Mitchell Thorson

Extra Stars, by Gregory Uhlmann 14 track album

Here's my Bandcamp Friday pick:
Extra Stars, by Gregory Uhlmann

intlanthem.bandcamp.com/album/extra-...

Today is Bandcamp Friday.

Straße von Hormus: So legt der Krieg die Straße von Hormus lahm Seit Samstag droht der Iran damit, Schiffe anzugreifen, die die Straße von Hormus passieren. Sehen Sie hier, welche Folgen das für den Verkehr in der Meerenge hat.

I made an animated map of ship movements in the Straights of Hormuz using data from marinetraffic.com.

Ship track frames rendered using #ggplot, base map created using #gdal, video editing using #ffmpeg, video player written in #svelte.

🎁 www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2...

One brillant idea here is to combine the inputs and outputs in the middle instead of trying to connect precisely the sources and destinations, creating an unreadable spaghetti.

Love that @puzzmo.com is getting in on the Atproto action

You have to mainline info all the time because our information tools make you do so. Infinite scroll timelines, group chats with no beginning or end, recommender algorithms with no sense of place — all of them require constant vigilance to make sense of. We can do better.

In fact, Amodei already answered the question: if nuclear weapons were developed by a private company, and that private company sought to dictate terms to the U.S. military, the U.S. would absolutely be incentivized to destroy that company. The reason goes back to the question of international law, North Korea, and the rest: International law is ultimately a function of power; might makes right. There are some categories of capabilities — like nuclear weapons — that are sufficiently powerful to fundamentally affect the U.S.’s freedom of action; we can bomb Iran, but we can’t North Korea. To the extent that AI is on the level of nuclear weapons — or beyond — is the extent that Amodei and Anthropic are building a power base that potentially rivals the U.S. military. Anthropic talks a lot about alignment; this insistence on controlling the U.S. military, however, is fundamentally misaligned with reality. Current AI models are obviously not yet so powerful that they rival the U.S. military; if that is the trajectory, however — and no one has been more vocal in arguing for that trajectory than Amodei — then it seems to me the choice facing the U.S. is actually quite binary: Option 1 is that Anthropic accepts a subservient position relative to the U.S. government, and does not seek to retain ultimate decision-making power about how its models are used, instead leaving that to Congress and the President. Option 2 is that the U.S. government either destroys Anthropic or removes Amodei.

Ben Thompson making a full-throated case for fascism here stratechery.com/2026/anthrop...

The cruelty and violence of this is monstrous.

announcing our €3,8M seed round and more on what's next

today, we're announcing our €3,8M ($4.5M) seed financing round, led by byFounders with participation from Bain Capital Crypto, Antler, Thomas Dohmke (former CEO of GitHub), Avery Pennarun (CEO of Tailscale) among other incredible angels.

read more on what's next: blog.tangled.org/seed

Happy BirdCast Day!

The very first brave migrants are starting to make their way North.

Tonight has 17 million birds predicted. By the height of migration in may we'll see as many as 1.3 BILLION birds on the move.

It's one of nature's great spectacles!

birdcast.org/migration-to...

Just snagged a remote ticket for #ATmosphereConf 2026. Even though I haven't built anything serious for atproto yet, I'm so inspired by many of the projects being build across the community. Its makes me want to get involved and make some stuff here.

I genuinely have a hard time understanding Anthropic's logic here. Even if you aren't staunchly anti-AI, it seems obvious that they built their models by stealing content and probably breaking the law in the process.

When they start throwing stones like this, the hypocrisy becomes all too clear.

Exciting news! Bluesky's v1.117 update has rolled out more support for Bandcamp embeds—now you can play songs right inside posts! Happy listening 🎶

Don’t think people realize how much journalism has almost never paid for itself. The work of news gathering has almost always required some kind of subsidy — either by bundling, licit government support, or a de facto monopoly on local info distribution — and usually works in firms as a loss leader.

We visualize the Olympic medal count as Norwegian-style scarf. :) 📊
Check out how Germany looks like and generate your own scarf – including download of the knitting pattern.

The goal shouldn't be to get journalists and politicians posting on Bluesky, the goal should be to get them to adopt atproto. That requires different tactics, different products, different incentives.

Timely essay from @joshuabenton.com. News publishers won't leave extractive platforms without viable alternatives. Ideally, news publishers could own their distribution layer while still reaching mass audiences. I think atproto can offer that, but we need to build a lot more.

reminder this is tomorrow!!!
let me know what you guys want to see when i talk all about atproto and pair program an app with him 👀

Extremely satisfying game to play. Check it out: dialed.gg

ppl should stop using ai-generated diagrams. you know i’m not anti-ai but they’re just not good at this yet!

the problem is that diagrams have a very specific purpose: they’re meant to compress understanding into few key bits. ai vomits out poor approximations that aren’t conceptually compressed

Simply stunning!

Building the camps The warehouseification of detention and initial thoughts on stopping it.

When I got the contract to write a history of concentration camps in 2014, I hoped to keep the US from ending up here. That didn't work out! But now it's critical to understand how much is already in process and the enormity of what's coming. The sooner we act to stop it, the more people we'll save.

This is relevant to my interests

A decade later and just thinking about this game brings up many emotions from that time in my life. One of those media objects that just burrowed into my psyche at the time. What a beautiful game.

Today’s the day! Buy some music from your favorite artists.

While reporting this, I had something happen that's never happened. A comms rep for one of the co's disputed my reporting and said what I was telling them was untrue because it was not in Grok, xAI's chatbot.

I was looking directly at the files. And this person was using AI to challenge the truth.

Amid the hundreds of colleagues we’ve lost today, I wanted to highlight the BRILLIANT data/graphics folks who any newsroom should be fighting to hire right now—threading here:

This is what democracy looks like The Trump administration claims the imprimatur of the people. The people disagree.

I’ve been noodling this piece over for a while. It ties together a few threads that i think ought to be tied together.
www.pbump.net/o/this-is-wh...

Extremely cool map of NYC!

Map by New York Times of January 2026 expected snow storm totals.

Map by The Washington Post of January 2026 expected amounts of snow, rain, sleet, freezing rain, and a mix.

Map by CNN of January 2026 expected snow storm totals.

I love weather and I love maps. So when there is an incoming snow storm it is interesting for me to see how different news agencies are mapping the event.

Here are examples from @nytimes.com @washingtonpost.com @cnn.com. Any others you've seen that work well (or don't)?

Links threaded below: