When your band is playing at the #NFLDraft there’s only one kind of refreshment you need…
THE PEOPLE DO NOT YEARN FOR AUTOMATION
Software brain is changing the world, but most people still aren’t buying.
Source: BEWARE SOFTWARE BRAIN | The Verge
I really like this explanation from Nilay Patel on “Software Brain” and how disconnected tech folks are from how “normies” live their lives. I hope the right people get the message.
I biked past the festivities on my way home this evening and even with the crowd supposedly falling short of expectations that’s too much crowd for me.
Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit
Napoleon was, by any reasonable accounting, a genius – a military mind who rewrote the rules of European warfare, a political operator who fought his way up from being a minor league Corsican nobility to the Emperor of France and ruler of most of modern Europe before he turned 35, and a reformer whose ideas around the judicial system and the liberal order still echo today.
But none of that stopped him from making one of the dumbest decisions any leader has ever made, because he was arrogant, because he’d gotten away with so much for so long that he confused his luck for a system, and because (with the exception of Talleyrand) most of the people around him had simply stopped telling him no.
Ramble On
I love this song so much, and this version in particular is so good.
Haiku 2026-03-22
Evelyn asked me
To write another haiku
I’m a great father
Trying out posting via the “Enable Mastodon API” plugin…
ActivityPub Test Redux Redux
I haven’t had much luck in the past getting the ActivityPub WP plugin to work. Maybe today is the day?
Dread Bait
Muted a whole bunch of political / upsetting terms. Unfollowed people posting non-stop dread bait. This was crucial to regaining an even keel.
The whole article is worth reading. Lots of good advice for keeping sane during <gestures around> all this. But I especially like the term “dread bait”. It definitely captures the spirit of a certain kind of poster who shares every horror and atrocity seemingly in the hopes that “someone” will Do Something, or rather maybe just engage with their post and make them feel like they’ve Done Something.
Reblog of ssweeny:
Reblog via ssweeny
The latest in a series of “self-help” style books I’ve gotten from the library this year.
This one had by far the “loosest” prose. Probably because the author started as a blogger rather than an academic. But this style helped the “anecdote interspersed with lessons learned” pattern that these books tend to use feel less stale.
I do think the overall lesson of “you are mortal and therefore can only give so many fucks, so choose carefully what to give a fuck about” is probably more necessary now than ever and I’m so glad I read this one.