Andrew Reid

Four charts with a scary Halloween theme. Fig.1 "This scatterplot is dripping with blood" Fig. 2: A pie chart, captioned "The data reveal an angry mask" Fig. 3: A line graph with areas shaded red, captioned "The trend has developed toward razor-sharp fangs" Fig. 4: A bimodal distribution with a scary faces looking like two ghosts, captioned "This is a bimodal distribution of vengeful spirits. Cartoon by Grant Snider (2019)

📊 #dataviz
⚠️PSA: Time to issue the annual Halloween _Axes of Evil_ Warning.
👹 Don't let any of these cross your threshold.

i think if you ride public transit enough you learn that most weird behavior is not dangerous, and conversely i think driving a car teaches you that everyone is trying to kill you at all times

Opinion | A Nazi Tattoo Exposes Democrats’ Greatest Weakness

Gift link to Tressie McMillan Cottom's NYT piece today about Graham Patner and his tattoo. Nuanced and insightful, but I'm gonna post it to social media anyways.

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/o...

#giftlink

As the great Norm Macdonald said (when dying of cancer):

"I'm pretty sure, I'm not a doctor, but I'm pretty sure if you die, the cancer dies at the same time. That's not a loss. That's a draw"

The official home of the Python Programming Language

TLDR; The PSF has made the decision to put our community and our shared diversity, equity, and inclusion values ahead of seeking $1.5M in new revenue. Please read and share. pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-...
🧵

A picture of two people in front of a projector screen, which is showing the first slide of a PhD defense titled "State-Level Nuclear Fuel Cycle Simulations for International Safeguards Applications". On the right is Katie, wearing a suit and the smile of relief that comes with finishing your defense, and next to her is her advisor Paul Wilson

A picture from the audience of Katie mid-presentation, pointing at the screen. On the screen is a slide showing the new nuclear material packaging capability and how it allows simulations to track individual nuclear materials of different types

Defended my PhD in nuclear engineering

A collage of some of the female fans of Star Trek throughout history

Trektober 30 - The women of Star Trek fandom!

Star Trek has a long history of fandom (One of the first!) and women are such an integral part of it that I thought I would highlight some of them!

(Long thread upcoming)

As a wise man once said, if you can get to the coffee shop in 15 minutes but the barista commutes from the suburbs, it's not a 15-minute city, it's a theme park.

(A bit of googling, the wise man is apparently Gareth Klieber, quoted by @danwentzel.urbanists.social.ap.brid.gy )

High-value thread about public messaging. As the great Mel Brooks told us, "The thing you gotta know is, *everything* is show biz."

women created fandom over star trek. cons, fanfiction and shipping, even being obnoxious and demanding of corporate media, the invention of cosplay. it all started with women who were mad about star trek getting canceled.

My mom was one of the OG Spirk zine enthusiasts who wrote letters to get Star Trek back on the air.

WOMEN got that show on the air (we love Lucy🖖) and women organized letter writing campaigns to keep it there!

There IS no Star Trek without women supporting it!

(PS look up Bjo Trimble)

Every time I’ve done the architecture tour in Chicago (which I highly recommend), I’m struck by what a hideous scar on the city skyline Trump’s building is. Just a garish monstrosity with no reverence for the space around it.

I know we're in the post-ironic age, but the argument appears to literally be that liberals and progressives are too conservative, though admittedly in the small-c risk-averse preservationist sense.

I hate this timeline.

I have no experience with embedded systems, but "both" seems plausible to me, including a subset of middleware components rewritten from Python to Rust, with another layer to back-fill the features that weren't ported, forlornly calling out to long-abandoned github repos every day at 12:00.

this is a weirdly specific thing but what would you think would be more likely to see on a fictional giant combat robot?

1. Middleware as glue to different services

2. Hard real-time operating system kernel as integrating layer

3. Something else

Good, short thread on Internet economics, and the pros and cons of AI-mediated all-to-all communications at scale.

Updating my LEGO White House

Book challenge:
- read a book published in each year of your life
- read books that scare you
- offer a librarian whiskey & chocolates to show you hidden books of dark spells & maps to the realm of faerie
- build a wizard tower out of books, hide inside for 1,000 years, and emerge with untold power

The serious answer is:

A fixture of every "A-Team" episode is the "welding montage," in Act II where the gang builds the crazy ad-hoc armored vehicle and/or house of traps for the bad guys. The Mr. T character is prominent in this scene. He's also the main mechanic for the van.

It's amazing how the "fuck user experience" contingent have now managed to take over both open source AND private technology at this point in history.

Why I reimagined "LOTR" from Mordor's perspective - Salon.com Kirill Yeskov explains what led him to write

A while ago I learned that there was a revisionist take on LoTR from the point of view of Mordor, with the conceit that Mordor was scientific and on the verge of industrialization.

I've never found it, but here's an article about it.
www.salon.com/2011/02/23/l...

Original artwork that mimics the famous raising of the flag on Iwo Jima, with the marines replaced by protesters in inflatable animal costumes. The Statue of Liberty and a city landscape are in the background.

Incredible artwork by @4nikkolas.bsky.social.

fundamentally any stochastic system cannot be suitable for producing software unattended. If nothing else we need things like, eg, reproducible builds for security purposes.

AT&T Long Lines

is one of the most monumental efforts that has zero cultural understanding

1. Washington DC

#NoKings 👑

I realize this is unconfirmed, but the literal administrative echo of "Whose streets? Our streets!" is enormously pleasing.

The Majority AI View - Anil Dash A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

Okay, for the folks who asked: here's the majority AI view, writing up the reasonable, thoughtful view on AI that the vast majority of people in tech hold, that gets overshadowed by the bluster and hype of the tycoons trying to shill their nonsense. anildash.com/2025/10/17/t... Please share!

Isn't the leftist solution to view the content on the e-resources page of your local taxpayer-supported public library?

Or hit up your local autonomous collective for a gift link, maybe?

Me: Musters some executive function for a small web-based chore.

Website: We now require two-factor authentication. Would you like the second factor in the Inbox of Anxiety, or the Small Screen of Eternal Distraction?"

...

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