

Not always, but highly likely to be true: There are things that set you apart as a kid or teen, things that you are probably tried to hide or suppress. Those very things (not a variant, the thing itself) will be the source a disproportionate % of the good in your life as an adult.

It’s worth considering what a tragic love story Unstoppable Force and Immoveable Object are. The only other thing in the universe that could possible understand them is each other. People always talk about what would happen if they met. And yet it is cosmologically impossible for them to do so.

Bingo. You COULD label students responding to a meaningless, rote task by making it simpler and more efficient as “cheating.” Although a completely different, entirely logical response would be to ask what an assignment would look like that imbued them with meaning and creativity