This image sums it up pretty well.
“It’s vulgar, it’s violent, it’s commercial, it’s grandiose, it’s tacky, and it dishonors a place once thought worthy of care and respect.
In other words, it’s Donald Trump.”
This image sums it up pretty well.
“It’s vulgar, it’s violent, it’s commercial, it’s grandiose, it’s tacky, and it dishonors a place once thought worthy of care and respect.
In other words, it’s Donald Trump.”
I think with AI you’ve got to be building the software equivalent of escalators if you’re going to do it for prod. That way if the AI goes away you still have stairs, unless you’ve gotten too out of shape to walk up them.
See, I read this as if you have to make Plan B deterministic (as a backup), why have a non-deterministic Plan A in the first place?
I’m usually all for uniformity and consistency. But this mandate for hydration breaks during this World Cup even when the match is INDOORS is just crazy.
This is my hand towel holder. Right next to my sink in the bathroom. You will notice it is free of its titular hand towel. In fact, it’s a rare occasion that it has its towel in tow.
This is not a slight to Jayme. Not even a little bit. She does a fantastic job of keeping up with laundry. Especially when the kids are home.
The real reason is that everyone uses dad’s hand towel. Except dad. Jayme uses it when she’s on my side (for whatever reason…makeup, hair drying, what have you). Caroline uses it whenever she uses the bathroom for the shower and/or bath. And Brian uses it when he shaves in my sink. Do they have their own bathroom? Yes they do.
We’ve lived in this house for 7 years. Do you know how many times I’ve actually used my own hand towel?
About 6 times.
Kennedy Center removes Trump’s name from building - The Washington Post
“With the removal of 18 letters — “The Donald J. Trump and” — the building’s exterior reads “The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts” once more. Trump’s name had been on the facade for 176 days, a dramatic change to the 55-year-old memorial to an assassinated president.”
Good. Things can go back to normal.
Really trying to understand why FIFA chose “MAR” for the abbreviation for Morocco. The only thing that might make sense is the French name for the country (“Maroc”). Yet, when the country’s name is spelled out elsewhere in the tournament, it’s the normal spelling “Morocco”.
Weird.
I’m genuinely asking…
In 1986, when the World Cup was hosted in Mexico, were there hydration breaks? If not, why? If so, why is everyone making such a big deal of them now?
I never realized how loud a hard surface flooring installation is in an empty house. The echoing is just ridiculous.
Infantino’s Yearslong Effort to Woo Trump for the World Cup - The New York Times
For the past year, FIFA, the governing body of international soccer, has leased an office on the 17th floor of New York’s Trump Tower that has sat all but empty. The rent goes to President Trump’s family business, but soccer officials say the space sits largely idle.
Paying rent to the Trumps was the choice of Gianni Infantino, FIFA’s president, who has made being close to Mr. Trump a top priority. He has lavished the president with praise, trophies and a medal. He has made pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago, the Trump National Doral golf club and even the “Melania” documentary premiere.
Mr. Infantino has publicly boosted the president through impeachments and plummeting poll numbers.
It was all in service, Mr. Infantino’s supporters say, of ensuring that the World Cup, which begins this week, goes off without a hitch. Mr. Trump could disrupt the games in any number of ways. Mr. Infantino, allies say, is handling a volatile president who responds to praise and gifts.
That swamp Trump kept railing against must be absolutely resplendent.
The Supreme Court Has Invented a Right to Discriminate - The Atlantic
Now here was an example of exactly what Alito was talking about. “States are free to decide for themselves whether last-minute changes to an election are in their best interests,” the justices wrote this week. If a Republican legislature decides that a redistricting plan to suppress the power of Black voters is “in their best interests,” they may proceed.
They’re not hiding it.
It’s not surprising that every person I’ve met that rails against school indoctrination (both K-12 and higher ed) don’t know any actual teachers in real life, much less stepped a single foot in a classroom as an adult.
Why is it that everybody loses their damn mind when a man transitions to a woman, but nobody seems to give a shit about when a woman transitions to a man?
Why Linux creator Linus Torvalds gets angry hearing “99% of code is AI” - The New Stack
Torvalds dismissed the idea that AI might one day “replace” programming, arguing instead that it boosts productivity, much like past revolutions in software development. Torvalds emphasized that true software engineering requires, in the immediate future, human understanding of the underlying systems, not just the ability to write AI prompts.
💯
If you have to ask this question in real life, put the underwear down.
The story of Norway’s Viking World Cup photoshoot
This is fantastic!
Everyone should have an oversized T-shirt that they can lounge around the house in.
Imagine being so homophobic that you won’t even wear a hat, for one night, with the logo of your team filled with a rainbow color design.
And, of course, the Texas Rangers with their own “hold my beer” moment:
Why is there so much hate for homosexuals? I just don’t understand. I don’t understand the lack of empathy and humanity from these utterly obvious bigots.
What’s it like to have a jawline?
Daring Fireball: ‘The Insider’
All this Sturm und Drang surrounding 60 Minutes has me thinking about a re-watch of The Insider, Michael Mann’s great 1999 movie. Letterboxd’s synopsis: “A research chemist comes under personal and professional attack when he decides to appear in a 60 Minutes exposé on Big Tobacco.” It’s a great movie, and feels apt AF at the moment. Here’s the original segment on 60 Minutes, which ran an entire half hour.
What’s going on today is like if — instead of getting shady, threatening, and litigious — the tobacco companies had just purchased CBS, purged the staff at 60 Minutes, and hired a bunch of pro-cigarette stooges to replace them.
Spot on.
Candy cigarettes…who even knew they still made these?!
From (eval ‘Toast)’s Mastodon post:
I want smaller programs with fewer features that take longer to write by people who are happier to do so and I’m not kidding
Can’t say I disagree.
Tony Gilroy Accepts Award for Andor: “Fuck the Empire!”
Now that Andor has been out for a while, showrunner Tony Gilroy is free to speak his mind on what the show was all about. I mean, it was pretty clear to the audience, but now he can say his piece.
Love this, too.
As it pertains to AI, I really feel like Dr. Ian Malcom.
From JA Westenberg’s Mastodon posts:
The 7 golden rules of not being a dick on the internet
- No quote dunking. If you disagree with someone, reply to them directly. Broadcasting their post to your audience with a snide caption turns a disagreement into a pile-on. Which is the entire point, I know. But we’re better than that, right?
…right?
No snark-and-lock. Don’t fire off a smug “cutting” reply and then limit who can respond. If you can dish it, you can take it; turning off replies after a dunk is the social media version of ringing a doorbell and running. Don’t be a fucking child.
Read the kind version. Most takes that look outrageous are clumsy phrasing or missing context, so when something reads badly, go back and find the more generous interpretation before you reply.
Screenshot in good faith. When you repost someone to criticise them, show enough of the thread that people can see what they actually meant, because cropping out the context to make someone look worse is lying with extra steps.
Don’t subtweet, say it. Vague callout posts about “some people” are passive-aggressive theatre; either name the issue and talk to the person or let it go.
Correct, don’t humiliate. When someone’s wrong, you want the truth out there, so share the correction and skip the victory lap that only shames them.
Log off before you escalate. When a thread gets your heart racing, close the app, because you’ll type something worse while you’re angry and the post will keep until tomorrow if it’s worth making in the first place.
I love every one of these. A wonderful reference for anyone writing on the internet.
I must admit, I am guilty of some of these. #1, for example. I don’t think I’m intentially being a dick. It’s just that me replying to them is not…feasible, I guess. Most of mine are news stories, where the reply wouldn’t be going to the person I’m mocking. And #3, I don’t always do this. Sometimes I do. Sometimes, not so much. It’s most dependent on my mood. Not really fair.
On the other hand, I really do try to adhere to #4 every single time. I’ve always believed context is key. And #6, I absolutely adhere to. Because I’m not a douche. (Life Rule #1).
Also, I should obey #7 a lot more.
Three Ways to Get Paid – Jason Zweig
Linking this here for the future. No reason.
Scott Pelley Accuses CBS News Boss of ‘Murdering’ ‘60 Minutes’
CBS News faced a fresh wave of turmoil on Monday after Scott Pelley, the “60 Minutes” correspondent, laced into the show’s newly hired executive producer during a staff meeting and accused Bari Weiss, the network’s editor in chief, of “murdering” the longstanding Sunday news program.
Love to see this. Individuals, journalists specifically, standing up and telling the truth.
I see no lie.
This blind guy just walked in with a set of golf clubs over his shoulder. And now I have questions.
You know what I’m sick of? People and pundits who blame, and constantly flog, the left for the atrocities of the right? I hear almost daily: “Well, the left isn’t giving these people (whomever they are) a viable alternative”. How about instead, saying something like “The right are being complete and utter assholes about humanity”?
And the majority I’m talking about are left-leaning pundits.
The one I’m hearing about a lot right now are young men. Instead of calling out over and over and over again the toxic shit that is being spewed out of every right-wing mouth they can find, all I hear is about how the left is not doing enough. What enough means, who knows?
Look, I get that the left needs to come up with alternatives on these topics. Young men. Masculinity. Trans rights. Gay rights. Civil rights. Protecting black and brown people. I really do. And I agree with that 100%. But can’t we all agree, and say it out loud with our meat mouths again and again and again, that the right’s views on people who are NOT straight, white men are absolutely atrocious?
Please.
Just once.
For the love of whatever god or non-god you pray to.
Seen at the grocery store:
What?!
Why So Many Control Rooms Were Seafoam Green
Now, looking at the interiors of the Manhattan Project control rooms and plants, the broad use of Light and Medium Green makes sense. One mistake and mass devastation could have occurred within these towns. Birren writes, “Note that most of the standards are soft in tone. This is deliberate and intended to establish a non-distracting environment. Green is a restful and natural-looking color for average factory interiors. Light Green with Medium Green is suggested.”
Fascinating information about something we don’t really think about (unless we’re trained to think about it). Hospitals are the same way. Here’s an example control room following Birren’s suggestions:
Looks normal to me. It probably looks normal to you. But it’s normal because of his influence. Well done, sir.
Treasury Department confirms steps taken to put Trump on new $250 bill | AP News
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Thursday that his department has prepared the design for a $250 bill featuring President Donald Trump, anticipating the passage of stalled legislation in Congress to put the president on a new denomination of legal tender.
Totally normal behavior.
I cannot seem to type-spell notification consistently. It’s like a brain-to-muscle block or something. I even misspelled it typing it out here.
“Love defies logic,” said the logical thinker.
Todd Vaziri on Mastodon:
What a dreadful place we are in where a mega billionaire says something like “You could double the taxes I pay, and it’s not gonna help that teacher in Queens. I promise you.” and not be shamed by the culture and the people around him into making a public apology the very next day.
Couldn’t agree more. And yet, here we are.
Nothing says honoring fallen American soldiers than having those 10x extra state patrols out there on the roads setting speed traps.
Switching to water from now on. This is ridiculous.
Watching “Doc Hollywood” for the 452nd time.
Two things:
After the rain.
Greg Knauss on Mastodon:
The rapidly-increasing percentage of my day spent ensuring that whatever product or service I’m interacting with isn’t actively trying to fuck me is exhausting.
We are no longer customers or clients or citizens or even human. We are exploitable marks, turnips to be bled dry and discarded.
I don’t mean this to apply just to tech — it’s everything, from cable providers to oil companies to the stock market to (and inspired and led by) the President of the United States.
We live in a grift culture, where the only thing that matters is how much you have to be cheated out of.
Yep, yep, yep.
Between January and March 2026, Beyond Plastics placed 53 Bluetooth-enabled trackers inside single-use polypropylene cold cups and dropped them into in-store recycling bins at 35 Starbucks locations across nine states and Washington, D.C. Of the 36 trackers that returned usable data, none pinged from a recycling facility. Instead, the cups traveled to landfills, incinerators, waste-transfer stations, and material recovery facilities.
Can’t say I’m surprised.
Watched “All the President’s Men” for the first time last night. The 1970’s era of filmmaking sits in stark contrast to today. The picture quality, the color palette, the light (or lack thereof), the sound mixing, just to name a few.
But the thing that stood out to me was the following screenshot:
Why are there just cars parked perpendicular to the parking spaces? What kind of madness is this?
Wow, do I not know my U.S. geography! Atlanta is 7th on this list!
Speaking of the Braves, I came across this Instagram post from Dale Murphy today and thought I’d share…
I’ve been thinking a lot about Bobby Cox and the impact he had on my career and my life. It’s not a new thought—| always credit him for saving my career because well… he did.
Bobby was so loyal-he gave guys every chance he possibly could to succeed. He didn’t panic. He was patient. I never saw frustration come out as anger with him. I still remember him yelling encouragement to guys from the dugout when they were up to bat. They couldn’t always hear him…but everyone in the dugout could. I think that encouragement was for our benefit-knowing he’d be yelling the same things to us when we were at the plate.
Bobby always had your back. If you were on his team-you were his guy. If not, you weren’t. It was as simple as that. You might remember that game when I was with the Phillies and Bobby told Tom Glavine he had to even the score and throw at the next guy up to bat. Glav checked the lineup card and said, “Bobby, it’s Murph!” It didn’t matter to Bobby. We were friends of course. And a short time before that I had been one of his guys-but not anymore. I always admired Bobby for that—he was a players manager in every sense of the word.
You can still see Bobby Cox’s influence throughout the Braves organization today. As one of those who was fortunate enough to play for him, I will always feel lucky that our paths crossed in Atlanta, Georgia, all those years ago and blessed to have known him and be able to call him a friend.
RIP to one of the best-Bobby Cox.
I love that we have Murphy as one of the “good guys” of baseball representing Atlanta. My dad tells me when I was really little (in the 80’s), I woujd always talk about him while we watched the Braves on TBS.
Talk about a tale of two responses to a bad start.
The Film That Explains Contemporary America - The Atlantic
My colleague David Frum once wrote about the Trump era, “When this is all over, nobody will admit to ever having supported it.” I thought about that a lot while watching The Sorrow and the Pity, which showed how true it was in France. But the documentary is ambiguous on what a society should do about that. One old guerrilla says that he knows that informers continue to live around him. He cannot forget the betrayals, but he also doesn’t seek revenge. Ophuls makes a case that remembering what happened is essential, but he leaves for viewers to decide whether it’s more important to effect justice or to simply coexist with those who see the error of their ways, even if they do not admit it.
This will be the hardest part for me. I already know that.
Because I know these people. I work with these people. I live amongst them.
I don’t know that I will ever forgive them.
Ever.
The quiet grief of adult friendship
And perhaps this is why adult friendship feels increasingly radical. It resists the transactional logic modern life rewards everywhere else. Because a real friend offers something profoundly rare: unoptimised presence. Family is structured by blood. Marriage by institution. Work relationships by utility. Friendship survives purely through mutual choosing. Nobody has to stay. And yet some people do.
Despite impossible schedules and emotional fatigue, some friends continue returning. They send memes during meetings. They remember your important dates. They call you out-of-the-blue. Not because it is convenient. But because somewhere, beneath all the exhaustion adulthood imposes, they still consider your inner life important. Sometimes it is simply the stubborn decision to keep returning to people despite the world constantly training you to prioritise everything else.
When I was younger, and this topic came up, I must admit that I kind of rolled my eyes a bit. It seemed like “olds” bemoaning some nostalgic past that may or may not have actually existed.
At almost 46, however, I am seeing things very differently. Feeling the loss of that connection more than I ever have.
StanChart CEO seeks to reassure staff over ‘lower value human capital’ comment | Reuters
Standard Chartered (STAN.L), opens new tab CEO Bill Winters sought to assuage staff concerns on Wednesday, a day after saying that the bank will cut thousands of jobs over the next four years as it moves to replace “lower-value human capital” with technology.
I mean, he could have said “human scum”. How ungrateful are you, people?
How to deal with your kid leaving • Buttondown
Our children should know that we had lives before them, during them, and after them. If for no other reason than they need role models of how to live a life. Which gets lived until the very end.
I love every part of this post. My oldest will be a senior in college this year. My youngest is off to Europe for the summer (after his college freshman year) in about 48 hours.
Shit gettin’ real.