Nate Frey

Four year olds just want to build the thing on the box, they don’t understand that no one has ever built the pictured structure because it can’t be done

One particularly irritating brand of what I assume is AI slop that I encounter as a parent is the magnetic tile box that shows a structure that is physically impossible to build, as in it defies the possibilities of how objects of particular sizes can relate to each other in three dimensional space

A line graph showing NSF grant awards made through 2/27/26 for fiscal year 2026 compared with grant awards for fiscal years 2021-2025.

NSF Update (Awards through 2/27/26)

Directorates to follow

1/10

Also buying young kids white clothes, no matter how cool they look

Americans Are Leaving the U.S. in Record Numbers More citizens are replanting overseas, drawn by a quality of life made easily affordable by the U.S.’s enviable salaries.

This is such a well done piece that reports out, with hard data and interviews, something profound about what's gone wrong in this country.

www.wsj.com/us-news/amer...

Too lazy to make a version of this chart that replaces the labels on the exponential up and down lines with “lol no” but that’s my reaction

Ah but one never gets a TED talk asking those questions

Even people in my life who know better take it at face value regularly! Hell, I do occasionally if I’m in a rush or not paying attention

Truly spoken like someone who has never tried to change a process in a large enterprise

But… their estimation of what AI will supposedly accomplish in the next 18 months and how widely it will be adopted and used in 2027 strikes me as borderline-absurd

That Citrini post is silly, sorry

There’s almost a point there: the SaaS/XaaS world has always been dependent on locking a customer into a product that might not actually be very good to get recurring revenue, and if AI really does disrupt that, a lot of XaaS is already overvalued and overlevered

That was also ten years ago and I’m 90+% sure that class must have been reworked by now; it was on the older side of our offerings even then

Yeah, I TA’d/taught intro mapping and GIS asynchronously a couple times in grad school, and it was kinda a bummer, although admittedly that’s not a class I would read much into about the program. (Penn State Geography takes online education much more seriously than many programs!)

And transit definitely *can* be a boondoggle! The DC streetcar was clearly a mistake, and California HSR seems to be going… not great. But I don’t think that’s a particularly common occurrence given how rarely the US makes major investments in transit

Sure does! And yet, even now, fully online programs are looked down upon in many segments of the job market, and I think this just further exacerbates that issue

I think the DC Silver Line is largely not seen as a boondoggle locally (except maybe the part past Dulles) despite the fact that it both cost more and accomplished less than promised

(I was going to respond to the person arguing with you re: credibility on this point, but looking their timeline made me block them)

I agree w you, and in US political context, I don’t think “credibility” is rly in play; by the time a major transit project is realized nobody remembers the sales job

In “Social Context of Spatial Choice: Activity Locations & Residential Segregation,” @ashitakarl.bsky.social et al. use transportation surveys, admin data & big data to examine “the role of segregation clusters as an important social context in mobility patterns.” read.dukeupress.edu/demography/a...

Some orgs seem to try to square this circle with SAFe, but my experience was that you end up doing waterfall-with-sprints-and-Jira

I stumbled across a post on here earlier that was so bad that I got partway through reactivating my pseudonymous account to say something mean to the person before I checked myself & let it go

This kind of thing is why I try to block and mute heavily on topics that attract those types of posts

I feel this coming. Not immediately, but he’s getting heavy enough to give us back pain when we carry him

My rinky dink hometown area (a series of connected small towns plus some unincorporated stuff) with a low-five-digit population had two newspapers for a while when I was a kid

I can't get over this number: in 2007, there were 360,000 newspaper jobs. Now, there are 80,000. "My local paper sucked!" Sure. What sucks even more? The void. "I get all my news from the Guardian!" No, the Guardian doesn't report on your town council, your school board, local cops.

Grave of the Fireflies, that movie an assault on the psyche

Baseball isn’t demographically worst for MAGA-correlated attributes, but it’s definitely culturally worst

I love the game, but in my decade or so of playing it as a kid, I made approximately zero friends on baseball teams; the culture was alien to me even at that level

I used to feel this way, but many years of killing myself pushing original bands that basically went nowhere for various reasons has increased the appeal of playing music that I have a degree of personal separation from, tbh

I haven’t had this in years because I gave up beef, but creamed chipped beef on toast, which you may also know by another, more colorful name

I grew up about one town from here, depending on how you count. Am I shocked that the cops are wildly unprofessional? I am not.

I started reading Yglesias more than 20 years ago and stopped around when he started Slow Boring whe the lack of editorial oversight allowed his worst impulses to run unchecked. I think I have a pretty good read on his whole deal, honestly

YouTube video by Joni Mitchell - Topic Furry Sings the Blues

5) Joni Mitchell - Furry Sings the Blues (Hejira, 1976)

One of my favorite songs ever. The sense of place is incredible, which appeals to my inner geographer

There are several cool versions of this on YT, including a Last Waltz outtake, but the original is still the best

youtu.be/1BF4nnl4c0I?...