I have decided that the number of emails I would like to receive per day is five (5). Please coordinate among yourselves to not exceed this quota.

Looking at the state of the world, I have decided that I permanently can’t even, until further notice.

I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA 10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)

Folks, I'm sick, cold, broke, my teeth hurt, winter is coming, my housing situation is precarious again, and Putin is my neighbor. If you could please help me reach this month's goal I'd be mighty grateful. A repost may reach sympathetic eyes, a small dono goes a long way. Also:

The Liquid Glass approach raises the visual stimulation and noise baseline across all devices and with less contrast and legibility where it matters, which is an extremely ableist decision. An increase in visual stimulus is an increase in cognitive load for some brains, one they cannot opt out of.

Ok that’s it I’m nuking npm from all my machines. What a curse for amateurs trying to self-host their own tech infrastructure. www.stepsecurity.io/blog/ctrl-ti...

I feel like the X-men movies missed an opportunity to do a Mystique espionage thriller. How does all of that work if spies can be shapeshifters? How would you know if someone was actually a double agent or being framed as one? Who would feel safe? etc

We used to dream wonderful things.

If your yak shaving velocity is slow enough then you can achieve continuous yak shaving.

Ok now who replaced the shaved yak with an unshaven one?

This one gets you both in the chuckles and the feels.

If you've been using a 📌 emoji to bookmark posts, @rafael.my and @samuel.bsky.team cooked up a special tool you can use to migrate them to your Saved Posts. Try it here: pin2saved.vercel.app

Hahahahahahaha, they tried to take WhatsApp away from the youngs??!! In a South Asian country??!! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Slightly diminish a boook: Discipline and Counsel

🎉 Don't Get Your Hopes Up is out Tue Sep 16! A short game about housing shortage and horror in architecture. A wayward history of Amsterdam that has evaded archival capture. A weird, disquieting, experimental non-fiction piece. Free on Steam / PWYW on itch: store.steampowered.com/app/3795490/...

Did you know your MacBook has a sensor that knows the exact angle of the screen hinge? It’s not exposed as a public API, but I figured out a way to read it and make it sound like an old wooden door. Source code and a downloadable app to try it yourself […] [Original post on hachyderm.io]

Noodling today morning on the idea that database ontologies are human interfaces. The database design is at the base of how software teams construct reality but they don’t think of it that way. Eventually the database becomes the IA, but is not seen as the source of it.

I am trying to do yak shaving but someone keeps taking away my shears.

Hey we found the thing that is worse than a crisis of replicability. If I knew that bullshit blog posts could get published in Nature I’d have been farting them out every weekend.

GPT-5: There are definitely 5 lights in the room.

It feels like this “agentic AI” stuff is a really long road to finally just doing what we should’ve done all along which is invest in the semantic web. So many use cases are just “use an unreliable language machine to transform unstructured info into semantically meaningful structured info”

macOS really needs a services dashboard: one place that is not the menu bar where you can see all running manageable background services you have installed or activated, and ways to list and protect all their network interfaces, and open their UIs.

Maybe it’s just me, but it feels like basic human decency has been in much shorter supply this last decade, everywhere you look.

This is going to be like microdosing on cognitive LSD every day all day. On the other hand we will get to see fragile cyborgs with invisible backdoors wandering around the world, so maybe that could be fun. techcrunch.com/2025/07/30/z...

This a great example of what I call the principle of conservation of use-labour: The amount of work involved in a scene of use never changes with the introduction of products that solve problems, instead producing new problems or transforming the scene of use

Age verification? My internet connection was made of sounds.

The great James Doohan, gone 20 years ago today. He once received a letter from a fan who had threatened suicide — and he reached out to her. “To me, it was the best thing I ever did in my life.” 💕 #RIP

Apparently eBay now shackles personal item sellers by placing limits on how expensive of an item you can sell without first selling a lot of items. Even if you have 100% ratings. So for anyone trying to occasionally sell used electronics when they upgrade, eBay is no longer an option. ↓

'Vacations.' The word is 'vacations.'

There's special punishment in being someone who finds self-promotion not just difficult as a concept but also painful. "Oh, just sell yourself and be super confident at what you do!" Easy. Anyway, I *am* great at what I do, so do you know anyone who needs my help? www.verylittlegravitas.com

PSA: don’t get your primary embodiment experiences from your spiritual practice — that is a prime pathway to institutional hacking of your psyche.

In case you need another sense of scale.... 3 standard deviations is often used for something statistically significant in psychology and astronomy. 5 for high energy (astro)particle physics, because the sample size is so high. 9 standard deviations is beyond insane.

Bookmarking this thought: Protocols are a form of commons.

This teapot shelf (2 reposts deep) was made with *borrowed tools*! Imagine how much could be unleashed if we had a functional commons.

The singularity is awesome

i had a call this morning so this is not contemporaneous but i wrote down the stories of what i've been working on for the past uhh 17 years? buttondown.com/dorian/archi...

amtrak’s marketing team gets it

The kind of overthinking off-hand design details that is both delightful in itself and also shows the infinite human capacity to rationalise and add intention to anything, however vague (but this time in a good way).

45 minutes after getting in line at my local DMV the CA DMV status website is still not sure where in line I am. Glad to see we’re doing eventual consistency via telegraph again.

What is common knowledge in your field, but shocks outsiders? - Asking people what they want is a very bad way of learning about that they actually want. - Most product, service, and policy decisions made in the world do not understand this.

Turtle Mutual Aid:

Let me remind you that Ridley Scott is British, and therefore ought to know that Indians have been making movies since 1913, at least 2 generations before he was born. And that finding an English-speaking Indian actor of proven talent takes maybe 5 minutes. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinema_...

I’m watching Gladiator 2 and they have an Indian doctor side character (ha!) but apparently could not locate a single Indian actor to play them. Incredible feat of avoiding the obvious and the trivially easy.

I spent some time on the Old Place today and it’s* mostly just people shouting at each other, unchecked misinformation, AI bots selling nonsense, and vicious stupidity. Some significant population of users is getting their brains baked by it. * both my feeds & algorithmic feeds on trending topics

Hot damn. Science rocks!

The Zeroth Commandment: do not arrange matters such that people are compelled to violate a commandment just to survive.

Ok I’m using the second 5 minutes of Andor season 1 as a UX example forever. It’s a fantastic case study in how not to design a control interface.

I've been wanting to tell my widowhood story publicly for years, but I know I don't have the kind of grief story people want to hear. No community rallied, no family healed, no strength discovered. I wrote about the gap between grief narratives and reality. www.dataandpolitics.net/why-i-find-i...

We stick all sorts of mostly useless and in some cases frankly dangerous stuff in image metadata, so why isn’t alt text just embedded the same way?

For anyone wanting a measured review of the recent India-Pakistan conflict, I recommend this (rare) calm international discussion of this conflict and its multi-polar stakes from journalists across the subcontinent: youtu.be/earyQwplY-M