Close to last call if you need some festively appropriate (mostly) music for the next few days!
24.12.2025 23:54
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Close to last call if you need some festively appropriate (mostly) music for the next few days!
It's time for my 22nd(!) annual Xmess mix.
Construct your own tiny, festive reality with the sonic equivalent of finding a half-eaten candy cane in a coat pocket from 1987. Confuse your in-laws or use it to soundtrack a festive mental breakdown in a mall parking lot. Happy Holidays!
Proposing a new principle - Tyrell’s Law: Any person that can be synthesized, will. Preferably at scale.
We have some news to share with you. 🥄
Today we took legal action to challenge our termination, filing an appeal with the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board. We did this because we believe the elimination of 18F violated safeguards that exist to protect a nonpartisan civil service.
The Trio LP Trio and Error.
This week I learned the band Trio intentionally put “skips” in one of their songs. The songwriter thought the song was ‘too beautiful’ and needed to be ‘destroyed’ a bit. It took me going through digital copies and buying and LP to figure it out.
www.stephan-remmler.de/dokuwiki/dok...
![The Alarm - Absolute Reality (Official Music Video) [2018 Remaster]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:3tsfheevslbvte4h5j43xsla/bafkreihz7fqwbu66qd75m2nzcgbusse6jyq7ggbcxmivjryooqwmlaahzy@jpeg)
“You may have love
You may have hate
You may be the President Of The United States
But even you, you can't sit and hide
While the world's resources die”
m.youtube.com/watch?v=9l8b...
Mike Peters of the alarm
RIP Mike Peters. The Alarm were a staple of early mixtapes. ❤️
youtu.be/1tw_hbYYbbE
Fun fact, it's possible the domain "climatecore" was established because some folks might not have known the pronunciation of the word "corps" was "core."
Just slightly possible.
A picture of a card from Edward Gorey's Fantod Deck, the Urn, shown upside down.
The Urn reversed, gonna be one of those days, I guess.
This one stings a bit. Building and launching ACC's site was a stressfest, but going from zero to site in a few months was a highlight of my time at 18F. I learned so much about building with constraints, limited resources, bubble gum, scotch tape, adrenaline, and caffeine.
... and, yes, there are lots of experimental AI things to do in government, just nothing attached to current payment, benefit, or safety systems, yo.
I learned the term from this article, but didn't want to share a link behind a sign-in without some backup. 404's reporting is top-notch.
This is perfect. I hadn't heard of "vibe coding," but it's precisely the thing I'm worried about with government development and AI. Coding with "vibes" is the approach that gets people dropped from benefits (or worse).
The ultimate goal of a market intentionally drowning itself in AI and SaaS methodologies is a camera that costs nothing to own, but scans each photograph you take for copyrighted logos or phrases, then charges a dollar for each such photo you wish to keep, and another for each you wish to share.
I didn't know I needed a sun and steel-drenched dancefloor reedit of Bruce Hornsby and the Range's "The Way It Is," but my day is already so much better for it.
The new Walt McClements album, On a Painted Ocean has been a welcome companion the last few weeks. It's full of minor disturbances in the surface of the day that spiral out into the wee hours.
A screen capture from The Simpsons. In Mr. Burns' plush office, complete with amazing floor-to-ceiling bookcases, C. Montgomery Burns stands in a stern pose as he looks over a model of the town of Springfield. A concerned Mr. Smithers looks on as Burns utters the famous line, "SINCE THE BEGINNING OF TIME MAN HAS YEARNED TO DESTROY THE SUN."
Honestly, I expect this sort of project any day now.
1. The goals of public bureaucracy are usually vague. For example, while the USDS was ostensibly created to "improve digital services," there is no singular metric (like profit) that the service could fall back on to point to improvement. This is ubiquitous across all public bureaucracies. For example, if the goal of the library A Service as Easy as Ordering Takeout 45 is to provide access to materials, how do we judge that we have succeeded? If it is to increase literacy, how do we know that it is the impact of the library? 2. No government, library, school, or other public institution could possibly attain every metric mandated by the public and usually must choose a few. For example, the USDS chose "efficiency" over almost any other metric. When choosing tech-nology, libraries cannot possibly weigh every single metric that could be important to their patrons. Generally, libraries must weigh the metrics of efficiency, cost, robustness, effectiveness, privacy, and other metrics and choose a few based on their judgment. 3. The primary reward of public bureaucracy is adherence to professional norms rather than profit. This means that incentives are limited, but derived pleasure from work is usually higher due to the professional's feeling of purpose. 4. Public bureaucracy solves significantly more difficult problems than the private sector, and considering the two as equal creates an intense misalignment. For example, "improving literacy" is significantly more complicated than "selling more books to line Jeff Bezos's pockets." "Ending homelessness" is more complicated than "buving real estate
putting people first is hard to do in a government that, ultimately, has the power to command people and even send them to prison. A business may put people first because businesses compete with each other in order to attract customers, but the government competes with nobody. And cutting red tape may be possible in a business firm that can tell whether it is doing a good job by looking at its sales and profits, but cutting it in a government agency is much harder because (ordinarily) government agencies deal with neither sales nor profits. (Wilson 2000, 1-2)
My new paper describes why the “business ontology” is a fallacy, and how the business-centered technocratic approach to digital service delivery made agencies like USDS uniquely vulnerable to takeover under a malicious regime. journals.library.wustl.edu/pollib/artic...
(It is also worth noting that, like other ham-fisted attempts to memory-hole information, they just whacked a top-level page, and the pages underneath are still there and in search.)
Here's a puzzler: Why would the State Department take down all its policy pages, positions, and reports on AI at the beginning of April of this year? Wipe the slate clean of all previous AI work. 🤔
Tonight’s entertainment: Tommy Lee Jones’ 4th best movie. Linda Hamilton, Robert Vaughn and THE Bubba Smith in a small role. The only criticism is the soundtrack is missing the John Carpenter synth vibes. (I know it’s Lalo Schifrin but it needs more high energy vibes.)
Also consider this a full-throated, blue-ribbon, star on the fridge, high-five endorsement for @arnicas.bsky.social's newsletter at arnicas.substack.com.
I love this SO much. Traceability to source documents is the sort of feature I dreamed about when thinking about government AI tools. The ability to help identify, amplify, or de-emphasize docs in the training data? Swoooon.
Bad AAPL
Sharing a story from 2021 for no real reason. It was an interesting take back then. Wonder how it's aged?
It HAS been nice to go back through 7 years of bookmarks and see what I was reading, watching, and listening to.
Remember "peak tech conference" of the 20-teens? A company called Fetch posted a Google sheet of all the events they were tracking in 2018! Warning: This may cause a wave of nostalgia.
So, when sites are seen as disposable as paper plates, the incentives for deep research and design get pushed way down.
I found my old raindrop.io account and was pleasantly amazed to discover they're still around and have bookmarks I uploaded 6+ years ago.
I didn't keep track of the numbers, but so many of the sites from even 3 years ago? Gone, baby, gone. Blogspots of nothing. Gaping gashes of SITE NOT FOUND.
I took some time last week to review all those warnings about old and compromised passwords Chrome and iOS go on about. I didn't have to worry since most of the sites had gone offline—everything from e-commerce to social sites, poof! URLs bought by scammers or 404-o-rama.
