We could fix spam email, calls, and SMS by charging a fairly nominal fee to send those things

<bum bum bum bum> A drone attack by Ukraine killed a Russian major general

I hate that this would ruin @jumaane.bsky.social's Christmas, but it would also be very funny, and not without historical precedent - William T. Collins was acting mayor of New York City for exactly one day (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William...)

This is going to turn out to be spectacularly corrupt in some way; my middle schooler's school - unprompted - sent out a form with the hardware ID already filled out for us to get a Chromebook, which we declined

Not feeling it; Greek myths are supposed to be technicolor dreamscapes and this is a bunch of sad guys in drab uniforms on a boat in the dark

I have similar issues with AI in coding - I can pretty much only trust it to do a simple discrete little method that doesn’t rely on understanding the rest of the app and can easily be verified (and even then, unless there’s tricky math or an API I don’t know it’s often faster to write it myself)

Hades 2 bonus level idea

This is a good and thorough thread - I don’t think I appreciated how much recent US oil discourse is very specifically focused on energy industry profits

Looking like Q4 is going to be our best Q4 for our App Store revenue since before COVID, despite the fact that since last summer we've been offering customers in the US an in-app option to buy directly from our website at a discount and a great many of them are taking advantage of that option

Zuckerberg is like a kid in a movie who somehow gets access to grown-up money and uses it to buy a big stupid house and fill it with impractical shit

If Mamdani adds parking meters and quintuples parking tickets he can pay for free buses and much more

I hope this malevolent little chode gets hit with a state indictment on 1/1

So in the last two months we've had suicides at two UES private schools and a subway-surfing fatality at a UES public middle school

Useful thread from our reporter @bxroberts.org 🧵

Everybody needs to come to terms with the fact that the first-gen tech billionaires are just as shitty as the second-gen ones

The Switch 2 lacks any compelling exclusives; they're certainly coming, but unlike with Wii U, everybody owns a regular Switch and so "last-gen games for both consoles" like BotW are not a big sales driver; all they've really got is a relatively unexciting Mario Kart update and Donkey Kong Bananza

We moved to NYC from a car suburb a year and a half ago and now I cannot imagine ever wanting to live in a place where my kids were not able to walk (or for HS take transit) to school

This is creepy - there’s been a TON of SendGrid phishing email the last few months (it seems like SendGrid is maybe unable to stop them from sending phishing messages through SendGrid’s own servers?) and the latest one seems to be designed to piss off conservatives so they’ll click without thinking

The good news is that most of the 97% of kids that Harvard rejects would be just as good classmates to your kid as the 3% that they accept, and they'll run into lots of those kids at whatever school they end up at

Because they've cut bus routes all over the place and if my kid wants to get to school at 755 she has to be dropped off at the bus stop at 615 in the morning

Plans for Elizabeth II's death were known as Operation London Bridge and there was a great Guardian article on them all the way back in 2017, talking about big events like this in code is the best way to talk about them

From the studio that brought you “DOOM causes school shootings” and “D&D turns kids into Satan worshippers” comes an exciting new holiday film

Again, promise to seize all of it in one go and distribute half to the American people in the form of stimulus checks and it’d probably get veto-proof-majority-to-pack-the-Supreme-Court numbers

(somberly) Inconceivable

I walk by this building all the time, it looks like crap and there’s no earthly way it’s worth $9.5M/year in rent

This would be a fantastic test case for the state of Illinois to prosecute an ICE agent over

A conspiracy-theory-ish view of mine is that US tech companies desperately *want* AI to be inefficient and are eager to come up with ways to keep it inefficient, because it does them no good at all if it’s a cheap generic thing anybody can run

No tax, seize all assets over $100M, if you pass that number the next year we take the excess and then also tax your income, nobody needs more than $100M

Fossil is dead, nuclear is dead, no amount of subsidies will save them, the only competition now is how fast you can build up capacity at this new price level

Went to this hotel bar (at the W in Union Square) today and apparently the building originally belonged to a life insurance company and they built this ornate two-story ballroom as a place to sell insurance?

I mean at this point if you ever run ads somewhere like CBS then you’re trapped, because if you ever subsequently pull your ads - even simply because they’re underperforming - they accuse you of censorship and sue you in North Texas

The tragedy of the Biden administration is it did not have to be a blip and interregnum in the Long Trump Era, but thanks to choices made, largely his own, it will at best be remembered as an attempt to govern without doing politics, a failure compounded by his disastrous support for genocide abroad

The logical solution to this is to have ladies-only services, which would also produce several of the most confusing, self-contradictory Supreme Court cases in history

a) This sucks and would be an actually good case for tech legislation since most of them do this crap now b) If your developer account Account Holder is your own personal account, please for the love of God fix that and create a business account just for that

AI fail of the week: my daughter's drama teacher posted some clues about the spring musical and the group chat (not her) is asking AI's about them and they're all *spectacularly* wrong; Claude/Gemini/ChatGPT all in their latest and greatest 'reasoning' modes still spit out useless made-up garbage.

Apple v Epic is about as non-terrible as I could have hoped, Apple can charge for links but per cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/op... they probably can't charge very much, since the court seems to think that Apple is somehow accruing linkout-specific costs that developers should pay them for.

On the one hand my 10yo had the same backpack for a long time so "aww," on the other hand in our experience *at best* these maybe last 2 years. (and with summer camp? where one unfortunate tumble off a canoe or whatever means it's permanently enmuddified?)

This is going to go so amazingly wrong so quickly and I can’t wait

I'm in this age range, but I was a tech kid and in middle school I both a) had a popular website/newsletter where I reviewed cards for the Middle-Earth trading card game and b) made money selling Mac shareware games, so to be honest I don't feel as detached from the digital world as she describes.

2020 + Biden were a massive missed opportunity for Democrats, but despite all the short-term awfulness, it’s possible that 2024 + Trump 2 will turn out to be an equally massive one for Republicans

"Staffing a government with competent people," what a refreshing idea

I don't see why the movie theater industry's demise requires any more of an explanation than "everybody has a big high-definition TV and got used to watching movies on it during COVID"

Big Late Song energy

It occurs to me that "seizing all privately held assets over $100M and mailing every American a five-figure check with their share of the proceeds" would be an astonishingly popular policy which you could actually do if you blew up the Supreme Court.

I'm glad that my kids are old enough that their cohort is already vaccinated but this fucking sucks; I hope NY responds by subjecting parents applying for religious exemptions to the same level of scrutiny they used to apply to conscientious objectors during Vietnam

They usually turn out better than you - different, but better - but you’re usually too immature to appreciate that fact until you’re pretty far along in the process

It's a real shame Apple has leaned so heavily on the idea of all innovation coming from / profit accruing to them, rather than, say, trying to create an ecosystem where they make money when their partners make money like Microsoft in its glory days.

Neighbor has a piano and for some reason the only things they play - like every day for the past 6 months - are the first 8 measures of "Bennie and the Jets" by Elton John and a random background song from Minecraft

The naked corruption - which has gotten really, really obvious the last few months thanks to the plane and the ballroom - makes this case a lot easier, since you can push reform for its own sake rather than Letting Democrats Govern

Good god Rhythm Doctor is amazing - haven't felt this sort of pure joy from a game in *years*, if you're not grinning by the end of the second boss battle you need to see the Wizard.