You know, given the population of Shrewsbury and the number of corpses, begin to think that Brother Cadfael is committing at least some of these murders himself

"This is why I say that reading fiction is not based in primary or secondary belief nor the suspension of disbelief, eat shit Coleridge, because reading is only possession. Any devout reader is long since possessed, deeply and by legion."

Unsettling to discover at this late date that I am actually very comfortable and happy with philosophy, which I thought I loathed, as a field?? Turns out it was just philosophy majors I had a problem with.

There is no ethical consumption in capitalism, but it's been a hard week for trying to apply my "not an absolutist" approach to "the AI is running on illegal unpermitted gas turbines."

“I dont want to proofread I want to edit stop giving me things I didt ask for!!” Well sorry Sad Gregory it’s the internet and some things are hard

You could actually avoid building the whole post-editing house of cards by building an on-by-default option to preview a post (in a different typeface) before sending it. It‘s a proofreading problem.

The bots are beyond parody

Thinking about a decade of evolution in gambling-inflected tech crazes—NFTs, blockchain, metaverse, prediction markets the nested doll of variously credible AI claims—got me thinking about millenarians and apocalypse cults and the rhetoric of the last chance, which is now text rather than subtext.

Catch up on what you missed this week (and last) with updates from the @unbreaking.org Infectious Disease Control and Data Security folks. unbreaking.org/blog/briefin...

oh my god

I like it here though

If I mute "Bsky" I assume I will still get most of the interesting atproto stuff without having to see the opinion guys dramatically opinionating about "Bsky types" quite so much

Yes.

dear internet everything: unless I say otherwise I would like to remain signed in for, in fact, the rest of my life

OMG the DOJ lawyer just said presidential power has never been "circumcised." He was trying to say "circumscribed."

in case you missed last night's gender-neutral little dude

Para mim, é perfeito

found a new NOAA gallery that has terrible metadata but also this guy

hysteresis, I barely know sis

Posting from a cab ride with Thomas Friedman.

My nomination for the least representative fake social media posts anyone has ever mocked up (from pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35533417/)

I have to say, I like seeing people get it. I really do. www.aaronrosspowell.com/3mlqxgn3hzk2...

The beatings and tear gas and medical neglect and physical injuries DHS inflicts are just the visible half of the regime's brutality. Behind it is a bureaucratic violence that snakes through communities, wrecking families and lives. From our Immigration team: bsky.app/profile/unbr...

This is all very bad.

It would be cool if you could set a flag on account deactivation to indicate whether it's intended to be temporary or permanent.

LET MEEEEEEE INNNNNNNN

Today in "Erin tries to breathe" I learned that lots of actual people *shoot waterpiks up their noses* and at least one dude on reddit is trying to rig up a navage-style nasal rinse-suction setup with a shop vac

More of what we're up to at @unbreaking.org. Our federal workforce folks updated at the end of last week: whistleblowers back at FEMA, proposed cuts at the IRS, and a bonkers attempt to give all federal workers' claims-level medical data to the Office of Personnel Management. Thread:

Today's experiment in "poasting while doing something else" has not been a success. I'll try again another day.

To be ultra clear, nothing I write has ever been through the infernal machines. Even if I had no other objections, the obvious + hidden costs to my thinking would be too great. If I can't do better than the smoothie-textured average of all posts, I shouldn't be writing.

Emily has revealed my true self and now I can’t unsee it either

do I have to put a photograph of my actual head back as my avatar or just trust that people at a conf will recognize me as the Cat Who Vomited, human edition

For context, there are syndicates who have a reasonable record and then there is ShinyHunters. Maybe the folks who've been studying them are all wrong! But I would trust them much less far than I could throw all that money. krebsonsecurity.com/2026/02/plea...

oh my god

The worst grocery-related task is now stirring the new jar of peanut butter. Previously, the worst one was un-double-bagging paper grocery bags for storage, but no one double-bags now and we mostly have boxes if we forget cloth.

It‘s very easy to miss this kind of stuff in the flood of All the Things, but there is so much accountability work happening and it is rough to read but so vital to have

"The end result of all of this is that we grew from 2k users to almost 150k, added a ton of heavy new functionality, and still managed to optimize and cut down costs from $.15 per active user per month to just $.03 or so." - @snarfed.org breaks down all the work he's done to optimize Bridgy Fed 1/

This is also an announcement that I'll be delivering the keynote for the Next Socials track for @publicspaces.net & @newpublic.org in Amsterdam on June 5th. conference.publicspaces.net/en

I regret to say that my next talk is also going to be nominally about earthquakes and kelp, but also that it goes significantly harder

In every academic book there is a secret second book hiding in the footnotes. Sometimes it is the first draft that had migrated there to escape the revisions. Sometimes it is the author's tortured secret rebuttal of their own claims, and sometimes it is the incipient form of the their next book.

Where I ended up is that if we consider the term "hallucinate" in its pre-LLM sense, "the network is hallucinating 100% of the time and should be treated accordingly" is a more useful posture for an operator than "yeah it hallucinates sometimes."

today I found a way to confuse a maximum number of strangers across the entire spectrum of the robot wars

This is all making my brain completely melt down.

I think it’s much less that the LLMs “hallucinate“ (I know, everyone hates the term) and much more that the LLMs are themselves best understood as a series of hallucinations.

My cold medication and I are returning to work now but if you happen to have access to the July 25 issue of the formerly very influential Anglican weekly paper (The) Guardian from 1941, I have questions 😅

From SD Tucker's Blithe Spirits: An Imaginative History of the Poltergeist (2020). File under: "behind the times."

Part of what has decimated trust in that thing we call The Media is it used to serve this function but instead decided to just become the flood of bad news. And I'll say it again: this is quite literally heroic work.

So about this. Oregon banned OTC sale of real Sudafed (pseudoephedrine) in 2005. I, a person who then had to periodically jump through hoops to get prescription pseudoephedrine to keep my lungs from crashing, did not know this had been repealed in 2022 until…this week?

We’re always on the lookout for researchers, writers, and editors to make and maintain pages, and we also need folks with legal expertise who can help us understand some of the administration’s more Byzantine maneuvers. Here’s how to join us: unbreaking.org/how-to-help/