Belbrion

@stevesi 100% this. I bought some Nike socks 10 years ago and they are starting to fail. Every sock purchased off of Amazon of the same brand is horrible quality. Still looking for the next thing. My wife likes Bombas, so maybe I'll have to give them a closer look.

I've only worn ~5 different brands of socks my whole life. I pick a style and it usually lasts 10 years until it vanishes from the market or gets reformulated by private equity. My current made-in-america family-owned brand got "value engineered" by a PE investment...cont'd.

Seattle's mayor Katie Wilson has announced accelerated timeline and expanded scope of Seattle's upzones, including early implementation of the state TOD bill HB1491. What Bruce Harrell's proposal was vs what Wilson's proposal could be (ignore regional, urban centers)

Artemis II has reached its maximum distance from Earth. On the far side of the Moon, 252,756 miles away, Reid, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy have now traveled farther from Earth than any humans in history and now begin their journey home. Before they left, they said they hoped this mission would be forgotten, but it will be remembered as the moment people started to believe that America can once again do the near-impossible and change the world. Congratulations to this incredible crew and the entire NASA team, our international and commercial partners, but this mission isn’t over until they’re under safe parachutes, splashing down into the Pacific.

A simple way to think about AI agents: LLM = reasoning Tools = actions Memory = context Agents combine all three.

What you're watching is a scene that required Disney to invent an entirely new category of animation software. Deep Canvas was built specifically for Tarzan. Artists painted individual brushstrokes into 3D space, and the software tracked the exact position of every stroke. When the virtual camera moved through the jungle, the system repainted the scene in real time from the new angle. Hand-painted art you could fly through like a Steadicam shot. The Deep Canvas sequences in Tarzan total about 10 minutes of an 88-minute film. Those 10 minutes required the team to build custom software from scratch, send animators on a two-week safari to Kenya and Uganda to study mountain gorillas in the wild, and render the most expensive traditionally animated film ever made at $130 million. The film grossed $448 million. Deep Canvas won a Technical Achievement Oscar. Disney used it twice more. Atlantis got a few sequences. Treasure Planet used Deep Canvas for 75% of its environments and pushed the budget even higher. It flopped. Disney took a $74 million write-down and blamed the medium. By 2013, Bob Iger announced there were zero hand-drawn features in development. The studio laid off most of its 2D animation staff. That same year, Frozen became Disney's first animated film to gross $1 billion. The math was settled. The technology that made this scene possible existed for exactly three feature films before the studio that invented it decided it was too expensive to justify. Deep Canvas won an Academy Award and then quietly disappeared.

@donasarkar Incredible

Employed

@PNWConservative I rode it Saturday for the inauguration and plan on riding it regularly for my commute. I commute I-5 over the ship canal bridge and noticed my commute was about 10 minutes faster today. Maybe coincidence or maybe it is making a difference already?

Look at that mostly empty $3,800,000,000 light rail train! Now look at that $500,000 bus overtaking it and having more flexible options for riders. Oh well, it’s just taxpayer money. Doesn’t need to be spent responsibly.

@ahc Very interesting read. Thanks for sharing! Followed.

(After reading some responses, I realize many will not have seen Praxis's redemptive thesis for AI — this comes closest to representing my own views on key issues: journal.praxis.co/a-redemptive-t…)

Just spent two days with senior staff at Anthropic and a group of Christians deeply committed to finding redemptive paths for AI. Encouraging on many fronts. Above all I think the guests were unanimously blown away by the humility and moral seriousness of Anthropic's leadership.

A Washington State Senator runs a consulting firm. The legislature created a program at the Department of Commerce. Her firm got the contract to run it. She now controls Commerce’s budget. /1

@daviddorg How are you going to do your X posts?

Today I am scanning my brain before I spend a year without screens Doctors expect brain function to change, but whether the structure itself changes, nobody seems to know All the data will be public: baseline, 6-month, and 12-month scans included

In the Pacific Northwest and Utah, there's a popular condiment called "fry sauce" that seemingly none of the rest of the country likes. It's apparently made from a base of mayonnaise and ketchup, and various seasonings like pepper and garlic powder are added.

She accidentally described one of the most replicated findings in behavioral psychology. Harvard and Duke researchers found in 2011 that people value things they build themselves 63% higher than identical pre-assembled versions. They called it the IKEA effect. Labor alone, even assembling a standardized box from instructions, is enough to make people overvalue their own creations. Gardening runs this effect at full intensity. You chose the seeds. You dug the holes. You watered daily. By harvest, your brain has priced that tomato at roughly 10x grocery store rates, and the math feels completely justified. Now stack Kahneman and Tversky's loss aversion on top. Losses register at approximately 2x the emotional intensity of equivalent gains. One of the most replicated findings in behavioral economics. So the aphid eating her garden is triggering both simultaneously. She built something her brain values at 163% of objective worth. She's watching it get destroyed in real time. Her nervous system is processing that destruction at double intensity. The grocery store tomato being out of stock? Mild annoyance. Zero labor investment means zero IKEA effect, means proportional emotional response. The garden tomato carries months of accumulated effort justification. The aphid isn't eating a $4 tomato. Her brain priced it at $40 and is processing the loss at $80. Gardening is the only common hobby that combines the IKEA effect, loss aversion, and a live adversary that reproduces faster than you can respond. The violence tracks.

🚨 Do you understand what this man just pulled off.. > a guy from North Carolina used AI to generate hundreds of thousands of songs.. uploaded them to Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon.. then botted billions of streams on his own tracks and walked away with $8 million > 660,000 fake streams per day.. spread across thousands of AI songs so nobody noticed.. $1.2 million a year.. for music no human ever actually listened to real artists are out here grinding for 0.003 cents per stream.. promoting on TikTok.. begging for playlist placements.. and this guy just had AI make the music AND the audience first-ever criminal streaming fraud case.. he's paying back $8 million.. but the playbook is out there now.. and AI just got better since he started the music industry spent 10 years fighting piracy.. now they have to fight songs that don't exist being listened to by people who don't exist.

@tomwarren But why?

Amazon is making an Alexa phone. Codenamed “Transformer,” the phone is reportedly being developed by a group led by Xbox cofounder J Allard theverge.com/tech/897915/am…

@iamfreeauditing I clicked through and watched some clips from the video, but it mostly looks like annoyed people getting educated on transparency laws. What is the point of this video?

Illegal Recording at Tacoma Public Utilities?! - Security Guard Loses His Mind - UPDATE! Working an update story about the Public Records Act at TPU. Security Officer Jay Fernandez loses his mind, seemingly lost in a fantasy world playing out an intricate hostage neogtiation scenario. Fernandez attempts to gas light, instigate conflict, and shows what real unprofessionalism is about. He wanted blurred on YouTube to hide his embarassing behavior, so now he gets infinity on no blur here on X.

@DisneyCruise Who is cutting onions?

Make the memories that never leave you, where magic meets the sea. 🚢🌙✨

Jeff's message to toxic gaming culture: "If a game comes out and you don't want to play it and you've never played it, shut the f*ck up. No one cares." "It's not difficult to sh*t on something. Apparently, it takes a ton of courage to say 'hey, I actually like this thing.'" Midlife crisis Jeff who gives zero f*cks is the Jeff we needed.

In a sign of how misleading some stats can be, this winter is now Seattle’s snowiest in three years. You’d never know that all the snowfall occurred on one day—and at the buzzer!

I've been reading ancient marriage contracts for a manuscript and I think it's really fun to see that a lot of our stereotypes of the ancient world are actually not the whole story. Patriarchal societies, sure. But no one can overcome the power of Girl Dad.

@elonmusk At least one team should be the onfire team