Merry Christmas! Please enjoy the opening to this Japanese Christmas concert special that I watch every year. As far as I can tell, this has otherwise been scrubbed from the internet

incredible things are happening on tiktok www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8y5e9Jo/

The Star Wars Holiday Special is so dang waspy. I had totally forgotten how ridiculous it was.

Whenever I watch a Star Wars movie and I hear R2D2, in my head I subtitle every string of books with, "I don't have hands, you imbecile." Just an angry little guy.

Look there are many things Cyberpunk gets wrong but... Wow this is a take.

And Santa is airborne! www.noradsanta.org/en/map

Oh wow, incredible.

This keeps happening. In yesterday's announcement about the State Dept pulling visas, a State Dept spokesperson claimed that they were stopping "Murthy-style speech suppression" leaving out that Amy Coney Barrett's ruling said there was no evidence of any such speech suppression...

level of brainrot where you start exclusively thinking of trig functions in terms of exponentials

Every time I see PT vs ST Star wars debates and debating the relative merits, I'm reminded how weird it is for grown ass adults to me talking about clone trooper OCs or whatever and not imagining the entire fuckign rest of that magnificent setting. The entire fandom is strange and it makes me sad.

My guess is the opposite: in the majority of cases there's no tool that does the single thing I want, and having an agent build it genuinely is faster than searching for and evaluating the closest existing matches I've built 166 little tools like this in the last 2 years! tools.simonwillison.net

Some challenged me to come up with an impactful tariff that I'd like and support as part of their elaborate and nonsensical argument I have "Trump Derangement Syndrome." This thread is a public response to that challenge. I would propose an aggressive policy towards lithium ion batteries...

gender affirming naval procurement

Pretty interesting thread.

My working theory is that the actual "problem with COVID" isn't that it isolated people, but rather that people actually re-evaluated their social structure and formed a new one. This new structure, being new and ad hoc, was less amenable to external interference and MUCH more valuable to people.

Who needs Reason Hit & Run and Quillette when you've got Princeton Fucking University Press?

“Like Prime, but with human beings.”

I will point out Ghost exists and seems quite good. Substack is a lot like what late Facebook was before the under 55 collapse.

The amount of open anti-Indian racism on US software engineering forums (esp related to hiring) has really cranked up with the latest collapse of tech hiring + AI-driven labor displacement (and I guess the broader cultural turn). And people wonder why there is a reactionary culture foothold there.

The writing of Final Fantasy XIV's Endwalker extension is... actually great.

The post they are replying to was written on an MacBook Pro I upgraded to 64 GB of RAM specifically to be able to run 70B models You can run Qwen3-Coder-30B on 32GB or RAM, and it's surprisingly capable at most coding tasks, even

that’s right, the Trump admin now restricts foreign-made drone use by realtors, conservation researchers, and filmmakers more than it does the use of foreign-made drones by the actual military

sometimes this site is good

i treat the never-ending STEM vs humanities conflict on this website, particularly the "humanities education will save us!" claims, with bemusement but one relevant thing to the conflict i found was Francis Fukuyama getting so angry at the moral relativism of postmodernists he went into polsci

lol so the Pirate Wires Thiel cronies are just kinda goin’ pro-fascist now, huh?

I really wish this was actually the #1 or even top 3 thing we see LLMs being used for. That, at least, would be wholesome.

The powerful "creeping boomeritis" vibe of BlueSky is on full display in the comments.

Scientists have developed a robotic hand exoskeleton that can passively train expert pianists to play faster keystrokes and overcome the ceiling effect in motor skills. Read more in #ScienceRobotics: https://scim.ag/3N3bJil

If Americans wanna make cheap drone motors, have at I guess? The reason folks don't is that it's actually super tedious without a lot of equipment and specialized workflows. But unlike some other areas like semifabs, it's not totally absurd to try.

Rep. Josh Gottheimer announced before the new year his new "Make Crime Illegal" bill will outlaw all crimes. Republicans are announcing their broad support for "the most sweeping anti-crime legislation in our lifetime."

Rogue Flight is a pretty special game all around. Not only does it have some serious 90s anime vibes and great art direction to match, but it ALSO has a really strong Star Fox meets Einhander feel in a world where very few games can pull off either feel anymore.

One of the most startling statistics from OpenRouter’s State of AI report is that there is more usage of Open Source models like DeepSeek and LLaMa for AI girlfriends than for programming. I’m sure selection bias plays a part but it seems the loneliness epidemic and AI is an under-explored subject.

What's so fascinating about reactionaries is that they revel in innumeracy, consistently. Is this what they mean by "the Aestheticization of Politics?"

"this could have been slop, but it's not" is rapidly becoming a surefire signifier of premium-ness

Well the data isn't ZH. But I think this is actually good news. Neither Democrats nor Republicans believe the idea that the economy is doing well. Cooking the numbers in traditional ways will not save anyone anymore.

A more honest proposal would be "Has Feminism Given Us the Ability to Profit from Lying to Other Women?"

Time to learn to build them, I guess.

gen z sysadmins be like rm -fr

Yeah, uh, this almost implies like consumers engaging defensive spending and proactive spending while bracing for a break.

I'd just like to encourage people to recall that regardless of the order, a decline of 4.5% and then a growth of 4.5% is always a net loss. That's how multiplication works. So even if you believe the numbers, the chaos of Q1 damages them badly.

This was a pretty good example of law enforcement going all out to find a guy using a cell jammer on transit: www.dnainfo.com/chicago/2016...

It's like layers of untruth. While we should not support a nation doing apartheid then genocide, the amount of money we send is not very large compared to other expenditures. Israel is not very liberal in policies, and the rate of hate-based crimes against LGBT+ people is higher than any US city.

It's extremely funny to see this because yeah buying AND selling this is illegal as all hell. And buying/selling it is the only way you'd ever get caught owning it, making TikTok feel like entrapment. Even using it repeatedly, these things are very difficult to catch if they're moving.

I think I have an idea. Let me give you some statements. 0. If you are hiring right now and you only see a slow trickle of white men, your company may have a bad reputation OR your hiring funnel is tweaked.

This year I've had to be the hiring manager and select candidates for four positions and it has been the strangest year. I wish I could talk more about how the job market is right now... Maybe I can isolate a few things.

I want to see everyone involved in this on trial.

CBS News may not want you to see its CECOT reporting, but I'm happy to share this powerful video that our team produced this year.

(This is directed at my followers and folks in my eyeline, not Dare, who's linked here as a concrete example). You should listen to me about the electricity problem.

Why care about the accuracy of gen AI tools in your work if your boss doesn't, or the environment you're in doesn't? I'd understand anyone ground down.

Also! Modern management values data over a lack of data and more importantly and dangerously *even when that more data is incorrect or has errors*. Bureaucracy will value more incorrect data over no data at all.