I for one am not at all worried that the most powerful people on earth have optimized my society and my brain to be ultra-reliant on the misery machine we keep in our pockets.

Installing "one sec" on my phone has been a big help with preventing doomscrolling and I would definitely recommend it for everyone. one-sec.app

We're long overdue to bridge the divides that are tearing the US apart. Here's your reminder that Braver Angels exists and is working on just that, and you can help! braverangels.org

The thing about investing in public transit is that it *scales* — the more people use it, the better it gets. For everyone. Whereas the more cars there are, the *worse* everything about driving gets. Traffic. Parking. [Ever noticed that in just about every car ad it’s alone on the road? Yeah.]

👇 Humanity has done something genuinely remarkable here, and it’s worth stopping for a moment to appreciate it. tinyurl.com/264gavaq

A lot of things about society suck a whole lot but one of them is that some single person will get filmed being a dickhead and then we’ll spend a full week hyperfixating on them. It’s like the entire internet has pathological rumination.

Absolutely off the charts public health capacity on display here.

A small thing that could be tried is every story, sitcom, movie, comic, etc. that decides to utilize a contemporary setting in the US should just put high speed rail in. Adjust everything else accordingly. Maybe if we show people enough in fiction they’ll accept and build a better future.

One of the most astonishing welfare gains of all time. New, from WHO/UNICEF: Between 2015 and 2024: 961 million gained safe drinking water. 1.2 billion gained safe sanitation. 1.5 billion gained access to basic hygiene. 429 million fewer practicing open defecation. No media has reported this.

Sometimes we’re unsatisfied with a thing we made because when it only existed in our head, we saw all the things it could have been and when it’s done we know all the things that it isn’t, but we can’t see the way it expands into a million new things when someone else unpacks it in their head. 🖊️🦑

my father-in-law is a “I know a guy” Guy. sadly all the old Guys are aging out of the Guy Economy. Guys are fundamentally incompatible with Hustle Culture because it’s not about “winning” a deal, it’s about collecting favors and goodwill in a mutually-beneficial cycle. protect your local Guy Economy

you know how people on the internet will engage more with something if there is a factual error in it? i'm going to try that at work.

“But the most important thing for democratic renewal […] is that members of a political coalition see themselves as participants in democratic design, not the neoliberal end-users of a technocratic solution or deals brokered with power on our behalf.”

This is an excellent, thoughtful thread.

Two elements of a good future: 1. People need to be able to talk to each other 2. People need to be able to figure out what’s real

Friendly reminder: If the rage and despair machine has you cooked, turn it off! Touch some grass, talk to people IRL. We're all in this together.

Happy August! 💦🐠 #pixelart "Surf here quite small, and water astonishingly clear. While swimming well off-shore, spotted odd formations far beneath surface..."

Game on.

If you're catching up on the horrors of AI-induced psychosis, LLM girlfriends, and people waving ChatGPT at experts to tell experts they are wrong because the all-knowing LLM says so... This article I wrote in May both predicts this slide and shows a way out. www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

I'll say it once and I'll say it again. If you think artists are just "naturally talented", you're deeply wrong. The only difference between you and us is that we kept trying when it didn't come out like we hoped. You can always make art yourself. There's no bad time to start, you can start now.

I've been thinking about CLI tool UX recently. Sometimes LLMs get things wrong in a fundamental way, but other times it's like, hey yeah that syntax should be valid, that would be a useful alias to support, etc Blog post on using LLMs for UX review coming soon, DM if interested in reviewing drafts

If you can substitute "hungry ghost trapped in a jar" for "AI" in a sentence it's probably a valid use case for LLMs. Take "I have a bunch of hungry ghosts in jars, they mainly write SQL queries for me". Sure. Reasonable use case. "My girlfriend is a hungry ghost I trapped in a jar"? No. Deranged.

Latest edition is out! Featuring some very good news about marine protected areas, a new species of manta ray, a fresh round of insanity from the US Department of Energy, and a barnstorming essay about solar ‘as a tool for liberation’ from @billmckibben.bsky.social fixthenews.com/p/307-solar-...

You can, in fact, just decide to start a thing. I do it all of the time and it's a good way to execute ideas rather to just critique others' ideas. Critique by doing as Michelangelo said. Critique by DOING.

i think there's fundamentally two types of people: artists and engineers. artists try to achieve perfection through practice; engineers through measurement. the hard parts are trying to figure out what to practice and what to measure.

Just make it exist first, you can make it good later

you have been visited by the Skylight Napping Fox and will have good fortune for the rest of the week 🤗

Can Bluesky say every word in the dictionary? I dunno but I plan to find out! I made a website that tracks every single word said on bluesky (as of yesterday).

The annoying spam texts destroying the Democratic brand: $678M raised through those spam tactics $282M to one consulting firm: Mothership Strategies. $11M to actual campaigns (1.6%) The party isn’t just treating donors like marks—it’s being fleeced itself yet continues to back Mothership.

Newsletter: In a media landscape dominated by algorithmic feeds that aim to manipulate and extract, sometimes the most radical thing you can do is choose to read what you want, when you want, without anyone watching over your shoulder. Here’s how to use RSS. www.citationneeded.news/curate-with-...

The truth is a situation where one group uses a weapon and another foregoes it will never lead to both groups agreeing to forgo it. A weapon only available to one side become infinitely more valuable, not less.

I just want to say “thank you” to the people who turned “Discovery Channel” into “Ghosts and Bigfoot” and “The Learning Channel” into “Granite Countertop Propaganda” for being a guiding light* for me as an owner of an educational media company. *to run away from.

If we want to fix our democracy, we NEED ranked choice voting. Find out more at fairvoteillinois.org.

Reminder: code review is not "to catch mistakes", it is a tool for understanding to limit bus/lottery factor first and foremost. When code is written (if you're lucky) by one human, having the second human abdicate their judgment to the machine is actively harmful to your team's code understanding.

I never posted this here, but I made a pretty big write-up over on Tumblr for anyone interested in learning #pixelart! It's a guide on software, fundamentals, jargon and resources. Since links are legal on Bsky I can share it: www.tumblr.com/tofupixel/75... #tutorial Hope someone finds it useful!

Normal people worried about vaccines: “vaccine hesitancy.” This is good, I like this term. Powerful people making money and gaining power by making people terrified of proven-safe medical treatments: “anti-vaxxers.” Ok, but actually I don’t like this term.

For 20 years Mozilla has developed one of the most useful tools for web devs. developer.mozilla.org/en-US/blog/m... Congrats to the MDN team on an awesome milestone. I'm happy that we've played a small part in its history and I'm excited to see it continue to be at the core of every web dev's job.

"Understanding" is a pretty beautiful compound word...in this case "under" has a somewhat archaic meaning of "among" (also still present in "under these circumstances.") So understanding is "Standing among" as-in a mind that figuratively shares space with the concepts in question.

Colonel Sanders and General Tso were bitter enemies on the battlefield, but their lust for chicken recipes made them into passionate lovers

"Train is the new private jet." Dua Lipa continues to promote taking the train over flying, boarding a Eurostar to London at Gare du Nord. This is climate-conscious messaging done right. Posted by lejeuneengage on IG.

I feel like the only thing I repeat as infinitum is that there is no One Weird Trick for anything, despite what Silicon Valley has brainwashed you into thinking; there are no lone wolf geniuses waiting to be born who will solve disease or space travel. It’s just people working hard, working together

This defeatism about "only China" drives me insane. We moved almost 4B out of extreme poverty from 1990-2020. "Only" 800M were Chinese. No one wants to admit the whole world is equalising, and that this is the success of the liberal project – overall, human lives are becoming more equally valued.

China added 93 gigawatts of solar last month — that's 1% of global electricity. In a month. How fast could the world decarbonise if others sprinted too? ⚡️

Solar plus battery now beats gas for 24/7 power in sunny cities. Farewell, fossil gas peakers? ☀️🔋

We haven't even begun to scratch the surface of what is possible.

This is exactly what the internet is for.

next time you're in a national park, take some photos of the signage and upload it to help these archivists www.404media.co/save-our-sig...

Happy July! ☀️🌵 #pixelart "Saw very large convoy of cargo-laden wagons leave fortress this morning and head west toward distant mountain range. No idea what this was about, but clearly SOMETHING ELSE lies west of here. Have decided to find out what."

Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw.