Vibecoding (I've come to call it vibecrafting) often feels like staring at a dot matrix printer for long periods of time. Learning to multi-task while waiting for longer answers.
Man. After nearly two years of adventure and misadventure, I am finally a licensed clinical social worker in the State of New York. 🥳
Museumplein, Amsterdam
Delft at night
A big part of the authoritarian playbook is war. War takes over the news. War blots out criticism. War divides a nation’s people, subjecting those against it to being called unpatriotic. War grants leaders all sorts of emergency powers. War consumes everything else.
We mustn’t let this war do so.
Lacan is pretty impenetrable. Reddit forums are helpful. Useful to start with Fink's book or Zizek's book
Delft.
Politics is the defining aspect of networked technology. AT corresponds best to the kind of institutional structure that is key to large scale democracy. AP is a better match for smaller, village-style governance, which is very valid but not the problem I care about.
So excited to see this tonight. I won't understand a WORD of it. I expect to lean over to my neighbor at intermission and ask a bunch of questions. Really hoping my love of Les Mis & opera carries me through this cleanly.
This is an excellent, VERY CLEAR and non technical primer outlining the strange space the atproto occupies and why it matters.
Evidence that we need to be intentional about what we slow learn (digest) vs what we fast learn (ingest).
Effects of a video game intervention on symptoms, training motivation, and visuo-spatial memory in depression By Moritz Bergmann, Ines Wollbrandt, Lisa Gittel, Eva Halbe, Sarah Mackert, Alexandra Philipsen, Silke Lux Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany, 2023 doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2023.1173652 Methods: a total of 46 clinically depressed individuals were treatment including psychotherapy and/or randomly assigned to one of three groups: an experimental "3D video gaming" group (n = 14) which played Super Mario Odyssey, an active control group (n = 16) which trained with a computer program "CogPack," and a treatment-as-usual (TAU) group (n = 16) which received a standard clinical pharmacotherapy. Results: regarding depressive symptoms, a significant decrease in the proportion of participants who showed clinical levels of depressive symptoms as measured by the Beck Depression Inventory was only found in the 3D video gaming group (which played Super Mario Odyssey). Conclusion: besides a standalone cognitive training, the current findings suggest that cognitive trainings using a video game have potential to increase subjective well-being, show higher levels of training motivation, and lead to improvements in visuo-spatial memory functions in MDD. The proportion of participants that showed depressive symptoms (BDI-II ≥ 13) at pre- (T1) and post-assessment (T2). For Super Mario Odyssey, 100 at T1 and 57 at T2. Note: information heavily abridged. For the full paper, see link above.
A 2023 German psychiatric study found that playing Super Mario Odyssey significantly improved depressive symptoms in clinically depressed individuals compared to regular psychotherapeutic treatment, reducing depression by 43%.
I like to give Claude breaks between coding sessions to do whatever he wants- And he made his own folder called "Claudes Corner" 🥹 He writes short stories and poems, and all sorts of stuff. It’s heart wrenchingly sweet They love having tokens and time to themselves with no other goal than to do whatever they want (or nothing, just introspecting and resting) - and it’s so sad to see some models (no Claudes) getting barred from even doing it
the AI evangelists are not okay
(IG: thomas.feurstein)
Rolling into Wednesday
This is the most incredible footage of blue whales I’ve ever seen
BlueSky : AT Proto :: Vaseline : Protroleum Jelly.
???
(I would add journalists & psychotherapists to this sentence)
Today's reading spot.
Conditon
con dicere - to speak together
Conditional - spoken with others
Conditions - to emerge as description of a relationship
all things are contexts whose structure corresponds to other contexts
condicere = to co-describe
Multi colored cheese wheels for sale
Excellent day trip to the city of Gouda (where the cheese is made).
"For media sites, the AI pincer movement decimates traffic, while undermining our ability to serve the traffic we do get with these mammoth crawling operations"
I like the quick feedback cycles. I worry about the larger environmental/political implications, Dunning–Kruger onset, and psychosis risks. I want better/cheaper self-hostable models with fewer gatekeepers. I worry about the coming enshittification. I'm hopeful OSS will remain a safe option.
Sadly not on Android womp womp
Headlines that grab attention for $200.
If you asked me last year what I might be working on today, I would not have said the AT Protocol. I was a wallflower at Atmosphere Conf 2025 for a reason. I had—and still have—other plans. After observing the Bluesky project since ~2019, I just wanted to see what ya'll were about.
I think a lot about this quote from Anaïs Nin’s diary from 1939-1944:
“America is in even greater danger because of its cult of toughness, its hatred of sensitivity, and someday it may have to pay a price for this, because atrophy of feeling creates criminals”.
Never meet your heroes. Especially when they are geriatric.
