Interesting essay. I’m inclined to agree with the overall observation, though I’m not as sure I buy the consolidation argument. Worth reading though.

The latest post from @charity.wtf is an excellent discussion (rant?) on the value of operations and why it’s such a bad idea to pretend you don’t have to do it.

very sincerely, please be aware that no one on social media, least of all massive accounts, is going to give you advance warning of u.s. miltary action except by accident speaking assuredly about unknowable things drives traffic but you are better off going out and touching grass

This would be hilarious if it weren’t so enraging and embarrassing

Happy MLK day!

Actually the iPod shuffle was the platonic ideal of distraction free screenless music

This post from @norootcause.surfingcomplexity.com is quite good, and I agree captures one of the big reasons why it’s hard to effectively investigate large, high-profile incidents.

Search is in fact one of the main use cases for me these days! Especially using an internal search engine at work, but also Gemini is pretty good now.

There is really no reason not to block this account. Like I understand why bsky is verifying it, better than imposters running around. But there’s nothing of value in anything it could post.

ok this is perfect

This was a great listen, and I liked the insight from @sunshowers.io that LLMs aren’t just for producing more code: they can help produce higher-quality code in the same time

Blog post: Why I continue to blog with Wordpress

ICE is younger than my blog ICE is younger than my email address ICE is younger than at least one of my ukuleles

This is not me saying that the US has an ideal government structure, to be clear. Absolutely not. There’s a lot wrong with it. But if anything I think power should be *more* distributed. To misquote the Zen of Python: Federalism is one honking great idea -- let's do more of that!

Good thread, up and down. I continue to believe one of the best *ideas* in American democracy, mixed as the implementation is, is that power is spread around into so many different institutions. Even capturing the Presidency, Congress, and SCOTUS does not give Republicans complete control.

i have been reading Tom Ricks’ “Fighting the Good War” which is a military analysis of the civil rights movement, and one thing that comes abundantly across is that movement leaders and ordinary people made it a practice to refuse to fall into despair and cynicism.

Blog post: It’s not just about shorter sentences

I would really prefer that fewer things happen at once

I haven’t had a good excuse to go to CUG for a while, but I agree it’s a pretty excellent conference.

Blog post: baby monitor thinking.ajdecon.org/2026/01/12/b...

Blog post: Lowering the barrier to posting thinking.ajdecon.org/2026/01/12/l...

“People We Meet On Vacation” was an adorable, if forgettable, rom-com and a good Sunday evening watch. My partner had gripes with it as it compared to the novel, but the leads had good chemistry and there was some witty banter.

Services I run over Tailscale, just for myself, include: - An RSS feed reader - A personal git forge - An IRC bouncer - A (poorly maintained) wiki - JupyterLab - Open WebUI for playing with local LLMs on a GPU workstation And probably a few things I’ve forgotten

Tailscale is just so handy. The personal plan with up to 100 devices (!) is such a perfect tool for homelabs when you also want to include cloud instances or just access from your phone.

If I was the commander in chief of the Imperial hegemon I would simply not dismantle the network of military and diplomatic alliances, favourable trade deals, and broad cultural paramountcy that had made my nation the most wealthy and powerful the world has ever seen.

Exhausted after a 20-minute meltdown but still insists she’s not sleepy

Things are grim right now but as a reminder of who we are and why we fight, this is the US Women’s figuring skating champion.

These books are So Good and I enjoyed them so much. Strongly suggest you read these — and the new covers are lovely!

Quick reminder to preorder! Please support my angsty queer books

Blog post: Links to some interesting coverage of the LAVD scheduler on Linux, optimizing for latency-critical tasks for gaming workloads thinking.ajdecon.org/2026/01/10/l...

I don’t think we should have ceded control quite so quickly and without so much as a fight.

Every time @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com posts this graphic, I do in fact try to imagine a world in which every individual is able to achieve their full measure of excellence. And that they are willing to fight to do so.

Federal Agents Shoot 2 People in Portland Who Threatened to Exist: tinyurl.com/mjrsh7d2

It’s worth considering that LLMs talk like this because they’ve been trained on a ton of fiction that includes AI characters. But also…

The number of Gestapo in Germany was 32,000. The population was 70 million. That's one Gestapo for every 2200 citizens. The number of ICE agents is 20,000. The population of the US is 348 million. That's one ICE agent for every 17,000 citizens. There are more of us.

Features like this would in fact be a good idea IMO. HN is… HN, but some ideas like the flame war detector are handy.

this is like the first rule of Being A Good Manager Club not even kidding (I have no idea if that's the context this person was stating this within!, that's just the note it hit for me)

every ice agent will be held to account.

We’ve been withdrawn from over 30 international organizations, treaties, and conventions as of today, including multiple UN ones, as well as many having to do with energy, security, and human rights www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

This thread captures a lot of what scares me about all this Greenland talk

Oooh this is very neat to see. An initial implementation of gang scheduling built into k8s and some nice features being envisioned in the future

Good thread, up and down. Mike is the policy director of the Free Speech Coalition, a trade association for the adult industry which has done a bunch of good 1A advocacy and legal work.

This is delightful

You know, maybe just once, for the surprise value, we should have congress declare war on a country before we bomb, invade and murder them. At this point, no one will see it coming, you'll achieve total surprise.

Econ is very much not my field, but this is a really interesting experience report

Ceci n'est pas un SCIF Unfortunately that is without the irony of the original.

Woke up a few minutes ago to respond to the puppy crying. Made the mistake of looking at the news on my phone. Sigh. Well, folks… here’s a puppy?