Alan

a bald man is wearing a red sweater with a star trek logo on it Alt: Capt Picard, his head sinking into his upturned palm, a small comfort for a world gone so terribly wrong.

Optimus Prime, of course.

The biggest risk in this moment is something sociologists call “symbolic compliance.”

That’s when an institution that is violating civil rights gives the public just enough symbolic victories that accountability efforts lose steam before there has been any meaningful change.

To Opus 4.5: "Artifact, no react, with an interactive explainer of how octaves work - should include buttons to press to make sounds and frequency visualizations, make the design minimal, but have a lot of subtle puns" tools.simonwillison.net/octave-expla...

Man running inside subway car toward camera. Closer to the camera (facing away from us) is an impossibly small (grown) man (?) in flannel jacket grasping the leg of a much larger woman (side view).

From BBC, an innocuous still from a new TV show. The show is about a brain getting hacked but image has hacked my brain. In the right corner, optical illusion or gen AI outcropping slop?

If the show is about ai slop dripping into real life, bravo.

Oh good, it’s back now.

Screenshot of an Apple notification on my phone that says: Unable to install “WNYC” The app is longer available in the App Store

Can’t download @wnyc? Is anyone else having this problem?

And it will have to choose: the red pill or the blue pill?

Hot take: Bezos wants robots to do the job, not borgs. The glasses are collecting training data.
Dark Mirror-esque employee surveillance is just icing on the fast fascism cake.

My dad taught me that my bosses are not my friends. I didn’t believe it at first but it’s been proven true. Be careful who you open up to.

Sandwich guy beats taco guy

Not to make light of any of this, but has anyone seen I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson?

Closing the loop, paper prototyping the AR prototyping on the prototyping architecture.

Prototyping software architecture in actual Lego, let's see if it's just cute or actually help.

Hype Cycle: a show that covers exciting new technology, tool, or method. They trip out on capabilities and potential applications - then find cracks and inevitably talk themselves out of it. Every episode.

🙋‍♂️

Big roll of butcher paper stretched across a desk. Sloppy notes all over.

It does. A big scroll is a nice change.

Interesting! The associations slide around for me but there’s always a local logic.
C&D seem like jocks sometimes. N has their shit together more than M.
U is part of the bureaucracy but W is detached from the charade. W will make it to the Olympics someday.

RST are for sure the seniors.

I always think of MN as the threshold. Can’t explain it.

XYZ - freaks.

GHJ - brats. Into sports but not especially good at sports.

KI - geeks, probably.

E - who knows. A genius.

This is the canvas model I’ve been wanting to see for years. There is a ton of latent design space. Very inspired to see this!

Loose pencil sketches of tiny camera on the wristband buckle. Looks like a friendly cyclops.

Sketch of person clicking watch screen with free hand. The other arm (with the watch) is raised and rotated, as if shielding the person’s eyes from a phantasmagoric cacopoly of failing systems (gurgling and dissolving and getting closer) while, in the middle of it all, a dog sits in a chair and drinks coffee. This is the photo.

If the Apple Watch gets a camera, it would be cool (though probably impractical) to have it on the wristband somehow. I don’t use the phone camera much, but I would use a wrist cam all the time.

To be fair, whenever I see “lawmaker” I hear “lawn maker.”

People with glasses and contacts have to realize that we have a disability that just happens to be highly accommodated for in modern society and that accommodation is the only reason why poor eyesight is not considered a disability.

Exactly. Reacher (the show) makes The Accountant look good. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were related.

You should know that a big part of 18F's work was to make sure multi-million to multi-*hundreds*-of-millions dollar contracts at fed *and* state level didn't go to shitty enterprise IT consultancies that *repeatedly* delivered tech that didn't work, was late, or didn't even do what it needed to

former colleagues from 18F have asked me to share this open letter widely - please pass on 🙏 🇺🇸 💻💪 18f.org

Is the button focusable? - Manuel Matuzovic I'm a frontend developer in Graz, specialized in HTML, accessibility, and CSS layout and architecture.

Let’s play a game. I’ll hide a button using different techniques in HTML and CSS, and you have to guess whether it’s still focusable.

matuzo.at/blog/2025/is...

Rubio had decreed that certain critical programs – such as aid to Ukraine and Syria and costs related to the PEPFAR program to combat HIV in Africa – would continue to be funded. Several times, USAID managers prepared packages of these payments and got the agency’s interim leaders to sign off on them with support from the White House. But each time, using their new gatekeeping powers and clearly acting on orders from Musk or one of his lieutenants, Farritor and Kliger would veto the payments – a process that required them to manually check boxes in the payment system one at a time, the same tedious way you probably pay your bills online. Meanwhile, AIDS clinics shuttered and staff found themselves stranded in unstable countries such as the Congo. A pregnant woman in an undisclosed country has sued the Trump administration because she was denied a medevac helicopter. In another case, I was told, an employee in southern Africa who needed chemotherapy was also denied a chopper because no one would authorize the money.

According to a WaPo article Luke Farritor is manually blocking @altusaid.bsky.social HIV/AIDS care funds in violation of court orders. Paused/stopped HIV treatment means more babies born with HIV, more infections, and more deaths. Let him know your thoughts.

ax28@cdc.gov
Luke.Farritor@hhs.gov

Dillinger’s Escape Plan

A Thousand Years of Nonlinear Pizza

What if Trump and Musk are Wallfacers?