Chris Waltrip

I am so sick of seeing landscape AI slop that has been blatantly trained on AJ Casson's art with no mention of his name, so here is some of his original work. He is one of my biggest inspirations and all-time favorite artists. AJ Casson's landscapes are stunning and so completely unique.

If anybody's actually released a known-bug-free 100% machine-generated product created by a nontechnical person that's good enough that people are actually buying it, please send me a link. … I'm waiting.)
2/3

Striking, isn’t it, that every AI assistant with a human name has a female one right up until they invent one that’s there to help you code, and it is Claude

the simple truth remains that republicans are a bunch of weird freaks pushing policy that everyone hates

ICE pulls over Texas Monthly’s senior taco editor while reporting in West Texas 'They wanted us to get anxious. It worked,' the award-winning food journalist said of his encounter with ICE agents.

ICE pulls over Texas Monthly’s senior taco editor while reporting in West Texas www.sacurrent.com/news/texas-n...

Wise words from WEB DuBois to gird us today: "It would be shame and cowardice to surrender this glorious land and its opportunities for civilization and humanity to the thugs and lynchers, the mobs and profiteers, the monopolists & gamblers who today choke its soul and steal its resources."

Shot + chaser

World still on track for catastrophic 2.6C temperature rise, report finds Fossil fuel emissions have hit a record high while many nations have done too little to avert deadly global heating

With current pledges, the world's on track for 2.6°C of warming in 2100 compared to preindustrial levels.

10 years ago, before the Paris agreement, it was 3.6°C

20+ years ago, we thought it would be 4-5°C

So 2.6°C is better, but the problem is that climate impacts are way worse than we predicted.

You: Ugh, this migraine is killing me. I’m going to take excedrin

Alien: (50,000 light years away) Our psychic broadcast telling them blueprints for an infinite free energy machine has failed. They used the inhibitor

Ryan Moulton @moultano Oil is the most Lovecraftian thing that actually exists. You're telling me that there's a black ichor under the earth, made from the ancient dead, whose burning can realize all the dreams of man but only at the price of slowly returning the earth to its primordial state?

"World's first potential trillionaire has killed 600,000 people, including 400,000 children" is the only headline that anyone should ever read about Elon Musk

I’ll keep pushing this line of analysis because I’m increasingly convinced the clearest path out of this mess is for Dems to adopt a relentless anti-corruption, anti-inequality, anti-oligarchy, pro-democracy platform. The Dem leadership hasn’t realized it yet, but they’re now a reform party.

Predator | Priscilla Page Get more from Priscilla Page on Patreon

can't remember whether I've ever shared my Predator essay here, but it feels like a good time to do so

You gotta wonder if Texas Republicans are looking at their new congressional map and wondering if they made a huge mistake.

IF YOU ARE IN LINE TO SPEAK ILL OF DICK CHENEY, STAY IN LINE!!

These big wins will embolden Dems to take on Trump's lawbreaking and show there's a price for GOP enabling of him. Folks hate to hear this, but normal patterns are asserting themselves: Liberalism isn't dead, Rs are likely to lose in 2026, and Trump is really unpopular, not a magical exception.

Following all of the software engineering, data engineering, etc subreddits is really depressing right now because all anyone talks about is a) how bad hiring is, and b) how bad the actual work itself is now due to dealing with LLMs in the workplace.

Here’s How the AI Crash Happens The U.S. is becoming an Nvidia-state.

so @matteowong.bsky.social & I wrote on data centers: arguably the most important buildings in the world & are, in a way, holding the economy hostage. Byzantine financial instruments, private equity, depreciating tech, hype, $trillion valuations. it’s all there. an ai crash prob starts here.

Sam watching helplessly as Frodo starts to identify with Gollum, a weird, transparently insane bald freak in a diaper who eats live birds and mutters about murdering Sam and Frodo all the time, was a mood without a strong modern parallel until people started falling for AI.

it's cool how America's entire political apparatus genuflects to a pudding brained buffoon with the same approval rating as botulism

nothing pulls you from the farce of believing that your unemployment has anything to do with lack of skills like looking at the cohort of people who are employed and realizing their heads are so far up their own asses they must technically be wind instruments.

Wake up honey, new mustard just dropped

Starplot Star charts and maps of the sky in Python

I've found a really good Python library to create your own Sky Maps: starplot.dev. Really amazing to prepare observation nights. And great support of his developer, Steve Berardi.

#AstroMethods

10-3 marks the anniversary of the recording session for Chronic Town at Mitch Easter’s Drive-In Studio in Winston-Salem. Tracks recorded “1,000,000,” “Ages Of You,” “Gardening At Night,” “Carnival Of Sorts (Box Cars),” “Stumble,” “Shaking Through,” “White Tornado,””9-9” (attempted but abandoned).

Ezra Klein Accidentally Shows How the Media Brought Us Trump The prominent liberal pundit made up a fake version of Charlie Kirk to praise, laundering his reputation the way a lot of mainstream media launders MAGA

"And they are adamantly opposed to recognizing bad faith, so they let themselves be used, over and over, in an endless attempt to find reasonable common ground with political forces bent on division."

The problem is they climbed up the escalation ladder too quickly. They've run out of credible "or elses."

Or else what? You'll try to murder Congress then pardon the guys who did it and call them patriots? You'll have the Supreme Court overturn precedent without even explaining their reasoning?

Always a delight to see GWAR in the news.

WTF

Keep sciencing. We are living through a time when looking at a rock and wondering how old it is qualifies as an act of resistance.

60 years after Gemini, newly processed images reveal incredible details “It’s that level of risk that they were taking. I think that’s what really hit home.”…

Cool interview with Andy Saunders about his book, "Gemini & Mercury Remastered", and his work re-processing the 1960s US crewed-spaceflight photo archives with modern, digital technology. #photography #gemini #spaceflight