passing the so-called “ marshmallow test “ by refusing to eat a single delicious marshmallow. passing the stupid test by setting fire to the factory that makes the delicious marshmallows

I’m fairly bullish on atproto’s chances to evolve into a usefully decentralized foundation for social apps—but irrespective of the technical arguments, it’s not going to be pleasant, nor will it succeed, if people in a position of authority and influence are going to be jerks.

oh no, we’re doing videogame difficulty discourse with food now

I don't know how university leaders expect to sustain their institutions *even as class-reproduction machines* if they sell out to a dictator and crush their own core workers. Like, you have to put oil in the engine. You have to put gasoline in the car.

ah yes, the problem is certainly the people who identify and describe problems, rather than the extremely well-funded organizations who use their power to make sure nobody anywhere ever manages to sustainably fix a problem /s

it's sort of funny how we got the digging and refilling holes economic stimulus keynes proposed as a thought experiment but it's matrix multiplication at gargantuan scale

Wow to listen to you it's like ANYONE who leverages strongman rhetoric and promises of return to a prelapsarian, "pure" Christian past to construct a unitary executive theory of power and unaccountable new paramilitary to suppress dissent and round up "undesirable" ethnicities into camps, is a nazi

We need to come up with a catchy name for "failures/exploits caused by in-band signaling", like "the billion dollar mistake" was for nullable pointers. (Not even picking on llms in particular here: in-band signaling is the misfeature that keeps on giving, back to the dawn of computing/telecomms)

the funny thing about the constant misappropriation of MLK is that the guy left a massive body of writing specifically aimed at explaining his views of those of the movement he represented to the broad public. it is extremely easy to know what the guy thought on a variety of subjects and yet

I’m worried it can still get stupider

Object lessons in why rules and norms exist appear to be periodically necessary

yet another bad day to be a systems thinker

I’ve now seen @ezrakleinbot.bsky.social twice write up a list of recent incidents of political violence—once in the NYT, once in a tweet—and it strikes me that in both lists the victims are 100% white. No mention of (off the top of my head) Esther Salas and her son in NJ or Javier Martinez in NM.

How does this all square with all their years of insisting on the importance of free speech? That's very simple, they were lying

I’m not particularly excited to fly commercial airlines anymore if the pilot hiring filter is going to be “whether they laughed hard enough at whichever joke was the most racist in the latest episode of Kill Tony”

i would posit that a society where even governors use the phrase "touch grass" in a public statement and expect to be understood cannot in fact log off. offline may as well be the lost garden of eden

“Today’s radical Supreme Court decision tramples on our Constitution and enables racial profiling to continue without explanation,” says Sen. @padilla.senate.gov: www.padilla.senate.gov/newsroom/pre...

going to keep saying: a society that would like to keep functioning has to discourage baldfaced lying, especially by authorities

the deep American inability to think about other countries is going to mask how much we're destroying our international reputation I think

Bluesky needs an easily accessible “temporarily hide labels while I take a screenshot” button. Labels are great but they take up space, and sometimes the labels determine whether you can capture a good three-post exchange in a single shot.

The fact that Kraft ally Jay Cashman set up a fake pro-bike org to slow down or cancel infrastructure projects deserves more attention: www.pedalsafebostonscam.com

The film industry tries to do as much thinking as possible before getting out the expensive lights and cameras, and the software industry does the exact opposite

cosigned; it's not coding, it's deciding what to code

This is the logo for a brand of toothpaste designed to be used exclusively while driving through superhighway stack interchanges

Using one photo already on your phone, what is the announcement tomorrow at 2?

kids don't come pre-equipped with bigotry, as much as people would like to pretend they do. they have no context for anything other than what YOU have given to them. when you say it's "hard" to explain gay people, it's because you have already done a bad job at explaining everything else

Resisting the powerful urge to explain every 2025 news story as an instance of the Einstellung effect

ME: computer, are these numbers equal COMPUTER: *taking a long drag from a cigarette* who can say

I think fighting fascism involves not validating a lot of fascist framing about marginalized people and I think coalition building involves not pushing marginalized people out of the coalition. We have to stand against the narratives that say otherwise and hold leaders to that standard.

Firing and demoralizing feminized jobs as enemies of the state while brazenly bribing men with violent jobs that almost instantly puts them into the middle of middle class is very basic gendered warfare. Fulfilling the manosphere’s promise.

Say it again for those in the back: HUMANITIES USUALLY SUBSIDIZE STEM at most R1s. Yes we have receipts.

i'm seeing "human language can be syntheszed without a theory of mind what gives" and my dude: that's the basis of a bunch of board games and children's wordplay activities not that it matters, but "people think a computer is talking to them" (1964-67) is twice as old as "the web" (1993)

This is amazing but as a guy…the kind of guy who takes 45 bags of groceries in one trip, arms going numb, I’m gonna want more babies. Really baby that fuckin thing up. I don’t wanna make two trips.

Poker Face is a fantasy where the ability to recognize bullshit has an effect on society

it is very much in the interest of AI chatbot companies to keep the general public confused about how their services actually work and to what extent they can accurately take advantage of real-time information, yes

The Scriveners Who Walk Away From Omelas

TGIF bsky, enjoy this dissociative moment of zen.

From Donald Shoup’s “The High Cost of Free Parking” and candidate for the most 2003 sentence ever written.

Right, see, because we use “discrimination” as shorthand for “illegal and harmful discrimination,” the Trump movement is trying to outlaw the basic concept of distinguishing between one thing and another, like a bank seeing and acting on the difference between a real business and a crypto scam

The idea that President can negotiate/dictate bilateral “deals” by using the full force of the federal government to punish and humiliate his perceived enemies goes against the whole idea of the rule of law. That should be the story, rather than normalizing this authoritarian behavior.

The problem with the horse-race coverage of Trump II is that, across the board, he is destroying nonzero sum arrangements: rule of law, institutions, collective goods, trade relationships, alliances. So what the media portrays as a win for Trump is usually a net loss for everyone, including the US.

a lot of people don’t know this, but “EDC” stands for “everyday daisy carnival”

www.albanylaw.edu/government-l... People have been sounding the warnings for a very very long time, 3 decades of warnings.

A big thing that happened is a lot of people took complaining about “woke” kids, institutions , etc as free money without any consequences and any harm and now that the consequences and harm are obvious they really want duck the bill.

For 15 years, I watched brilliant and caring people desperately attempt to avert the privacy and data security apocalypse that’s upon us - which has now been massively exacerbated by dumbass-enabling AI tools. They did their best, not enough people listened, and now, well, God help us all.