Today, August 4, 2026, is the setting of Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” about a fully automated house continuing on after the family who lived there and the world around it died in a nuclear blast.
Jake Wildstrom
@dwildstr.bsky.social
Mathematician, tinkerer, crocheter, freelance geek.
I'm not Hasan Piker's biggest fan but if he can exorcise the malignant spirit of James Carville from the Democratic Party then he can't be _all_ bad.
Donie O’Sullivan@donie.bsky.social · 3d ago"I am not going to be in the same party with Hasan Piker ... if he becomes a force in the Democratic Party, I am out of here," James Carville says on Fox this morning. Reminder: The Left Insurgency airs tonight on CNN at 8p ET.
Apropos of nothing, looking at trade dress for various editions of the Lord Peter Wimsy stories. It's interesting because they're both murder mysteries — and thus gritty — but also moderately comic, with the central character being a faintly Wodehousian upper-class twit, and art can go either way.
Between this and the discovery that solar panel shade can actually _increase_ certain crop yields, people are discovering that there are truly extraordinary opportunities to make better use of the earth's surface area with solar panels. There's so much power waiting to be harnessed!
Ada Palmer@adapalmer.bsky.social · 2w agoA Chilean salmon farm now draws about 57% of its power from panels laid over the water, cutting roughly 136,000 litres of diesel a year and silencing the generators. With the noise gone, thousands of salmon have gathered in the shade beneath the arrays. Ecoportal buff.ly/CwczkbP #ShareGoodNewsToo
Passing thought for the morning: slow-blinking at a cat and playing peekaboo with a baby are essentially the same thing. "My eyes were gone, and now they're back! This demonstrates my trustworthiness and/or entertainment value!"
Huh, I had somehow missed the news that, since 2021, Maryland no longer had a state song, which is actually good news, since "Maryland, My Maryland" was the worst set of lyrics ever to be graced with the name. But it ought to have a new one. One that doesn't suck.
Opera goes hard: "In Elena Doria Winell's operatic adaptation, on the other hand, the psychological weight of unrecognized labor takes a toll on the Hen and she, in a final mad scene, murders the other farm animals, chokes on the bread, and dies."
The Little Red Hen - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
I've told this story before but as a little kid i told everyone i was going to be a garbage truck driver when i grew up. when i became an archaeologist, my parents told me they were proud that i had held onto my childhood dream of collecting other people's rubbish
danielle weisberg@danielleweisberg.bsky.social · 2mo agoI went to a two-year-old’s birthday party today and their parents booked an LA Waste Management trash truck to come park out front and the way these kids RAN to see this thing up close!!! The WM reps also had party favors and coloring books. Lowkey want to book it for my own birthday
A hot take thread on LLMs, undercutting the market, and how their strategies are (and are not) like the Uber/Lyft market-invasion plan. The tl;dr: AI is trying to do for creative labor what Uber did for hired drivers, and it's not going to work. Disclaimer: I am not any sort of relevant expert.
ICE is not about immigration. ICE is about normalizing a paramilitary force on peaceful streets. Abolish ICE.
Abdul El-Sayed@abdulelsayed.bsky.social · 2mo agoICE is not about immigration. ICE is about normalizing a paramilitary force on peaceful streets. Abolish ICE.
Eurovision is over! Spoiler: once again, fans managed to keep pro-Israel brigading at bay.
Eurovision 2026 grand final thoughts
The notes I wrote up for the second final ended up being kind of fragmentary; I was distracted for a fair bit of the show. But I’m definitely writing up full details for the grand final. Denm…
bishopsreviews.wordpress.com
Better late than never, my Eurovision first semifinal thoughts.
Eurovision 2026: first semi-final
Maybe I should use this site again some day for talking about something other than Eurovision. Well, today’s not that day. Thoughts on the performances in the first semifinal! Moldova, “…
bishopsreviews.wordpress.com
I'm using OpenAI Whisper to subtitle a video and am pleasantly surprised by the accuracy. I probably shouldn't be, because AFAICT Whisper uses a trained neural-net model like most cool "AI" did from, oh, 2002 through 2019. It's only the injection of LLM that makes modern "AI" horseshit.
Listening to the America cover of "I Don't Believe in Miracles", thinking, "Colin Blunstone went harder." It's hard to imagine going less hard than Blunstone, but America pulled it off.
(Reposting because image upload failed the first time for some reason) Today I was nearly brained by falling hardware while teaching! OK, I exaggerate. I was a good 10 feet away, but on any given day, I quite reasonably could have been near or under the projector screen as it fell.
So, it looks for all the world like the administration's next move on Iran is "declare victory and run away as fast as possible, leaving the mess for other people to clean up". It's giving credit where it's very much not due, but it looks like that might be the best move under these circumstances?
Having a PhD doesn’t mean you’re always right, but it does mean that you unlock new and more powerful ways to be wrong.
All you need to know about ballot fraud is that it is, and for several decades has been, vanishingly rare. If you really want to dig deeper, then historical information is that over a century ago, ballot fraud was _rampant_, but almost all technological developments since then have improved matters.
It may be frivolous to do so, but it's been surprisingly effective to view the Iran war through the lens of EU5 mechanics, as encountered by a recklessly ignorant player: * Declare war without even fabricating a casus belli, take a huge stability hit.
Listening to Hobo Blues Band's 2008 _Bolondvadászat_ parallel to the 1984 original, mostly thinking of the remake as an overproduced mess that was an ill-conceived idea, but in spite of it all that bizarre disco-funk arrangement of "Mesél az erdő" is growing on me.
DHS keeps the fuck plane. Lewandowski stays on it and he has to fuck. Markwayne's problem now.
Hemry, Local Bartender@bartenderhemry.bsky.social · 5mo agoDoes she get to keep the fuck plane
My daddy always told me, "Never bet on anything that can talk." With that dictum in mind, I have a question about the constant string of reports of insider bets winning big on prediction markets: who are they winning _from_? Who are the dumb marks placing bets in pools with known insiders?
The Iranian regime was horrifically unpopular with their people mere months ago, and our response to that is... surprise attacks? I'm not any sort of student of history, but I get the impression nothing juices a government's legitimacy like foreign aggression. We've fucked the revolution so hard.
To triumph in a swordfight, you have to at some point do something your opponent won't expect, but despite its high success rate, the Surprise Blowjob never became a popular fencing technique.
@baldjameswin.bsky.social · 6mo ago
Customer in Aisle 1 (loudly, into cellphone): Yes, I’m here, and I found it, but they have a bunch of different kinds and I don’t know which one to get. Me: Hi, can I help you? Customer: I need some rat poison for my husband. Me: OK, no problem. How big is your husband? (This really happened.)
I wrote a little tool to solve a problem that was bugging me. Little code solutions like this always bring me joy.
GitHub - dwildstr/unbooklet: Split and reorder pages in a PDF from a scanned booklet
Split and reorder pages in a PDF from a scanned booklet - dwildstr/unbooklet
github.com
So, evidently @jaketapper.bsky.social has kicked off a conversation about exactly what is a "concentration camp". This sort of thing _should_ be basic knowledge, but a lot of people have the same misunderstanding of how the Konzentrationslager system worked which I'll call "the Auschwitz effect".