hey there. my name is colin (he/him or ey/em), I’m a computer programmer living in seattle, washington, USA[^1]. I currently work on software which manages a...
by and large this op-ed from the NYT a few days ago is pretty good, but there's a couple real groaner paragraphs in the middle (citations mine): [...] A Pew survey published this month showed that in most of the 36 surveyed countries, China was viewed more favorably than the United States. That included Canada, where 33 percent of respondents saw America favorably, compared with 44 percent for…
just witnessed someone on a lime glider 1 cuss out someone on a lime scooter for going the wrong way down a bike lane. they did this while running a red turn arrow and cutting through a line of people in a crosswalk, naturally. the electric motorcycles that limebike cleverly markets as “electric bicycles you don’t have to pedal”
let me get this out of the way first: I think "age verification" is a stupid idea. it has been cheated for centuries, it will continue to always be cheated, and it is a hideous attempt to wallpaper over a culture of parenting and structural business incentives which are completely misaligned to nurturing and protecting children in a real way. we all know at this point that the realm of stuff which…
the apple watch has four features. your watch patches itself in the middle of the night after an idle period, so it’s pretty sure you’re not using it (this is good.) if you have an iPhone with alarms set on it, the alarms only go off on your phone if the phone can’t contact your watch, and otherwise go off on your watch, which alarms quietly by tapping your wrist. (this is good like 98% of the…
https://nesbitt.io/2025/12/27/how-to-ruin-all-of-package-management.html in general I agree with Andrew's argument here -- the commodification of influence/centrality/importance metrics is going to utterly destroy their value. however, I'm less sold on the specific examples he puts forward of how AI, crypto, and prediction markets constitute a step change rather than another new frontier for the…
deeply embarrassing. sorry to be a bernie bro here, but brief recap: kamala harris became the VP nominee in 2020 in exchange for jim clyburn endorsing joe biden so he could win south carolina convincingly and kill bernie sanders's campaign after biden barely contested the first three primaries. this implication is written on her wikipedia page. it isn't some kind of fringe conspiracy theory.…
( if you haven't seen it, count yourself lucky. ) The people who build these products aren't bad or evil. Most of us got into tech with an earnest desire to leave the world better than we found it. background: the resonant computing manifesto counts among its drafters at least three xooglers with at least a decade of tenure each 1 ; three venture capitalists, one of whom is a general partner at a…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/04/17/llm-poisoning-grooming-chatbots-russia (or https://archive.ph/seDGw if you don't have a washington post subscription) some ones to grow on we have been hearing in pop culture for the past fifteen (twenty? twenty-five? more?) years about the problems of believing what you read on the internet. in the final analysis, what the AI industry has done…
so today on the internet there's a lot of hay being made out of another in a long line of AI faux pas by Google, where Google demonstrates the power of artificial intelligence to automatically generate factually incorrect marketing copy on your electronic cheesemonger storefront. sorry for linking the New York Post as the source for this, but there's a good reason, which I'll address after this…
there's a story at the top of Reuters's web site right now that I think demonstrates a really vivid microcosm of the fucking miserable incentive structure on the contemporary internet for actually teaching people anything true, revelatory, or useful about the world. DeepSeek's chatbot achieves 17% accuracy, trails Western rivals in NewsGuard audit…