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Reposted by Lane Becker

Cyd Harrell @cydharrell.bsky.social · 20h

thread, h/t @yvonnezlam.bsky.social (think about this in concert with how much we value "focus" these days)

Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · Apr 25

And… I backed off this notion for a while because it seemed a bit secondary. But increasingly I think I was right the first time. Life works when people and systems accept their fuzzy unarticulated ancillary roles and know that they are part of something uncontracted but networked.

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Lane Becker @lanebecker.bsky.social · 16d

“Use strong white flour for a superior product. Form the dough. Knead until it’s as elastic as the truth.” www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/how...

How to Make Strudel Like Magda Goebbels

“My grandfather used to say ‘and Magda Goebbels made a great strudel’ and I never knew what it meant until after he died my grandmother explained s...

www.mcsweeneys.net

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Lane Becker @lanebecker.bsky.social · 17d

U2.5

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Lane Becker @lanebecker.bsky.social · 18d

Hard agree!

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Lane Becker @lanebecker.bsky.social · 19d

“Fascism is a temper tantrum disguised as an ideology.” www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8SHcorw/

there’s no such thing as hypocrisy when you’re worldview is that you can just do whatever you want. * * * enjoy my rant. views are my own

TikTok video by Abbie Richards

www.tiktok.com

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Lane Becker @lanebecker.bsky.social · 20d

“You can tell the country is free because everywhere you look, there is less and less evidence that slavery ever happened.” www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

A Beautiful Day for Saying Nothing

That chill in the air isn’t Jimmy Kimmel’s show being suspended. It’s just autumn!

www.theatlantic.com

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Lane Becker @lanebecker.bsky.social · Sep 5

”Wikipedia is one of the few platforms online where tremendous computing power isn’t being deployed in the service of telling you exactly what you want to hear.” www.theverge.com/cs/features/...

Wikipedia is under attack — and how it can survive

The site’s volunteers face threats from Trump, billionaires, and AI.

www.theverge.com

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Lane Becker @lanebecker.bsky.social · Aug 26

Holy hell. There’s bad, incredibly bad, unbelievably bad, and then, much, much worse than all of those, is this.

kate conger @kateconger.com · Aug 26

The entire Social Security database, dumped on a random cloud server: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/u...

DOGE Put Critical Social Security Data at Risk, Whistle-Blower Says

www.nytimes.com

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Lane Becker @lanebecker.bsky.social · Aug 23

Whaaaat? We must agree to disagree. You don’t find the slow mystery of it all entirely gripping? I love the way Clarke totally marinates all her characters in the environment. And the metaphor! All the metaphor!

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Lane Becker @lanebecker.bsky.social · Aug 22

youtu.be/TsdY2tccB0w

Photoshop Tutorial Web Design Gold Psd

YouTube video by Mir Rom

youtu.be

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Lane Becker @lanebecker.bsky.social · Aug 22

Oh joy. Can’t wait to see how many vehicles pile up in this particular car crash. Is there even anyone left to do the work?

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Reposted by Lane Becker

Tim Onion @bencollins.bsky.social · Jul 30

Holy shit, they did it. They wrote the headline.

NYC Mass Shooting Was Nearly Impossible to Prevent, Experts Say

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Lane Becker @lanebecker.bsky.social · Jul 29

Ohhh this is good to know! Thanks for the pointer. I was a little sad about losing Arc, Dia is super-uninteresting, and really didn’t want to go back to the regular browsing model.

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Reposted by Lane Becker

Roland Meyer @bildoperationen.bsky.social · Jul 26

Counterfactual pseudo-history is the default mode of AI slop. The latent spaces of #genAI are free of chronology, causality, or historical time. All visual patterns exist here simultaneously as equally accessible & exploitable resources, organized by similarity & ready to be endlessly recombined
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Stil from the infamous AI video released on National Resistance Day by the French government. It shows a German soldier in a scene supposedly representing Parisians celebrating the end of Nazi occupation.

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Reposted by Lane Becker

ae @aelkus.bsky.social · Jul 12

and I think it symbolizes a lot about why tech progress right now feels so strange and perverse, you have people promising that things like this will lead to a new gold rush while much of the actual foundations of American scientific and technological superiority are being burned to the ground

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Lane Becker @lanebecker.bsky.social · Jun 29

Yes! So well-said. I have been sitting with similar thoughts and frustrations, and musing about possible paths forward, and this really helps frame the moment. You described the situation and the pitfalls hidden in post-DOGE era thinking so well. Also, love love the phrase “public mechanics.”

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Reposted by Lane Becker

Dan McCrum @mccrum.bsky.social · Jun 20

Palate cleansing Friday nonsense

Alasdair Beckett-King @misterabk.bsky.social · Jun 20

Every guy with a tragic backstory (in a movie):

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Reposted by Lane Becker

Strahan Cadell 🇨🇦🇻🇦🇺🇦🇬🇱 @quincunctial.bsky.social · Jun 15

I will repeat myself: there is a persistent belief that popular government should be based on convincing people by argumentative debate, when its true basis is the negotiation of rational compromises between people of different beliefs.

Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · Jun 15

100% this: "'debating' people — particularly in live or quasi-live forms — is a bad epistemic practice. It essentially rewards people for being dogmatic, incurious, and willfully slippery with rhetoric." www.slowboring.com/p/a-rawlsian...

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Lane Becker @lanebecker.bsky.social · May 15

"Perhaps we need a Wikipedia Liberty Index. Real or threatened censorship of Wikipedia is a lagging indicator of a state's attitudes towards free press, free speech, academic freedom, and free expression in general, and a real-time indicator of active efforts at suppression."

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Lane Becker @lanebecker.bsky.social · May 15

“You can learn a lot about a state's freedom of expression by how it treats Wikipedia. Censoring the site indicates that a significant erosion of rights has already taken place. Tracking how states treat Wikipedia provides a useful signal for those trying to counter rising authoritarianism.”

What Attacks on Wikipedia Reveal about Free Expression | TechPolicy.Press

Ryan McGrady writes that you can learn a lot about a state's view on free expression by how it treats Wikipedia.

techpolicy.press

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Reposted by Lane Becker

Aster Olsen @asterolsen.bsky.social · May 8

Not to be too pro technocrat, but it is astounding how much this country depended on the selflessness of like a few hundred thousand highly educated public servants who, for peanuts, made sure our food and medicine and environment etc were safe. And in return these servants were demonized.

Bill Grueskin @bgrueskin.bsky.social · May 7

“When it comes to .. raw milk, I want to be free to form a relationship with a local farmer, look him in the eyes, pet his cow, and then decide if I feel safe to drink the milk from his farm.”

— Casey Means, Trump’s latest surgeon-general nominee.

www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

Trump Picks a ‘MAHA’ Movement Leader for Surgeon General

The president said he would nominate Dr. Casey Means, a California doctor and wellness influencer, to be the next surgeon general.

www.wsj.com

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Reposted by Lane Becker

Shae von Londinium @intrepidbrit.bsky.social · May 3

An excellent review of Sinners. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, I would HIGHLY recommend it. And all the commentary and ink spilled about Ryan Coogler’s deal underlines one of the central points of the story.

The Jim Crow Economy Is the True Horror in 'Sinners'

The film illustrates the near-impossibility of upward mobility during the segregation era.

www.theatlantic.com

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Lane Becker @lanebecker.bsky.social · Apr 24

same

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Lane Becker @lanebecker.bsky.social · Apr 15

Anybody out there who can connect me to someone at Cloudflare working on AI Labyrinth? We're intrigued over in Wikimedia-land and want to learn more. blog.cloudflare.com/ai-labyrinth/

Trapping misbehaving bots in an AI Labyrinth

How Cloudflare uses generative AI to slow down, confuse, and waste the resources of AI Crawlers and other bots that don’t respect “no crawl” directives.

blog.cloudflare.com

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Lane Becker @lanebecker.bsky.social · Apr 13

Manischewitz Jell-O shots replaced the third cup of wine this fine Passover night. We saved the last one for Elijah.

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