What is culture but a really poorly organized software package that we have to learn to stop importing *?

The obvious wisdom and effectiveness of Housing First is obscured by the fact we've made "a tiny, no-frills apartment" an expensive status symbol in huge swathes of the country by creating an artificial housing shortage

seeing like a state machine James C Scott, and me

backofmind.substack.com/p/seeing-lik... may be relevant to your interests.

me 🤝 Proton's comms person

explaining that you cannot simply decide a court order doesn't apply to you just because you don't like it

And if you pay someone using a credit card, you are not anonymous. Actually, lets make it even simpler.

You are not anonymous.

The only question is how hard you've made it to find your identity. It's not impossible. You have made at least one mistake, and that's all it takes.

Seeing Like a State
vs
Seeing Like a State Machine

marketspider can have little a self-indulgent philosopoasting, as a treat: my epistemology has shifted pretty strongly towards "if I behave as if this is true, do I get better outcomes?" over the past hmm year or so, and it cuts through the is/ought bullshit nicely

btw corporate egregores are real

speaking of ACLs, "replacing ACLs with real-ish time yes-no verdicts from an LLM on access requests" is something somebody's going to implement in the very near future isn't it

Don't like that. Don't like that one bit

Page of forever stamps with a picture of Alex Trebek and a jeopardy style Answer reading “this naturalized US citizen hosted the quiz show Jeopardy! For 37 seasons”

Spouse who is an immigration lawyer just got the world’s greatest USPS forever stamps for his mail

where are the nimbys explaining how oil prices aren't actually about supply constraints

a diagram of a waffle funnel with "your post" at the top. through the funnel there are several cross-sections: - audience: you, comprehension of your post: 100% - audience: followers, comprehension of your post: 90% - audience: followers of followers, comprehension of your post: 50% - audience: followers of followers of followers, comprehension of your post: 20% through the bottom of the funnel are "replies to your post" with several waffles with stinky lines

What we might refer to as the "Waffle Funnel"

Walk-In Soda Cave at Sheetz

Plato's

Two scientists walk through a cluttered old-fashioned science laboratory. The female scientist says “Analogue instruments! Paper records! Chalk boards! I thought you'd agreed to modernise the laboratory?” The male scientist replies “That's what i'm so excited about: we have moved to cloud-based storage for our data!” They step out onto a balcony. She says: “Please tell me you haven't built a library zeppelin” This is exactly what he has done. It floats across the sky and he adds “It's got a fax machine!”

My cartoon for this week’s @newscientist.com

Paninis.

Mayor Mamdani and a child play with Legos while looking very serious and concentrated. The child is impossibly adorable and wearing tiny blue glasses.

No interruptions, please. We’re building universal child care.

Threads thread: thriller_instinct 3d Is it okay to bully 40 and 50 year olds who are on social media just for being on it, cuz like why are you here - 254 Q 3.1K G 28 746 corporateash 18h ••• My ICQ UIN is 7231680. That number is burned into my consciousness. I inadvertently learned that you could see private conversations in public chat rooms when using Telnet instead of a browser on GeoCities. I can tell you the difference in audible dial-up handshakes between 1200, 2400, 14.4 kbps modems. I needed a edu email address to join Facebook after my university was admitted. We were here at the beginning. We made social media. You wouldn't be in my Top 8. I have usernames older than you. 852 Q62 G6 72

“I have usernames older than you.”.
Holy shit

so the world's energy mix looks like this. around 20%-25% of the world's oil (7%pt of total energy) and a third of the world's gas (another 7%pt) goes thru hormuz.

right now that's been zero'd out, and there's no clear path back. a sixth of the world's energy supply is just... gone.

A ton of it is heavily incentivized wishful thinking, because we don't want to admit how much work, especially infrastructural and maintenance work, is involved in building even new things.

that's when we started estimating project costs post hoc, and my goodness _that_ kind of legibility really upsets product executives

a question i like asking when someone doesn’t like where we ended up and wants to redesign it is ‘okay have the stakeholders and requirements changed enough where we won’t end up at the same spot?’ 🙃

"How many things would have to go right in order for us to build this thing to desired constraints the way we have it in our heads?" is not a question we're used to asking.

You need terraform and Claude to initiate a career limiting database drop? That’s amateur hour shit, man.

OTOH, at least you've got a secure job for, uh, life.

I am getting very tired of people blaming “private equity” for changing consumer behavior.

Private equity didn’t degrade the quality of the clothes you buy, ultra fast fashion and online shopping where you sort by low price, then buy clothes without ever actually touching them did that.

So Philip Glass just joined TikTok. He only has like 4 posts and they’re simply him in what I assume is his living room playing the piano. First comment on one I saw was “your piano is too close to the fireplace, you’ll dry it out” and if that’s not the internet in a nutshell I don’t know what is.

FT comments section this morning - saying what everyone else is thinking, right?

Headline of a Q&A in New Yorker formatting Headline: A panicked middle-aged man refuses to tell me directions to the bathroom. Subhed: Please, I just have to pee. I'm in a hurry. By Isaac Chotiner March 4, 2026

Excuse me. Oh, God. Oh, no. Holy shit. Get away from me. I was wondering if you knew where the bathrooms are. Look, I'm ... it's not a crime to scroll through your high school girlfriend's Instagram account. We remained friends after high school! I was at her wedding! It's only natural to see how she's doing.

I'm in a bit of a hurry, and I'm afraid that if I choose the wrong corridor, I'll be late for my train. I think they're down that way, but I'm actually from out of town. Please stop talking to me.

Real quick, though. I agree that it's natural to be interested in an old friend, but aren't you afraid about the message you might be sending by liking a picture of her at the beach from 2015? If that did happen, and I'm only going off your word, it was probably an accident. They put the ... scroll bars or whatever ... close to the thumbs up button. People have been complaining about that for years. I've been complaining about that for years.

The wall in view of my video calls is in dire need of some Safety II propaganda posters.

here we see an experienced vibecoder struggling to adapt to primitive & obsolete technology

Imputed rent doesn't pay the bills.