Amy Karatz

@Architectolder I love the diagonal balance. Perfect goofiness for a unique shingle style home.

A bit out of sorts

@Architectolder Not in Chicago. Many newer condos here have that all-in-one room.

This is a bit different than all of us are used to seeing.

@Architectolder Yellow, yellow, yellow. A happy color to welcome one home, a distinct color to enhance curb appeal, and a color with historic precedent.

Gray or a splash of yellow under the Live oaks

@sciencegirl 😄😄😄😄😄 When men design.

An apartment building with indoor balconies in Virginia, USA

@SamaHoole I could eat that every night of the week. Root vegetables and meat and broth. It’s pretty much what I had to reinvent for myself anyway. I know the Russian version was in my family somewhere, but it was lost by the time I began to cook.

There is a Welsh dish you have almost certainly never heard of, and it fed a hill nation for six hundred years. It is called cawl. Pronounced, approximately, "cowl." Chunks of mutton, leek, swede, parsnip, potato, and carrot simmered for hours in a single pot until the meat falls off the bone and the broth turns the colour of amber. That is the whole dish. That is also one of the most nutritionally complete meals in the British peasant tradition. It is eaten as two courses from one pot. The broth first, ladled into a bowl and drunk almost like a tea, tasting of the marrow and the leeks and the slow kindness of long cooking. The meat and vegetables second, fished out with a slotted spoon, piled onto a plate, and eaten with a hunk of bread and a wedge of Caerphilly cheese on the side. A Welsh hill farmer in 1880 ate cawl three or four times a week. The mutton came from the family's own sheep, culled at five or six years old, the fat yellow with Welsh grass. The leeks and the root vegetables came from the garden behind the farmhouse. The bread was baked that morning in the kitchen range. The cheese was made from the household cow two valleys over. One bowl delivered, in a single sitting, substantial complete protein, collagen dissolved from the bones, fat-soluble vitamins rendered out of the marrow, and the minerals leached from the meat and vegetables over four hours of slow heat. All from a single cut of mutton shank that fed the family for three days. A 2024 survey of Welsh adults found that approximately 40% had never eaten cawl. A further 30% had eaten it only at a tourist restaurant, served as a heritage novelty in a ceramic bowl with a sprig of thyme on top. Every peasant cuisine on earth independently arrived at this formula. Scotch broth in the Highlands. Mutton broth in the Borders. Pot-au-feu across the Channel. Bollito misto in Piedmont. Cocido in Castile. The same idea, solved by every hungry population in Europe, independently: take the toughest cut of the cheapest animal, simmer it for half a day with whatever roots are in the cellar, serve it twice from the same pot, feed everyone. This is traditional wisdom. It is what your great-grandmothers knew without having to be taught. The formula is not a recipe so much as a principle: tough cut, long time, root vegetables, two courses from one pot. It works in every kitchen on earth because it was developed by every kitchen on earth, in parallel, by people who had to feed families on what the land gave them. The knowledge is not difficult. The ingredients are still sitting on the butcher's slab and the greengrocer's shelf. The pot is, probably, already in the cupboard. The only part that has gone missing is the grandmother who used to tell you how to start it.

@Architectolder Exquisite

Insert an adjective that describes absolute wonderment

@Architectolder Ditto: No black toilets with matching fluted sinks.

Why do I constantly have to say, No wallpaper

@anishmoonka @kaveri59872487 My takeaway is different from your point. AI is being trained to think like a young man thinks, because the vast preponderance of data & info is created by young men. What comes of this will not benefit women. It will harm us, and harming us will destroy society everywhere.

Yesterday Meta told every US employee their computer will now record mouse clicks, keystrokes, and screenshots while they work. All of it goes into training an AI to do their job. In 30 days, 8,000 of these same employees are being laid off. Reuters got the memo. The wording is the company's own: the recordings will be used to build "AI agents that can perform work tasks autonomously." Reuters also confirmed the May 20 date and the number, 8,000 people, exactly 10% of Meta's global workforce. Meta is spending $115 to $135 billion on AI infrastructure this year, almost double the $72 billion it spent last year. The entire business only generated $115.8 billion in cash for all of 2025. Meta is now planning to spend more on AI in 2026 than the whole company brings in. Part of the bill went to a company called Scale AI. Meta paid $14.3 billion for 49% of it last June, mostly to bring in CEO Alexandr Wang. Scale's whole job is to tag and clean the human-written data that AI models learn from. Meta wanted Wang because their old data supply ran dry. The public internet is almost out of fresh material to feed these models. A group called Epoch AI ran the math and projects the world will burn through its supply of high-quality human-written text on the web somewhere between 2026 and 2032. The industry calls this the "data wall." Google and OpenAI are stuck on the same side of it. So Meta turned inward, to the most expensive training material money can buy: their own employees doing their own jobs. Mouse movements teach the AI how to move around a screen, click by click. Keystroke logs hand it the exact shortcuts and rhythm an experienced worker uses, the muscle memory of the job. Screenshots show what a finished task should look like. The people being recorded in April are the raw material for the AI that replaces them in May. This is not just a Meta thing. Amazon laid off 16,000 corporate workers in January. Oracle let go of up to 30,000 of its people, about 18% of the company, on March 31. The cash they saved goes toward $156 billion in AI data centers. The whole pattern across big tech is identical. Record profits and record AI spending, paired with the biggest workforce cuts since the pandemic. The thing they are building is a software worker that opens the dashboard, reads the numbers, drafts the email, books the meeting, and never needs a coffee break. The training data for that worker is a senior Meta employee doing all of that, on Meta's payroll, one month before their last day.

@financedystop My daughter cooks on a mid 1930s Chambers stove that’s extraordinary. Nearly 100 years old and perfect. Fits into a tiny kitchen too.

A 1953 6-burner stove with dual ovens, a built-in grill, tons of storage below, and an $8,000 price tag. Built like a tank. Meanwhile, appliances today cost way more, last a fraction as long, and feel soulless. We need to start building things to last again.

@dieworkwear Priceless. To me, the pup looks like an inspector, a perfect job for a wired-haired dachshund. The eyebrows say all.

every time this tailor posts a photo of their workspace, it looks like their dog is a tailor and he's showing off the garments he made IG z.o.e.y.a.t.e.s

@SamaHoole Have you eaten it? It sounds delicious as well as practical. Years ago there was a Vancouver eatery with NW North American tribal food. Earthy flavors throughout. I remember giant whole shrimp and a whipped wild berry, almost bitter dessert. The tastes were very comforting.

A Plains Native American could walk for a month on pemmican. Dried bison meat, pounded to powder. Rendered bison fat. A handful of dried berries. Mixed, pressed into cakes, stored in rawhide bags. Calorie density no modern survival food has ever matched. Shelf life of years. No refrigeration. No processing plant. Lewis and Clark ate pemmican. The Hudson's Bay Company fed an empire on pemmican. Every Arctic and Antarctic explorer took it because it was the only food dense enough to justify the weight. It was bison fat and bison meat. Nothing else. We replaced it with granola bars. The person eating the granola bar is consuming seed oil, refined sugar, glyphosate-sprayed oats, and a wrapper that will outlast the bison by approximately ten thousand years. The pemmican would have lasted three. We call this progress.

@Architectolder Lovely feature. Strange location.

Some will like, some will not

@HertzEmom007 @5am1am_6 Silent Butler 😉

@5am1am_6 Those were used with a small flat brush to brush crumbs off the tablecloth between courses. It had a name like "Butlers Friend" ( that's not right but it was something along those lines.)

Found this tarnished beauty at an estate sale. The restoration was pure therapy, but the reveal at the end? I honestly didn't see it coming. 🤯✨ ​Can anyone guess what this was actually designed for? Hint: It’s not just a fancy box. 👇

@5am1am_6 It’s a “silent butler” for table crumbs and cigarette butts. Now you need a silver handled table broom for sweeping crumbs into this.

@anishmoonka The average student born in the 1920s knew 40,000 words before leaving school after 8th grade. But no longer… The average student born in the 1970s knew 10,000 words when graduating high school. For 2026 high school grads, average word knowledge is even lower.

If you read 20 minutes a day, you see roughly 2 million words a year. If you read less than a minute, you see around 8,000. That exposure gap is most of why one person will write well by age 18 and the other won't. In 2018, education researchers combined 54 experiments on 5,018 students to test whether reading actually makes people better writers. Reading improved writing more than most writing classes did on their own. There are two reasons for this. The first is sheer volume. The average American high school graduate knows around 40,000 words, and you can't teach 40,000 words in a classroom. Direct vocabulary lessons cover a few hundred a year at best. The rest sneak in through reading. You pick up words the way you pick up slang from a new city. Hear them enough times and they stick. The second is how the brain handles it. Brain scans show that reading and writing use heavily overlapping regions, especially the parts that handle language. When you read a sentence that works, your brain is quietly rehearsing the machinery you'll need to write one. Reading is practice for writing, even when you're not trying to practice. Stephen Krashen, a language researcher at USC who has spent more than 40 years on this question, put it about as bluntly as anyone could. Writing style can't be taught in a classroom. You absorb it. And you absorb it almost entirely through reading. There's one catch. Reading alone only gets you halfway. The same research that shows reading lifts writing also shows the biggest gains come from doing both, with each one feeding the other. Stephen King reads 70 to 80 books a year, and he writes 2,000 words a day. The reading gives him patterns to copy, and the writing is where he learns to use them. So: reading is the part you can't skip. Writing is what teaches you to use what reading gave you. You need both. If you're only doing one, make it reading.

@Wthmoni Skin

Don’t cheat… just answer 😤

@hjluks More specifically, the ability to understand witty language has vanished.

Nonsense. What’s wrong with people.

@hwinkler4real Cloris

Mabel

@hjluks More evidence that wit has died in American English.

@donwinslow I love creativity, but…

My strong suspicion is that this is Trump voter.