Matt Karlov

This is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time. @aptshadow.bsky.social @abraham.bsky.social

Comic. [Two people on shore looking at body of water] PERSON 1: Hey, where’s that big island we were looking at this morning? PERSON 2 with short hair: Oh, it’s underwater. The ocean’s depth here goes up and down by like ten feet every day. PERSON 1: What? PERSON 2: It’s because the planet has a big moon orbiting near the surface. It causes weird gravity effects. PERSON 1: *What???* [caption] People here are used to them, but tides are one of the weirdest and most sci-fi elements of life on Earth.

Sea Level

xkcd.com/3135/

One day I would like for human society to progress to a point that it wouldn't be profoundly embarrassing to explain how it works to an advanced alien species.

Amazon review of Pride and Prejudice, left by carlton p morgan on 30 July 2010: "Just a bunch of people going to each other's houses"

Happy 15th anniversary of the peak achievement of literary criticism, to all who celebrate

The lesson people infuriatingly never seem to master is that there is no creating a police state just for other people. If you create a police state with no due process for immigrants or accused criminals, then that's the system you've created for yourself.

Stand aside Turing, we now have The Potato Test.

This is high art

Loved season 2 of Severance. Gripping, weird, heartfelt, and unabashedly itself. More please.

Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not) While political reporters are still doing their view-from-nowhere “Democrats say this, Republicans say that” dance, tech and legal journalists have been watching an unfortunately recogn…

Techdirt explains why they're a democracy blog now and also, coincidentally, why this will always be a Mike Masnick stan account: www.techdirt.com/2025/03/04/w...

dropped phone

Let’s take a quick look at LOTR from Sauron’s perspective, where it resembles nothing so much as a counter-espionage spy thriller.

A world in which everyone understood this would be a very different world indeed.

Ok so… There’s a nice little park on a corner, and a path running directly to one edge of the park. That’s the first image, but there’s 12 other images here. In the second image, there is now a desire path running diagonally across the park. Next image, the path has been blocked by a park bench that the council has put in as a deterrent. Unfazed, in image 4 the path now deftly avoids the park bench. In images 5 and 6 the process is repeated, this time with a strategically placed bin which the desire path also avoids. Presumably in a fit of rage, the council plants an entire hedge to stop people creating new desire paths but eventually this too is defeated and a new path find a way. Finally, the council admits defeat and turns the desire path into a proper paved pathway. After a little while, a new desire path curving off this new paved pathway begins to emerge…

A little comic about desire paths.

Feelings are Facts: Love, Privacy, and the Politics of Intellectual Shame A debut of new research and analysis, focused on emotions and the affective register—love! shame! intimacy! What happens when we put lov...

Many insights to digest in this talk by @meredithmeredith.bsky.social

I particularly appreciated the exploration of how surveillance tech and authoritarianism share a key impulse: to divide the world into the few who know and the many who are merely objects to be known

media.ccc.de/v/38c3-feeli...

This is the web now. One easy thing you can do: switch browsers. Brave is just like Chrome except it’s made by people who care about privacy rather than advertising.

from the notebooks of Raymond Chandler - possible titles he jotted down

An idea like this only gets taken seriously when (a) the company fundamentally sees people as nothing more than users, essentially interchangeable and reducible to their digitally-mediated outputs, or (b) the company believes a sufficient proportion of its customers see each other that way.

THE YETI SPEAKS (whose two halves use the same letters, in the same order):

The Importance of the Oxford Comma   Owing to ambiguities caused by its omission, the Oxford comma was the subject of a petition raised by serious serialists keen to ensure its mandatory use in lists of three things or more.   And what a response! From across every nation, the signatures poured in beyond all expectation – from the investment bankers, robbers and thieves, to the politicians, self-servers and exponents of sleaze.   There were the Daily Mail readers, the clowns and deluded; the climate change deniers, the daft and the stupid; the morally bankrupt, Donald Trump and Piers Morgan; Elon Musk, a Bond villain and a trafficker of organs;   plus the poets, the drug fiends and chronically poor – all supported this change to grammatical law. This formal petition was then presented in hope to Sir David Attenborough, the King and the Pope. Brian Bilston

Today’s poem is called ‘The Importance of the Oxford Comma’.

In the Beginning, There Was Computation Life is code, and code is life, in nature as it is in technology.

There’s a long history of people claiming that life is explicable by the best technology of the day (computing, steam engines, clockwork, etc), so I always approach these claims with scepticism. But this is very interesting.

nautil.us/in-the-begin...

Discworld QOTD, from Jingo

The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Panel one: Two small figures stand before a huge machine. One says “Our startup has innovated the human writer out of the publishing process. This machine can write sixty-five books an hour.” A conveyor belt at the front of the machine dispatches a continuous stream of books. Panel two: They walk across the workshop. The second figure, who is reading one of the books, says “but will people actually want to read this stuff?” Panel three: They have reached a second huge machine. “The real beauty of our integrated system” says the first figure “is that it also frees companies from the tyranny of human readers”. A conveyor belt at the front of the machine dispatches a continuous stream of robot readers, happily consuming the content from the other machine.

My cartoon for this week’s Guardian Books.

“I before E except for when your weird foreign neighbour Keith receives eight counterfeit beige sleighs from feisty caffeinated weightlifters”

Astrophysicists theorize that 85% of the day is spent doing “dark work” which cannot be directly measured but is implied by how tired I feel

Vladimir: Well, shall we log off?
Estragon: Yes, let's log off.

[They do not log off.]

A 'great flood' of AI noise is coming for the internet and it's swallowing Twitter first The internet is filling up with machine-generated "zombie content" designed to game algorithms and scam humans. Experts call it the "great AI flood".

Have you got anything without spam in it?

The Philosophy of Magic -
existentialcomics.com/comic/537