blikblok

This is why I put myself in a coma from 7-23 (useless years) and am now enjoying my 30s on slow mode

@ErinChack That was as a good read! You got this girl.

One day I hope to make jokes on this website again, but it’s been a weird couple of months nytimes.com/2026/04/24/sty…

@DavidAstinWalsh Whole Foods is able to offer you the goods and services it provides BECAUSE people pay for those goods and services. Is it really so hard to understand that we lose a functional society if we accept that looters win? PS I notice the Times isn't free, and these two are rich.

Is it really so hard to understand “these bastards steal from us all the time, so we might as well steal from them?”

@tasha032218 It drives me nuts how the men do this with their pat leave. My coworker took her mat leave the same way the men on our team take their pat leave, and it was awful. I don't blame her because she's just trying to keep pace, but the pat/mat leave thing is broken.

Also, I am the only senior woman in our company. Everyone else is male and brag about how they take 2-5 DAY paternity “leave”. So my 7 weeks was not only seen as obscenely long, but now has set an unfortunate precedent for any other woman in our company.

I came back from maternity leave and they handed my team over to the (sweet) girl *I* trained. I now have been basically put on “paperwork no one else wants to do” at a director’s salary. I ordered flower delivery today. So! Nail in the coffin we’re moving.

@whimpermanence I need a better button than the like button for this one.

laura jensen

@Phanatic1a @ch1cken_t3nder @realteaemoji This whole convo has me remembering that I used to spend 40 hours walking home most evenings only bc I really hated the other option (the bus) I still like bike commuting sometimes but it's also nice having an option to just drive 5 minutes and then get on with my day.

@ch1cken_t3nder @realteaemoji Nobody "spontaneously" decides "Hey, I'm going to spend two hours walking home today." Nobody.

lot of people dunking on this but in fairness to them, you'd be hard pressed to find 6 entire unbroken miles of (relatively) safe pedestrian pathways in most of the rest of the country

@realteaemoji My 60 yr old father bikes to work on bike paths in suburban Indiana (& not a fancy area); I walked to school w/ friends growing up there years ago on a multiuse path. I also prefer big cities, but acting like other places haven't heard of sidewalks is silly.

I love the videos of the astronauts doing space chores

@SteveKBark Reading that NYT article felt like reading The Fourth Turning like yeah for sure for sure when you see a Computer Man if you really pay attention you'll see he used the same words used by Other Computer Man at the same time & in the same order therefor we know all the secrets

tl;dr for those who don't want to read the whole NYT article: - John Carreyrou, the journalist who exposed the Theranos fraud, spent a year building the case that Adam Back is Satoshi - Back essentially blueprinted every core Bitcoin concept on Cypherpunk mailing lists a decade before Bitcoin launched - Back went silent on those lists exactly when Satoshi appeared, then resurfaced right after Satoshi vanished - Text analysis scanned 34,000 users across three cryptography mailing lists and 134,000+ posts, filtered to 620 who discussed digital cash. From there, layering in Satoshi's writing quirks (British spellings, hyphenation errors, obscure crypto terms) narrowed it to one person: Back - When confronted in person, Back denied it but allegedly slipped into first person when responding to a Satoshi quote - Satoshi's email exchanges with everyone, including other candidates like Hal Finney, are pretty straightforward. The 2008 emails with Back are the anomaly, containing contradictions that even Back himself has publicly acknowledged don't add up. When asked to provide the metadata for those emails, Back refused. I personally still think there's a convincing case for Hal Finney, or that it's a consortium of people, but this is the most methodical, evidence-dense case I've seen for a single Satoshi candidate. Certainly more convincing than the documentary "Money Electric" that settled on Peter Todd.

once i figure out where to procure the giant egg our gemini designed living room is gonna have vibes off the charts

I personally like the Williamsburg Bridge, but it is also basically only bearable during the sunrise/sunset hours when it is not a pedestrian filled, New-York-State-Of-Mind-blasting hellscape. Which is of course kinda the meta point of all the suburbs people in this conversation.

This legit sounds like a nice time but it is also v funny to defend "city as a personality" by listing a bunch of things you can easily do in most nice suburbs.

@melissa I found a dead snake in the garden and got the shovel out carried him all the way out in the woods to bury him. Upon further inspection he is rubber.

one time a friend got me a succulent. a tiny perfect one in an open dome habitat. i resented the burden. you can't kill a gift. i heeded sun. i got a mister. confidence grew. i got more plants and misted them too. one day i see mold. i scrape it off, alarmed. the plant is plastic

@SuzieCueMusic @angryaboutbikes I just bought my first home. The older folks kept asking "why don't you just build one!" since it look me so long to find a place I liked, and I had to explain multiple times how freaking expensive building a house is. Wild to be able to build one for $70k!

@angryaboutbikes I’m 41 & have never owned a home. My parents bought my childhood home in 1988 for $70k. 3bd/1.5bath ranch-style 1-floor house, they had it built. It was in a new subdivision in a rural-ish exurb of St. Louis, MO.

I’ve been asking this question for a while now and I have never ever ever ever ever ever ever gotten a response to it. It’s always some variant of “well that doesn’t matter, the point is I worked hard…”

@packyM At work my boss tells me to "use AI" on something I know it can't do yet, sends me a project scope he had AI write but he didn't read (I'm on the hook if it's wrong), & tells me we can't hire anyone else but everything needs to be faster now, because of AI. I'm excited why now?

AI is very weird for me because normally I'd be the guy who'd argue that it's crazy we're not more excited about this miracle technology, but I completely get this sentiment. AI companies have clearly botched telling the story. That's a big piece of this. Telling people, "We built this thing that is definitely going to take your job and hopefully we can figure out how to give you handouts or something on the other side, or come up with even better jobs or whatever, say thank you" is clearly terrible messaging. Part of the issue is that what you need to say to raise tens of billions of dollars is very different from what you need to say to get the public excited. "This is definitely a better Google, it does some other cool stuff, too, and we think it's going to really help make you and your loved ones healthier" doesn't fund data centers. Then there's the gap between hype and the average person's experience with AI. Models are getting more useful for a small number of people - if you're a coder or a mathematician or someone who wants to make software but never learned to code, the last few model upgrades have felt really big. That's like ~5% of people, maybe? 2%? If you just want it to answer your questions or do your homework, it's gotten a little bit better, but it's also gotten better for everyone else, so it's not like you have a magic A+ machine all to yourself. Meanwhile, that very small group for whom it's more useful (or who at least say it's more useful because they don't want to be the one who admits it's not) is flooding the zone telling people, "If you don't use these tools as much as / as well as I do, you are completely screwed. You're going to lose your job to me and my army of bots. You (and your kids) are going to be part of the permanent underclass." If you dare question how incredible it is, you are told that you just don't get it, either because you're not smart enough, are too low agency, or don't pay for the latest paid models, which are the really good ones and don't even bother with the free stuff, you dumb poor. And you hear stories like the guy making an mRNA vaccine to fight his dog's cancer, which is awesome, and you're told that everyone will be able to have personalized medicine like that in the future, which sounds great. But like, are you, who can't even make a website with Claude Code, going to start using AlphaFold to whip up your own peptides? Are those dickbags telling you that they're going to be so much richer than you also going to live so much longer than you?? Plus, you hear creepy stories about AI encouraging people to kill themselves, and you know those people were probably unstable anyway and that AI is just a tool and it'll tell you whatever you want, but is it worth the risk? Pretending to be afraid of it might be the best way to stop it from taking your job, which, remember, all of the leaders at the big labs are promising it will do, unless you want to go be a plumber or something, work with your hands (they will not, of course, but you, you should probably seriously consider getting your hands dirty). Or maybe you're not pretending about being afraid, you actually are, which would be totally justified because the leaders of the big labs have told you to be afraid, that they're afraid, that these things are like nuclear weapons in the wrong hands and that there's a 10%? 25%? higher? chance that they'll kill us all, but it's worth the risk, because this is how society progresses. There's no turning back. "We have achieved Recursive Self-Improvement!" they squawk. "This is the big one! Humans are really and truly useless meatbags now! Ha ha!" And you're so confused, because most of the AI you actually encounter is slop. Poorly written social media posts, fake images, etc. Some of it is very funny, but if this is the stuff that's definitely going to take your job and then probably kill you, you don't quite see how? Are you that replaceable? Would you be more excited than concerned? Or would you be more concerned than excited? Personally, I'm excited, because I think LLMs are overhyped. We'll spend bajillions of dollars on inference in a Red Queen's Race, the slop will runneth over, some people will certainly lose their jobs, but a lot of things will genuinely improve, and a lot of people will end up being able to do more at their job than they can now. Plus, the non-chatbots, the models that power embodied AI and help crack biology, are showing early signs that they're going to be magical. In the past week or so, Travis Kalanick, Bob McGrew, and RJ Scaringe all said they're going to be building AI-powered factories. Yann LeCun raised $1 billion for world models to accelerate AI's impact on the physical world. Robots can play tennis now. We'll all have personal tennis coaches or coaches who teach us anything we want when we're around, and spend the rest of their days making our beds, doing our laundry, cooking healthy, delicious meals. The near future is going to be insanely cool, and different in all sorts of ways, some of which we can predict, and some of which we can't. But my god you weirdos need to stop shilling your dystopian fantasies to the people if you ever want them to feel more excited than concerned.

If openai ever needs to train llms in "tryhard lady who can't quite get the tone of the tweet quite right", my account is available.

In retrospect maybe I didn't need to stay up for 3 more hours endlessly scrolling.

@SardineTruther On behalf of us suburban tv class types, we are wishing you luck, and I hope you enjoy your metropolitan ceremony of Transaction With Barista. & that it makes you fulfilled, and less hostile, and gives you much of the participation in society which you seek!

A hill I will die on is that if you live in a metropolitan area, you should never own a coffee machine. It's a tool for the outer-suburban recliner and 85" OLED television class to never have to leave their shoddily built four-bedder; forever pretending to enjoy an average brown. The ceremony of going out and getting a coffee instead, is fulfilling. You should enjoy it and take it as an opportunity to recreationally participate in society. It will make you less hostile.

@megannn_lynne I love to try a new wacky flavor even though I should have learned my lesson by now.

my whimsical & trusting heart has led me to the world’s worst gimmicky potato chip flavors

@darth_erogenous just repeatedly refreshing gmail over here. no i'm not expecting an email. it's just the only mildly interesting app still allowed to exist on my phone.

I enjoy blocking 12 websites on my computer in the hopes of not squandering my life and suddenly becoming addicted to the desktop version of 2048 or google image search results for “Windmill”