Tessera

Truth matters.

"Think deeply." There are two pieces here: 1. Take time before speaking or taking action when confronted with a problem. 2. Think for yourself. Do not give this away - to an LLM, to an autocrat, to a cult, to another person, etc. Always keep thinking for yourself.

"Look for the gifts." Every challenging situation, every awful thing that I've experienced, was also a path with gifts along the way, and focusing on the gifts makes the path easier.

"You can do some good." It's frustrating to see every injustice and focus on the things we can't control, but to go too far in the other direction and ignore injustice and live only for pleasure is hollow and starves the soul. Do some good. Just a little. Whatever you can. That is enough today.

"Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech" "your words... tied to your real life identity....Post an inconvenient message about a politician, or get a little too rowdy in a group chat, and you'll get ... a knock at the door. " news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4871...

news.ycombinator.com

Congress is about to vote on the KIDS Act, which would open the door for a surveillance-state internet where you have to submit your driver's license or a facial scan to post/view content. Use the EFF's tool to quickly tell your rep.s to oppose this bill: act.eff.org/action/tell-...

Tell Congress: Don’t Force Age Checks Online

Congress is preparing to vote on the KIDS Act, a sweeping internet bill that would pressure websites and apps to determine users’ ages before allowing them to read websites, send private messages, or ...

act.eff.org

sophie alpert @sophiebits.com · last mo.

There is a new union at Wizards of the Coast! 🎉 cwa-union.org/news/release...

Wizards of the Coast Developers Form Union with CWA

A supermajority of game developers behind the popular digital game Magic: The Gathering Arena has announced their intent to form a union with CWA, also marking the first unionization effort at Hasbro ...

cwa-union.org

got frustrated recently at work about people writing using AI instead of using their brains! here's my take on it: sophiebits.com/2026/06/25/t...

There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text

sophiebits.com

@flarnie.bsky.social · 2mo ago

When I write code, it achieves two goals: The obvious goal - the code we get that run and does a thing. The less obvious goal - my own knowledge of that code, which enables me to debug, improve, and expand it in the future.

@flarnie.bsky.social · 3mo ago

About a year ago I realized cocoa prices were rising, so I got about a year's supply of cocoa/chocolate. Red cocoa powder cost about 8$ for 8oz at that time, so 1$ per oz. My year's supply of cocoa is starting to run thin, and the price of red cocoa powder is still over 2$ per oz.

@flarnie.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I started sharing one thing I learned recently each time I give my stand-up update, and this has been so helpful for me. It reinforces all the things I'm learning, shares context and knowledge with my teammates, and sometimes sparks interesting conversations leading to more learning.

I HATE being sick. Pretty sure this is just a common cold but it's so distracting and annoying. Sneezing and coughing, eyes watering, and feeling fuzzy headed. Ugh. Day 6 of this now.

Bright spot for today - AI resistance is growing stephvee.ca/blog/artific...

AI Resistance is Growing

People are sick of artificial intelligence, and are increasingly making it known through acts of resistance.

stephvee.ca

Eliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Just finished both seasons of "Restaurant to another world", and I appreciated that the chef was always putting in effort to do things to the highest quality, to learn new techniques, and to bring people joy, and that was his primary motivation rather than focusing on profit.

Extremely normal and fine for a company to put this in a public statement

21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

elia ayoub@ayoub.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Palantir put out the most cartoonishly evil statement possible. They’re so arrogant and self-confident they don’t seem to believe their fascistic plans can be opposed. We must get rid of Palantir altogether. twitter-thread.com/t/2045574398...

I wrote docs instead of slides for my latest internal tech talk, and now the docs are written. In the actual presentation, scrolling through the doc worked just as well as flipping through a slide, and it also encouraged making time for live demos and getting into the actual code.

Also for any SWEs who need a laugh - this made me laugh so hard I could not breathe. My fav line might have been "a kafka topic for every interaction". 10/10 youtu.be/xE9W9Ghe4Jk?...

Shipping a button in 2026…

YouTube video by Kai Lentit

youtu.be