Ida Benedetto

Very good read. So much is so familiar. findhigherground.substack.com/p/what-i-lea...

Cardboard sign wedged into a community garden fence that says "run like Cuomo is chasing you." With an Illustration of a man in a suit

Orange "Halloween Voter 2025" sticker showing an illustrated pigeon with a witch hat and a trick-or-treat pumpkin basket in its beak. The sticker is on a matching orange shirt with a Caucasian hand and finger pointing at it.

Working from The Center for Fiction today. The sound of footsteps echoing against tall book stacks is so reassuring. Will be doing this more often. centerforfiction.org

"highly questionable taste" offset by audacity. 👏

Unexpectedly saw a very bad ex at an event I love and frequent.

Feeling so grateful to the theoretical physics who chatted my ear off. I was genuinely interested and the intellectual distraction was so welcome.

More reasons to love/hate quantum computers?

AI generated description of mental health chat bots Wysa, Youper, and Ash generated through search engine Kagi.

Someone I know who's in a fragile mental state post-breakup shared how they're using ChatGPT to work through it.

Their approach sounded dubious.

I suggested at least trying mental health specific AI bots, none of which I have tried, so not sure how good they are. What would you do?

POLLS ARE NOW OPEN.

Find out where you early vote ⬇️ 🗳️
findmypollsite.vote.nyc

"I thought it was like a calculator. It's never going to say '2+2 = 5.' It would never lie to you. Why would it?"

Agreed, worth watching.

I really held out trying to keep LinkedIn as a rolodex, but it's overcome me as really just a social network. Bummer.

Happy Indigenous People's Day

Support fr Columbus Day as a national holiday kicked off in response to the lynching of 11 Italian immigrants in 1891, the largest group lynching in US history

Italian-Americans and their descendants (me!) are good now. Time to turn the day over for others who need it

The Stanford d.school Celebrations felt like the non-fiction @meowwolf.com of design, a high compliment coming from me. So much polish, participation, and whimsey! I had a great time. #dschool2025 #creativeessentials dschool.stanford.edu/2025-celebra...

Me: Convince me of that. Because it sounds ass backwards to me.

Claude: I can't convince you of that because you're right - it is ass backwards.

--

🙄
At least it said "ass backwards"? 🤷‍♀️

Also, knocking Candy Land is fair from a game design standpoint, but dicey from a historical standpoint. Candy Land was created in the 1940s by a nurse making fun activities to play with crippled children during a really really nasty polio epidemic. It's ideal for the context it was created for.

Planet Money Makes A Boardgame Planet Money is making a board game!We're partnering with Exploding Kittens to create a board game, which will be available for purchase in fall 2026.We'll periodically publish episodes between now an...

@planetmoney.bsky.social made a board game! First episode about it is out now. A version of it was tested at my board game day.

I love hearing about the industry wide aspiration to create a Monopoly killer. Monopoly is not a great game.🤘

www.npr.org/series/g-s1-...

Help Build the Future: Announcing Cloudflare’s Goal to Hire 1,111 Interns in 2026 We are incredibly excited to announce our most ambitious intern program yet: Cloudflare aims to hire as many as 1,111 interns over the course of 2026.

@cloudflare.social continues w/ principled contrarian approaches to AI.

As @emollick.bsky.social said in a new post, "unimaginative organizations" can be misguided by a "focus on cost-cutting, rather than using these new capabilities to expand or transform work." blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-1...

Wormwood (miniseries) - Wikipedia

Weird time in history seen by the obsession of a son who lost his father and a documentarian versed in interrogating the US government. I most appreciated the son's reflections on exhuming his father and the closing interview between Seymour Hersh and Errol Morris.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormwoo...

YouTube video by Mr. Cardamom Mr. Cardamom - Nani (starring Madhur Jaffrey)

Finally actually watched Mr. Caramom's rap vidoes. I feel good about them. Do you feel good about them? I think you should feel good about them. Bow down for ya Nani. www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQVs...

@zohrankmamdani.bsky.social

While cloth on wood surface showing range of mending stitches in a sampler by Miniature Rhino

Finished a sampler today. 🪡

In a recent convo reminiscing on my astrology classes, I remembered the chart of a public figure that seemed not at all indicative of prominent public leadership. At the time, Nov 2020, I took it as evidence that astrology might not work. Had to look back at whose chart it was.... Kamala Harris! 😬😭

Astrology, Reiki & Shamanic Healing in NYC | Fierce & Tender Professional astrology, Reiki, and shamanic healing services in New York City. Traditional methods with Ida Benedetto. In-person and remote sessions available.

Been re-engaging my astrology fixation lately. After reading a strangers chart at an event after a few drinks, she convinced me to set up shop. We'll see if that actually goes anywhere... but I did vibe code a website in a day and a half. So satisfying! fierceandtender.com

wish i had some answers to share....

Magical Thinking on AI A Response to Thomas Friedman's Recent AI Columns in the New York Times

Is there a term for our tendency to be spooked by our own creations and mistakenly attribute powerful properties to them that they most certainly do not have?

Seems like AI might just be the most recent instance of this.
@melaniemitchell.bsky.social

aiguide.substack.com/p/magical-th...

Tripping on Utopia Order now Winner of the 2025 PROSE Award for Best Book in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology. “Lively and engrossing… The psychedelic flowering of the sixties has, it turns out,…

The books I read:

- Tripping on Utopia benjaminpbreen.com/books/trippi...
- The Personality Brokers www.merveemre.com/paraliterary/

🎧 How to Use Claude Code as a Second Brain Serial founder Noah Brier on using Claude Code for more than just coding: to take notes, organize ideas—and come up with new ones

What's happening that the OSS, CIA precursor, has emerged in the collective cognitive soup?

It's featured heavily in two history books I just read, and in this podcast every.to/podcast/how-..., a guy happens to be republishing their 1944 sabotage manual to distribute at his conference.

OpenAI thinks its critics are funded by billionaires. Now it’s going after them The multibillion-dollar AI giant thinks it's critics are part of a billionaire conspiracy. We examined the evidence

This situation with OpenAI lawyers pursuing non-profits on the assumption that there's a vast conspiracy is intense... Really appreciate the reporting on it.

sfstandard.com/2025/09/02/o...

Posted a reflection on b my consulting practices on LinkedIn, of all places.

www.linkedin.com/pulse/lets-g...

Gotta develop a better internet home for my writing....

Bus Festival Explore buses from our vintage fleet, representing more than 90 years of New York City surface transit history, on September 21, 2025 at Emily Roebling Plaza in Brooklyn Bridge Park.

Think @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social will show? www.nytransitmuseum.org/busfestival/

My lower back still hurts two weeks later after trying out a personal training session at Lifetime. So miserable. Gotta just trust my own proprioception and not think the professionals actually know any better.

Gonna check it out. I always end up regretting it when I don't dive immediately into Casey's software suggestions. (Obsidian!!)