the idea that Paul wasn’t going to be the singer for Live and Let Die is not at all true but it’s a good story so he and everyone else likes repeating it. George Martin loved the fake story too. there was going to also be a second version sung by someone else, at a nightclub scene in the movie

how did i go so long not knowing we were literally teaching people to read wrong. i knew something wasn't right but jesus christ www.apmreports.org/episode/2019...

Tic Tac Toe: The Movie

I made a Mac word game: bergmayer.net/plaintextpanic

FANTASY/MAGI.GIF

So this is why I kept being late for everything yesterday www.npr.org/2025/12/21/n...

When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.

It's genuinely a colossal failure of state and society that we haven't obsessively digitized every archival object we possibly can. It would cost a fuckton. It'd have colossal benefits for the whole goddamn world.

I finally wrote about Apple’s BS “intellectual property” justification for its extraction of rents from developers bergmayer.net/apples-ip-pr...

New alternative to “gentle reminder”

while Doug watches

one part of an American restoration is that police (in general, e.g. ICE) need to be de-militarized: not just in terms of tactics, but also aesthetics. No more playing tactical army man, no pretending you're an "operator." Cops should wear nice little blue uniforms with cute hats

GG Allin and the Toilet Rats

DOJ's Epstein excuses on Xitter and the responding community notes are turning into Matryoshka dolls.

Since his appointment, RFK Jr. has pursued a brutal vision of American health that several experts liken to a sort of eugenics. Kennedy has made it clear that certain deaths are acceptable or even preferable to a world where every child is vaccinated. Read more: www.theverge.com/health/66136...

We found a tape containing UNIX V4 - long believed lost - in storage at the University of Utah. Yesterday, the Computer History Museum read it! There's a raw copy of the tape up at archive.org/details/utah... , a .tar at squoze.net/UNIX/v4/ , and much more at discuss.systems/@ricci/11550...

lol this is fucked. this developer made a neat little javascript thing that lets you transfer files between computers on your network via the browser. set up a .net domain and hosted it there. got popular. LimeWire "acquires" the project... and just redirects to LimeWire github.com/SnapDrop/sna...

You believe surveys over peoples lived experience? Lived experience is so important we asked thousands of people about that experience! In a way that mathematically ensured a broad and diverse range of experiences! Asking about peoples' lived experience along dozens of different dimensions!

(plinky plonky piano music playing as a man examines a sealed can of soup, rotates it, twists and pulls it. he gives up, exhausted. through a window we see a neighbor smiling at an identical but open can) Can't open 'er? Can opener. Paid for by American Can Opener Manufacturers Advocacy Association

it is weird to talk about “Ike and Tine Turner’s River Deep Mountain High” and not play their actual recoding. They didn’t write it! “As made famous by” is ok

The atomic ensemble time scale at the NIST Boulder campus has failed.

ugh presta valves are the worst. they just become completely nonfunctional at the slightest provocation

It’s always disappointing when a book turns out to be an “oral history”

there will not be a robot that can play NHL-level hockey in my lifetime

extremely funny how many conversations are people who are being automated out of a job (software engineers) defending ai against people who are not (creatives)

Impersonal bureaucratic systems are liberation from the tyranny of the village and the tribe. Long live modernity

Siri still sees “14th St” and says “Fourteenth Saint”

Great AP reporting here on what happened at KCBS after FCC’s Brendan Carr threatened the station. Anchors demoted, stories spiked, shameless corporate censorship and capitulation.

Khan would have been Earth's handsomest dictator

Terrifying headline if you don’t realize they are sports teams.

STARTREK/ENTERPRE.GIF

Fallout of the TikTok ban, ruling, and divestment: - US now among the nations that ban media platforms to protect citizens from disfavored content - First Amendment doctrine significantly weakened - hugely popular media platform now under the direct control of Trump's ideological allies

if you're on a Mac and having trouble thinking of baby names, just type ``cat /usr/share/dict/propernames`` into the terminal

Policy Brief: Interconnection and Regulated Traffic Obligations - Internet Society www.internetsociety.org/resources/po...

cool app for word games www.scrabbleplayers.org/w/NASPA_Zyzz...

remember when a knock on Obama was that he said "I" too much

Counterpoint: No, he doesn't. Being "commander in chief" of the military means he is the top official in charge of making sure the military follows Congress's directives. It does not grant him "independent" authority

Just once, I'd like to see Dick Durbin *try* to explain the actual mechanisms by which repealing 230 will protect children from being exploited and abused. There will be hand waving about how it will "open them up to litigation" but that's not an answer.

I'm also personally indebted to Strahm for giving me one of the better quotes I've had from an athlete in the past several years

see I'd have kept him because he is super weird

"The owner of a mark is not required to constantly monitor every nook and cranny of the entire nation and to fire both barrels of his shotgun instantly upon spotting a possible infringer." Engineered Mech. Servs., Inc. v. Applied Mech. Tech., Inc., 584 F. Supp. 1149, 1160 (M.D. La. 1984)

On the "duty to police" trademarks: "[C]ourts have long recognized that a trademark owner has no obligation to sue all possible infringers." - 2 McCarthy on Trademarks and Unfair Competition § 17:17 (5th ed.)

A former immigration judge alleged to DOJ that Trump fired her bc of her sex & national origin DOJ said equal employment opportunity laws don't supersede Trump's removal powers under Article II this is literally a claim to constitutional power to discriminate ballsandstrikes.org/law-politics...

As both the House & Senate look to repeal Section 230, I'm curious who they think should be held liable for the comments they've left open on the Epstein photo dump...? Them? Dropbox? Do they have a trust & safety team watching the comments?

Chomsky's original linguistic ideas are entirely discredited and even he has abandoned them. he and his followers have vitriolically attacked people who dare disagree with their latest iteration which is essentially unfalsifiable pseudoscience

[At an Epstein event] Hey man can you not take a thousand pictures of me?

Reminding everyone for no particular reason that Section 230 is one of the last things standing between free speech online and Trump having control over everything you see and say on the internet