Where the grass is [redacted] and the girls are [redacted].

slop is something that takes more human effort to consume than it took to produce. When my coworker sends me raw Gemini output he’s not expressing his freedom to create, he’s disrespecting the value of my time

AI Liker Georg@avengingfem.me · 4mo ago

probably orthogonal to your view of slop but: bsky.app/profile/aven...

People tell me all the time that Waymo is bad because Google is unaccountable. In other news, humans are so accountable that this woman who killed a whole family will (checks notes) be getting her driver’s license back in her mid-80s after (checks notes) transferring all her assets.

San Francisco Chronicle@sfchronicle.com · 6mo ago

The woman prosecutors said killed a family of four after ramming into a bus stop with her car in San Francisco’s West Portal neighborhood will avoid jail time after changing her plea in court.

A key challenge, and a huge source of the disconnect between Silicon Valley and the other creative industries is that, for coders, AI eliminates the drudgery so they can focus on the creative/expressive part. In every other creative discipline, it has the exact opposite effect.

all else being equal I am of course going to root for Team USA but I admit I am strongly pro-Dune and anti-people-sharing-their-poetry-with-me

this is one of those cases where I think no, even rhetorically, you don’t go there. you draw a bright red line and when someone talks about denaturalization you laugh in their face and say “what are you taking about, we don’t do that in America” instead of dunking on their side’s immigrants

Brandon Friedman@brandonfriedman.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Democrats should promise, today, that Melania Trump, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel will be stripped of citizenship and deported if the administration advances this effort

I continue to be in absolute awe of the writers at Quanta. Just an insanely hard job to do, every single article www.quantamagazine.org/networks-hol...

Networks Hold the Key to a Decades-Old Problem About Waves | Quanta Magazine

Mathematicians are still trying to understand fundamental properties of the Fourier transform, one of their most ubiquitous and powerful tools. A new result marks an exciting advance toward that goal.

quantamagazine.org

what if i get into a car chase!!! what if i forge an unlikely bond with a detective who is on the wrong side of his crooked department and i have to help get him to the court house safely to testify!! what if the plot of SPEED happens to me??? these are all reasonable anxieties, sorry i hit your kid

Michael Hobbes@michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 6mo ago

This technology already exists and is widely used. It doesn't involve 'government surveillance' and would not allow ICE or any other government agency to stop individual cars. Just say you think thousands of kids dying every year is worth it so you can speed! www.autoweek.com/news/a615322...

why are these figure skaters allowed to wear costumes that are not variations on their nation's flag? this is absurd (I am willing to countenance RARE exceptions for costumes based on widely-understood and reductive caricatures, e.g. bear costumes for Russia)

I knew bluesky would find a use of AI it likes eventually

gamera obscura@ohrobin.bsky.social · 6mo ago

He wrote FUCK ICE with his own urine.

it's not just that Mamdani is charming af (he is), it's that he is normalizing the idea that children are full members of society that we all share a collective responsibility for

Emoji Caresser@lizrummy.bsky.social · 6mo ago

From @acyn.bsky.social (posted on X) "Reporter: Do any of you have a favorite animal? Child: My favorite one is a gold snake that can move. It has gold eyes, and it has a super-duper tail… Reporter: Mr. Mamdani, the second question for you. Mamdani: Yes. It’s also the golden snake."

welp, this destroyed me first thing upon waking up

they're so close, conceptually and numerically

TIL my grandfather has a wikipedia page! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_J... I knew he was an olympian but it's kind of a funny story. He immigrated from Holland and played field hockey intensely w/ some of his emigre buddies. When the US decided to field a men's field hockey team, they were the

I have very fond memories of paperbacks. My dad did construction work for Olsson's Books & Records and hung out in the break room, where remaindered books with the covers torn off (you only shipped the covers back for a refund) were in bins for staff to take home www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/b...

So Long to Cheap Books You Could Fit in Your Pocket

nytimes.com

running to framebridge brb

nice remembrance (and mirror!) of the now-departed CIA World Factbook from @simonwillison.net simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/5/t...

Spotlighting The World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell

Somewhat devastating news today from CIA: One of CIA’s oldest and most recognizable intelligence publications, The World Factbook, has sunset. There's not even a hint as to why they decided …

simonwillison.net

A great post from @mike.teczno.com medium.com/@michalmigur... But I’d add that this is only part of the compliance picture. Labels are too. So are what we might call “virtual” boundaries—often-abstract lines that national authorities insist must be present (sometimes w specific styling)

Weeknotes, 2026W04: Boundary Issues

I recently nerd-sniped myself into thinking about political points of view on maps, and wondering whether it’d be possible to create…

medium.com

an excellent post from @peterodrigue.bsky.social and @ggwash.org, worth a read for anyone who has an opinion about speed cameras. I'm grateful to him for advancing the conversation (and the generous shout-out) ggwash.org/view/102070/...

If you don’t like traffic cameras, you’ll hate the police

Congressional Republicans are floating axing DC’s traffic camera program. Everyone, including MPD, would hate this.

ggwash.org

I can’t get over how weird this Starfleet Academy show is. Just so obviously the same people and ideas as Discovery, from the timeline to the endless JJ-style flares to the returning non-beloved characters (feat Admiral, You Know, The Tall One). Angry outsider/matriarch mentor. New kind of Klingon!

did not expect the first great and empathetic piece of criticism I read in 2026 to be about Dilbert www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-dilber...

The Dilbert Afterlife

Sixty-eight years of highly defective people

astralcodexten.com

This video shows ICE holding children hostage to bait parents out of their homes. Just unspeakable levels of cruelty and inhumanity.

the 2025/2026 #treelemetry season has concluded treelemetry.tomlee.space

we are nearing the end of the #treelemetry xmasalytics season. some valuable insights gleaned, and a major evolution in our software architecture. more to do, particularly with respect to automated segmentation of events. but we're emerging with a great dataset to iterate on

As a reminder, the reason that the Federal Reserve renovation cost so much is because they followed the law: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Federal Reserve@federalreserve.gov · 7mo ago

Video message from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell: www.youtube.com/watch?v=KckG... www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/s...

we put on the Paw Patrol Christmas special for our youngest yesterday (the season's not over until we get around to taking down the tree!) they attempt a "true meaning of Christmas" plot but it's tricky.

TIL the FBI has its own image format fbibiospecs.fbi.gov/certificatio...

WSQ | Federal Bureau of Investigation

The Wavelet Scalar Quantization (WSQ) Gray-scale Fingerprint Image Compression Algorithm is the standard for the exchange of 8-bit, 500ppi fingerprint images within the criminal justice community. Lis...

fbibiospecs.fbi.gov

Thought-provoking project from @dbreunig.bsky.social www.dbreunig.com/2026/01/08/a...

A Software Library with No Code

Do we still need libraries of 3rd party code when AI agents are this good?

dbreunig.com

USDOT and a major outlet are framing DC's traffic cameras as a cash grab. They're essential for keeping people safe on our streets. But the revenues should go to Vision Zero as the Council planned, not DC's general budget.

What the Politico story got wrong about automated traffic enforcement, and what it got right

View this post on ggwash.org

ggwash.org

I sat in a fucking court room and heard Apple imply that a naked cartoon banana was somehow inappropriate but somehow Grok non consensually undressing women and children is ok?? www.theverge.com/policy/85990...

Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are cowards

Once you’ve traded your principles for proximity to power, do you even run your own company?

theverge.com