In her book The Idealist, Nina Munk talks about the pride a developmental aid community took in having a trash pile for the first time.

Did he read the bit in Lord of The Rings where a creepy toxic guy filled the local ruler’s head with idiotic poison and wrecked everything in that kingdom until the king came to his senses and chucked the toxic creep out?

makes me weep to think of the gifts robbed from us because unaffordable housing has made it difficult for people to pursue their passions and hobbies

I can't understate how good of a job the @inkandswitch.com folks did at this Automerge website. Wow, holy shit automerge.org And the fact that you can *interact* with the visual demo at the top? This is the new high bar for a technical website. Holy moly.

This is so brilliantly simple, even the police could do it

This is utterly brilliant:

I built a free tool to try to embarrass British police into doing their job cctv.numpad.io. More info here: onodi.co/bisect/

In general I think it's hard to combat scientific misinformation when some of the best research is locked behind an academic paywall, while lots of nonsense gets published free for everyone to read in predatory journals.

I thought a MWh battery might be ~shipping container size, or something impractical like that. But with a reasonable-to-low density estimate it turns out to be roughly 3,300 litres, or a cube with 1.5m sides. Not terrible!

Since WW2, 19 seats in Westminster have been won with less than 30% of the vote. Ten of those were last year. They'll be a lot more next time.

Apparently I forgot to post my new blog post on here. Oops! numpad.substack.com/p/using-misd...

2025.09.11 edition now out, featuring: @maxiferreira.com @livestore.dev @tonyonodi.bsky.social @electric-sql.com Excali Organizer Slingshot @obsidian.md

It’s only just occurred to me that the mantra of TikTok videos is “tell don’t show”

Well fucking do something about it then

John Burn-Murdoch has broken into my apartment and is charting my personal decline across key metrics in red paint over the walls

There's a realistic chance we get to a position where Wikipedia is blocked while official government accounts are posting on a site that created MechaHitler AI

The UK: we must reinvigorate our uncompetitive and slow growth economy! Also the UK: time to censor the easiest general reference of archive of human knowledge, which is also free.

Well, at least he stopped those kids from being saved from HIV

the way democracy works now is that we keep voting for people to whack us in the nuts with bigger and bigger hammers. occasionally we vote for someone who says they’ll use smaller hammers, but guess what? bigger hammers

If I may be a little cruder, "The government should punch people in the dick" might poll at 60%, but people will still be angry at the government when their dicks hurt.

funny to think that jonathan swift, alexander pope, and isaac newton all lost money on the south sea bubble. would be like, idk, kazuo ishiguro and demis hassabis getting rugpulled on some memecoin

Skype pulled most incomprehensible bag fumble of all time. A 15 year head start. Total ubiquity. Added to the Oxford English Dictionary by 2014. Only to fall nuts-first into irrelevance at the exact moment when all other communication was made illegal. Truly, the Pete Best of videoconferencing. RIP.

My MacBook now has theory of mind; strange world.

Just yesterday I was thinking about how, when social media platforms rolled out algorithms, everyone was like “we don’t want that.” And they were like “no no, trust us, the data says you do; it’ll be great.” Now not only are the algorithms not great, they sucked the life out of everything

If they used one of those Hellfires with the swords on someone dumping a mattress, Starmer would be back at polling 50%.

there are people out there who really, truly can't wait to just "hop on a quick call". like, genuinely for the love of the game. and they have to be stopped.

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented apex predator reanimation as a cautionary tale Tech Company: At long last, we have reanimated the apex predator from classic sci-fi novel Don't Reanimate the Apex Predator time.com/7274542/colo...

Thinking about these guys

at least the memes will be better than they were in the thirties

www.theverge.com/news/639681/... USB-C can deliver up to 240W(!) now, so in theory you could go a step further and power a battery-less bike over USB-C. Just bring your own power pack, or as many as you need, snake a cable from your backpack, and go

We must RETVRN to Hieronymus Bosch McDonald's.

Not good not good digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcont...

Millennials:

It's an exciting day for @electric-sql.com - we've published v1 of our sync engine 🎉🚀 It's been a lot of work from an awesome team, that I'm so proud to be part of, to get here! The API is stable, and has been running at scale in production for a few months 🥳

I'd thought this was "the other natural selection guy", but that's Alfred Russel Wallace. This was before either of them!

That's an awful lot of pre-waterproof-hull shipping

the democrats should all wear juggalo makeup, I don’t think it would help but it would be annoying to give a speech looking at that

Just hit me what the DOGE stuff reminds me of: China's Great Leap Forward/Cultural Revolution. Ideologues purging every "counter-revolutionary" and smashing things just to smash them, not caring about the consequences. You even have the cadres of cruel idiot teenagers being sent to do the dirty work

tip: if you take an x.com url and change it to xcancel.com - leaving everything after the slash intact - you can read threads logged out.

Don’t ever let Starmer defend this Aid cut as ‘needing to make hard decisions’. It’s the reverse. Reducing support for the voiceless is the very easiest, most cowardly path he could have taken.

Rich Nephew being an anti-corruption expert is one of my favorite examples of nominative determinism

Legendary hater Charles Darwin

www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0gj... surely Google and others are working on models that can do distillation, i.e. models that take a big model as an input and output a smaller model that does roughly the same thing.

Claude is so unbelievably keen to write react apps. It would kiss react apps on the mouth if it could.

One thing that concerns me is that when the dust settles, the US actually gets a better position in trade deals, at the cost of being despised by just about everyone, with the result that lots of people can say the administration "won." And so there's a short-term benefit for long-term damage.

Trudeau gives addresses in both English and French. How about that!

Me: Oh no that trolley is going to run us over! Guy tied up on the track next to me who somehow thinks he's actually the guy holding the lever: Lol cry more 😂

Odd use of "difficult"