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Brian Gawalt

@brian.gawalt.com
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  1. 1

    five photos of five red road signs with white text, all against a arid california chapparal type background THOUGH THE DARK OF FUTURE'S PAST THE MAGICIAN LONGS TO SEE ONE CHANCE OUT BETWEEN TWO WORLDS FIRE WALK WITH ME [cursively scripty logo] Burma Shave
    562 145
    Jan 8, 2026
  2. 2

    Screen shot of a tweet from Feb 21 2022 Male Body Inspector @tommyveggies Man i really wish i grew up in the 90s! Everyone dressed so cool back then and the music was real. Also, you’d be called Gay Mike for the rest of your life if you wore a purple shirt once
    Tiffany⸆⸉ @tiffanyclay.dev
    What’s a real thing from your childhood that kids these days would find completely foreign? Like, how we used to be able to walk right up to the gate to meet our family coming off a flight. Or how we had to pick a spot to meet at the theater BEFORE we went.
    547 69
    Jul 14, 2025
  3. 3

    i would like to thank @lastpositivist.bsky.social for coining "ok, but no galaxy brain stuff" as a general purpose technology

    Tweet screencap, https://x.com/lastpositivist/status/1348212384037482496 Liam Bright @lastpositivist Adding a single principle to utilitarianism ("ok, but no galaxy brain stuff, alright?") and thereby perfecting moral philosophy. 2:17 AM · Jan 10, 2021
    Paul Crider @paulcrider.liberalcurrents.com
    The liberal ability to craft interesting, fruitful Gedankenexperimente has markedly declined. Gone are the days of veils of ignorance or experience machines. Now we conjure up avowed antiliberals to air their grievances at liberals, assuming perfect faith. www.noemamag.com/from-statecr...
    Suppose we wanted to repeat the experiment in 2025. More pointedly, let’s put ourselves in Coronaeus’s shoes: a wealthy and comfortable hegemon at a time when his hegemony was challenged. In the 16th century, that meant being Catholic. In the 21st century, it means being liberal while the liberal-democratic order begins to crack. So, if we, like Coronaeus, want to understand how our rivals live and think, who should we invite? It’s obvious: Liberals should seek out the most articulate and thoughtful representatives of regimes from around the world that are threatening to dethrone liberalism from the political, social, economic and cultural pre-eminence it has enjoyed for roughly the past 75 years. In the spirit of naming names, I’d send RSVPs to Aleksandr Dugin of Russia, the philosopher who has been called “Putin’s Brain”; Wang Huning, the shrewd ideologue who has led Beijing for some 40 years; Steve Bannon of the United States, who, whatever his faults, has channeled Trumpism like no one else; Mohan Bhagwat, head of India’s Hindu nationalist movement; Rached Ghannouchi of Tunisia for an Islamist perspective; and finally Viktor Orbán, who, although currently the Prime Minister of Hungary, seems to relish rowdy gatherings.
    169 24
    Mar 7, 2025
  4. 4

    Five part diagram on a white board A) a pig squished into a single point B) a pig stretched to be a line segment C) a pig that is a square D) a pig that is a cube E) two cube pigs coupled to form a hyper pig
    Tricia Lockwood @tricialockwood.bsky.social
    hyperpig
    142 28
    Aug 20, 2024
  5. 5

    Zeb from Rebels and I did the word balloon but so now he's saying what luke said
    Luke O'Neil @lukeoneil47.bsky.social
    Ezra is a little bitch I'm sorry. Always has been always will be. And he trusts every single motherfucker he meets. On God this boy is dumb.
    118 8
    Jan 1, 2026
  6. 6

    Reply

    (i will take the null hypothesis here; if he seems super cool and successful in the us videos and a shunned loser in the paris videos, thats because it's way easier for him to shoot 100x as many us videos and keep the winners vs how much he can shoot in one week in paris)

    96 0
    Jun 25, 2026
  7. 7

    Hm.

    Facebook ad for Fidelity wealth management where two guys in suits are behind a woman in a suit, showing her into an office Scene from Goodfellas where Joe Pesci, in a suit, is being shown into an office by two guys in suits behind him
    94 14
    Aug 3, 2025
  8. 8

    Lol they scored and he took it off. "We can relax, for now"

    Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social
    Senegal's manager put a blazer over the white T today which is how you know they mean business
    67 4
    Jul 1, 2026
  9. 9

    Reply

    As long as we're on the subject: no, no one actually knows how magnets work

    65 1
    Nov 18, 2024
  10. 10

    Medicaid for all. "Oh no someone is secretly rich in assets and is faking low income to get Medicaid" doesn't matter when everyone gets Medicaid.

    64 16
    May 31, 2025
  11. 11

    Reply

    this is related to @lukeoneil47.bsky.social's letter about how the congressional covid advice kept saying people should "call your doctor" and none of those three words actually describe how health care ever works now

    62 2
    Feb 15, 2024
  12. 12

    @niedermeyer.io I went on FB marketplace to give away some compact discs. now I'm 11 grand in the hole and hoping the CDs will fit in this glove box.

    FB marketplace posting for a 1948 Studebaker Weasel, a weird hybrid of ice cream truck and armored personnel carrier
    53 7
    Aug 25, 2024
  13. 13

    Reply

    i trace this back to 9/11 as filtered through 24. the terrorists win if jack bauer doesn't torture three guys a day(, which he hates doing btw, if you even care)

    52 1
    Jun 26, 2026
  14. 14

    Reply

    Using a pair of these as trek poles for ten miles after having 24 tacos and beers

    45 1
    Feb 27, 2026
  15. 15

    Reply to @brendelbored.bsky.social

    louis the chef from the little mermaid leaning forward slightly with a huge grin looking off to the side while he delicately stirs something in a pan. rene auberjonois does the voice including for the le poisson song.
    45 0
    Oct 13, 2025
  16. 16

    Reply

    "i started building with async and now can't tell what things happened when" yuup

    41 1
    Mar 26, 2025
  17. 17

    when i start the jupyter backend, i need to open a fresh new chrome window to load its notebook tree. can't just be a new tab in the long-lived main chrome window. this is called "sandboxing" and it's important for security.

    39 2
    Apr 3, 2026
  18. 18

    This has been a real problem in the job market, and for a while, too. Before Mark Zuckerberg showed up at NeurIPS, you could count on any job posting asking for ML expertise to reflect a genuine business need for ML. But then staffing up potemkin ML jobs became a shortcut to attracting investors.

    SE Gyges @segyges.bsky.social
    the basic problem is that LLMs are so general purpose that people use them extremely badly. the barrier to entry for having a bad idea is way way lower, whereas like, previously to even set up a spam classifier required someone who knew math to be involved first
    37 1
    Jul 22, 2025
  19. 19

    i went to uva (pretty solid eng/cs school) and then to uc berkeley (insane world-class eng/cs school, which i also say of udub) and had this same culture shock: they are not great at educating; they are great at incubating the 1/3 people who can self-educate at surprising speed and washing out 2/3

    Jeremy Diamond ☕️ @dmnd.me
    Okay here’s a fresh AI angle: current CS student just wants to learn to code
    Post on r/udub (University of Washington subreddit) This entire CS school is depressingly obsessed with Al. ldk if this is just a me problem, but here's my little rant... I came to UW CS because I love programming and computers and creating fun nerdy stuff... but everybody in this department feels absolutely crosseyed obsessed with generative Al. I have professors straight up encouraging Al coding (what happened to learning?), ML-based projects shoehorned into classes that should have nothing to do with it whatsoever, and it feels impossible to find research that's not based on generative Al (which is a bummer, since CS is such a wide and diverse field). If you don't care for this thing which, forgive the harsh language, plagiarizes everything and produces uninspired shit products, it feels like you're hard outta luck here. I get everyone vibe codes in industry, fine, but I'm here to learn, not to get shaped into a dull corporate vibe coder machine. Theory courses are the only ones which feel moderately safe from this stuff. I honestly feel like switching majors, but I get that it'd be a stupid thing to do at this point. Does anybody feel this way or am I an old person yelling at a cloud?
    36 2
    Apr 3, 2026
  20. 20

    Reply

    The XX - Intro
    www.youtube.com/watch?v=veHq...

    The XX Intro long version]
    YouTube video by Laurent Zen
    35 0
    Jul 13, 2025
  21. 21

    Reply to @anildash.com

    not to be too goofy with it but "you people made me give up my peanut farm" is the one that bounces around my brain
    theonion.com/you-people-m...

    You People Made Me Give Up My Peanut Farm Before I Got To Be President
    For generations, U.S. presidents have gone to great lengths to avoid potential conflicts of interest. When I was elected, I followed suit by placing my small business in a blind trust to assure our ci...
    35 1
    Sep 8, 2025
  22. 22

    Reply

    how is skull-flap-dropping happening often enough to have a detectable effect size??

    35 0
    Jan 27, 2025
  23. 23

    Reply

    ebbbe beedee bebee bedeeeo obJEction

    33 0
    Apr 27, 2026
  24. 24

    Reply

    i wouldn't lean too hard on this, the story is very proud of itself every time it gets to say "lol the enemy of your enemy was also your enemy"

    32 0
    Nov 23, 2025
  25. 25

    Passed this on from @lukeoneil47.bsky.social in a professional context

    www.welcometohellworld.com/take-some-sm...

    Excerpt from the linked hellworld newsletter: "If you want something perfectly tailored 1:1 to your own taste meant solely for you to experience alone you can already do that just by sitting there and thinking about it buddy. Skip the middle man step of the computer. It's just going to put it back in your brain anyway."
    31 8
    Jan 3, 2025