Andrew F

I made a thing! @wndr.chat is the chat log for a spaceship on an interstellar journey. There is a semblance of a plot that plays out over a year but it's mostly, for lack of a better term, NPC chatter to interrupt the doom scrolling.

“My hairdresser’s nephew didn’t speak until he was seven. Then one day, in the parking lot of a Gelson’s, he said, ‘thermodynamics.’ Now he’s a concert pianist.” buff.ly/yvtg5zT

the story goes like this

Leftover duck. Still plenty of meat on those bones. Take it home, throw it in a pot, add some broth, some rice. Baby, we've got a congee going.

"sure did boss, real fucking random, just like you asked"

The golden standard for remote controlled infrastructure is a webcam pointed at a thermometer and a sign that says, "Looks off? Call Jim."

OK, but it is kinda funny that the AI plotline in 2019 was "big corp insists positronic brain can't feel emotion" and the reality in 2026 is closer to "big corp insists slime mold pun factory is sad".

llms only “exist” to give one reply at a turn you: x llm: y then the whole process starts over. there is no continuity. each reply is 100% fresh. the context of your previous “conversation” is included, hidden from you, in every request you make. continuity is an illusion

Any time I post about impeachment, I get defeatist replies from people telling me it’s pointless because the Republicans won’t support it. If you decide in advance that you’re going to lose, you will definitely lose. And the value of an impeachment process is not just removing a bad president.

Enterprise software companies had a short-lived run where they competed on usability and product-led growth which seems to be over. Now every SaaS app seems to be converging on the same UX monstrosity, complete with AI features of dubious value.

In short: Revive the OTA. 11/11

We must pause agentic children.

like I suspect many of you on This Website, I think a core reason why I find Eliezer Yudkowsky and his rationalist and effective altruist satellites so intensely annoying is because I had a VERY similar “being a super weird, pretentious, hyper-literate kid” experience - I just, you know, grew up.

My instinct these days is that LLM are intelligent in the way that slime molds or fungi might be intelligent. And that's kinda cool! Maybe even useful. But I have to admit that the personhood of slime molds is not a Top 10 ethical quandary for me.

I've made an interactive map for exploring the terrain of the world! It uses @mapterhorn.com data and tiles, and WebGL for dynamic colors and animations. relief.bertspaan.nl/world?lang=en

> if the defendant possesses anything that is inherently dangerous, as specified under the "ultrahazardous" definition, the defendant is then strictly liable for any damages caused by such possession I dunno, maybe we just take them at their word that LLMs are super dangerous.

I wonder how much student AI writing could be "detected" by simply printing out a random page from each student's essay, removing formatting and identifying marks, and then asking each student to pick out the one that was theirs.

Is tree removal spam suddenly a thing for anyone else? I get a ton of these "we're doing tree removal in your area" messages but they're from different, not local numbers and they never mention a name.

the original Apple Watch #macinstosh #floppydisks #floppydiskart

Last call: This historic, pioneering Bay Area brewpub to close its doors after 40 years

Huh. theonion.com/god-horrifie...

"We need to pause AI development" "Aight, let's unplug US-East-1" "No not like that"

I've done this and the wax falls off instead of pooling and getting carried up the wick and the entire wick burns up in like 20 minutes and at some point the off-balance candle falls off and rolls away while still on fire. I do not recommend.

Hot take: Follow feed by default removes one of the levers you'd use to mitigate dog piling. "A lot of people are angrily QTing this post so we are going to just stop showing those" is sometimes a sensible approach.

It's going to be real funny if games in 2030 are doing crazy things with inference, but a moderately sized Cities: Skylines 3 city still manages to slow your machine to a crawl.

"And please, when I fail, will you tell me? You have the absolute right to cuss me out" but it's coming from my spreadsheet.

Has anyone made a combined @standard.site + bsky reader yet? Seems like there'd be something there -- the whole "oh hey here's a blog post; lemme add it to my long reads feed for later" sort of thing. #atproto

Timeless humour! A 2,000 year-old Roman souvenir pen with a joke inscription roughly equivalent to: “I went to Rome and all I got you was this cheap pen!" 😂 Dated circa 70 AD, this iron stylus pen was recovered in London during excavations by MOLA. 📷 Juan Jose Fuldain/MOLA #Archaeology

Two married professors and their son are being held in ICE detention, despite being legal permanent residents and having no criminal records. All, apparently, because their mom/MIL was a translator for the Iranian hostage takers in 1979, before they were even born. www.thenation.com/article/soci...

Bauhaus Milhaus

well that sucks. apparently the ALA/Freedom To Read Foundation have trademarks on the phrase "free people read freely", which i use in a lino print i made into stickers a few years ago.

This is sad but also, Airtable's "unsubscribe from these marketing messages" functionality doesn't work unless you escalate to their legal team, and somehow this all feels related.

I am not saying we need a Toy Story 6, but if there is a Toy Story 6, maybe Gail should write it.

Each year America should get a little infrastructure, as a treat.

Menlo Park is trying to convert public parking lots to housing, and one of the things I find funny is that the local Draeger's, which has its own private lot and is thus unaffected, is complaining a whole lot more than Trader Joe's, which relies on a perpetually cramped public lot.

Was about to get a salad for lunch, had a second thoughs about the mixed greens, got a rice bowl instead. Anyways, I wonder what the cumulative impact of the cyclospora outbreak on calories and fiber intake is.

Taco Bell: Keep Records Más

I like a good PWA as much as anyone but (1) a lot of things really don't need to be PWAs and (2) the way Chrome nudges me to install is annoying. "Welcome to my API docs, please install it to your home screen as an app. Uh, no?"

Not the use of the word "detained" here to make it appear as though the settlers have some legal capacity to be doing this. If i ran up on a US Rep with a rifle and prevented them from leaving it would be, correctly, described as kidnapping; and doing so with political ends would be terrorism.

Someone is going to create a social network where you have to mail hand-written posts and honestly, it might be kinda awesome?