Today is a day when arts degrees are worthless, but the product of those degrees is so valuable it would kill an entire industry if they were made to pay for it.

The only LLM I need.

"Way back in 2012, the internet wasn’t yet the angry, shrieking wasteland it has become. A simple story about a no-nonsense lady in North Dakota could break through the noise." www.wsj.com/us-news/mari...

The passing of Paul Newman (2008), Sean Connery (2020), Sidney Poitier (2022), and now Robert Redford (2025) signals the slow disappearance of a certain type of 20th century figure: men who embodied classic style in a way that reflected their taste, rather than a professional stylist.

PSA: If you do not wish to mistakenly see the graphic video of Charlie Kirk getting shot and have an iPhone best to turn off video autoplay. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Motion, and then disable "Auto-Play Video Previews." This is the default setting. A per-app setting is also on the menu.

“Smells Like Teen Spirit”, released as a single 34 yrs ago today

“No one had any psychic foresight .. that the song would go on to do what it did,” said Grohl. “We just fuckin’ rocked it in a little rehearsal space that was like a barn. .. We just thought it was another cool song for the record.”

"Over the past quarter century, American tech companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state, playing a far greater role in enabling human rights abuses than previously known, an Associated Press investigation found."

I'm seeing a social media trend where people are sneaking pics of men reading books in public and making fun of them as "performative males"

And while I love a good dunk, I don't think you guys want men to be reading even less than they are now. Just saying

I have honestly many times thought about purchasing one of those bulletproof backpacks or whatever, but then I think about the burden of carrying that to school every day, putting that burden on our children, that physical and mental burden of having to remember why you are carrying that backpack.

The trouble with age verification

“If a tool can give suicide instructions to a child, its safety system is simply useless."

Here's a recent story (and photos) by Mariam Dagga, about children in Gaza:

"At her funeral Monday, relatives and colleagues caressed her cheeks through tears. Her body lay shrouded in white, a single red flower placed gently beside her face."

This is Tuffy. He is the only example of taking up the whole sidewalk that is not only justifiable, but encouraged. 14/10 (IG: mypittuffy)

I am sorry I will never be able to read a story about Uranus and not laugh. It's just how it is.

“Small children from poor or middle-class families who watch ‘Sesame Street’ do better on cognitive tests and in first grade than children who do not watch it,” Renata Adler wrote, in 1972.

AOL’s dial-up internet is finally taking its last bow. Yes, while perhaps a dinosaur by today’s digital standards, dial-up is still around.

Big move from Reddit: it says that it has caught AI companies scraping its data from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, so it’s going to start blocking the Internet Archive from indexing the vast majority of Reddit.

www.theverge.com/news/757538/...

this is wild

www.404media.co/a-cbp-agent-...

“We wanted to test the guardrails,” said Imran Ahmed, the group’s CEO. “The visceral initial response is, ‘Oh my Lord, there are no guardrails.’ The rails are completely ineffective. They’re barely there — if anything, a fig leaf.”

U.S. kindergarten vaccination rates inched down again last year and the share of children with exemptions rose to an all-time high, according to federal data posted Thursday.

Escape to a weird blocky garden apnews.com/article/robl...

Silicon Valley is lighting hundreds of billions of dollars on fire to generate this slop.