The difficulty of James Bond is that he was written in a period rich with an array of more of less complex Cold War spies and could be read as veering between the different registers of the genre. In some ways the character has become a bloated aggregation now instead of a clever discursive figure.

Becoming more aware of what I might call “administrative AI” as a new category of AI use. Getting a semi-agentic AI to quickly compile existing information into a formatted report feels like a different kind of task from asking it to logically reason about the info or to produce something creative.

Don't look now, but the world has now installed 3TW of solar. Took 10 years to get from 100GW to 1TW. Less than 3 years to get to 2TW. Less than 2 years to get to 3TW. Analysts expect *9TW* by 2036.

The World Crossed a Major Solar Milestone. No One Noticed

The next phase of the boom may reveal a shift in who is gaining access to the technology.

bloomberg.com

iirc there was a Foreign Affairs or Foreign Policy piece at least a year ago making the argument about billionaires as new aristocratic elites and a return to transnational networks of royal-like people. does anyone remember title? @dandrezner.bsky.social @beijingpalmer.bsky.social

These are Naomi Klein chips.

Jack Hurley@loudribs.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Found these in the Chinese supermarket today and the branding is 💪💪💪

and now for something good: architecture people, design people, urbanists! most aesthetically innovative/ distinctive public (maybe government maybe just public access) buildings constructed in the U.S. in the C21?

Given that I remember people in the 80s saying stuff “now” is disposable crap, unlike what they “used to make”, and now people talk about how stuff made “back then” (the 80s) was meant to last, I think we are at least partly living through multiple iterations of survivorship bias.

I think the conspiracy is comforting to people -- "a few bad guys did this." The reality -- "electeds, planners, and most of the public believed that the car was the future and rail transit was outdated" is actually more unsettling since it raises the question of what we're getting wrong now.

The fact we never truly sorta expressed the grief of Covid is an underrated factor around the moment we’re in. Never even had a national memorial service

In the same way that concrete is good for building structures that are in compression and bad for building structures that are in tension, AI seems to be good at doing certain categories of human work even at the same time that it is really bad at other kinds.

It’s really hard to imagine right now, but I kind of dimly wonder if at some point in the distant future there will start to be a backlash to the tech backlash. If so, it probably won’t appear in any form that we could recognize today.

Starting to think the worst use of LLMs in research is to finish a paper whose core idea wasn't good enough to write it up in the first place

Have an idea for a project I think every now & then about doing, but I’ve been told it would be a bad idea, but I also likely wasn’t getting feedback from the most informed sources of advice. I wonder if it’s better to do something rather than nothing.

My impression is that this is also true of a lot of other disciplines — there’s a lot of ✨content✨ geared towards introductory concepts because there is a far larger market of beginners than there is of mid-level practitioners

The idea that there's an easy abundance of free resources to learn to code is laughable once you've done what I've done and been a VP of research at a company that helped thousands of people break into tech careers. There's an abundance of *beginner tutorials*

This, in particular, is fascinating if you want to totally undermine any personal confidence you may have in your ability to parse information

There should be an equivalent of Letterboxd for buildings you’ve visited.

What I mean is both the cyberattack and the recent solutions to open math problem look something like “try an unreasonable number of directed basic operations in parallel, keep pushing deeper, and don’t take shortcuts”

Emilie Owens calls brainrot content "a decompression-driven genre of participation." They use the infinite scroll to put off having to deal with stress, like a kind of compensatory behavior. I kinda get it: the world sucks right now. I can't imagine being 15! journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

‘It speaks to me in brain rot’: Theorising ‘brain rot’ as a genre of participation among teenagers - Emilie Owens, 2025

In 2024, Oxford University Press made ‘brain rot’ – a piece of teenage slang found primarily on the popular video sharing application TikTok – its word of the y...

journals.sagepub.com

Every technology comes with trade offs, the question is who gets to make the decision about whether the trade offs are worthwhile.

Just incredibly sad that when I receive a (kind, sincere, legit) note praising one of my books now I spend the first few minutes mentally hazing it to make sure it's not AI. The corrosion of trust created by the mudslide of AI slop inundating our lives is appalling. And getting worse by the day.

"when Spider Man is in the outer boroughs with smaller buildings does he web swing from utility poles and does Con Ed hate that"

(brainwave) if you are trying to teach STEM majors why it is important to edit their work, a famously fruitless task, do not call it editing; call it refactoring

IMO: There’s a good piece to be written about how hotel room rates have soared, gentrifying tourism to the city.

More 'why haven't we been doing this for the past 50 years' recommendations. Detecting cyclists/pedestrians/VRUs in blind spots was among the top rationales for gifting 5 GHz of public bandwidth to the auto industry for radar >decade ago, which has mostly used it to protect and comfort car drivers.

David Zipper@davidzipper.bsky.social · last wk.

New GAO report examines how driver blind spots endanger pedestrians and cyclists—and asks why USDOT has done nothing about it. www.gao.gov/products/gao...

What does one satellite look like from another's point of view? On 18 Jul we found out! MTG-S1 & Meteosat-12 share an orbital slot 36,000km up & sometimes cross paths. The IRS on MTG-S1 caught Meteosat-12 over Timbuktu, Mali. ⬇️ The image is low-res, but you see Meteosat-12's solar panels/antennas.

This is probably silly, but every now and then I stop and look at things like viaducts, shopping carts, chickens eating corn, or cats rolling there and back in sunlight and think how incredibly unlikely all of this is in the grand scheme of things. We could've been a barren ball of rock.

NASA 💫has released one of the most detailed visualizations ever created of Earth’s ocean currents. Using data from satellites and advanced ocean models, the map reveals massive rivers of moving water, swirling eddies hundreds of miles wide, and the powerful Gulf Stream carrying warm water

The US gov has effectively censored immigrants; I've met person after another who has scrubbed their online presence so it can't be held against them during visa processes, leaving them unable to advocate for themselves