Who are Clay + Webster's counterparts in today's Senate? "The true scope and stakes of the fight is revealed by the response of the country’s great statesmen, especially Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, to Jackson’s overreach." -- @chancephillips.bsky.social

My quote of the day Masha Gessen

"He was set on making the world..more interesting..w richer collective goods & better conversation. Whatever got in the way of that, he pushed to one side. What I take from Aaron is that the best way to be truly productive on the margin, is to try to build for other people & connect them together."

"In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limits." www.computerworld.com/article/4059...

Thoughtful piece by @laurenshof.online on why + how threat models need to be updated for both: - Bluesky PBC (the company) - the atproto ecosystem (writ large) - communities using these services However, it's important to remember that responses at each of these levels can + will vary 1/4

This is really clever Instead of designating a subset of posts (within the current lexicon) as private or local-only, this UX allows authors to optionally publish to an app-only audience (using a parallel lexicon) It's an additive instead of subtractive use of the protocol

Great example of how devs can just make up new atproto records and use them in whatever way they want. Worth pointing out that some *other* dev could make an app that displays `app.bsky.feed.post` and `net.anisota.feed.post` in whatever way *they* want. The atproto network is radically open.

Watch this. I strive to be this clear and effective. Best line — “A temper tantrum disguised as an ideology.”

Wanted to share a new project: PackCAD – a 3D modeling tool for designing folded structures. packcad.com PackCAD is initially targeting folded packaging workflows – though I’m aiming for this to eventually be a general tool for “structural origami,” with applications in engineering/manufacturing.

excited to share that we are following through on our earlier commitments and putting together an independent+neutral organization to house the DID PLC system, includes the directory service

Did a thing on the Charlie Kirk shooting. Some thoughts on growing up LDS & how it can prime people for any & all kinds of radicalization. And how quick the right wing was to turn on Mormons. youtu.be/coJF2wq5BHY

👍 "Debate me bro” culture: "creates a false equivalence between good-faith expertise and bad-faith trolling. When you agree to debate someone pushing long-debunked conspiracy theories or openly hateful ideologies, you’re implicitly suggesting that their position deserves equal consideration."

"The study, which was conducted by the National Institute of Justice and hosted on a DOJ website was available there at least until September 12, 2025, according to an archive of the page saved by the Wayback Machine."

"These dumbasses, you see, know how to get attention, but they don’t know how to do things. If they did, they would not have adapted so well to the troll’s lifestyle in the first place."

Intriguing n=15 interview study used #TalkAloud protocols to capture quotes from participants discussing how they reasoned about feed results vs. their intentions in trying to set them up Very brief experiment, so likely more insightful about initial attitudes than what longer-term use might reveal

with all the discussion around mod actions recently, I thought it would be interesting to start tracking the rate at which @moderation.bsky.app applies the top labels bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/b...

I love this vision! Important read for understanding how, while Blacksky emerged from Rudy's work solving problems for his own community, the ambition here is bigger *Infrastructure for interdependence* = a whole autonomous community stack, from hosting to moderation to funding to social app(s)…

good Sunday read who is the real villain? “a man who no longer believes in the possibility of a better world, and who is thus irresistibly compelled to reduce others to the same condition”

1. What does a Cold War-era game theory problem known as the silent duel have to do with high-risk research strategies, publication in Cell/Nature/Science glamor journals, and the academic job market? Kevin Gross and I tackle these questions in our latest arXiv preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2509.06718

An old, bad habit of "centrist" pundits:

This quote in a passage from "Blood In The Machine" is from 1801. I guess the super rich tech titans/investors and their influencer / journalist courtiers never change? This is pretty much the modern equivalent of that old quote: 1/9

“I was told… two words were flagged: One was transition and one was privilege,” Klenz said. “Transition — transitioning from childhood to adulthood. Privilege came up because a parent wrote a glowing review of staff that said what a privilege it was to work with them.”

Screwing over DeafBlind kids, a fun little eugenic/anti-woke cocktail 🫠

Kinda? Mistreatment, fear for your life. And police violence are 3 different things. I'll use what happens when I get pulled over as an example. 1) If while driving, I get pulled over for no reason by a cop just hunting for tickets, that's mistreatment. 7/10 Black people get this.

It's in studying these differences that scientists can uncover what drives the variation in disease prevalence & severity & in the process, make discoveries they might not have otherwise. TL;DR: Studying health disparities is not only *morally right*, it's an efficient way to make big discoveries.

From yesterday: I talked with a bunch of NIH employees about what it's like inside the assault on government science, and how they feel about the potential for a shutdown. Spoiler, they're basically for it. Please subscribe, it's free!

That’s what Tim Walz did so well. They’ve been nuts to run away from that.

smart analysis from @sifill.bsky.social on why the Supreme Court has "all but declared war" on district courts: Trial judges are closest to the facts, and those facts pose obstacles to the GOP justices' preferred outcomes "Inconvenient facts expose the game" sherrilyn.substack.com/p/scotus-ice...

Excellent point about the fundamentally rhetorical basis of SCOTUS's legitimacy It was always about how the process supported + helped justify potentially unpopular outcomes. Strip that away to a raw exercise of naked unreasoned arbitrary power + any hints of justice vanish

Seems like an appropriate time to re-share the @aaronboodman.com thread. "Chrome was delivered without any sprints at all" xcancel.com/aboodman/sta...

Now that we have private bookmarks here, I can almost completely replicate the memex-style curation workflow I used on Mastodon (+ before that, Twitter): hachyderm.io/@pevohr/1095... Hat tip to the bsky team for shipping this missing feature!

Lots of sharp-elbowed "Fight" messages emerging from primary challengers who've just plain had it, + are done deferring to Dem incumbents For example, this very crisp, clear rebuke to @moulton.house.gov (MA-6):

haha oh no

Two things: 1) Black Lives Matter is not *done*. It's never done. Me Too, also not done. Y'all really underestimate our endurance.🤷🏿‍♂️ 2) It's not difficult to be an ally. Andrew Garfield and Julia Roberts made space, Ayo Edebiri took her space, and the nonsense question was exposed for what it is.

Yeemz' bio says she "developed her signature style—singing while playing the cello like a guitar—after she couldn’t bring her ukulele to college.” There's got to be some backstory where ukes are verboten but cellos ok. 185 weeks to go. Happy Saturday. #morningmusic www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cn2...

float liltingly over cello slides + arpeggios

Shout out to the columnists who were calling this before the 2nd Trump Administration even started.

Useful 🧵 on what might still be motivating the woeful passivity of "Team Don't Fight", because their inaction is clearly intentional Inferring that there's a deliberate plan being followed may lead to insights on who did what why + what they hoped to get out of it Why call it a strategy, though?

Congress plays a fundamental role in the design of administrative agencies. Take for instance, patent examination: initially, the Secretary of State reviewed patents, then the courts, and finally in 1836, Congress created a new agency, the Patent Office.

Psychology, therapy: these fields seek to understand the ways in which *every single human is absolutely unique and unaccounted for by numbers and general norms.* This work is fundamentally incompatible with an epistemology of statistics and probability.

In which @hankgreen.bsky.social explains humanity’s favorite insecticide to drink youtu.be/p-Dy2pcdBSU

Short piece by Elizabeth Laraki on how UX researchers added landmark navigation to Google Maps in 2008 Key design elements: - orientation - description - confirmation - error correction

Mach 0.4. Not bad. I guess

New blog post on how Streamplace indexes ATProto, with my take on some PDS additions we could make to improve the ecosystem!

Sometimes mods will do something I wouldn't have. I'll never know because I will never have the full context, but even then they're not wrong. They are shaping the community. If I don't like it (e.g. choosing borderline assholes over the rest of us), it's just not my community.

UX design: If you make it easier to add to the list than to remove things, you get a junk list

Grand jury nullification, circa 2025: "Felonious ham? Nah!"

Clever branding work here The word "control" won't appeal to privacy-conscious Fedi folks -- quite the opposite -- but either you're open to the tradeoffs enabled by atproto's "public by default" approach, or you're not