I was browsing top Bluesky links and not only is it overly centered on US politics, but it is also largely pretty negative stuff. I don't disagree there's a lot of bad in the world, but that's not all people want to talk about. In contrast, the top Subreddits are way more fun and interest driven:

brendan@schlage.town · 3w ago

I just browsed logged out discover, not great fam… - mostly-US-politics news - memeslop; petslop - random generic photos the odd good post, but mostly: tons of images, and… NOT A DAMN THING I'D ACTUALLY WANT TO TALK ABOUT! YOU KNOW, LIKE…ENGAGE WITH. AS A PERSON. ON AN OSTENSIBLY SOCIAL WEBSITE.

1995: “A few months ago there was some breakthrough announcement that on the internet they were going to broadcast a baseball game. You could listen to a baseball game on your computer. And I just thought to myself: does radio ring a bell?”

Bill Gates Trying to Convince Dave the Internet is the Future | David Letterman

YouTube video by Letterman

youtu.be

Bluesky's Custom Feeds have a lot of potential (and room to improve) – but when you find a good one and want to share, it ain't easy! Here's @leaflet.pub's awesome Leaflet Quotes feed: bsky.app/profile/did:... /

A really great essay that addresses the erosion of teams due to increasing individual reliance on AI

The AI Cohesion Paradox: Why AI-Empowered Teams Cooperate Less — And What Leaders Can Do About It

teaiops.leaflet.pub

I just browsed logged out discover, not great fam… - mostly-US-politics news - memeslop; petslop - random generic photos the odd good post, but mostly: tons of images, and… NOT A DAMN THING I'D ACTUALLY WANT TO TALK ABOUT! YOU KNOW, LIKE…ENGAGE WITH. AS A PERSON. ON AN OSTENSIBLY SOCIAL WEBSITE.

Carl Assmann@ccssmnn.bsky.social · 3w ago

hey @pfrazee.com i wonder how i can make my discover feed pleasant? im new here spent some time finding people from the tech, web and local first communities i like

“[Americans] are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate.” Remarkable progress in AI alongside alarming degradation of human intellectual capacities … but I’m sure it’s just an extraordinary coincidence

The End of Reading Is Here

Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.

theatlantic.com

Somewhat humbling to have Claude Fable do a final review of some software that you're about to release and have it then find (and fix) FIVE release blockers, for an estimated (unsubsidized) cost of $149.25 simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/5/s...

sqlite-utils 4.0rc2, mostly written by Claude Fable

I wrote about the sqlite-utils 4.0rc1 release a couple of weeks ago. Since we only have Claude Fable on our Max subscriptions for a few more days, I decided to …

simonwillison.net

One thing I've learned about paradoxes: often the answer to the riddle of "how can this one thing have such a contradictory set of features and effects?" is "it's not one thing, it's *two* things*." 1/

I've been dual-tracking Q&A AI queries between Perplexity with Gemini 3.1 Pro and GPT-5.5 Extra High. But Gemini has gone backwards recently without any public version change. Google clearly doesn't have enough compute and has been kneecapping their own model to avoid timeouts. /

Serendipitous convo picking up lunch with a young electrician father. Has a 2.5 year old. No TV, no videos, no sugar, no candy. Got a used tricycle. People know what's happening, and even if we can't stop it for ourselves, there is growing awareness not to feed the next generation overstimulation.

jimmy@jimmy.path.pub · 3mo ago

OH: "I literally picked up the phone to text you." The zero attention economy. Any attention is a gift.

This is a really good read about how AI can really mess with college student learning. There's a second layer though around casual cheating that is centered around envy and greed and that is recognizable among the investment banking finance strivers pre-2008 or any other bubble.

Opinion | What A.I. Did to My College Class

nytimes.com

If this hantavirus thing breaks out 🫣 Based on the fact that yet again health authorities poured a lot of skepticism on human-to-human spread, but now the consensus is the hantavirus *was* spreading on the cruise ship, I think we are potentially about to enter an even weirder information environment

Medical epidemiologist explains what to know about the cruise ship hantavirus outbreak

A medical epidemiologist explains what you need to know about the hantavirus virus and how the outbreak is playing out.

pbs.org

Pretty cool to be able to see the most blocked accounts for Bluesky, but also Bluesky's own feed customization app is the #2 blocked account 😅?! Surprised/not surprised, but it's disappointing to see the hate. Bluesky can't have an impact without much needed experimentation. clearsky.app #atproto

OH: "I literally picked up the phone to text you." The zero attention economy. Any attention is a gift.

The other funny thing about distillation is distillation is a legitimate technique for cost savings over the long run. If a client application tracks all their questions and answers from a large LLM, incorporates some of their own QA, using those answers to teach smaller open models is just smart. /

jimmy@jimmy.path.pub · 5mo ago

Disturbing hypocrisy – reports on the other site saying that Anthropic appears to have distilled *from* Chinese model DeepSeek. I was also able to personally reproduce.

Waymos are far safer and many skeptic pieces have been double counting when comparing with human drivers. I haven't had time to write about it, but I'll say it's a warning sign that skeptics have been unable to identify this obvious numerical issue. Also trying to use Tesla to tar Waymo. /

Streetsblog NYC@nyc.streetsblog.org · 4mo ago

And the "AVs are safer" argument is shakier than people in the industry want you to believe...

The verdicts against Meta confirm what we’ve known all along: they are harming our kids. As a parent, I am committed to holding Meta accountable - and we’ll do just that when we go to trial later this year. Our kids deserve better. www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-ne...

Jury finds Meta and YouTube negligent in landmark lawsuit on social media safety

The jurors awarded the plaintiff $3 million in damages, finding Meta 70% responsible for harm caused to her, and YouTube responsible for 30%.

nbcnews.com

Thinking about technology adoption: For good ideas, a lot of times, it's not the research or data that is lacking. Proven ideas are often well-known. A woo woo educational fad called "whole language" and "balanced literacy" moved away from phonics and destroyed reading for a generation. /

NJ schools teach reading as they wish, and critics say that fails kids

YouTube video by NJ Spotlight News

youtube.com

I just signed up for Claude as I respect Anthropic for putting responsible use above profit. Hegseth refuses to agree that AI shouldn’t be used for mass surveillance of Americans and for creating robots authorized to kill without a human decision-maker. (1/2)

AI Software Translation: People have been bouncing between bullish and skeptical about AI coding. This is a good example where if you have something that is very well-defined, AI is the clear catalyst that enables a little bit of human and a little bit of compute combined to go a really long way.

Matthew Phillips@fancypenguin.party · 5mo ago

There is no moat any more. blog.cloudflare.com/vinext/

Disturbing hypocrisy – reports on the other site saying that Anthropic appears to have distilled *from* Chinese model DeepSeek. I was also able to personally reproduce.

Dustin Volz@dustinvolz.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Three Chinese AI companies—DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax—prompted Anthropic's Claude more than 16 million times, siphoning information from its system to train and improve their own products, Anthropic said in a blog post Monday. www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anth...

Much has been made of the AI-driven SaaS-pocalypse's effect on employment and the broader economy. But on a lighter note, I wonder if there is a detectable downturn in asking friends simple questions.

Every few months, I write an updated, idiosyncratic guide on which AIs to use right now. My new version has the most changes ever, since AI is no longer just about chatbots. To use AI you need to understand how to think about models, apps, and harnesses. open.substack.com/pub/oneusefu...

A Guide to Which AI to Use in the Agentic Era

It's not just chatbots anymore

open.substack.com

This is very 2010s tech trauma and spiteful, but I don't mind that $TEAM is in decline due to fears of being replaced by AI. No other company did more to create little dictatorships within the industry with more annoying software. Go ahead and drag JIRA and Confluence to the trash bin please.

Just an utter catastrophe for the industry and for democracy.

Sammy Roth@sammyroth.bsky.social · 6mo ago

This chart. Wow. reportearth.substack.com/p/the-washin... via @chriscmooney.bsky.social

This chart. Wow. reportearth.substack.com/p/the-washin... via @chriscmooney.bsky.social

There is so much hype about Anthropic because of Claude Code and business success, but for Q&A, I still find if I really want to check something, GPT-5.2 is worth waiting for and has much stronger logic. If I want conventional wisdom / pretty good + speed, I find myself going to Gemini.

jimmy@jimmy.path.pub · 6mo ago

The AI Frontier has such wild swings. A year-and-a-half ago, Perplexity was talking about how Anthropic had saved them by eliminating hallucinations. Now, on this hallucination benchmark, the top models all have <half the hallucination rate of Claude. And open models / Chinese models do really well.

College coders built a simple tool for DMV staff and administrators to identify repeat dangerous speeding behavior.

How to Use Data to Fight For Safe Streets and Stop Super Speeders - Streetsblog New York City

College coders built a simple tool for DMV staff and administrators to identify repeat dangerous speeding behavior.

buff.ly

The AI Frontier has such wild swings. A year-and-a-half ago, Perplexity was talking about how Anthropic had saved them by eliminating hallucinations. Now, on this hallucination benchmark, the top models all have <half the hallucination rate of Claude. And open models / Chinese models do really well.

This is how I am supposed to get updates on the aftermath of the storm. Instagram: when I open the link I am Immediately told I have to download instagram. I can X out of that, but I can’t look at any of the posts on the city’s page bc it forces me to download instagram.

Super_Bus_Machine 🚌🚍@super-bus-machine.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Just my assessment of the past week. City leaders did a good job getting ahead of this storm, did a great job providing drivers a place to park who affected by snow routes. But then for some reason, they stopped updating. The last update on the city’s website was Sunday.