Democrats Will Likely Disappoint Voters Soon - The Atlantic

it’s going to be a struggle to actually deliver on something practical here for the american populace. the knobs are even further removed from where they are with the president.

something, something, walk and chew gum. i’m cautiously optimistic with the crop of youthful candidates coming into congress that there’s the energy to do something good here. we’re all screaming for something solid on the healthcare front.

A.I. Stories in the Age of AI Hype: a Conversation with Ted Chiang • Buttondown

i cannot turn away from anything from ted chiang.

The G.I. and the Paperback: A World War II Love Story

war on the rocks with an interesting digression to literature for the GIs in WW2.

The New Food Movement - The Atlantic michael pollan on the state of things 20 years since the omnivore’s dilemma. definitely worth a read, not much has changed, a lot’s gotten worse, there are some hopeful developments. King Corn still rules the American heartland, where 9...

i followed these 2 links from recommendo’s mailer this morning. a short, but enlightening rabbit hole.

• The Moon Trees - this web site is straight from 1999, but very interesting background.
• Apollo 14’s Moon Trees Are a Living Legacy - The Atlantic - the atlantic provides some very useful context.

The US Government Is Hiding a Secret Court Ruling About How It Spies on Americans | WIRED

not as much detail in this wired article as i’d like to see, but this should come as a surprise to no one who’s been paying attention to this for more than half a minute.

Jane Street, HRT Are Spending Billions to Win in AI Era - Bloomberg

bloomberg does the AI thing with the the HFT firms. complete with pictures of data center shit in the mountains of norway.

these GPU counts are absolutely adorable. seems like the more pragmatic folks are going to set 💰 aflame with the hyperscalers. an approach i think i wholeheartedly endorse.

archive.is - Jane Street, HRT Are Spending Billions to Win in AI Era - Bloomberg

a surprisingly engaging short from the BBC on karl ove knausgard. i haven’t quite been able to bring myself to grind thru his stuff, but i do appreciate the appeal. this is definitely one dude who’s left it all on the page.

The Ultrawealthy Produce More Carbon Pollution Than Nearly Half of Humanity

the numbers outlined here don’t seem too far off when you start doing the math and they’re kind of mind-boggling. i’d be super interested in seeing the methodology here and what’s going on under the hood. if you were going to pick on something here, i suspect it’s the fact that the methodology builds the answer. but then again, there’s plenty of historical data on this front so that seems largely moot. at this point we’re really just knuckling down on how much.

It’s Hard To Be A Rich Radical | Defector

defector updates yours truly on the latest state of things with killer mike of RTJ. i haven’t dug into the purported particulars here, but it would seem that killer mike is not helping the cause like one would hope.

view post on x

[sorry about the x/twitter posting]

this made its way across my INBOX/feed somehow. it strikes me that as organizations drive to flatten their structure and the c-suite drives to get the AI to do the management that there will be a market for tools that you can run as an individual contributor and get a read as to what your performance looks like to management and how you can send the right signals to the AI overlords.

Opinion | What America Is Living Without - The New York Times

i get, but am a little irked that this is labelled opinion. this is a rundown of the real things that people are forgoing in this economy, in this country. these are not aspirational things, just solidly middle class things and the occaisional treat.

see also the new american dream.

The Shrugflation Triangle: How AI, Oil, and Treasuries are Impacting the Economy warning! this is a long read. yes, it’s on substack. but for my money, kyla scanlon’s one of the best out there wrangling a variety of perspectives on the economy and i think her instincts and ...

US military gives Elon Musk’s SpaceX access to sensitive tracking data | SpaceX | The Guardian

every time you turn around you discover that our government has already been bent over.

Golden Dome Is Technologically and Financially Infeasible

it doesn’t require a ton of sophisticated analysis to come to these conclusions. still, it’s nice to see them getting some attention.

I’m Still Convinced the iPod Was the Perfect Gadget | WIRED

the assertion that its lack of internet connectivity was the best feature is one of those things i strongly agree with.

this has only been re-enforced by apple music (unbeknownst to me) absolutely soaking my data plan over the past 2 weeks in italy. turning cellular off for apple music on my phone was a surprisingly grounding, and enjoyable, experience.

Big-money broke behavior i’ve largely regarded BBSP as oddly consumerist wankery with occaisional insights that slap. they really stuck the landing in this post. after describing a fair amount of juvenile judgement and dumb “rich” behavior they work their way to the profoun...

You Are No Longer Invited to Dinner

Modernity has shifted leisure from activities that require coordination with other people toward activities that can be consumed without the permission or participation of others.

this is (imho) a damning indictment of where things have been going and i’m personally not encouraged by this. we’ve been trying to be better about this in our house, but i get it. it’s a struggle.

50 Best Places to Visit in 2027: Lonely Planet’s Top Travel Destinations - Lonely Planet

897: Intergenerational Space Travel - This American Life

i loved this.

The Data-Center Debate Is Divorced From the Facts - The Atlantic

much right, some wrong. either way, watch folks lose their m07h3f-cking minds.

The Latest from Litespeed is the Rumpus, a $1,000 Handmade Titanium Balance Bike - Bikerumor

i love titanium bikes. this is ridiculous. if you see a kid on one of these their parents should be crotch kicked immediately.

Inside the Return of Legendary MPLS FTW Alleycat Babes in Bikeland - Racket

i totally missed this earlier this year. clearly my racket reading is not what it should be. this is a wonderful love letter to the minneapolis biking scene.

Empire of Grift - The Atlantic

this is a rather eye popping rundown of the activities and the engagements of the current administration. it’s sobering to see all of the bullshit of the past couple of years laid out like this. but, there it is. with the firehose of shit we’ve endured i forgot about a few of these. oh shit, yeah … there’s a purported, “board of peace”.

what’s clear these days is that only power matters. the pretense of doing anything good or a larger more civically minded undertaking has been tossed out the window. the notion of being a city on the hill is poof … gone.

your tax dollars at work.

• Make Your First Edit to OpenStreetMap in the Next 15 Minutes | Website Wizard JOSM Plugin

ok, this was something that, for some reason, i could not turn away from. this is a delightfully quick little diversion and there’s even a homebrew recipe for josm. which makes the process that much simpler. the hardest thing in this little writeup is finding the filter panel in the JOSM tool.

sidebar, this is a peek into a very cool world where software meets built reality and all sorts of data sources and layers and cool shit. that i had the time to poke at this in earnest.

Protecting Engineers’ Skills in the AI Era

An operator who only ever supervises automation slowly stops being an operator. The hands go cold. The mental model of what the plant is actually doing gets fuzzy. Then comes the day the automation hands control back. It’s always the worst day, because automation only quits when it’s confused or in trouble. But by then, you have a person in the chair who hasn’t truly operated the thing in years. The manual steps were there to keep the human current. It was inefficient by design, on purpose.

insert snarky comment about vs code fans.

Voters Have a Message for Democrats - The Atlantic there are some interesting bits in here: Julie, a Democrat from Arizona, said this about her party’s leaders in an April 2025 focus group: “They didn’t make people connect to them emotionally enough. And we need that emotio...

work with me here what if the watcher is really a story about america’s dysfunctional relationship with safety and real estate? i’m really trying to find some sort of justification for having wasted time watching this stupid series on netflix. what if instead of being a whod...

So you want to use OpenRouter? — Mo Moustafa

this is a great compendium of the various nits and gremlins that exist within openrouter and more specifically the backing providers. well worth the read.

random reactions / notes i forgot how disorienting this book was when i read it years ago. it takes a solid 30% of the book before the place setting and the character relationships really start to sink in. the descriptive text is incredibly dense. it’s been interesting to...