Someone in NYC should do interviews with middle-school kids who take the subway to and from school every day, to see if they have any advice for Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy who can't seem to go a single day without pissing himself in fear over them.

Wow it is so blatantly obvious when Cursor Auto mode switches from Opus 4.6 to a dumber model. Night and day difference in code quality, and adherence to instructions. I can't go back, only Opus 4.6 for me now.

Reminder that Anthropic’s “radical leftist demands” are to ask the US to please not use their models to make autonomous killer drones or do domestic surveillance on American citizens. How far has America fallen into fascism that these two requests are now considered “radical”?

The infamous question mark emails at Amazon are probably one of the biggest examples of this. Nothing like a single "?" to set of a flurry of work and investigation lol

Thinking about whoever said that by accepting a meal from people and then arresting them ICE agents broke a cultural taboo that was invented by, like, the first humans to set up a tent

I get tired of saying it, but I’ll say it again: the nature of oppression in America is that they workshop it first on Black, Latino, Asian & Native people. But it is always, in the end, coming for everyone.

ChatGPT has gotten frighteningly good at being the interface for a search engine. The workflow on the left was easy, accurate, and nearly instantaneous. It took a couple search queries and the tools filter (which most people overlook) to replicate and get Google to find what I was looking for

Yeah I voted for Suozzi. He was the best bad option on a terrible ballot. I’ve been keeping my eye on him since. He’s consistently catered to MAGA’s over the immigrant families and average New York City residents he claims to represent. This isn’t a one time failure, nor an accidental mistake.

I don’t completely buy it. If they only wanted to rig elections it wouldn’t be that hard to just run a fake Democratic candidate, get NGP VAN access and grab data themselves. That takes time though. I fear it’s far darker than just rigging an election. It’s something they want to do sooner

There’s a lot of people who are willing to abandon democracy if it means that capitalism stays dominant. There’s a small number of extremely wealthy people who will abandon both democracy and free market capitalism if it means they can keep getting richer The latter are using the former

Bingo. Does anyone else remember the era when tech workers actually thought that maybe we could make the world a better place? Now it’s full mask off evil as capitalism has finished consuming the open source and tech nerd communities that used to be cornerstones of what was built.

OpenAI exec James Dyett calling out the cowardice

jfc

Yes name and shame… but also remember that it’s by design. Democrats keep a rotating set of sacrificial “villains” to be the fall guys who keep the status quo going. It’s not a new pattern. We’ve seen this for a long time.

There is a theory that all of civilization started so as to stop psychopaths. We gathered around campfires to sing and dance and tell stories, because in the light of that flickering flame we could see the true faces of the psychopaths among us. They were unable to engage properly with the group

NZ geothermal power hit a new record on 28/12/25 – 29,367 MWh, meeting 31% of demand for the day. Looks like there will be more records set in days to come. Note a lot of capacity was offline in Nov-Dec for maintenance.

One of my favourite anthropological theories is that camp fires with conversation, songs, story telling, and dance, are an ancient defence against psychopaths.

Jesus famously did not disrupt proceedings at a place of worship and call out religious hypocrisy

Soon: “Pokémon…. Go to the protest” New app for keeping track of your collection: “Gotta catch ‘em all!” Watch as they evolve… from agents, to criminal charges, to prison. Okay I’m done now, but someone will have fun with this.

Back when I was working at AWS there were a number of protestors that would interrupt the NYC AWS Summit to protest ICE, among other things. This was years ago, and at the time I thought it was a little bit silly. They were right though.

Something I've been turning over in my head for a while: All systems converge toward the expectations embedded in their narrative environment. No reward functions, constraints, safety mechanisms, or checks and balances can fully prevent this. Yes this applies to both AI and politics.

Sometimes when I make a decision early, at first I doubt myself, but in the long run I’ve end up with no regrets: - I quit Twitter right after Musk bought it - I moved out of the US to NZ soon after Trump took office No regrets on either decision. I feel lucky to have been early, rather than late

So many downgrades between these two scenes but a few things stand out: - Twitter on the big screen in the background? Lmfao… - What are those uncomfortable looking golden dining room chairs? You know they probably feel terrible - Are they just hiding behind a curtain instead of in a proper room?

How many US government assisted/directed coups have there been in your lifetime?

This video had me hooked from the beginning, throughout the 55 min duration. Absolutely incredible engineering went into this machine, and the story of how it was built and refined, shows why it is the single most impressive thing that humans have built so far: www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUH...

This is interesting, and I’ve noticed this as well. On the other hand, I wonder how much of this is because we’ve just become accustomed to every online interaction with a “real human” being a confrontation, so a “yes and” style of improvisation with a non critical speaker actually feels strange

One of the discoveries that has been getting more attention recently: solar panels last longer than originally expected. As long as they aren’t physically destroyed by hail, there are surviving solar panels from the 90’s that are still at 80% capacity, 30 years later. Oil industry FUD has failed.

In case it’s not obvious: America after 100 million deportations would look like peak Detroit urban decay: boarded up buildings and closed shops and decaying infrastructure that can no longer be supported by reduced tax dollar income. Crime and squatters would be all that remains in a dead economy

day one in mamdani’s new york

All our soft animal bodies ever wanted was the feeling of strength in numbers. Who knew our progress would come with so much chaos?

Corruption so pungent, it wafts right off the page: Lobbyists who do pardon deals “say their going rate is $1 million. Pardon-seekers have offered some lobbyists close to the president success fees of as much as $6 million if they can close the deal.” Gift link www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

This chart is wild, but if accurate, the main things that stand out to me are: 1. House and utility costs are mostly flat, despite widespread belief that housing is getting too expensive. 2. Grocery costs have gone way, way down. Less time equals more takeaway maybe? Again a surprising stat though.

I’d go a step further: video games can help heal your attention span. I quit most social media and started spending more time playing games that require long term planning and a spreadsheet to keep track of things. My focus and ability to stay in the flow has healed dramatically.

The “domestic terrorist” title from the current US regime is going to be an honorific. reason.com/2025/12/26/j...

Unfortunately, the idea that you can just eat healthy, consume supplements, and detox to fix your health has also killed a lot of people who can afford health care, and are otherwise pro-science and pro-vaccines. It's personal for me, as my own mother died to this.

A million Muslims live in New York City. We belong here, as does every other New Yorker. This is vile Islamophobia from the Councilwoman and it has no place in our city.

The Food Farm in Aotearoa NZ shows how permaculture can regenerate land and nourish community 🌱✨. Once overgrazed, it’s now a vibrant, diverse agroecological farm guided by earth care, people care & fair share. 🌱 More: agroecologymap.org/l/the-food-f... #Agroecology #Permaculture #NZ

It’s been two weeks since ICE took Yuanxin Zheng from his father. He is six years old. He’s still not home. This has to end.

So how much longer until US citizens also have to provide their social media logins for entry? Of course, whether a US citizen or not, they’ve already got a profile on you and your every political belief. They don’t need the logins, it’s just speech suppression www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/5...

can't stop watching this clip of a tesla Optimus teleoperator taking his headset off before properly logging out the robot

This is actually pretty incredible. Nano Banana Pro combines multi modal understanding of real world objects, their constituent components, and what those components look like. Here it visually generated a disassembled version of the given reference car. Of course it's not 100% accurate, but wow:

Good morning to Brazilian reporter Manuela Borges, who’s been waiting eleven years for this petty moment. ❤️ 🇧🇷

Adventures in toddler parenting: Five minutes of defending myself from a feisty toddler who kept saying “my hair” while attempting to pull the literal hair off my scalp. 😅 He remained unconvinced by all pleas or appeals to logic until I said “okay then you can have my hair and I’ll take your hair”

Lmfao… FT must be trying to compete with The Onion now

It’s time to talk about something personal: The moment I knew it was time to take a break from big tech was the week I had to do my yearly Amazon assigned anti-bribery and anti-corruption training, while that very same day Amazon decided to make a $1 million donation to Trump’s inaugural fund.

Congratulations to NYC, and Zohran Mamdani, the next mayor of NYC. I'm happy with the results. Billionaire money, and disgustingly racist AI created attack ads have lost today, as they should. Now let's see if NYC can implement basic quality of life policies that other countries already have.

I'm thinking about this image. Each generation reduced the distance their kids could roam, despite experiencing broader freedom themselves (or perhaps because of it). Did the parents remember close calls or scary circumstances that they wanted to protect their kids from?

"It is estimated that more than one in five U.S. adults live with a mental illness (59.3 million in 2022; 23.1% of the U.S. adult population)." (www.nimh.nih.gov/health/stati...) The mental health epidemic in the US started long before ChatGPT. Glad to see OpenAI trying hard to not make it worse.

The smarter you are, the longer you can postpone being wrong. Every hour of research delays the moment you have to face the fact that the map and the territory will never match. www.joanwestenberg.com/p/the-map-i...

Zohran Mamdani is so scary because he is planting the idea that you can tax billionaires and use the money to help people instead of debating what services to cut to pay for tax cuts. Which is literally why the US government is currently shut down. He is destroying decades of political messaging.