Tim Walker

Oh, very nice!

What type of shoes are they?

I will brace myself to read this one.

Feisty seems good!

This sounds like a good problem to have. :)

I’m glad you had such a nice time with your friends.

When Using AI Leads to “Brain Fry” As firms increasingly incentivize employees to build and oversee complex teams of agents—for example, by measuring and rewarding token consumption as a proxy for performance—people are finding themsel...

Phrase of the moment: "AI brain fry"
hbr.org/2026/03/when...

“You realize it’s our technology, and this elaborate structure of civilization, that gives us the freedom not to be present, which is to say conscious. We normally think we’re more conscious than animals, but there’s a sense in which they’re more conscious than we are.”

~Michael Pollan

“It’s not that people on social media or engaging with chatbots are not conscious. It’s just that the space of their consciousness is being manipulated on purpose.”

~Pollan

Damn, she was right. Every day IS a winding road.

💀

This leads me to reflect on how many of the books I loved when I was a kid featured kids going around on their own — on bikes, on foot, etc.

And then I contrast that to how many (i.e. nearly zero) kids I see going around like that these days. 😔

💥 Just came up with an idea for a series of picture-book whodunits for little kids.

Do I need another good idea for a project? NO. Will I at least write it down? Sure.

@above96th.bsky.social Nice to make your acquaintance — I used to live above 96th Street myself!

This skeet and the replies make for good and thoughtful discourse on the nature of labor, skill acquisition, and knowledge work.

It’s different in social sciences where the writing and the thinking are inextricably linked, and where the “pseudo code” product is the final product, because they end user is also human and not a machine. 2/2

What they fail to get is that predictive algorithms for coding are transformative because they streamline the “turn these task specs from human language into computer language” part of the job. They don’t transform the thinking part of figuring out which tasks need doing and why. 1/

And, you know, not for nothing, coding and historical research and writing are wildly different skills with wildly different methodologies and goals.

📣📣📣Can you hear me now??? A Red-winged Blackbird making his presence felt this morning along Central Park's Harlem Meer. That's the Dana Discovery Center in the background for all the locals! ❤️🖤🧡 #Blackbirds #CentralPark #birding

Especially in academia, news & art, it’s important that *people* create what we read/appreciate because what matters to people about those things are the insights, trustworthiness and interiority of the people making them.

“Poems either do not succeed, or they feel as much delivered as created.”

~ Mary Oliver

an elderly woman in a green shirt says it 's been 84 years ... Alt: The old lady from TITANIC saying "It's been 84 years..."

BTW, my oldest saves on Bluesky are only from late 2024. I just spent a few minutes (!) scrolling all the way down to my oldest saves on Instagram . . . from February 2018. 😵‍💫

5/

As I've said before (see nested skeet), this purgation project means you should expect random reposts of stuff that could be months or years old.

bsky.app/profile/twal...

4/

a man is sitting in the driver 's seat of a car and says `` are we there yet ? '' Alt: Deadpool asking Dopinder "Are we there yet?"

I'm sure I'll also post about books I'm reading & other interesting stuff I come across, but mainly I'm resetting my habits to get away from saving posts e-mails, papers, etc. "for later" — or a version of "later" that never comes.

3/

a man in a suit and hat is standing with his hands in his pockets in a black and white photo . Alt: Cary Grant wearing an amazing suit in HIS GIRL FRIDAY (one of my favorite films), looking grimly self-righteous, and saying "Get out."

...which is tied to stuff some of y'all have heard me say before/recently about purging bookmarks (and saves, e-mails, papers, whatever).

So for the next however-long-it-takes, I'm replacing scrolling with purgation.

2/

a man with curly hair and a beard says it bothers me leonardo Alt: a man with curly hair and a beard says "it bothers me".

Y'all, I love social media for the interactions I have with neat people — but all the browsing & scrolling is undermining my:

—cognition
—mental health
—time & task management
—spirit (?)

So I'm trying an experiment...

1/

PLEASE take my hard-won advice for tough times: Don't oversell the badness of a thing — to yourself or others.

If it merely sucks, say "Ugh, this sucks" — not "FML this is so disheartening."

It's SO common to hear people make a situation worse — & hamstring their own response — by exaggerating it.

YES.

the internet has *always* had a problem of hate-sharing, and if we want to get out of this, we gotta be equally committed to sharing good work and supporting the people who make it

I know 0.002% as much as you do about drones, but if I guessed “Because the people running this show really are that feckless, and they don’t care if they do it the stupid way,” how close would I be?

I miss when gambling was illegal