“There is no point in criticizing something if some law of nature means that it must be so. But there is, despite claims otherwise, no law of nature which says we have to be bastards to each other or to the species we share this world with.” @ianwelsh.bsky.social www.ianwelsh.net/we-dont-have...
love it when a university i attended 20 years ago writes to let me know they've been hacked and they've leaked my social.
Text: The deal purportedly involves "retraining the content recommendation algorithm on U.S. user data to ensure the content feed is free from outside manipulation," but given you can't trust any of the companies involved, the Trump administration, or what's left of U.S. regulators, that means absolutely nothing. Oracle will be "overseeing data protection," but that means nothing as well given Oracle is run by an authoritarian-enabling billionaire with a long history of his own privacy abuses.
we’ve been gaslighted into believing that gaslighting is a thing.
i wonder if a part of this isn’t the end of crypto idealism due to aggressive mainstreaming by an obviously corrupt and overweening state. a lot of early crypto enthusiasts really were idealists of one bent or another, of whichever bent in ways that the Trump era defiles. so why not cash out now?
Loading quoted Bluesky post...
“The average American can no more imagine the texture, habits, and routines of everyday life in a walkable urban community than they can imagine completely cutting meat out of their diet. Maybe less so.” @ad-mastro.bsky.social
Loading quoted Bluesky post...
for me the real marker of credibility is his promise to bring drug prices down 400, 500, even 600 percent. i am willing to presume all of his claims are as credible as that one.
i like to think i could have made a failure of myself no matter what my race or gender — or nationality or religion or sexual preference — had been.
have we considered prosecuting a war for whaling rights? the world once ran on whale oil and blubber. MAGA!
A great piece that explains succinctly why Congressionally defined independent agencies, far from undermining executive accountability, are prerequisite to it. by @jamellebouie.net www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/o...
is it a "real" journal if they didn't vet the references? isn't that a minimal editorial function?
Loading quoted Bluesky post...
The relevant unit of housing is not the unit. It's the district or neighborhood. Housing in contemporary society is not to about glorified tents, just to keep the rain off. Homes are the literal structure of society. Their most important characteristics are in relationship to other elements.
Please let’s try approval voting, potentially with no primary at all, just some reasonable ballot access criteria that ensure a tractable number of general election candidates.
Loading quoted Bluesky post...
okay, evolution. why do they have those cute little itty bitty claws? to ravage nearby amoebae for meat? or just to make the look more like cute little itty bitty bears?
Loading quoted Bluesky post...
i’m not sure how much is because it has shifted or because the community that would once have been its audience has shifted, but vox.com seems increasingly unmoored somehow.
Text: It is worth remembering that the explosion of suburban growth in the postwar era was not about detached houses or yards or conservative morality, really; it was about building a lot of housing quickly and at scale. The postwar suburban project was the YIMBY movement of its day and context. In those days, with cities in rough shape after 20 years of neglect, intense housing demand among young people, and a great deal of cheap and easily buildable land adjacent to the old cities, the easiest way to solve the housing crisis and build homes for young families was to build suburbia. The fact that this was the physical context of the postwar baby boom probably says very little about the relation between childbearing and the kind of housing in which it took place.
how is AI slop affecting / likely to affect geolocation of photos?
it’s not AI good or bad. at what particular tasks, in what particular domains, with what care for quality and accountability for error? there are lots of thorny issues about what role we want for cars with their inefficient occupancy, but, that aside, Waymo deserves to be distinguished from Tesla.
Loading quoted Bluesky post...
i’m 55 years old, but when i talk to myself i still refer to myself as “kid”.
