House of Black&White

Rhaegar tweeted valiantly, Rhaegar tweeted nobly, Rhaegar tweeted honorably. And Rhaegar's battery died.

It's finding real edge cases to improve. Stuff I would have had to discover through manual testing. Interesting.

Just put the data centers in the trains.

More jobs at risk.

Tfw when fidelity to Helen of Troy’s genetics is somehow super important

Keep the page perfectly still, then the exact moment he's about to tap the screen, load an ad and shift everything down half an inch.

I put a prompt injection into my LinkedIn bio and recruiters are messaging me in Old English and calling me Lord.

Wealthy parents are going to start sending their kids to "low tech" private schools while working class kids are going to be handed tablets filled with ed tech and AI. Writing by hand and turning in paper assignments will become the new upper-class cultural symbol.

@sentantiq When is Diomedes going to get his movie?

the great thing about AI is that everyone seems to think "well it gets things wrong in my area of expertise but its so good for everything else"

and if you are just starting or returning again, some ideas for reading sententiaeantiquae.com/2025/11/11/rea…

The people yearn for content on the shield. Nolan should bring back shorts and do a solid 15 min of just Ken Burns slow zoom over the shield. No dialogue.

Dedicating a whole chapter to the shield is like when Melville flexed and did a whole chapter on whale anatomy.

@sentantiq Was Achilles wrong bc he was just a fast-walking early labor rights lawyer with a spear who was also his own strike-breaker, or was he wrong bc his main job (sacking towns) undercuts the case he tries to make grounded on property rights?

What in the iliad or the Odyssey should we fight about today?

I find myself doing a lot better work, being more satisfied, and also learn a lot more+faster when I do *the hard work* and don’t outsource it to AI. As in, I’ll use AI as a *tool* with substasks, additional research: but I don’t turn off my brain or kick back, assuming it can do the work for me. Every time I “hand over the” hard work part to AI and mentally turn off, I either regret it or find myself eventually needing to go back and spend more time on it. I also see slop work coming out from people who assume the AI does better work than they would.

This morning @scratchyjohnson tweeted an important factoid. Squanto, the Indian who spoke English and helped the pilgrims survive, was sold by John Smith to a Spaniards and the deed exists in the city we're in for Excursion. Rather than rolling our eyes, Alan, Gavin & I went to the state archives in Málaga to see if we can find said recorded deed of 20 Indians sold by John Smith to Juan Bautista Reales. We get to the Archives (see Alan's picture below), and a small genial white lab coat wearing gentleman who speaks no English says this is impossible to find. His new boss, the head archivist, Carmen, comes in and says it certainly exists but may be difficult to find. If you only had the year. We tell her it was 1614. She pulls up a list of the books from 29 notaries whose work they have from 1614. She asks who the notary was. We have no idea. They say they can't go through 29 archives to look for it. Also it's all in old Spanish which nobody speaks and it'll be hard to locate even if they know the Notary. So Alan and Gavin get to work. Gavin finds an article in the internet archive that seems to have a partial picture of the document. Carmen and the other archivist decipher the name after 15 min. They find that name in their cross reference. Carmen goes to the vault to look while the lab coat gentleman asks for my life history, driver's licence number and a lien on my grandchildren. Totally worth it. Carmen comes back to say she found the volume. It is tremendously delicate. Opening it may break some pages. Does it have to be today because if so the answer will be no. We ask her if this is interesting to them. Both very seriously nod their heads. We tell them this is very important to the United States and many of our friends. Carmen tells us she will find it but that it takes time. White linen gloves and patience. We tell her to take her time. She says she will take a picture and email it to me. So here's why all this is important: after Squanto was sold by an Englishman to a Spaniard names Reales, said Spaniard brought Squanto and 19 other "inios" to Málaga. He recorded the deed in the state archives. Then a Franciscan priest ransomed Squanto. Squanto became Catholic. Was baptized and confirmed in Málaga. He then made his way to England where he worked and learned English. He paid his passage back across the ocean and found his Wampanoag tribesmen. Then when the Pilgrims landed they found a Catholic English-speaking native who helped them survive their first winter. It is entirely possible that but for a Franciscan priest who ransomed Squanto, the Pilgrims may not have survived their first winter in New England. That's history. American history. And the record of it is in Málaga. In a book. One of 29 books kept by notaries in Málaga in 1614. That are still searchable. This image, when it comes, belongs in the US National Archive. This is Cultural Debris. x.com/i/status/20349… cc: @alancornett @gwbled @Gonnassaurius_ @wrathofgnon

each person is on a different trajectory sometimes, for some period of time, a group of people find themselves in the same vicinity. they feel like peers. they have shared challenges, can relate to each other but it doesn’t last. eventually they diverge

kenopsia (n.)

We're _still_ all classics scholars. When do we get to wear our next hat?

We’re in a period where everything feels like it’s getting jumbled up across roles because AI lets you explore the adjacencies of other functions more easily. We all collectively have to figure out the new form of definition of what these jobs look like in a world of agents, and certainly many will look different from what they did before. But there are some immutable laws that will eventually re-emerge over time and become clear again. As an example, when you’re scaling, product managers should be spending an insane amount of time with customers and getting feedback on the product and thinking through what to do build next, how to design it so it’s usable, and so on. Engineers should be understanding the business objectives, and building systems that scale and are secure, even as feature velocity increases by 10X. Now both can do a bit more of the others role, and this can temporarily get conflated as doing the whole thing, but eventually the work adds up to be enough that it makes sense to specialize again. Similarly, in GTM, the product marketer can certainly generate a working design and video for a launch, but the specialist is always going to (or should) have an eye for quality that delivers a better outcome. My bet is that AI enhances specialization even further, even if a few roles collapse into each other, and the future toolchain and craft of the specialist will be much higher leverage and output far greater than anyone else as a hobbyist in that function.

Two branches diverged in a git repo And sad I could not push to both I pushed to the branch less traveled by And now all the builds are broken.