tsky

TIL mechanical sympathy

this crossed my desk from @biancawylie.com earlier, on a form of public-sector procurement that not only takes the idiosyncrasies of information infrastructure into account, but would acknowledge the relationships implicit in other procurements as well:

www.digitalpublic.io/intro-to-rel...

indeed the kind of output i'm concerned about with raw (ie non-RAG'd) LLM output is gonna look a lot like the reinhart-rogoff debacle: www.newyorker.com/news/john-ca...

by this i mean, data is used to argue (and get) a policy prescription and by the time you find out it's wrong it's a fait accompli

"Today, the hippies have aged out of the computer industry entirely, the yuppies are retired, and high-tech entrepreneurs like Musk are leaving California for Texas. The world of digital technology has changed too. In the 1990s, everyone from modem makers to software developers was focused on building the global network. Connection was the order of the day. Today, the World Wide Web is in place, our computers are in our pockets, and the smart money bets on turning the data we generate into patterns that can be sold to the highest bidder. The global system of connection built out in the 1990s has turned the social world into a resource for the oldest form of capitalism, extraction. For that kind of work Texas makes an ideal home. Built early on from the profits of cattle ranching and slave-picked cotton, propelled to national prominence by the oil booms of the early twentieth century, Texas has long been synonymous with turning natural and human resources into money. Its promoters have been expert, too, in turning cowboys and oilmen into emblems of American masculinity and celebrating a muscular Christianity. From its earliest days as part of Mexico, when the Mexican government required settlers to convert to Catholicism, extraction has been entwined with religion and racial politics. In the 1920s and 1930s, fundamentalist Christian radio echoed across the state. In 1953, Reverend Billy Graham staged a revival that filled the Cotton Bowl with seventy-five thousand Texans. Since the 1950s, Southern Baptists, whose conservatism has increased over the decades, have dominated the state’s religious scene. Today, they and right-wing members of other denominations help organize and fund the state’s politics."

"The Texan Ideology" by Fred Turner (2025)

thebaffler.com/salvos/the-t...

YouTube video by Doctor Cliff, AuD Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss | What Happens if You Lose Your Hearing Overnight?

Friend just randomly lost most of his hearing in one ear suddenly and his urgent & primary docs didn't know what to do. It turns out recovery right now requires immediate ENT diagnosis with treatment within a couple days. He waited 2 weeks. Possible CVD connection. www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiyQ...

Predated Carlota’s great France talk I posted last week or so.

arguably the job of design is to come up with creative ways of exhausting the space of mistakes, and doing it on the cheap

the beginning of wisdom is realizing that social media is not real life but after that comes realizing that nothing else is, either, so in that sense, wisdom is sort of a dead end

Sounds familiar to lots of design actually: “The importance of the *reference interview* is founded on a simple assumption: that patrons rarely start out asking the librarian for the information they actually need.”

Watch those CSPs tho!

Carlota PEREZ au Forum du Futuroscope 2025 (4/15) Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

In this talk for Futuroscope 2025 (with French subtitles) I say that populism happens midway along each technological revolution. The way out are policies creating new dynamic demand. Last time it was suburbanisation; this time it's reglobalisation for a North-South win-win game. urls.fr/xo9QKg

EFF Awards Honoring Those Who Are EFFecting Change YouTube video by EFForg

Here is @erie.bsky.social's acceptance speech at the EFF awards: www.youtube.com/live/uOYqIT3... Well worth watching.

Managed to sort-of-fold a Huffman tower. Origami with curved creases! Designed by famous Mathematician David Huffman, who also gave us Huffman codes for compression. Fun.

Seeing Like a Supply Chain: Data in the Circuits of Global Trade Miriam Posner

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Systems at War in a Hostile Universe: The Informatic Roots of Logistics 2. Exploding the BOM: Digitizing Production in the Cold War 3. Phantoms, Backflushes, and the Trumpet of Doom: The Dilemmas of Just-in-Time 4. Inventing SCM 5. The Sensate Company in the Animate Cloud 6. Transferring Risk in a Calamitous World

It’s in 😬😱

“Jesus Christ” was coded as “Administrators/political leadership.” (We coded this as “Other.”)

I do think that LLM-assisted coding of open ends is one of the genuinely promising use cases for the technology, so I hope that continues to develop, but also lol

www.langerresearch.com/wp-content/u...

It’s been the teams, people working together to figure things out and get things done.

We build in sand. But we are building it together. How lucky we are!

feels sometimes like I exist to make those that are not worried to worry and those that are worried to not worry, I just want everyone to think about it!

This seems especially questionable because Google has been pushing LLM responses on search that were known to be low quality,likely smaller,lower energy models.

Its search properties are so vast, it seems plausible that these could outstrip all the consumer&API Gemini usage in terms of the median.

This seems especially questionable because Google has been pushing LLM responses on search that were known to be low quality,likely smaller,lower energy models.

Its search properties are so vast, it seems plausible that these could outstrip all the consumer&API Gemini usage in terms of the median.

An image of a proposed redesign for the Massachusetts flag: it is a photo collage with a huge Dunkin Donuts at the center with the Harvard "Veritas" seal on the front of the building and a huge lobster plush doll walking out the front of it. The enormous smiling head of Governor Maura Healey rises up from behind the building, with heart-shaped sunglasses pasted over her eyes. Three bros in the lower left of the photo are raising a toast in red Solo cups, and in the lower right a (possibly drunk) young white person wearing a white T-shirt and sunglasses is waving a huge rainbow flag and wearing a rainbow boa. The word "MASSACHUSETTS" appears in the upper right in enormous pink-sprinkled letters in the Dunkin Donuts font.

The submissions for the new Massachusetts seal, flag and motto are up, and my friends, they are a *trip* www.mass.gov/doc/massachu...

Yeah, I had a bad pillow for 8 mo 1 time in another country a decade ago where pillows weren’t a thing. It got worse and worse, flew home to doc. Then I realized I was straining them by the way I was lying down. Now I use a leg pillow too to help stability. Scary indeed, good luck in resolution!

Live with Tim O’Reilly: A Conversation with Princeton’s Arvind Narayanan Is AI unprecedented, or is it a “normal technology”?

Tomorrow, on Live with Tim O'Reilly, I'll be talking with Arvind Narayanan of Princeton about his notion that AI is a "normal technology" rather than the beginning of an unprecedented singularity.
learning.oreilly.com/live-events/...

at 25m 14s, Strogatz touches on how he encourages talks to center appreciating, even “loving the question,” that motivates you as presenter.
Reminds me of his coverage of Archimedes’ explained intuition in Infinite Powers (2019) underlying the original “power” point en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archime...

Flavors of the post-modern bsky.app/profile/thad...

Put differently, this is the difference between a movement/architecture that attempts to subvert existing power dynamics and one that probably perpetuates existing power dynamics. Be wary of sync engines being marketed as the face of local-first…

Oh also Curt had like a decade at City of BOS.

Vision + Values - Civera

@jennajordan.me This new startup civera.com/vision-values/ kinda reminded me of some of your DuckDB gov transparency 2.0 ideas from Data Reality book club.
I know some of the team and they’re on our @codeforboston.bsky.social open slack if you have any q’s or potential sharing.

Woodley Park Zoo metro with OpenStreetMap trace of the subway rails

On Twitter in 2022, I made a nicer GIF render, my Blender skills have atrophied, but this shows the escalators going down and the OSM way lines to the horizon sort of inside the bottom white tube I made.

In DC at least, many of the OpenStreetMap rail traces are 3D. I loaded them in Blender one time.

A Guide to Thesis Writing and a Guide to Life Writing and research manuals like Umberto Eco’s “How to Write a Thesis” offer a vision of our best selves, Hua Hsu wrote, in 2015.

Umberto Eco’s enduringly popular manual “How to Write a Thesis” is more than a guide for undergraduates; the book is a celebration of the magical process of self-realization.