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Do not attempt to compete with Pinboard. https://t.co/49Ta1zhGr0 maciej@ceglowski.com +1 415 610 0231
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Jul 16 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Lurking the r/generator subreddit recently I learned something interesting about the situation in Texas. Quite reasonably a lot of people in the Houston area have decided to get generators installed, since there have been recent major power outages both in summer and winter... This being Texas, what most people want to run off their generator is a five-ton whole-house air conditioner. This as you can imagine is pretty power hungry, particularly when it first powers on. To avoid storing gas/diesel, a lot of people have opted for a natural gas hookup
Jul 9 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
The first time I voted in a US election I was amazed that no proof of citizenship—not even photo ID—was required. From the point of view of an immigrant, you're constantly made to prove your legal residency for stuff—jobs, school, driving—but for some reason not voting. I don't really get why positive proof of ID isn't a voting requirement, other than the fact that voting law in the US is very old and predates the modern surveillance state. I don't have strong feelings about it, but it's definitely a US oddity, like the lack of national ID
Jan 5 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Cryptocurrency and generative AI make roughly the same size claims to being transformative innovations, so it's interesting to see how many interesting things people have already found to do with the latter, while the first has mostly been an expensive tour through human folly I like thinking of cryptocurrency as "financial string theory", but for the parallel to really work a lot more physicists would need to be in jail
Dec 21, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Rising from the crypt to talk a little about how pre-wikipedia generations lived. There was a big encyclopedia in the library, but only really rich families would own one. The best that poor kids could hope for was grocery store encyclopedias, bought one volume at a time Grocery chains really would sell the world's saddest encyclopedia, one slim volume a week, and you felt lucky to have it. Unrestricted access to a full set of the Encyclopedia Britannica is the thing that felt most like having access to the world wide web in the pre-www days.
Aug 28, 2023 • 19 tweets • 8 min read
Early this year I went online after taking too many drugs and ordered a Mongolian yurt. Here is my yurt, and here is my story: Image The great thing about yurts is you can get high, make a deposit, and forget you bought one for seven months. Then in late July I got email giving me an imminent delivery date and demanding to see a photo of the finished substructure. I tried to bluff them with a quick Lowe's run Image
Jul 28, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
This whole thread on large-scale circulation in the Atlantic Ocean is great, but the real showstopper is that global-warming induced breakdown in this flow will result in significant *cooling* for a large chunk of Eurasia, greatly complicating the politics of climate response. The existing strategy for mitigating climate change is incoherent because:

1. It demands a total restructuring of societies worldwide
2. Most of this burden would fall on developing nations
3. It ignores imminent tipping points that (by definition) there is no coming back from
Mar 2, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Cantonese and Uyghur have since been put back into Signal. But this whole thread shows a troubling level of ignorance from the person in charge of software people are supposed to entrust their lives and freedom to. There's no such language as Traditional Chinese, for starters. People in Hong Kong speak Cantonese, which is written with traditional Chinese characters but is not legible to nonspeakers. In the past, the CCP's belief that Cantonese is just a wacky subdialect of Mandarin has made it easier for Cantonese speakers to hide in plain sight online
Feb 28, 2023 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
Let's see what Google's been up to with their political giving—it's been a while! As a reminder, Google's PAC collects voluntary employee contributions, then gives that money to politicians the company supports. We begin our evening with a nice $5K to the Republican Majority Fund Krysten Sinema fans on Twiiter will be chagrined to see Google only gave her $3000 (out of a possible $5K), but it's still early days in the 2024 election, plenty of time to top things off later.
Feb 16, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
We need strong regulatory limits on AI in order to reduce and eventually eliminate the number of these "I chatted with an AI the night before my column was due" articles in major media. We are automating away the job of Friedman's cab driver with no thought to the consequences. Image "Will ChatGPT make writing obsolete? I prompted ChatGPT for the answer and am printing it here verbatim in my overpaid New York Times sinecure"
Feb 14, 2023 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
NASA is spending a fortune to build what is basically the third stage of the Saturn V rocket, which first flew in 1966. This is like if GM spent billions over the next ten years to relaunch the Pontiac GTO (which I'm not saying is a bad idea). Source: reddit.com/r/SpaceLaunchS… The Artemis moon program is easily the most expensive tax-funded nostalgia trip since Iraq War II. A lot of engineers working out space daddy issues on the public dime
Feb 12, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
The endpoint of this process will be a human-like instantiation of the internet that that it's possible to talk to like you would a person. But no amount of iterative self-training can train out the inherent limitations of the data set you start with. In these chat models you're talking to a Borg-like entity that does its best to merge 4chan with every DEI policy and HR manual in existence. Like trying to make a stew out of your entire pantry, no amount of correcting the seasonings is going to fix the problems inherent in that
Jan 16, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
You can tell how NASA has grown over the years by how many steps they've felt compelled to add to the Moon landing This plan may have worked fine in the sixties, but it would not make adequate use of the many new centers of excellence NASA has accrued since Apollo
Dec 23, 2021 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
There's a disconnect between critiques of Telegram and its practical use that have made me uneasy about joining technical pile-ons around how it's not really encrypted messaging. Let me use the example of Telegram use in the Hong Kong protests I arrived in Hong Kong with each hair standing individually on end because everyone was using Telegram, which of course stores every group chat server-side like Moxie says. It took me a while to understand why it was so popular despite this shortcoming
Dec 22, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Good thread on how the FDA is preventing cheap, rapid covid tests from reaching the American public. I'm not on a campaign of hate against the Biden Administration. I voted for the guy. But I did so on the understanding that he would bring competence and seriousness to a government that had been a clown car, and I am genuinely appalled at how little changed around fighting covid
Dec 21, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Biden's press secretary made a sarcastic joke about this exact idea at a press conference 13 days ago, implying the cost (a result of the President's own policy) would be prohibitive. The tests will start to arrive after the omicron wave has crested. Paying a fortune to pharmaceutical companies who profiteer from FDA dysfunction in order to deliver an insufficient number of tests through a broken postal service too late to matter will be a real full body workout for the American government.
Dec 21, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
According to The Hill, the Democrats' new plan is to drive a wedge between Manchin and his voters by making this popular senator from an R+23 state vote against a whole series of Democratic bills. If Biden really wants to get Manchin in trouble with WV voters, he should recall the Senate from vacation, have Manchin write a 1.8T spending bill of his choice, and pass it immediately. This would have the added benefit of being the only sane strategy, and good for the country
Dec 20, 2021 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
I find these highly public attacks from within the party inexplicable. Manchin is someone who pretty capably represents the interests of an extremely conservative state, and I can think of 50 senators who it makes sense to attack before you start eating your own like this. Democrats who do well in Trump districts are the only hope the party has for winning in rural America, and we need more of them, because rural America is the only path to a Senate majority. So maybe tone down the civil war and fight the pandemic or something.
Dec 19, 2021 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Is there interest in a good faith technical explanation of this? I feel like a lot of those exist, but if smart people like Jay Rosen are not getting their minds around it then there is something amiss. What's the missing piece? I like to write and would gladly take a swing. A recurring problem in blockchain exposition is that people from outside tech see the trillions of dollars and growing mountain of cryptocurrency projects and reasonably assume some useful substantive core must exist under the hype, while those of us in tech know the awful truth.
Dec 19, 2021 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
The story here is that the party in power wasted its first year unwilling to pare down a bill to something that would pass its caucus, sent itself home for the holidays, and now blames the senator by some miracle we still have from WV for why people's child tax credit got cut off The theme here, with the praiseworthy exception of the infrastructure bill, is a failure to lead. You use the materials you're given to achieve what you realistically can, you keep disagreements private, and you don't sleep on a pandemic you promised to make your top priority.
Dec 17, 2021 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
We're now days away from New York City being overwhelmed by its biggest covid wave, and one or two weeks out from it happening nationally. I'm starting to fear that the President is too old or out of touch to do his vital job as a public communicator, and that there is no plan. ImageImage We need a national leader to step up and tell people:

1. It's going to get bad, we'll get through it
2. You're not fully vaxxed with two shots, get a third
3. We take these measures to protect our fellows, not ourselves. Wave the flag a bit, cite Normandy, whatever you need.
Dec 16, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
They've had a year to prepare this legislation. The only part of it that hasn't been constantly changed is the contention that it's urgent. If two senators are obstructing the bill, then let them write it themselves, and pass that. Don't just go home on another vacation. Put it off just a little longer and you can run on Build Back Better again!