People tell me all the time that Waymo is bad because Google is unaccountable. In other news, humans are so accountable that this woman who killed a whole family will (checks notes) be getting her driver’s license back in her mid-80s after (checks notes) transferring all her assets.

A key challenge, and a huge source of the disconnect between Silicon Valley and the other creative industries is that, for coders, AI eliminates the drudgery so they can focus on the creative/expressive part. In every other creative discipline, it has the exact opposite effect.

all else being equal I am of course going to root for Team USA but I admit I am strongly pro-Dune and anti-people-sharing-their-poetry-with-me

this is one of those cases where I think no, even rhetorically, you don’t go there. you draw a bright red line and when someone talks about denaturalization you laugh in their face and say “what are you taking about, we don’t do that in America” instead of dunking on their side’s immigrants

I continue to be in absolute awe of the writers at Quanta. Just an insanely hard job to do, every single article www.quantamagazine.org/networks-hol...

what if i get into a car chase!!! what if i forge an unlikely bond with a detective who is on the wrong side of his crooked department and i have to help get him to the court house safely to testify!! what if the plot of SPEED happens to me??? these are all reasonable anxieties, sorry i hit your kid

why are these figure skaters allowed to wear costumes that are not variations on their nation's flag? this is absurd (I am willing to countenance RARE exceptions for costumes based on widely-understood and reductive caricatures, e.g. bear costumes for Russia)

I knew bluesky would find a use of AI it likes eventually

it's not just that Mamdani is charming af (he is), it's that he is normalizing the idea that children are full members of society that we all share a collective responsibility for

welp, this destroyed me first thing upon waking up

they're so close, conceptually and numerically

TIL my grandfather has a wikipedia page! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_J... I knew he was an olympian but it's kind of a funny story. He immigrated from Holland and played field hockey intensely w/ some of his emigre buddies. When the US decided to field a men's field hockey team, they were the

I have very fond memories of paperbacks. My dad did construction work for Olsson's Books & Records and hung out in the break room, where remaindered books with the covers torn off (you only shipped the covers back for a refund) were in bins for staff to take home www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/b...

running to framebridge brb

nice remembrance (and mirror!) of the now-departed CIA World Factbook from @simonwillison.net simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/5/t...

A great post from @mike.teczno.com medium.com/@michalmigur... But I’d add that this is only part of the compliance picture. Labels are too. So are what we might call “virtual” boundaries—often-abstract lines that national authorities insist must be present (sometimes w specific styling)

an excellent post from @peterodrigue.bsky.social and @ggwash.org, worth a read for anyone who has an opinion about speed cameras. I'm grateful to him for advancing the conversation (and the generous shout-out) ggwash.org/view/102070/...

I can’t get over how weird this Starfleet Academy show is. Just so obviously the same people and ideas as Discovery, from the timeline to the endless JJ-style flares to the returning non-beloved characters (feat Admiral, You Know, The Tall One). Angry outsider/matriarch mentor. New kind of Klingon!

did not expect the first great and empathetic piece of criticism I read in 2026 to be about Dilbert www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-dilber...

This video shows ICE holding children hostage to bait parents out of their homes. Just unspeakable levels of cruelty and inhumanity.

the 2025/2026 #treelemetry season has concluded treelemetry.tomlee.space

we are nearing the end of the #treelemetry xmasalytics season. some valuable insights gleaned, and a major evolution in our software architecture. more to do, particularly with respect to automated segmentation of events. but we're emerging with a great dataset to iterate on

As a reminder, the reason that the Federal Reserve renovation cost so much is because they followed the law: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

we put on the Paw Patrol Christmas special for our youngest yesterday (the season's not over until we get around to taking down the tree!) they attempt a "true meaning of Christmas" plot but it's tricky.

TIL the FBI has its own image format fbibiospecs.fbi.gov/certificatio...

Thought-provoking project from @dbreunig.bsky.social www.dbreunig.com/2026/01/08/a...

USDOT and a major outlet are framing DC's traffic cameras as a cash grab. They're essential for keeping people safe on our streets. But the revenues should go to Vision Zero as the Council planned, not DC's general budget.

I sat in a fucking court room and heard Apple imply that a naked cartoon banana was somehow inappropriate but somehow Grok non consensually undressing women and children is ok?? www.theverge.com/policy/85990...

had this @ggwash.org tab open for ages, finally got to it. lovely stuff ggwash.org/view/101838/...

it me simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/4/c...

Eldest said “I hate the Muppets” today. Where did I fail her

scandalous

“Car bloat”—increasingly oversized automobiles—worsens road safety, affordability and the environment. Here are some of the stories I wrote in 2025 examining the trend and proposing solutions. 🧵 In @vox.com, I likened car bloat to secondhand smoke (which helped bring down the US tobacco industry).

absolutely true, but... now do humans en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabu... it seems plausible, maybe even likely, that thinking systems do less hallucination as their scope & power improves

it's totally normal for a politician--elected or aspiring--to be seen in the community doing Good Works. we have council members show up and give little speeches at monthly family bike rides, it's very nice. Abughazaleh's campaign running mutual aid seems firmly in this tradition. The interesting

Everyone is so backward on this! - eventually we will decide AI is conscious bc the Problem is Hard and humans feel empathy - that will carry numerous ethical consequences - if you’re an AI hater you should welcome this, it will crush the field - if you’re an AI booster you should deny it

I don't really get the left's romantic views about mutual aid when the whole point of progressive politics is that the state should provide the safety net — not charity

The fun thing about AI is that some people think it’s a big speculative bubble while other people think that’s hysterical catastrophizing and what’s actually going to happen is just unprecedented economic dislocation

you should read Jamelle for the full details but my assumption is that “heritage Americans” are somewhat more expensive and flavorful than the fatter Americans you would typically find at the supermarket

"Did you see what Mark Cuban posted? Oh did you see the clapb—" You shake yourself awake in the cold North Atlantic water. You are not online. It is July of 1858. You are a baleen whale, and you have changed your mind. The future most not come to pass. The telegraph cable must break.

Eastern Gate succeeds at depicting the Polish Intelligence Service as sophisticated and cosmopolitan, steely eyed and cold hearted in the face of an implacable foe of immense international scale. Then it turns out the bomb is disguised as an accordion.

profuse apologies to all of our users: a mishandled cleanup routine resulted in #treelemetry systems consuming over 1.8TB of disk space on the host system, blocking writes and stalling updates. the issue has been resolved, and we hope to recover much of the missing data treelemetry.tomlee.space

a great read, a kind I've missed github.com/celoyd/potat...

book is absolutely lovely so far, but this little section stood out to me. "Drivers and pedestrians said they typically broke laws to save time. Cyclists, however, said they typically broke laws to stay safe." ridiculously true. at no point on my bike do i think about The Law. i think about safety

sadly this has been the dominant editorial mode of all tech journalism since we left the initial era of gee-whiz naivete. obviously there are many talented writers who are exceptions but in general our popular treatment of it is reductive and hysterical

I started thinking about this around this date--that fact that the most productive use of AI "agents" is "using an interface initially designed for a teletype" is just one of those weird things. but of course, it's all text bergmayer.net/ai-and-telet...

enjoyed this well-deserved appreciation of @daveweigel.bsky.social's work www.semafor.com/newsletter/1...

my understanding is that the New Yorker does well for itself--network effects favoring superstar brands & all--so perhaps they have adequate incentive for gross banner ad chum? if so, is that good? like watching a lost & lamented species return to its ecological niche

it’s Christmas Eve and the pediatric fevers have begun

I made a Mac word game: bergmayer.net/plaintextpanic