There's a whole class of videos showing someone's mother or grandmother cooking with practiced ease and flipping hot food with bare fingers. How are their hands so tough? The secret is (as usual) that reality is complex, but we think only in shortcuts. (I love figuring out puzzles like this!)

I haven't bought McD or similar in decades; but last week my kids played in a late concert and were v thirsty at near midnight with a 45-min drive home; the McD drive-thru was the only option. We then lost 25 minutes failing to get anything at all before driving home.

Chris Betcher@chrisbetcher.com · 2w ago

I don't really eat fast food, and gave up on McDonald's, Hungry Jacks, etc years ago. But very, very occasionally I give in and have some, thinking maybe it's not that bad. Every single time it tastes like disappointment seasoned with regret.

Reading Psychology of Software Teams from @grimalkina.bsky.social at the moment diving into what happens to teams AFTER they commit, do whatever it takes, and ship that project to great acclaim and am reminded how "it's not a sprint; it's a marathon!" sounded wise, once No, these are our lives

The cool thing about playing guitar (and other instruments) is that no, your fingers (& brain) literally can't do what you want but you keep urging them to, and they slowly change, until you have different fingers and a different brain that can

+1 this Also — "if you hit a bug or missing feature, just raise a PR" falls over from lacking coding skills, sure but ALSO that's a terrible way to make a good UX. Imagine a new PM pushing for a feature. They know it's good b/c... a single user who hasn't used the product successfully spec'd it

Ian Coldwater 🧊🚫@lookitup.baby · 3w ago

Look, I’m an open source maintainer, and if you want people to use that FOSS software as an alternative to that proprietary software it’s good to understand why people wanted to use that proprietary software in the first place and why they might be hesitant to switch It’s not because users are dumb

I tried paddleboarding for the first time at an offsite — where I flew to a different country to see people I work with and it felt like a good metaphor to share here? With strangers I could also post a photo, like how I could walk up to random people at the store and show them This life is weird

Why do I see so many reactions to "big words = ableism", but zero of the posts they're reacting to? All the responses are the same, too ("look it up!") and none them seem aware of actual accessibility issues & ableism. It matters what the writing is; are we talking literary fiction or govt forms?

Mochyn 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🏳️‍🌈@mochyn.bsky.social · last mo.

I see that we're now at the "using big words in your book is ableism" point in the degradation of media literacy. You have in your hand a device that can pull up the definition of any word, dictionaries exist. If you don't know a word, look it up. What the hell has happened to curiosity??

I watched the first half of the world cup match last night, in seats pulled out into the street outside a bar in Paris I don't know why, but the FIFA logo got shown a LOT, and every single time I'd parse it first as FAFO

I gave a sponsor keynote launching the RAISE Summit Hackathon in Paris this morning! Made slides late last night, it wasn't clear I'd be able to use them; no rehearsal. Somehow it all went off quite smoothly, and I was a lot more comfortable on stage than sitting in the audience 5 minutes before.

Listen, I *used* to tell dad jokes on occasion, but I stopped completely a few years ago when he passed away ...we had a tough relationship, but some work on all sides did pay off; and his delight in sharing a good (or terrible) joke was never in doubt

Devops & AI-powered teams: this gets tricky. We moved away from the usual Grafana model of stable teams of 8+ engineers supporting any large project (and able to cover on-call for what they ship directly) to ... often 2-4 engineers in a workgroup building a project, with much more flexible groups.

I never see anyone else bragging about this but in the past 2 years, I've had *five* engineers in my team take multiple months off, either as new parents, or for their 5-year sabbatical all on the most fast-moving & innovating engineering team in the company. These things are not disconnected.

it remains true: to get better at doing something, you have to do it a lot, preferably in a row, and see how it turns out writing. playing music. teaching. sports. doing dishes. grant proposals. any human skill you care to name

javier grillo-marxuach@okbjgm.bsky.social · 2mo ago

and no, none of what is going on right now leads to “better” shows - why? BECAUSE WRITERS/DIRECTORS/CREATIVES DON’T GET ENOUGH OPPORTUNITIES TO GET BETTER AT THEIR CRAFT AND CAN’T EARN ENOUGH TO STAY IN IT FOR LONG ENOUGH TO GAIN MASTERY. (10/14)

Happy pride — remembering when the US was progressing rather better than recent days (2004)

Massachusetts Supreme Court Orders All Citizens To Gay Marry

BOSTON—Justices of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled 5-2 Monday in favor of full, equal, and mandatory gay marriages for all citizens. The order nullifies all pre-existing heterosexual ma...

theonion.com

I admit I would like to see a bit more variety in the "gotcha" questions people use to show gaps in AI abilities I mean, I have never once in my life asked any program of any kind how many [letter] are in [word] — can we mix in some more useful-feeling gotchas?

"[Chart type] of [type of data] that shows [reason for including chart]" is a start but alt text that leaves out any *conclusion* you can draw from the chart is still common. "A line graph showing EV, hybrid & ICE car sales over time to show large recent shifts" includes a reason.. but is useless

Accessibility Awareness@a11yawareness.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Many struggle with writing alt text for charts and other other data visualizations. Amy Cesal's "Writing Alt Text for Data Visualization" hammers home the importance of explaining the chart type, the type of data, and the reason for the chart. medium.com/nightingale/...

So here's my thesis re: "AI" at this point. 1. Not a "strong" AI 2. Not a "soft" AI 3. Questionably general 4. Still a useful tool and one that's going to permanently change the technology landscape

I'm not a philosopher but it does seem obvious that ethics apply to actions people take; we are the responsible actors. AI ethics would just be "are people deploying / using AI in ways that are morally good or not," and it's up to us to evaluate outcomes & regulate as needed.

Dr Abeba Birhane@abeba.blacksky.app · 3mo ago

folx, I’ve been working on AI "ethics" for almost a decade now & hate to tell you there’s no such thing as "ethical AI" the only "ethical principle" that works is regulating the shit out of the industry & to take back control of our autonomy, fundamental rights, freedoms & right to exist w/out AI

slightly increase a band 23cmИ

Ethan Kocak@ethankocak.com · 3mo ago

slightly increase a band They Must Be Giants

It's curious — I know enough of how LLMs work, there's no consciousness that'd be upset if I experimented to see what kinds of abuse would be rejected vs tolerated by different models but I just don't want to. It'd feel repugnant. Alarm bells going off.

Dare Obasanjo@carnage4life.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I think this is a great feature. While I have some reservations about further leading people to humanize AI chatbots, the internet has already made it easier to be ruder to people online than they would in person. We don't need a sandbox where you can learn to be infinitely rude without consequence

Yeah, this just changed my view. Starting from scratch risks building the wrong thing, whereas other companies can be a good proxy for what you want to do. simonwillison.net/2026/May/6/v...

There's an amazing communication hack where you share your interpretation & next actions, so the other person can see where you're headed and maybe help course-correct ... this was around before Claude, I swear it

fuckface "squeaky" from:me@skeet.best · 3mo ago

the thing I've personally noticed is how many times I'll submit a prompt, watch it reasoning, and go "oh, actually that minor point right there is a detail I *shouldn't* mention, it's getting hung up on trying to understand it", and damn if that ain't just the way it's gone my whole life with people

Trying to identify the helpful animal in this graphic? Here's a little rule of thumb to help you figure it out: Q: How do I distinguish a stoat from a weasel? A: A weasel is weasily wecognised and a stoat is stoatally different credit: Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust

Buckinghamshire Archives@bucksarchives.bsky.social · 3mo ago

We’ve been told our content needs to be more informative so here you go

AI-run business experiments are interesting and fun up to the point where they waste the time of humans who haven't opted into the experiments - I think they need to keep their own human operators in the loop for outbound actions that affect other people simonwillison.net/2026/May/5/o...

With AI, we can now create tech debt at unprecedented speeds ✨ Super curious if we can get *out* of it again, also at unprecedented speeds. For a start, if you have a working product you're WAY ahead of people building "good architecture" for a product they're still inventing with zero users.

Rob Whelan 🌱@robw.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Speedrunning tech debt must be... not fun, but tbh it'd be a pretty interesting challenge to untangle this This is not new territory! It's going to look similar to a lot of just-barely-survived startup codebases where feature after feature was barely added for a demo etc Many patterns to recovery

I've been using Android TalkBack for a while as a way to 1. Read articles, stories etc without needing my eyes on a screen 2. Remind myself how terrible accessibility is, despite the fact that we figured out this tech decades ago TalkBack does slowly improve; but overall experience gets worse

Trying to figure out why I'm utterly uninterested in this but others are I've never wanted a dustpan or paint rollsr tray that held a large bucket worth of dust / paint, for one — too heavy, disaster if it spills, more paint than I'd ever paint in one session (and if I have that much dust: ouch)

brennan@brennan.computer · 3mo ago

it's so crazy, sometimes you feel like everything has already been invented and then something pops up that is so obviously like 'why didn't we do this 50 years ago?' would love to see how they're doing the multipart mold - internal bossed measurements and lines would likely be separate segment(s)?

We are apparently inventing a way to generate media that just remixes what you already recognize & how you already think. No need to encounter other lives, mindsets, cultures, even other characters; no risk of accidentally enriching your perspective; just eating your own output, over & over, great

Jesse Hawken@jessehawken.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Jesus Christ, this is more dystopic than anything Philip K Dick ever wrote but it’s what the Russo Brothers want for your AI Slop future

First principle of data privacy is: what you don’t have, can’t be stolen from you, and no one can compel you to hand it over.

I'll need to write this down as a blog post, thanks for the prod. off the top of my head: - moving away from a task flow as the dominant paradigm - reducing noise in the flow - constructing delegation differently - much more recoverability - many more layers of abstraction on change/work history