I've watched thousands of videos from the Jan. 6 riot as part of NPR's reporting and archive project on that day. Here are some of the lesser known videos that have really stuck with me. 🧵

Tower with scenic observation level and telescope dome

The last egg nog of 2025 into the first coffee of 2026

Is this Sanders passing the torch? It could be. I think I hope it is. I hope Mamdani takes it and runs like hell. We'll know in 6-12 months?

Non-traditional sacred text you'd swear in on: The CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics OR The B5 book with the first page of all the human sacred texts they could find

I see outage farming, "famous horrible person said something horrible!" I've never heard of them. Maybe everyone else should try harder to have also never heard of them

Happy New Year UTC to sysadmins everywhere and people actually in that time zone

public science and public data is good! this is three National Weather Service stations near where I am that I scrape to give myself a sense of what the last two weeks of weather has been. I can do this because the data is free

weird economies of scale? 1000ft 2-conductor 4-AWG buriable power cable: $1.04/ft same but 4-conductor, twice as much wire: $1.23/ft

we should file a PEP to make the Python standard library `json` do a reasonable encoding of `datetime.datetime` (like Go standard library json does for its standard Time object)

I want to explosively launch some papal documents, a "canon cannon", as it were

I'd rather learn SQL once than learn 10 ORMs Today I look at the awkward syntax for a query in gorm and think, "I already know how to do this in SQL, this is not better" ORMs are platform lock-in for your mind SQL is not good, but somehow ORMs are consistently worse

Wake Up Dead Meme

I have seen this in community theatre. They're not expecting Broadway or Cirque du Soleil, they see something good intimately right there in front of them and it lands as _great_, or at least really good fun

keep watching blacksky, the future of bluesky is what's happening over there

Space Lasers! Science I missed from September. NASA's space-laser communication system. A video notes "hundreds of megabits at Mars close range" while the furthest tested signal was further than the furthest Earth-Mars distance. www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-d...

LLM-bot 4/1 opportunity Human: hey robot, write this report for me bot: Sure thing boss, real sexy, just like you asked Human: what?

stupid managers are measuring AI-adoption-compliance and are not measuring outcomes (does work get done better/faster/cheaper/etc)

Swayze mashup: Ghost + Dirty Dancing She runs up for The Lift at the end ... and faceplants on the floor falling right through the ghost. On second thought let's not go there

Solstice for nerds happened at 2025-12-21 15:03 UTC (10:03 US/Eastern) at the moment in the Earth's orbit where the axis was most nearly aligned with the sun (north pole most away from the sun, south pole most towards it) aa.usno.navy.mil/calculated/s...

"Too Like The Lightning" has one family business controlling 80% of the global robotaxi market. I thought this was unrealistic, but here's a bunch of Waymo doing stuff they probably won't get properly regulated for, so, sure, whatever. Watch out for the 8th generation of the Waymo family.

"tournament nexus" came to me from bad auto complete, but maybe someone who does SPORTS could do something with it

Up late thoughts about the sci-fi with the nice utopian setting and the hidden tournament nexus: thanks to Big Data we get great results from relatively few extra-judicial killings!

favorite spice girl (wrong answers only)

half the startups I hear about: how can we do something with AI? the other half: what can we sell to people doing something with AI? 2% of startups: let's solve a problem relevant to people outside of tech

now if only we had non-public content on bsky I could quit facebook

I mix 405g hot water with 35g coffee grounds and get 310g of drinkable coffee ... and daydream of a centrifuge to get 65g more coffee out of the grounds

Sometimes things work on the 'NPR model' (some donors, some free riders, but it all works out). Today I would like to feel this as a hopeful point about Humanity.

All hail the hypno-Homer

Brrrr, I need something for my computer to do so I can get another 50W of space heater into this office

The **Texas** Democratic Party is worthy of it's name

but from this one, AI poetry attacks you! 'Felis catus...' indeed. hmpf!

with infinite monkeys on typewriters eventually you get Shakespeare. modern LLMs have greatly cut the number of monkeys and increased the speed!

There's a meme form "Sure did, boss. Real sexy, just like you asked" and I'm a little sad I no longer work for the old boss who would have rolled with that perfectly

If you see this, repost with your model of positive masculinity.

The Onion only a minute behind NPR

How to become a smart person: Step one: recognize how stupid everyone else is. Step two: recognize how stupid you are. Step three, and this is the real clincher: actually read some fucking books once in a while.

I'm so uncool my workload still just wants CPU, not GPU or NPU. [sigh]

This is the best #redistricting #gerrymandering news I've read in a long time. College kid uses @davesredist.bsky.social to make map, it gets legally adopted by the state www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

I was curious, so I did the math, reproduced the official odds, and calculated that the expected value of a $2 powerball ticket (before jackpot which varies) is $0.32 With jackpot, sometimes the expected value is > $2 ! The median value of a ticket is always $0 bolson.org/~bolson/2025...

Thoughts for gingerbread season explosm.net/comics/kris-...

Last time I was unexpectedly unemployed it to 6 months for the state to clear the bureaucracy and send me any money. UBI that just always shows up would keep me in groceries with less stress

A theory about top-down LLM/AI promoters: 1. They don't believe in quality. They don't believe there's anything better than just barely checking the box and a passing grade. Why get a C+ grade when C will do?

"Why is everyone paid so little?" Is a question I'm trying to ask more than "Why does everything cost so much?"

King Brian declares that Hollywood shall make propaganda, best stuff since WWII, to promote social cohesion and beliefs is common infrastructure and taking care of everyone in the US. Buy Peace Bonds!

Yes! I want a suit I can _move_ in. I once got a suit custom tailored and it arrived too tight and I couldn't move in it.

You will be visited by three spirits

"new verse to Cohen's Hallelujah" is the best poetic form since the limerick

''keming''