Happy birthday to one of my favourite haters, Charles Darwin

Things are really heating up in the Hypothetical Sector

my daily commute used to require a transfer at the pentagon station, and I gotta say, advertising does work, because I ended up getting myself an F-35 as a treat

Incredible.

if you played sonic the hedgehog and put down the controller, sonic would look at you and tap his foot impatiently. this was proof that sega genesis cartridges had souls. the decision was made to make the storage cases a lot larger than the cartridges so they would have room to move around in there

On further research, Death May Be Your Santa Claus was a movie as well as an album title (and both came before the Mott the Hoople song?) The movie sounds a bit like Putney Swope. And then there’s this: m.youtube.com/watch?v=AP75...

my letta code agent has to write my commits with a particular message and then a quote that it believes is related to the commit This one goes extremely hard

This though. This is the sort of thing that really bugs me. "There is no guarantee" - sure, since we don't understand how the human mind works. There's no guarantee we're not all Boltzmann brains. But there are good reasons to think this is not how we work. (cc @shannonvallor.bsky.social)

Whoa! Someone recently uploaded some high-quality versions of unreleased Boards of Canada tracks from 1985-1996. This seems to be legit, judging from the excitement in the YT comments and on Reddit… [kottke.org]

One of the great things about this song is that you're never 100% sure of the setting, even in English www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5Wk...

Auden on detective stories is still one of the most enjoyable essays ever written harpers.org/archive/1948...

WH Auden was unimpressed by drugs

Stevie Smith

“This twilight beach recurs again and again in science fiction… the terminal beach, where the last man says farewell” [James Gleick]

These Anne Sexton clips on YouTube are incredible www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4Vl...

It is now taking a legit weirdly long time to nominate a new Fed chair. The combo of - knows what they're doing - won't spook the market and - is willing to do whatever the boss wants is clearly hard to find

Silicon Valley, having first taken all the fun out of psychedelics and MDMA, now convinced they should just be miserable in a normal way

I love dumb movie tag lines

Best full sentence album titles, a partial list: Weasels Ripped My Flesh Death May Be Your Santa Claus Millions Now Living Will Never Die Sometimes Dogs Bark at Nothing open.spotify.com/track/7ze1rw...

open.spotify.com/track/2txiGR... This reminded me of You Want it Darker, which is also essentially a metal/industrial song

When did the Poetry Foundation start doing Genius-style annotations?

Working on a comic about stoicism

genuinely stunning image

Camus does not get enough credit for being funny

A reminder that the “weaponise US Treasuries” playbook is outdated: no single foreign entity has meaningful market share, and foreigners are now far less important in government funding. Also (since at least Bagehot’s day), if central banks have one role, it is to act as buyers of last resort.

if i could make you read ONE (1) single post to improve your understanding of the challenges of social science in general it would be this one from @markfabian.bsky.social about wellbeing science specifically profmarkfabian.substack.com/p/airing-my-...

It’s crazy that nobody knows what the Berlin Wall was built for or by whom. I think the theory about ancient pagan rituals makes sense, but who knows? I appreciate that there are still true mysteries in this wonderful world of ours.

Liquor licenses in New York are such a depressing example of NIMBYism ny.eater.com/news/406288/...

Happy Birthday Patricia Highsmith!

Was worried I might have LLM psychosis but I asked Gemini and it said I’m fine

John Crowley

I realise I'm just a freak, but living in a multicultural city is the best thing of all time, it's just the best possible human experience and i can not understand why anyone on earth would be like "weve got to destroy this"

It's not the greatest trick the devil ever pulled, but getting academics to say "measure" when they mean quantify was impressively diabolical

tangential, but one of the most remarkable episiodes in the history of science to me is that fact that people in the 19th century correctly inferred the basic facts about the physiology of color vision by doing math on our color phenomenology

I would watch American Idol if it was just different guitarists playing the spacey fills in Boys of Summer open.spotify.com/track/4oOF9T...

Remembering Clement Greenberg on his birthday 🎂 📷 Arnold Newman, 1972 "When something really works, you're helpless. The toughest part of art criticism is praising, because then you use the same words all the time."

Everybody thinks 'https://' stands for 'hypertext transfer protocol secure' but it actually stands for 'head to this place, sucka' followed by a colon and two laser sounds

"Success often destroys American writers, or at least derails them… Americans may not read but, like the French, they take books and writers seriously, whereas the British view their writers in a vaguely adversarial way and success usually comes with a live round still in the chamber." —JG Ballard

Congrats to iOS 26 for simulating uncorrected astigmatism.

it's Blondie I'm talking about here and if you don't know this, listen to the first five Blondie albums. every one of them is great

Two rambling thoughts on Ben's article and a couple threads I see linking his work 1) part of the reason (I think) for the suprising number of 5-sigma interventions is due to the structure of medical interventions we study and how we study it 1/?

I've spent half my life working on "difficult" problems where the key question to ask is "is this difficult because it's difficult or is it difficult because you don't like the answer?"

not me bitch

Video message from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell: www.youtube.com/watch?v=KckG... www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/s...

"Colin Blunstone could be the most generally underappreciated singer among singers that all other singers know is great. There’s some sort of cool breathiness that still achieves complete control of the envelope." —Scott Miller The way his tone gradually fills out here… youtu.be/re1qLsd_qtw?...