Brent Simmons

I will sip this, but not for long
The flavor’s not very strong

Some of the most exciting new applications for wood include mass timber construction, which substitutes for hard-to-decarbonize materials like concrete and steel, and from this analysis it seems like there’s still a net environmental benefit.

Digging into the studies, it’s worth noting that the authors still found net benefits for long-lived end products like structural and building materials like lumber and plywood.

Waiting for the day it’s Swan Lake…

Way back at the beginning of the year after Luigi did his thing, I took a stab at how many people suffered early deaths due to UHC's policies and came up with "war crime" numbers... bsky.app/profile/thra...

Man, I thought my "drawing and quartering for white collar crime, restorative justice for everybody else" take was too hot to put out there, but there it is!

I've been geniunely curious why I haven't heard anyone ask him leading questions like this. The man has an ego more delicate than a Faberge egg, and I have to imagine he could be easily goaded into horrifying confessions if someone tried.

The smoke and it's flames now, and the frame is crashing to the ground. Oh, the huge elephant brothel!

Ratio this man! RATIOOO

They need to link up as the militant wing of on Dropout so I can justify the Superfan subscription

Guess now's a good time to float my joke account idea: GyreAI!

Gyre would not be AI, it would be Autistic Intelligence... which is to say I'd wait to be summoned to random threads via mention and then infodump for several posts before signing off with some minutiae about high bypass turbofans.

What a weird, crass way to mark Veteran’s day.

The Silicon Valley techbro set did not, and the world is vastly poorer for it.

Looking back there are several points where I think “there but for the grace of God go I,” and one of them was when I bounced off of an intro to programming in C++. My interests took an artistic bent, and I eventually came to appreciate society in an its color and mess and whorl.

As it happens, something important is lost when one turns a vibrant city like San Francisco into an undifferentiated wasteland of athleisure-clad, Huel-guzzling culture ciphers who can only carry a conversation if the topic is memory-safe programming languages or high-risk financial vehicles.

As an undiagnosed autistic kid with computers as my Special Interest, I once thought of myself as an enlightened superintelligence, and that the world would be a better place if those of us who Knew Computer ran the world one day. Then techbros made it happen, and it turns out to be not so great.

Silicon Valley techbros dreamed of a world where misanthropic computer nerds had to be tolerated, and when they made it so it turned out to be Very Bad and now we’re all locked in an existential battle against their anti-human worldview even as they train their kids to follow in their footsteps.

Architects in the US have bemoaned our low pay for years, but my firm partnered with a starchitect out of the UK recently. I was shocked that the juniors doing the grunt work on their part *in London* made about half of what my starting salary had been 15 years ago, after accounting for inflation.

If we were torching a McMansion a day at least the architectural environment of the country would be improving.

As a counterpoint, I did a quick check back after the incident at COTA this year, and there have been Lap 1/T1 incidents at that track at about 1/3 of races held there. Maybe it's an issue of track design, but as it stands dive-bombing to the T1 apex seems like it's way too tempting to drivers.

My mental image of Kitty in the command module already looked a bit like it was on the commode. Suddenly its unwillingness to come out makes so much more sense.

Kirk was moderately influential in the alt-right, but he’d lost stature in recent years and was on the outs with Trumpworld as he’d recently called for full disclosure of the Epstein files. He only became useful again as a martyr, and even then it seems like that was a flash in the pan.

A screenshot of a LinkedIn post featuring an AI-slop reimagining of a tram as a wood-clad, green-roof-mohawked sort of pod, because nothing can be truly green unless it has plastic trays of barely-clinging-to-life sedum thrown on top of it. The accompanying text reads: "Designing Movement. Designing Change. In Stockholm, we’re reimagining mobility - not just as transport, but as living design. This AI-driven, sustainable train concept shows how architecture and mobility can merge: built from natural materials, powered by clean energy, and shaped for both people and planet. I believe the next era of urban design will merge architecture, mobility, and AI into one ecosystem - where every structure and every journey contributes to a healthier, more connected city. The future of movement begins with how we imagine it. 🌿"

Here we see a rare subspecies of the LinkedIn Lunatic, "architectus viridibaptismata." Using planet-destroying AI, it has applied the visual signifiers of natural beauty to objects where they do not belong, presumably attempting to lure in its prey "stultus argentarius" -- the common idiot VC guy.

A read worth your time. "Bovine noises of studious grey-lady impartiality, with the labor of anything resembling 'appraisal' surgically excised" is, as the kids say, a *bar*.

Being online in 2025 means doing digital phrenology on cartoon images of frogs to determine if they’re fascist or anti-fascist.

If you're willing to place some constraints on the foundational biology of the aliens, amino acid dating might be a possibility. I don't think you'd have to stretch too far, since amino acids are thought to have been the first chemical precursors of life.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amino_a...

I hear radar-absorbent materials have a great nutty flavor when lightly toasted

What an absolutely batshit strawman: I guess trying to protect healthcare for working people is austerity, and our present Avengers Endgame-sized sequel to the dot-com bubble is worthy and must be kept inflated no matter the cost. Who'd have thought!?

Me about to fire off a slide deck to MBS titled “The Darco Arcology From SimCity 2000 Will Make Saudi Arabia The Envy Of The World”

The older architectural faculty at KU circa 2005 were still salty about the university pulling the ivy off Marvin Hall in the 90s.

I'm a huge fan of dedicated climbing trellises where they can work, though.