Much of my career boils down to: All code is liability. Minimize it. Feedback loops are everywhere. Speed them up; do them more. We're bad at predicting the future. Avoid it. More tests. Hire smart, motivated people, then get out of their way. Find the right thing to turn off and on again.
Star Axis is complete. 50 years in the making, land artist Charles Ross has finished his monumental observatory in New Mexico. An open lens tracks Polaris and the 26,000-year cycle of Earth's precession. Read the beautiful feature in the NYT -> www.nytimes.com/2026/07/22/a...
"The world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel"
Horace Walpole - Wikiquote
en.wikiquote.org
Huge, and surprising, and important. Dementia is down by almost half over the last 40-50y! (Also reconfirms that amyloid beta was largely a red herring, APOE4 is real, and - news to me - the shingles vaccine seems preventative!)
The Economist@economist.com · 6d ago“Some of the researchers just couldn’t believe the numbers themselves.” Jonathan Rosenthal tells “The Intelligence” of an astonishing decline in dementia rates
Forget Utopian futures, or dystopian ones, and aim for Protopia — a slight betterment. I explain in full: kevinkelly.substack.com/p/protopia
Protopia
For over a decade I have been talking about protopia, but I have never written out my description of it.
kevinkelly.substack.com
Of all the themes in The Matrix, one of my favorites is the requirement of a land line to call the operator and exit the Matrix. Cordless phones, cell radios, wireless networking...none of it can be trusted. When you're doing serious business, you need good old copper.
Hardline
A hardline (also spelled hard line or hard-line) refers to the wired telephones that Redpills used in order to jack out of the old Matrix versions prior to The Analyst's version. Because jacking in an...
matrix.fandom.com
taking a vacation? forgot which day of the week it is? don't worry, hotel elevator's got you
We do have to come to terms with the fact that the open social web is for everyone not just the people we agree with
no no, you don't understand, it's not a torment nexus it's just a torment fidget spinner
It's so weird that even with this World Cup's expanded field, China and India still didn't qualify, despite having the world's largest populations by far. Maybe football isn't historically as important for them, at least within their own countries?
We were lucky to catch Elim Chan's debut at SF Symphony last Fri as the next music director, and it was really special. She conducted La Mer, one of my favorite orchestral pieces. She said she felt humbled and grateful at taking on the role, and she exuded a really direct, open, youthful energy.
Gabe Meline@gmeline.bsky.social · 2mo agoSo yeah, Elim Chan finished tonight’s concert, then just wandered onto the street and started hanging out with everyone
The Great Supply Chain Security Paradox: "every open source lib is getting owned! wait at least a week to patch, let other people find the supply chain breaches before you" "AI is reversing all these patches, the window to exploit is down to just hours now, patch your shit immediately!" ... 🧐
The age-old debate: do you fix a broken system from the inside or the outside?
Whenever I need to optimize and I think I know where to start, I'm wrong. Not always, but close enough. Measure first. Then optimize. Every time.
my google account is heaven@gmail (long story), so I get a steady trickle of emails from people writing to God. some of them are real winners
Consider the world’s simplest database: #!/bin/bash db_set () { echo "$1,$2" >> database } db_get () { grep "^$1," database | sed -e "s/^$1,//" | tail -n 1 }
I've been a daily coffee drinker for decades, and I'm taking a break for a month right now. No real reason, just trying it. Halfway through, not much to report. One mild headache early on. No noticeable difference in energy. (I'm pretty insensitive to caffeine.) I still miss it though!
Lab Series 001 is a collaboration with the Protocol Institute to investigate three aspects of civilizational durability that are being radically reshaped by frontier technologies: time, epistemtic cycles, and interspecies ecologies. Learn more about Labs and how to apply: longnow.org/labs/001/
Long Now Lab 001: Protocols for the Long Now
Lab 001.1 is part of the [Protocols for the Long Now](https://longnow.org/labs/001) lab series. Civilizations run on protocols — shared norms for how we keep time, store knowledge, and make decisions...
longnow.org
I'm no music critic, but I think Imogen Heap's Hide and Seek may be one of the best popular music songs of all time. Right up there with American Pie, Hallelujah, Thriller, etc. Definitely the vocorder's pièce de résistance, I don't know anyone else who's taken that instrument quite so seriously.
Imogen Heap - Hide And Seek (Official Video)
Imogen Heap - Hide and Seek (Official Video)Follow on Spotify: http://smarturl.it/ImogenHeapSpotify?IQid=IHeapHASListen on Apple Music: http://smarturl.it/Im...
youtube.com
from the annals of getting high on your own supply (gift link) www.theverge.com/tldr/915176/...
Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want
Did the tech industry get high on its own supply?
theverge.com
