Mike Lee Williams

lmao www.justice.gov/epstein/file...

Salt is banned on sidewalks in Germany because it kills plants, corrodes infrastructure, etc. They use crushed pebbles. It works better on sidewalks, works in colder temps, and lasts longer. Depends on a city willing to clean the sidewalks when the snow melts though which lol USA.

Live view of how recently streets have been plowed across NYC.

Green = within past hour. Blue = within 1-3 hours.

This is thanks to the extraordinary efforts of @nycsanitation.bsky.social workers driving 2,000+ plows.

Get a live map of plowing in your neighborhood: nyc.gov/plownyc

Anthropic's CEO says that in 3 to 6 months, AI will be writing 90% of the code software developers were in charge of "And then in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code," Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said.

for example, I thought this was ridiculous. turns out it was only 3 months early. in 2026, of the couple thousand lines of code shipped with my name on them, pretty sure I typed less than 10% of them by hand

this weekend’s print NYT had an article that was published on the website before thanksgiving.

YouTube video by Tom Waits Tom Waits - "What's He Building?"

when my manager starts submitting pull requests out of the blue

very funny to try to scare people away from using LLMs by starting with the most thoughtfully designed and rigorously developed software on the planet

Who’s who at X, the deepfake porn site formerly known as Twitter A look inside Elon Musk’s big tent

like i was saying, the financial times delivers

Documentation Considered (Increasingly) Harmful In 1968, Edsger Dijkstra published a legendary article titled “Go To Statement Considered Harmful,” arguing that its use obfuscated program flow and should be abolished.

i am sorry to say that this is 100% correct samuelalbanie.substack.com/p/documentat...

highly recommend bsky.app/profile/did:... to identify bots and people suffering from poster's madness

2025 bsky.app/profile/mlw....

"rescent". i can barely spell any more. i just mash the keys and claude code understands anything in the ballpark. probably fine, nothing to worry about.

cover of nuclear war: a scenario

cover of little bosses everywhere

non-fiction:
annie jacobsen - nuclear war: a scenario (nuclear wonks have quibbles with this iiuc, i don't care)
bridget read - little bosses everywhere: how the pyramid scheme shaped america (good antidote to the idea that the current grifts are new)

cover of a short stay in hell

cover of the wall

cover of the exorcist

old fiction:
stephen peck - a short stay in hell (reread, chiang/borges vibes)
marlen haushofer - the wall (1963, but has smarter things to say about our relationship with nature and tech than a lot of rescent stuff)
william peter blatty - the exorcist (audiobook, read by the author, insane)

cover of hum

cover of perfection

my top books of 2025.

new fiction:
helen philips - "hum" (ai job replacement literary dystopia, goes well with "the wall", see below)
vincenzo latronico - "perfection" (kyle chayka's airspace in a novella form)

On a Brooklyn Boulevard, Mamdani Revives a Project Hampered by Scandal

exact same framing in the headline of www.nytimes.com/2026/01/03/n.... quick question for the headline writers: whose scandal hampered the project?

if you’re in new york and you want a print newspaper then the financial times delivers.

just endless plodding features about how people are on their phones a lot these days, NPR-level AI stuff, pieces that were on the website weeks ago, etc.

my work pays for me to have a weekend print sub to the NYT. the politics are vile of course (especially of the headline writers who are clearly fifth columnists). but the main thing I’ve noticed after reading it cover to cover every weekend for a couple of months is that it is unbelievably boring.

Claim Chowder: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Five Months Ago Link to: https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-ceo-ai-90-percent-code-3-to-6-months-2025-3

who’s going to tell gruber

daringfireball.net/linked/2025/...

Ooc, why did you include this in the prompt? “You were very happy solving this task and excited to try it and given the opportunity.”

why does this matter? practically speaking, denial leads orgs like the Society of Indexers to give their members very bad advice! is it good for indexers to be blindsided when inevitably (yes, inevitably) in a month someone writes a script that produces a human-quality index for $5?

LMArena is a cancer on AI Would you trust a medical system whose only metric was “which doctor wins the Internet?” No, you'd call that malpractice. Yet that's LMArena.

did you see surgehq.ai/blog/lmarena...

lmao at him on darts during covid: "Without crowds it was disgusting."

Chart showing "Percentage-point change in share of median US household income spent on different categories", 1985 to present. Food and Household Goods down 5-10%. Housing and essential services up ~5%.

apparently so. per BLS data the household income share spent on housing and essential services (health, college, childcare) are up about 5% since 1990. piece about this in today's FT (www.ft.com/content/3fa9..., gift link).

The Saturday FT magazine How To Spend It main article: How Warhammer Won

the Saturday Financial Times, the only good newspaper that you can get delivered in New York City

same notification yesterday and also didn't order a new phone 🤷🏻‍♂️

The drei Gläser meme.

Bad New Yorker article: "But matrix multiplication, to which our civilization is now devoting so many of its marginal resources, has all the elegance of a man hammering a nail into a board. It is possessed of neither beauty nor symmetry: in fact, in matrix multiplication, a times b is not the same as b times a."

i get reminded of it every time i am tempted to engage with obvious bait. the thing that reminded me of it this time was: