One of the insidious ways in which times like these affect us is that we are upset and angry, it’s hard to trace the sources of that when so many things are wrong, one is tempted to call out every available wrong you have energy for, in order to experience validation and agency ↓

This is explained by the cosmic as well as sociological fact that the anthropics particle is guaranteed to interact with everything it encounters.

Sisyphus but every day he unsubscribes from marketing and promotion emails.

I said this before, but I think people recommending other fantasy series to replace Harry Potter are barking up the wrong tree. That wasn't what made it popular. It's that people love cordoning themselves into little groups they can be loyal to, yet pretend it was fate. "Houses" was the key imho

Hyperobjects implicitly drive stove-touching without making it seem like stove-touching.

My act of quixotic optimism this week is watering & fertilizing the moss growing in-between the roofing cracks on my apartment’s balcony so it survives but also thrives during this heat wave. (It survives every year without my help but this year I’ve decided that is not enough)

*breathing into a paper bag*

And/Or this become an art piece on the nature of memory and how it is always & inherently reconstructed and you just started noticing it because the faces are never the same moment to moment… (Quoting because replies are disabled for me)

Adjusted for atmospheric refraction, today there will be 11h 58m 30s of daylight and tomorrow there will be 12h 00m 58s. That means it's the refraction-adjusted equinox, which comes a few days before the astronomical equinox. Happy Springfraction!

Insightful technical background on end to end encryption in social network messaging

A thing I’ve been thinking for a long time is that the Meadows school of systems mapping and change poorly recognises that the information used to construct these maps is riddled with all sorts of distortions; 1/

Prepare to be gotten in the feels, doubly so if you know the reference.

Doing peer review for a research conference, and yup GenAI is definitely cooking some researcher brains in a combination of “how can I connect my work to AI” desperation and a weird loss of criticality. It would be interesting work without these forced connections.

@jacobgeller.com I just watched your conversation with Quinn: if you have not already watched the most excellent Irving Finkel’s talks on games… www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wQq... www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vhr... www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4RT... … you’re about to have a fantastic time

I’m really in the mood for fierce acts of sensemaking today: I’m so back / LFG

When we talk about the problems with Bluetooth-enabled physical trackers, we usually talk about AirTags, but let us save some rage for Tile, powered by this paper discussing Tile's privacy, security, and accountability problems: arxiv.org/abs/2510.003...

I see that we are in an era of simultaneous pollution of and enclosure of the commons

hi friends, I’m about to be low internet for the next week or so!! I would love it so much if you could tell your amazing Bay Area Eng leader folks about this job, which closes 2/24!! that way when I get back to my inbox it will be full up with lovely applications 🙏🏻❤️

Crucial paper published Friday that deserves much more attention in the #LongCOVID world: www.nature.com/articles/s41... TLDR: 13/15 immunocompromised patients who had chronic COVID infections (>200 days) cleared the virus in under 2 weeks when given combo antivirals/monoclonals 1/

I’m thinking about worldbuilding for a disruptive & interesting order of magically-empowered healers in genre fantasy. 1/

Are female economists treated differently than males in academic seminars? These authors wanted to know whether gender shapes how scholars are treated when presenting research. So they built a massive dataset of 2,000+ economics seminars, job talks, and conference presentations from 2019–2023...

Thanks for the helpful auto-complete, Gmail.

www.sfchronicle.com/outdoors/art... This is exciting. My Nonna and Nonno had a dairy along this Estero. Been wanting to hike on nearby trails. Now we can

Today a friend and I had lunch and discovered the true form of liquid categorisation. Join me on a journey of stupidity.

Freedom from consequence is the greatest privilege. (It explains why so many work so hard and spend so much on consequence insulation.) bsky.app/profile/nico...

I’ve finally figured out why IKEA doesn’t have a store in Chennai; it’s because they can’t keep their chairs and cots straight! (This is a Tamil joke that would’ve killed back in the bad place)

Yo what the fuck short form videos are bad Short-Form Videos Degrade Our Capacity to Retain Intentions arxiv.org/pdf/2302.03714 Ht: HowTown

My Ubuntu Summit talk is up! Where I talk about: 1. How Desktop UX is effectively dead 2. Why I hate the term UX/UI with the heat of 1000 suns 3. How OSS can actually innovate in #ux www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fZT...

I feel very strongly about this one. We absolutely risk creating a future for the ‘average’ human which, as we well do or should know working in research & design, does not and has never existed.

THREAD. My parents' cat Bridget vanished. As the weeks dragged on they became ever more worried, so to distract himself my dad began to paint Bridget's adventures, imagining her travelling through time and popping up at some of art & music's most important moments. I've collected his work here...

It increasingly seems to me that we cannot save our online information and ecosystem unless we massively restrict or remove ads from everywhere. That might be the best (and only) defense against LLM pollution.

Ideas are common, but not equally distributed. Some people try to force meme their sole idea for their entire lives. For a certain class of person, that idea is "what if we could deskill workers?" And so (decades before computing became male-dominated) tech has been trying to replace developers.

Most profound writing I read in 2026 was "The Emotional Labor Behind AI Intimacy" by a Nairobi man who dreamed of working in air traffic control but instead winds up sexting & chatting w ppl who think they're talking to AI (while AI trains on him). 16 pages & free - READ IT data-workers.org/michael/

You can have two completely different PhDs and research areas and the world somewhat inevitably pushes you toward the same issues if you're a person who decides to care and pay attention over your career.

GOOD NEWS! Researchers have developed a cancer vaccine that has shown STUNNING results, PREVENTING up to 88% of MULTIPLE aggressive cancers by harnessing dual-pathway nanoparticles that train the immune system to recognize and destroy tumor cells. In some cases, it COMPLETELY prevented metastasis.

User researchers already document findings at a faster velocity than orgs can act on them. It strains credulity that tech leaders are clamoring for even more yet worse AI-generated findings. My new blog post, "The only winning move is not to play." gregg.io/the-only-win...

Developer attempts to replicate "Liquid Glass" in CSS, and once finished realizes what she'd actually created is an exploit for a fundamental, previously unknown, and rather serious browser vulnerability lyra.horse/blog/2025/12... "CSS hack accidentally becomes regular hack"

Just thinking of soil as akin to a coral reef was enough to set my mind alight.

Questions already answered by the t-shirt dot gif

This is really useful and clear analysis that converts vibes into even more emotional facts. Recommended reading for anyone who votes in North America.

I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you, Charlie Brown!

very funny to read the responses here as someone who works in the data space in tech. tech people by and large have no theory of what data is or isn't, and mostly think of it as "objective recordings of the truth." it's rather horrifying! i hate it! (the responses here are great)

As holiday season comes and more in-person gatherings happen, here's a reminder to reach out to your local mask bloc if you would like free masks / tests. find your local one from maskbloc.org SF / NorCal people can connect with linktr.ee/maskblocsuns...

Please let us stop putting people whose only skill is debate in positions of massive power. They do not know how to make things; they only know how to argue; their only recipe for conflict resolution is compromise; they cannot deal with losing a local optimum in order to gain a global optimum

I updated my phone to iOS 26 but that is nothing compared to how all of the news today has made me wish I had not been using my eyes.

This is a whole new level of minimalism.

Proudly comparing your app to both black mirror and squid games has to be a bit

I went check in on the bad place and found that the url contains ‘logout’, which explains why I keep having to login on my monthly visits. My guess is they’re force-logging people out to get them on the app. Hostile AND incompetent, as usual.