I've pretty much given up on optimizing my life; it's too easily thwarted by third parties. Now I mostly seek to avoid tedium so that I have the free time to read and learn stuff. And, of course, watch interesting videos from time to time.

26 U.S. Code § 7213 - Unauthorized disclosure of information

Just dropping this here, for no particular reason: 26 USC §7213 (Internal Revenue Code):

www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/...

JD Vance claimed on X that “Slava Ukraini” protesters followed him & shouted at his daughter.

Guess he didn’t realize it was caught on camera. No one yelled at his kid, and they didn’t follow them.

Vance & Musk need to quit using children as shields. The public isn’t backing down—we want answers.

YouTube video by Technology Connections Algorithms are breaking how we think

This brilliant video, by Alex of Technology Connections, encapsulates a lot of what I've been feeling and thinking of late. I can't recommend it enough, and I hope it resonates.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJp...

DDG is strongly privacy-oriented, does not retain (much less share) your search queries, and in general, they've been pretty awesome for me. While they have AI features now, like everyone else, you can shut them off easily. Works with Safari just fine, too. (2/2)

In case you might entertain the idea of an alternative: Long ago, I switched to DuckDuckGo, which is an aggregator of sorts—it pulls in results from Google, Bing, and other search engines, and presents a list of those results, filtered for relevance. (1/2)

What OMB is doing violates the constitution itself. The ICA fills in the details of how congress and the executive interact over the spending power, but finding the ICA unconstitutional and ratifying OMB’s action here would mean overthrowing the most fundamental constitutional design.

As expected, the Trump team is already deleting climate info from government websites. In anticipation, our team at Urban Ocean Lab created a permanent archive of 100+ key resources and published a permanent archive: www.urbanoceanlab.org/resource-hub 👩🏽‍💻

Good God, man. Isn't it enough that she knows YOU already?

I feel like I should be the one to plug SLA Industries for the same reasons. I still think it's one of the most interesting and disturbing game universes out there, and the system is sound. The horror genre just isn't really my cup of tea, but I still recognize the game and its art as briliant.

I've clearly not been keeping up with the scene, as I don't know what controversy Virginia McShannock is attached to.

"@MAGAMichelleS69" is very, very angry. She writes "I will be filing [capital P] Police [capital R] Reports against anyone that takes a screenshot of my Twitter posts. ¶ This is a warning to all liberals. Take a screenshot and you will be getting a visit from the State Police and FBI."

I'm not a liberal in the sense that she's meaning it (well, maybe I am, given that she's clearly unhinged), but boy howdy, I just couldn't resist this.

YouTube video by UFD Tech YouTube Premium Gets Ads

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DozO...

If this is gonna be the case, YouTube is going to lose Premium subscribers in droves. Including me. I do not understand why so many companies deliberately enshittify their offerings these days.

ORIGINAL PENNANT FOR THE NEW YORK YANKEES FOOTBALL TEAM CIRCA 1940S #157556 | eBay Publication: N.p. N.p., Circa 1940s. All books noted as First Editions are also First Printings unless indicated otherwise.

Example (this is a monochrome version of the same pennant):

www.ebay.com/itm/37492555...?

I'm not such an aficionado, but I do know what you have there is a New York Yankees FOOTBALL team pennant, in color. That team only existed for three years in the late 1940s, and such pennants are running $1000+.

WTH indeed. I feel rather strongly that Washington State needs a significant amount of tax reform, but I expected better than THAT from Bob Ferguson.

"'Following One Million' follows you."

_block_

I don't know about _banned_, but Singal has in my experience been a very consistent asshat who constantly interacts in bad faith, and I certainly recommend blocking him, and support marginalizing him pretty hard.

YouTube video by Dr. Glaucomflecken My Thoughts On The United Healthcare CEO Murder

"Dr Glaucomflecken" says it very well.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGgQ...

I was delighted to find out that the remarkable Adrian Bott (famous for inventing the “Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party” meme in 2015 that the amazing Franchesca Ramsey subsequently set to music) has moved to BlueSky.

Give 'em both a follow if you haven't run into them before.

YouTube video by hankschannel Who is Creating The Non-Human Army

Hank Green effectively called out @fl0wergarden.bsky.social as a LLM-driven argument bot. Well spotted.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpOk...

(Not a real quote, obviously—but it sure feels like it could have been.) [2/2]

"I take (possibly forlorn) hope in the fact that although Adolf Hitler is a mendacious, malevolent, transparently evil man, and stupid with it, Messerschmitt is not. He is highly intelligent and, diametrically opposed to Hitler, he has the welfare of the world at heart." [1/2]

Well, I didn't want to, but I did actually fully deactivate my Xitter account today. Recent changes to the Terms of Service with no way to opt out forced my hand.

At some point, someone is going to have to file class-action lawsuits that force companies that suck up their customers' content without consent to train their "AI" systems to compensate each of those customers. Like, at 25¢/word. You want work for hire? Pay us.

... to be better than this.
5/5

So at some point when I have time (no snickering), I really need to get a little more serious about setting up a reasonable blogging site. I'm not sure how much work I want to put into that—and I'd talk about it here, but again, small posts aren't really the best format for that—but it has ...
4/n

...but a thread of posts breaks up the cadence and continuity of thought, and responses are often scattered throughout the thread, adding even more fragmentation.

If BlueSky _had_ a long-form option, I'd probably use it instead of Facebork as well, but ... it's not going to. Probably ever.

3/n

Also, I always felt that Xitter would be well-served if it added the option of making long-form posts (squawks? honks?), but it never did. And BlueSky can't, because it's based on Mastodon and the post length is limited to 300 characters.

And while sure, you can use threads, ...
2/n

I'm still kind of struggling with what to do with BlueSky.

It doesn't have the critical mass that Xitter continues to maintain, so that conversational feel of tweets happens more rarely and feels somewhat anemic even when it does happen.

1/n