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• Post #4066797

  Joseph Weizenbaum, creator of ELIZA: “I had not realized…that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

• Post #2263299

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@mjtsai/116494957672603967 Pretty wild to see Adobe entering the “Microsoft Word 6 for Mac” phase. In 1993, Microsoft had the genius idea to normalize the UI across Mac and Windows. Easier for their development! Harder on users! It was so bad (and slow!) that they actually went back and **re-released Word 5** while they fixed the worst of it.

• Post #1891309

  Hairball the cat is unimpressed with your network graph visualization.

• Post #1767280

  Finishing David Pogue's “Apple: The First 50 Years” and wondering whether Apple should have shipped the Vision Pro as essentially a pro monitor/display device (with some additional input device niceties like improved gestures), essentially a peripheral. “Here's an amazing device for working with things spatially” for the audiences where it's having success, i.e. helping people think through or understand or approve massive architecture projects, or esoteric 3D imaging t...

• Post #1700107

  “So yeah, I’m having a great time with Qobuz, both because the product is genuinely better than Spotify, and because it feels like sweet release to be free of that shitpit.” https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/a-complete-guide-to-quitting-spotify

• Post #1534257

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@jeffluszcz/116433719238905868 Attended Swapfest at MIT for the first time this weekend…

• Post #1520717

  RE: https://infosec.exchange/@masek/116442253812152389 I don't know if it *started* during the financial crisis, but it certainly has been accelerating in that timeframe. My best guess is that the problem coincides with massive availability of capital—interest rates went exceptionally low, and there's been a massive amount of “money just sloshing around the market” (as my brother who works in finance puts it). This gave us a shift toward startups that were completely unmoore...

• Post #1366614

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@danluu/116317069604398190 Was finishing Andy Grove's “Only the Paranoid Survive” while on my walk to work this morning, and was about to post about how older tech business books are often better as unintentionally hilarious history, with pronouncements like: “But as my knowledge deepens, my conviction is growing that the triad of software coming from personal sources, from telephone and network sources and from the Internet will together be what will drive...

• Post #1366612

  RE: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/116324988415693534 Incredible thread about the source for Claude Code’s CLI being leaked due to a misconfiguration. Includes analysis of the many ways that the code is a mess, and how the mess is so extreme that it's practically its own coding pattern. Much hilarity, starting on April Fools' Eve:

• Post #1366610

  Unintentionally celebrating Apple's 50th anniversary today having just started “Apple in China” which so far is the best retelling of their history I've read in years.

• Post #1366608

  Fall is the best, but spring in Boston is a close second. Animals re-emerging, plants are blooming, and massive flakes of heavy, wet snow are falling on this fine morn, the seventh of April.

• Post #1366606

  RE: https://information.garden/@benfry/116332315564992715 Just finished; wow, this was *fantastic* (for someone who is very curious about China, tech history, business, supply chain, how things are made, materials and manufacturing, design process and scale, the intersection of politics/policy/business/history, etc etc…)

• Post #1366604

  “Porting Mac OS X to the Nintento Wii” This made my day—first, that there are people out there who do things like this, but second (and more to the point), that he also took the time to document the process in detail. So much to be learned here: https://bryankeller.github.io/2026/04/08/porting-mac-os-x-nintendo-wii.html

• Post #1366603

  RE: https://mstdn.social/@bit101/116386237944316247 Which is even worse, right? Acknowledging that there's a problem but missing the actual problem and instead doubling down on it? LLMs are not a sampling technique, it's non-deterministic autocomplete. So the answer that comes back isn't within some understood range, you can ask the same question and be 5%, 50% or 100% incorrect each time it's asked. (And yes, you can do lots of things to mitigate all these i...

• Post #1366602

  RE: https://typo.social/@justvanrossum/116408776027521514 Ah, the Alien film titles regex… https://www.artofthetitle.com/title/alien

• Post #1366601

  Spoke at a panel at Northeastern last week about careers in information design & data visualization. With 10 minutes allotted, it’s not a comprehensive guide to finding your path in life, but I wanted to pose a few questions that might help students focus their search: https://www.fathom.info/notebook/260406/

• Post #1366600

  “I am, thank God, curiously detached from all this. Four and a half years ago I was minding my own business, cutting metal in my machine shop, when I received a text message from John Gaeta, a former colleague at Magic Leap, reading simply “Sorry for your loss.” At first I thought that he’d sent it to me mistakenly, but after a bit of Googling I became aware that Facebook had changed its name and announced that it was now going to build the Metaverse.” “In retrospect, John’s message was prescie...

• Post #1366599

  Did OpenAI talk to Rosalind Franklin’s family about co-opting her good name this way? Is that a dumb question when their CEO uses an AI slop avatar of himself in the “style” of a Miyazaki character in spite of Miyazaki calling AI imagery “an insult to life itself”? https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/openai-starts-offering-a-biology-tuned-llm/

• Post #1066219

  RE: https://thepit.social/@peter/116376219055579156 I simply cannot get my head around why anyone would let AI anywhere near their data analysis work. Why would you add something to your work that can drop its accuracy by half? by 10%? by 1%? What would be an acceptable amount? What is the possible upside that would make this worth it? I'm floored by the number of people in this field who take themselves all too seriously but are out there starting their whatever *dot AI* companies t...

• Post #761085

  Still working to get the right marketing message for Rowboat, but in the meantime, lots of updates this month: improved cell editing, map improvements, plus a fresh desktop release: https://rowboat.net And for the superfans, all the gory details on the release page: https://docs.rowboat.net/releases/ 💪

• Post #689997

  Nearly every 7 digit number can be found in the first 100 million digits of pi. Search for your favorites, or simply bask in the wonders of math and probability: https://www.benfry.com/pi/ Happy π day!