really cool shoutout from The Guardian on my How The Heck piece (thanks @joshnicholas.com!)

What if every TikTok video you watched was printed on a CVS receipt? For the average user, that's dozens of miles of receipt paper per year, and 96% of it was chosen by an algorithm instead of people you follow. Link to this (somewhat silly) short data story below!

100% optimal, time to retire

LIGHT WORK

oooh @robmoore.tech made a 17-0 game for NFL and it is *addicting* I like that the random constraints (e.g. this run you have to draft an old-school TE) and the fact that you can play it for all 30 teams separately and that there are leaderboards! CC @minakimes.bsky.social

Really interesting psychological distinction between an extremely impressive individual event and a pattern of impressive events

equal parts grace and derp

Ted Chiang never misses

a while ago, I shared an essay I wrote about AI music, featuring an experiment where the user had to guess which clip was real vs. AI a few thousand votes in, my suspicion feels validated: it's very hard to tell even with that, I feel very hopeful about human art perthirtysix.com/is-music-jus...

it's been said before, but we really need to normalize clowning people for sending other people paragraphs of full, unedited AI text

had some time this weekend to *manually* write some code to make a chart and it was great! this is a lil self-tracked data viz about my month walking it's a bit over the top, but for my audience of one, I really like the quintuple-encoded dots (temperature, steps, humidity, rain, and date)

This is nicely put. The machine that subordinates all life to its own algorithm of self-expansion is already operating: It’s called capital. www.newyorker.com/science/anna...

had way too much fun with this one

In 2004, Playboy interviewed "the google guys."

why can’t i just be allowed to staple solar panels on all the rooftops in america and connect them to the grid my gosh darn self

getting a simple "lol" after sending someone a masterfully crafted pun is a special type of painful

Amazing write up from Shri as always. I love this micro-viz for getting across how these things worked really quickly/intuitively

I wrote about the Victorian history, physical sensor mechanisms, and networked logic of traffic lights! This is the fifth installment in the "How The Heck" series, following QR codes, GPS, Shazam, and solar panels. Hope you enjoy it! perthirtysix.com/how-the-heck-do-traffic-lights-work

I can, in principle, emulate the basketball skill of Steph Curry

For the 5th installment of the "How The Heck", we'll be going down the surprisingly interesting rabbit hole of... traffic lights!

SPURS WIN GAME 1 OF THE WESTERN CONFERENCE FINALS IN AN ABSOLUTE 2OT THRILLER! A GAME TO REMEMBER.

For today's newsletter, we revisit this White House chart crime perthirtysix.com/newsletters/...

what if I told you there's another way to have your writing not sound like AI...

This is the money paragraph for me.

I've had a lot of fun building out the "How The Heck?" series! The goal is to demystify everyday tech for curious and non-technical readers. So far, we've covered: - QR Codes - GPS - Shazam - Solar Panels Looking forward to working on the 5th one soon. perthirtysix.com/section/learn

A very well-articulated and balanced take that echoes a lot of what I've been feeling on the subject

I wrote about being inundated with AI writing at every turn, unwittingly turning my brain into the AI police, and how shitty AI writing is randomly showing up in my real life outside of the internet www.404media.co/your-ai-use-...

2022 / 2026

from our latest PerThirtySix newsletter: @robmoore.tech talking about the surprising complexity of picking colors in sports visualizations, and the merits of an autotelic approach to projects we're trying to one of these week, if you're interested! perthirtysix.com/newsletter

this guy is one of my favorite interactive visuals I've ever built :D (from the latest How The Heck piece, about solar panels: perthirtysix.com/how-the-heck...)

My next "how the heck?" piece is live, and it's all about solar panels! It interactively covers the physics, infrastructure, and economics of solar energy in (hopefully) an approachable way. I learned a ton working on it and hope you have fun looking through it. perthirtysix.com/how-the-heck...

as a total sci-fi literature newbie, I'm working my way through Ted Chiang's short stories and they're so good

conservative men: women are too emotional to be good leaders also conservative men: honor me all the time in the exact way I want or we will destroy society (and probably just do it anyway)

Classic Descriptor behavior with just words, no facts flowingdata.com/projects/dis...

working on not hedging everything I say, but only if you think it makes sense

you raise a very good and thoughtful point, john from maryland

my favorite part about this "how the heck" series I've been working on is that people clearly have an appetite for the web being a clean and beautiful place where you can just learn things

I yearn for rest like this

happened to me the other day on one of my interactives 🥰

Across every NFL trade since 2006, the trade-down side wins the best-player comparison 45% of the time, the trade-up side 35%. It seems like Buffalo cracked this code. The Bills did three first-round trade-backs in 2026 (26→28→31→35) picking up two extra fourth-rounders and moving up in the 3rd.

AI-generated sites are flooding the internet, swallowing all in their wake

apparently my Shazam Explainer was shared on r/technology over the weekend this thread made me chortle

New blog post: Compositing & Blending! 🥳 I spent the last few months reading all about blend modes so you don't have to: You'll learn what compositing and blending are, and what is actually going on under the hood when you apply blend modes in CSS 🎨 nik.digital/posts/compos...

The FT @financialtimes.com is hiring a new data journalist to join our US data and visuals team in New York. Great job, great team, great place to work. Apply here 👉 job-boards.eu.greenhouse.io/financialtim...

in my next life, I'd like to be a cat in a bookstore

This tweet came 11 years, 6 months & 27 days into LeBron's career. It’s been 10 years & 11 months since the tweet & the fuckery continues

THE PEOPLE DO NOT YEARN FOR AUTOMATION

How The Heck Does Shazam Work? “By throwing away almost everything and keeping only a handful of landmark peaks, a noisy 5-second clip from a coffee shop becomes a set of coordinates precise enough to pinpoint one song out of millions.” Fascinating! [perthirtysix.com]