Pete Willis

(spending 9 billion dollars to make a robot say "i have always loved you") hard times create strong men

before you’re permitted to gamble, you should be forced to consider yourself as an old person spending your fading years blank-faced and shoveling your dwindling savings into a slot machine that’s decorated with sexy Looney Tunes characters.

this is an essential service real-life casinos provide

Altman, and all these folks don't make predictions in order to predict the future, they make them to a) justify an overclocked corporate valuation, and b) argue for undoing regulations and receiving government support.

Tiny Golden-crowned Kinglet showing us all the field signs (for one nanosecond) #birds 🌿

no breakfast and now the old cook is weirding me out

Some late afternoon early / evening music for you 😊

So it turns out... the US air travel system was incredibly, deeply dependent on federal funding to just run day-to-day all this time, to the benefit of private airline shareholders, when everyone thinks that state-run trains are leeching off the government. Weird!

So it turns out that airports in the US are deeply dependent on money from the federal govt and they basically can't exist without it. Socialism, man. It's where you least expect it, but you should expect it because private businesses don't fund shit. Taxpayers do.

a colourful blue, orange, red and purple chart showing a light and dar kblue history for temperatures, recent shifts upwards through orange and light red, and two futures: one of light and dark red (1.5c), and one of deep purple (3c and more)

I think this is one of my favourite colourful climate chart type things, because it depicts two things at once:

- Things are going to get worse, no matter what

- The degree to which they get worse depends on decisions made today

theconversation.com/my-new-dark-... by @edhawkins.org

anyway. Dick Cheney died the same day Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City. you bet your whole ass a better world is possible.

“Surely the politics will remain peaceful if we swiftly force even huger swaths of the economy out of their identity-forming jobs at the same time”

“The root of suffering is attachment” - Buddha

subliminally compelled to buy face paint from Will Arnett in Northern Ontario

Head and shoulders portrait of a blue jay with head tilted down and crest erect.

💙
#birds #BlueJays

Cheaper, cleaner — and not available here Even as we rail in outrage at Donald Trump’s tariffs, the Canadian government has imposed our own punishingly high tariffs on Chinese vehicles — high enough to ensure they are kept out of Canada and t...

"By the end of this year, the Chinese will be buying more electric cars than the total number of all cars, SUVs and pickups sold in... the USA... The US and Canada seem prepared to wall themselves into a kind of hermit kingdom of fossil fuel burners."

www.nationalobserver.com/2025/10/27/o...

Half of the internet was down because us-east-1 had a DNS problem but sure buddy

Trump Administration's Arrival on Bluesky Highlights Growing Pains for Open Networks | TechPolicy.Press The administration’s antagonistic entry to the platform is best understood as a game of chicken, writes Erin Kissane.

“For people on Bluesky now, the Trump administration’s arrival should serve as a useful reminder that AT Protocol is built for fully open, fully public networking.”

www.techpolicy.press/trump-admini...

Small bird with black neck ring and face mask and yellow chin is perched on a wooden fence post.

Even without its “horns” showing, the stylish black mask and yellow chin are clues to identify the Horned Lark. They are here from April to October #birds

Why I am not using AI in the classroom Last week I spoke with some of my colleagues about the “challenges” posed by generative AI to our teaching. As anyone who follows me on Bluesky — or followed me on Twitter, prior …

tl;dr

1. Studies of genAI in the classroom show that it harms learning

2. The quality of AI-generated text is irrelevant to its most negative effects on teaching

3. The way AI has entered the classroom is as a money-making project extracting new labour, not a “tool” serving teachers’ actual needs

gravity, my old foe

It's so easy to get annoyed w/frontline workers; shit, I take lot of deep breaths: then I remind myself this service experience is a CHOICE made by a massive nickel and diming corporation who refuses to hire appropriate number of people at living wage, with proper equipment to provide this service.

the rare 'Cryptonomicon' reference, spotted in the wild

I am An Old (mid 50s). My ENTIRE FUCKING LIFE I was promised a utopian existence where manual labor and drudgery were eliminated by technology so I could be free to read, write, draw, make music, or whatever. Instead the tech will do all that while I labor in the mines (Amazon Fulfillment Ctr).

Imagine studying a technology whose presence in the classroom is so detrimental to the development of writing and research skills (including even the will to know the sources behind claims!) that mitigating its effects becomes a central goal of course design, and concluding with tips on adopting it.

China Is Beating the US in the Battle for Energy Export Dominance China’s exports of clean energy technology hit a record in August, with $20 billion shipped globally.

Oh:
- The US sold $80 billion in oil and gas abroad through July.
- China exported $120 billion in green technology over the same period.
By @akshatrathi.bsky.social
🎁🔗 www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

As coal fades, Australia looks to realize dream of 100% renewable… The country’s grid operator says shifting from coal to clean power is not only possible but inevitable. The work there could provide a road map for other…

Australia's grid operator has a clear line of sight to 100% renewables. There's nothing unknown or exotic required.

It'll be fun when the first large/major economies start hitting the goal. Too bad the US is likely to be at the rear of the pack.

The Primary Energy Fallacy is the idea that all primary energy from fossil fuels must be replaced with equivalent amount of clean energy.

BUT: Not necessary because >2/3 of all primary energy is lost as waste heat.

Electrification+renewables are far more efficient.

medium.com/@jan.rosenow...

Somewhere in America, a young Hispanic girl is hiding in an attic writing a diary.

a screenshot that reads "One of the biggest lies we ever told ourselves was that online wasn't "real." People still seem to believe this. Your online friends aren't real, what people say online doesn't have real meaning, what they show you isn't their real lives. That is categorically false. Online and offline are both constructs (maybe that's a conversation for another time), and they are intimately connected. If they weren't, how could GenAI chatbots drive people to suicide and how could our entire government be subsumed by Extremely Online meme-producing edgelords?"

Here's a little bit from this newsletter. I cannot share more because I don't want to spoil the best part, so go here and make sure you read through to the end.

www.leahreich.com/algorithmic-...

"some legal experts have called it a crime to summarily execute civilians" says today's New York Times, continuing their long tradition of whitewashing fascism

Absolute all-timer sentence in today's @nytimes.com