botwerks

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Managing Editor: steve ulrich
Webmaster: steve ulrich
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botwerks
11 Sep 15:15 • steve ulrich

the new american dream

i was listening to this esquire interview with emily st. john mandel. there’s a lot to dig into this interview and it’s a great conversation that i wholeheartedly endorse listening to in its entirety. but there was a couple of minutes of discussion in here regarding t...

botwerks
10 Sep 12:20 • steve ulrich

lying's totally allowed

The truth in political advertising: ‘You’re allowed to lie’ : NPR i’m in the middle of reading rewiring democracy by bruce schneier, et al, this was linked as a reference. i’ve suspected, but didn’t know, that lying is in acceptable in political advertising as the speech wo...

botwerks
07 Sep 02:45 • steve ulrich

da fuq? corporations can have spines?

Patagonia Sues the Trump Administration — Again | GearJunkie - this GearJunkie article was the first trip down this rabbit hole of bears ears lawsuit news.

here’s the word from the horse’s mouth - Patagonia sues Trump administration again to defend Bears Ears — Patagonia Works
the NYT weighs in - Patagonia Sues Trump Over Reduction of Bears Ears National Monument in Utah - The New York Times

oh and, fuck yeah, i’m in for a “buy-cott”. buy-cott, divas and shopping is the new BDS.

botwerks
07 Sep 02:45 • steve ulrich

surprise gem: mac os mole - drive cleaner

Mole: system cleaner

this was a recent discovery and in a little less than 5 minutes it had cleaned up a solid 50G of cruft from various locations and eliminated stale/dead caches fron uninstalled apps. highly recommended. i forget how i ran across this, but i’m glad i did.

botwerks
07 Sep 02:45 • steve ulrich

shitty takes for $500 please

Why Broadcom should buy Arista (and why it won’t) - SDxCentral

convulsive eye roll emoji.

botwerks
07 Sep 02:45 • steve ulrich

a plan to hijack yer socials

Inside a Conservative Operation to Hijack Your Social-Media Feed - The Atlantic

here’s a thought … waste the minimum of time on the socials.

botwerks
07 Sep 02:45 • steve ulrich

the new yorker on operation metro surge

What Happened in Minneapolis | The New Yorker

a balanced, albeit high-level, review of what happened with operation metro surge and some of the activity since.

it’s going to take me a long time before i don’t have a visceral enraged reaction when i read about this time in minneapolis history.

botwerks
31 Aug 02:36 • steve ulrich

notes: here comes the sun

it’s not a doomburger, honest! this was a really solid run at rallying the troops and driving a positive spin on the economic inertia behind renewable energy. i’ll be honest, it’s tough to read this as the trump administration is asserting control over venezuela’s oil reser...

botwerks
27 Aug 17:08 • steve ulrich

sources of happiness...

this is for future me. these are things that i’ve taken up that just make me happier. if future me is unhappy, check this list. when i get in the truck don’t listen to podcasts - listen to music. listen to interesting and fun music. hell, listen to the shit you’ve been l...

botwerks
23 Aug 15:48 • steve ulrich

socialism, it's so hot right now...

Why Do Rich Kids Love Socialism? - The Atlantic A teacher who has to buy his own school supplies, an adjunct professor who works at three universities to make ends meet, a social worker who assists the disadvantaged, a nurse whose hospital was bought by private equity, a fe...

botwerks
23 Aug 14:55 • steve ulrich

for a smart buncha guys, you really are dumb

Silicon Valley Doesn’t Get Why You Hate AI | WIRED

it speaks volumes that these guys can be so tone deaf and so smart at the same time. see also, public hatred of data centers.

botwerks
23 Aug 12:52 • steve ulrich

wired on high-quality replicas

We Bought a $500 Counterfeit Luxury Watch. Nobody Could Spot the Difference | WIRED

there’s this part of me that wants to buy one of these to appreciate the craft of the fake. there’s a part of me that wishes i still cared about mechanical watches like i used to. i miss that guy inside.

botwerks
20 Aug 13:00 • steve ulrich

this is not a death house

Designing the Dream House of an 87-Year-Old Tech Visionary

here’s a heartwarming write up and video short about a house/condo that stewart brand and his wife built on their land in petaluma.

botwerks
14 Aug 13:45 • steve ulrich

snow crash 30+ years later

i pulled snow crash off the shelf a couple of weeks ago. i’d been meaning to re-read this but … other things. i have to say, this has not aged well. it’s still an amusing and fun read, but it’s definitely grounded in the milieu of the late 80s early 90s. this novel had l...

botwerks
14 Aug 13:45 • steve ulrich

are you shopping? probably ...

Shopping is Impossible

this is the running joke in our house. if the phone is out … “you must be shopping”.

there’s never been more retail, but retail is dead. we have more forms of X to consumer than ever before and oh, so. many. options. and yet, it all sucks.

botwerks
11 Aug 15:30 • steve ulrich

there are no moats; build the infra

last week was apparently dominated by gossiping about the departures from google. SemiAnalysis and plenty of others spilled a lot of metaphorical ink in the topic. the SA take, Gemini is Cooked but GCP is Cooking reeks of gossip and twitter tea leaf reading with their usua...

botwerks
10 Aug 12:38 • steve ulrich

seafood plunder

Plunder and Danger on Argentina’s Sea Shelf

this is one of the most fascinating things i’ve read in a while.

botwerks
10 Aug 02:12 • steve ulrich

spin the flywheel of money harder

The great wealth transfer reality check

here’s an interesting writeup from that great bastion of progressive thought, visa. a couple of things to take away from this article.

there’s not as much trickling down as folks might think there is. it’s going to be siphoned off at various stages in the process
there’s wealth transfer and propping up taking place right now
this will keep the economic disparities locked in for the next few generations
consumer spending bumps are likely to be modest. of particular interest to visa who’s keen to get a couple points of fees on all of those transactions.

botwerks
10 Aug 02:12 • steve ulrich

suck it texas. you wish you had the stones of winona

All of WPD’s Flock cameras stolen | Crime & Justice | winonapost.com

well played winona.

botwerks
10 Aug 02:12 • steve ulrich

file under: griftocracy

Trump administration to pay German firm to halt US wind projects

botwerks
10 Aug 02:12 • steve ulrich

workism is for chumps

The Future Of Knowledge Workers In An AI-Driven World this is a great writeup. there’s a fair amount that i’ve discussed with friends and coworkers over the years. having worked in tech for my entire career, i don’t even bother trying to explain to people what i do, it’s w...

botwerks
10 Aug 02:12 • steve ulrich

finally, some non-AI crimin' news

AI model achieves breakthrough in forecasting cyclones — Google DeepMind

this is some of the best AI related news i’ve seen in a while. too bad it’s lost in the noise of google staff departures and misc. political dreck.

botwerks
03 Aug 13:08 • steve ulrich

the slide should have been evident long ago

How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds - Open RSS

well, this was a romp through some bad memories.

botwerks
03 Aug 12:27 • steve ulrich

your management fees will be paid in tokens

AI financial advice is surprisingly good — especially if you ask the right questions | MIT Sloan

botwerks
03 Aug 02:12 • steve ulrich

odyssey translator's film review

‘The Odyssey’ Translator Emily Wilson on Nolan’s New Movie

i still haven’t found the time to read this but i’m somehow sucked into everything around it.

this is a great bit of writing and has all sorts of fun pointers around it.

botwerks
02 Aug 13:25 • steve ulrich

in a country where corporations are people, this is not surprising

AI firms must answer for rogue bots, says Hugging Face boss

LLMs these days … amiright?

botwerks
01 Aug 22:40 • steve ulrich

premium dreck

dear apple -

it’s (checks watch and setting » general » about) iPadOS 26.6 …

what is this shit?

botwerks
01 Aug 22:11 • steve ulrich

oh? you think?

GOP Staffers Say the Party Has a Groyper Problem - POLITICO

botwerks
31 Jul 13:37 • steve ulrich

periodically, you must be prepared to burn it all down.

SlopCodeBench: Benchmarking How Coding Agents Degrade Over Long-Horizon Iterative Tasks

someone finally brings this topic to the fore. even small vibe coded projects can be horrifying under the hood.

nice test coverage, but whoa!

botwerks
31 Jul 12:56 • steve ulrich

kimi 3

quick personal observations on kimi 3 there are no moats. kimi k3 running at a fraction of the price of claude is impressive. i wired it up to claude-code yesterday and gave it a reasonable task to refactor some code based on some consolidation that i had spelled out in a ...