Programs are meant to be read by humans

autopilot — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 13:06:17 GMT

You can improve your programming skills by reading the annotated disassembly or source code for resource-constrained (previously) masterworks such as Tempest, Battlezone, Elite on the 6502 (previously), Ms PacMan, Gameboy Tetris, NES Super Mario, Prince of Persia, Colossal Cave Adventure, Zork 1, Spacewar!, Asteroids, the Apollo Guidance Computer (previously) and many more. Or learn from their failures, like the 2600 versions of PAC-MAN (previously) and the cursed ET (previously).

I picked the wrong week to stop using glue

chavenet — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 18:51:38 GMT

Because people have a need to glue things to other things [note: We'd love to provide information about how to glue everything to everything but there are just too many things. So we decided to focus on common household items.]

Withnail's Coat has a Complicated History

Sebmojo — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 10:47:40 GMT

An enquiry into Richard E Grant's coat in the film Withnail and I.

Timothy Leary May Have Been Among the CIA's Greatest Assets

dmh — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 19:04:53 GMT

Timothy Leary was touting LSD as a consciousness-expanding drug that could induce sexual euphoria among women and lead to the development of a more peaceful society. However, in hindsight, Leary proved to be a false prophet who helped destroy the 1960s movements by pushing young people to take a drug that fried their brains and diverted their energy from political activism.

Carl Oglesby, the one-time president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the leading 1960s-era campus anti-war organization, wrote in 1988 that "we have to contemplate the possibility that the great American acid trip, no matter how distinctive of the rebellion of the 1960s it came to appear, was in fact the result of a despicable government conspiracy....If U.S. intelligence bodies collaborated in an effort to drug the entire generation of Americans, then the reason they did so was to disorient it, sedate it, and depoliticize it."

Beware Software Brain!

k3ninho — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 12:07:52 GMT

"Software brain is powerful stuff. It's a way of thinking that basically created our modern world. Marc Andreessen, the literal embodiment of software brain, called it in 2011 when he wrote the piece "Why software is eating the world" as an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. But software thinking has been turbocharged by AI in a way that I think helps explain the enormous gap between how excited the tech industry is about the technology and how regular people are growing to dislike it more and more over time." from Nilay Patel in Decoder at The Verge.

It doesn't say about the generational changes that come about as each group has a new baseline of technology; while Gen Z are credited as highest rate of adopters for GenAI tools, they're the least satisfied and hate them.

It does say something like Engineer Mindset where everything is amenable to rules, structure and sequencing, and also crosses over to Law for the same reasons.

There's that lens for new technology: you were excited by changes in the world in you twenties, tolerated the delta in your thirties and everything new after forty is an abhorrent escapee from hell.

I'm an artisanal driver, it'll be another generational change for me to learn how to share spaces and anticipate the behaviour of robo-driven vehicles or to trust traffic flow to a networked optimiser.

I wonder if many people don't care for new tools because our lives are full with the tools at hand.

Woman's Talkspace therapy app sessions exposed in court

sickos haha yes dot jpg — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 00:06:10 GMT

Jennifer Kamrass confessed her worries to her therapist: her marriage, her finances, and self-esteem. Therapists are legally and ethically bound to confidentiality, but two years later, a transcript of every word Kamrass had typed to her psychologist using the app Talkspace was produced in court by her former employer. ... Talkspace has amassed "one of the largest mental health data banks in the world," according to reports to investors, containing 140 million message exchanges.

What's New in Old Books

Horace Rumpole — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 16:46:46 GMT

Some highlights from special collections libraries' blogs this week.
Verbiest's Complete Map of the World At 6" x 13", a spectacular gift from a 17th century Jesuit missionary to the Emperor of China.
A guide to finding pictures in the Caroline F. Schimmel Collection of Women in the American Wilderness
There is a Light That Never Goes Out Manchester's John Rylands Library acquires a collection of photographs documenting the city's legendary music scene.
Manuscript Monday A weekly video introduction to a medieval manuscript at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies.

Now They're Giving the Kids (A)iPads

TheProfessor — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 18:54:24 GMT

(And Chromebooks). Before we had a son, my wife and I had always assumed we'd send him to public school. But over his first year, we've been getting the feeling that it might be hard to find a public school whose curriculum isn't entirely mediated by iPad. It turns out we were wrong about that intuition, but only in the sense of the specific device: "In a national survey conducted by the Times last November, about eighty per cent of K-12 teachers said that their districts use Chromebooks," which was depressing enough, but it turns out that the Chromebooks are now the way that Google's going to inject its large language model into my future kindergartener: "[this Chromebook rollout] has created a vast captive market for Gemini and helped make A.I. in schools a near-universal prospect." And it looks like the 20% without a Chromebook probably have some other device with some other AI on it. [ungated]

This is not the first time we've talked about computers becoming ubiquitous in schools, but I think it's the first time we've talked about AI apps being nearly universally distributed as soon as kindergarten. I have a couple of thoughts that the article doesn't touch on but that seem essential to discussion (and then I'll post the requisite choice quotes).

(1) It's crazy to think that a parent might assiduously keep screens away from their kid for five years just for the public school system to hand them one when, given that they're in kindergarten, all they really need are crayons, blocks, and picture books;

(2) I think anybody with the means is going to try to avoid lobotomizing their kids with terrible laptops and terrible apps, so while we've always had an elite/normal educational split in this country, now we're going to have an elite that knows how to read and a great swathe of people who know how to watch TikToks and can't operate without being able to ask Claude what's going on;

(3) It seems like our entire public educational apparatus has been captured by Silicon Valley; I guess that's been true for a while now.

Alright, absolutely infuriating quotes for you:

Somehow, I was not prepared for the creepy neighbor to start hanging around my kids' schools; somehow, I thought we had until high school. In February, my son, who is in third grade at a public K-5 in Massachusetts, came home with a piece of paper in his backpack that read "Certificate of Completion," for "demonstrating an understanding of the basic concepts of Artificial Intelligence." He and his classmates had earned this honor, I learned, by playing a computer game produced by the nonprofit Code.org in partnership with Amazon Future Engineer, called Mix & Move with AI, in which the student "designs" a cartoon dancer and "remixes" a popular song—available, needless to say, on Amazon Music. The game is an inane drag-and-drop affair that has little to do with A.I.; the certificate, it turned out, was merely a memento of a pointless and deceptive branding exercise.

Then, in March, students at my eleven-year-old daughter's public middle school began receiving new Google Chromebooks, and that is when I heard the tap-tap of the cloven hooves approaching our doorstep. The Chromebooks, which the students use in every class and for homework, came pre-installed with an all-ages version of Gemini, a suite of A.I. tools. When my daughter, who is in sixth grade, begins writing an essay, she gets a prompt: "Help me write." If she is starting work on a slide-show presentation, the prompt is "Help me visualize." She shoos away these interruptions, but they persist: "Help me edit." "Beautify this slide." The image generator is there, if she'd ever wish to pull the plug on her imagination. The Gemini chatbot is there, if she ever wants to talk to no one.

...

No single company has a monopoly on A.I. in K-8 education. In Boston's public schools, sixth graders used chatbots powered by OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude to prepare for this year's statewide standardized tests. In New York's and Los Angeles's school districts, among others, kindergartners talk to a gamified reading bot called Amira, which records children's voices in order to provide A.I.-driven feedback. A public-school parent in Brooklyn told me about a second-grade art class in which the students can cook up A.I. slop using Adobe Express for Education. When a group of fourth graders in Los Angeles used the same Adobe program to design a Pippi Longstocking book cover, it spat out highly sexualized images.

...

Last month, New York City's Department of Education began soliciting public feedback on its preliminary guidelines for using A.I. in K-12 classrooms, which include this admonishment: "The question is not whether AI belongs in schools. The question is whether we will collectively build a system that governs AI to serve every student and every stakeholder."

...

The feasibility of such a scenario is yet to be established. But a new educator training program called the National Academy for AI Instruction may offer teachers a chance to stress-test some of the many promises that the A.I. industry has made to their profession. The academy, which is headquartered at the United Federation of Teachers' office in Manhattan, is a joint project of the U.F.T. and the American Federation of Teachers, and is funded via a twenty-three-million-dollar partnership with Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic. The in-person and online classes offered by the academy are intended to help educators "not accept the inevitable but navigate it," Randi Weingarten, the president of the A.F.T., told me.

...

The [New York] city D.O.E. official overseeing the guidelines, Miatheresa Pate, is a current recipient of a fellowship jointly offered by Google and GSV Ventures, an ed-tech venture-capital firm whose portfolio includes Amira and MagicSchool. (Other names on the current Google-GSV fellowship roster include top school officials in Berkeley, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Newark, and statewide officials in Colorado and Maryland.) "If you ask tobacco companies to help write your school's policy on cigarettes," Garrett quipped, "you're going to end up with guidance on how to smoke responsibly in school."

In my heart, I want to choose the Bucket of Bravery

Kitteh — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 16:30:43 GMT

A 'Game Show' That's Basically Dropout For Word Nerds Is The Funniest Thing I've Watched In Years slKotaku)

As the author of the article says, there is no streaming service for this show in North America. But you can see a lot of the episodes on YouTube.

S2E1 - Hannah Gadsby, Lloyd Langford, Nina Oyama

S2E5 - Becky Lucas, Alexei Toliopoulos, Tony Martin

...just for a few examples

This is one of those shows that Shepherd and I now watch when we need a silly palate cleanser from, well, everything.

Roberts Court Deals a Death Blow to the Voting Rights Act

sickos haha yes dot jpg — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 16:55:15 GMT

"The Supreme Court's six-to-three Republican-appointed majority issued a staggering ruling on Wednesday essentially killing the remaining protections of the Voting Rights Act, dealing a death blow to the country's most important civil rights law. The majority opinion by Justice Samuel Alito in Louisiana v. Callais strikes down the creation of a second majority-Black congressional district in Louisiana and in so doing narrows Section 2 of the VRA to the point of irrelevance, making it nearly impossible to prove that a gerrymandered map violates the right of voters of color."

ACLU: A History of the Voting Rights Act (through 2016)
NYT: "Why Is There a Voting Rights Act?"
NMAAHC (Blacksonian): 150 Years and Counting

VRA previously

temple robbers

dhruva — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 17:22:09 GMT

To Finance Their Lifestyle, a Young French Couple Went to Cambodia to Steal Antiquities. They Did Almost Everything Wrong "Clara and André Malraux conspired to loot the pink temple of Banteay Srei, but their failure started a battle of reclamation"

Skub [ˈsgɔb] means "push" in Danish

pwnguin — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 17:52:28 GMT

Skub is a (mobile friendly!) open source daily puzzle game with simple rules: Slide the puck to the target. Fewest moves wins.

Very much inspired by Ricochet Robots, and a long line of predecessor digital adaptions. This one features leaderboards, hints, solution animations and an archive of 100+ playable puzzles.

We desperately need better skepticism

chavenet — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 15:32:10 GMT

In 2024, Ed Zitron was hardly alone in wondering if AI would take this route; it seemed plausible to me too. Models like GPT-4 were tantalizing mostly because of what they suggested might be possible in the future, rather than for their direct economic utility. If building bigger models didn't pan out, it was easy to imagine that we'd see some bankruptcies. But time passes and situations evolve. Ed Zitron, though, clearly does not. from AI's biggest critic has lost the plot

indoctrination disguised as spiritually rigorous self-help content

sciatrix — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 17:54:50 GMT

A thirtysomething woman with the easy smile of your favorite neighbor sits in her earth-tone living room, natural light washing over a gray couch so long it could easily fit four children. The woman speaks of a friend, a married mother, who was frustrated that she had to constantly remind her germophile husband to wash his hands. Hearing this, the woman cautioned her friend: "I think it would be better for your entire family to get the black plague and die ... than for you to continue treating your husband like a toddler by reminding him to wash his hands." Welcome to Wife School, a video masterclass led by Tilly Dillehay, a 38-year-old Baptist writer, podcaster and pastor's wife who teaches women how to "become the kind of woman who inspires a godly leader".

US millionaire big-game hunter dies after being crushed by elephants

AlSweigart — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 03:45:36 GMT

[Guardian] [ungated] Ernie Dosio, a 75-year-old vineyard owner, was hunting yellow-backed duiker, an antelope species, in the central African country of Gabon when the incident occurred last Friday. While in the Lope-Okanda rainforest, he and his guide unexpectedly came across five female elephants accompanied by a calf. Originally from Lodi, California, Dosio had built an extensive collection of hunting trophies over the years, including animals such as elephants and lions. He was reportedly a familiar name within the Sacramento Safari Club.

Every year, clients of the trophy-hunting industry claim the lives of tens of thousands of wild animals across the world. Legal hunting tours in Africa are popular with some wealthy Americans, including Donald Trump Jr, who was pictured holding a severed elephant's tail more than a decade ago.

During his first presidential term, Donald Trump created a controversial wildlife advisory board to help rewrite federal rules for importing the heads and hides of African elephants, lions and rhinoceroses. The board was disbanded in 2020 after lawsuits alleging it was an illegal, biased panel stacked with trophy hunters rather than conservationists, who worked to promote the economic benefits of big game hunting.

this time it's personal

mittens — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 14:18:22 GMT

'Everyone knows what Woke 2 is. They know when they see it, instanter: an American flag borne through the tear gas, an incomprehensible rainbow-saturated meme explaining "you just lost to the woke agenda," eight million protesters shouting NO KINGS. Yet no one can say what Woke 2 is. This is the question I propose to answer. A place to start: why do we even need a 2? Don't we have woke at home? If we want to inaugurate Woke 2, we should start by understanding Woke 1: what it did, why it worked, what it was right about—and why it fell apart. Only then can we start building something new.' -- Samantha Hancox-Li, What is Woke 2?

I especially like the analysis of what went wrong with Woke 1, starting with its method of, as Hancox-Li calls it, "excavation":

Woke 1 adopted a different engine of cultural change, what I will call the "excavation." Take something that seems ordinary or unobjectionable, and then excavate a hidden connection with something we all agree is quite bad—most centrally, racism and sexism. [...] The genius of excavation is how it was an engine for mass participation, for social belonging, for ideological advancement. An excavation is not just an intellectual move, but a social one. By performing an excavation, you proved you were one of the good ones; anyone could do it; it worked to spread certain ideas like wildfire.

We have yet to understand the nature of that transformation

chavenet — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 08:43:01 GMT

The things we call phones today are not phones at all. We have appropriated the name of an older technology and applied it to something entirely distinct. If the smartphone is as bright and alluring as Narcissus's mirror, the telephone — the real phone — was dark and obscure. It did not lull, or seduce, or enchant. It haunted, tormented, and whispered. It drove one mad not through flattery or pleasure, but through a kind of pervasive uncanniness that threatened always to overwhelm the distinction between the scientific and the occult. from Ben Lerner Hears Ghosts in the Wires, an essay on Transcription [ungated]

He snatched at you and you match his cigarette

chavenet — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 14:21:31 GMT

The matchbook pulled from a dead man's pocket in a film noir is never just a matchbook, and it's never just a clue to a single, solvable crime. Instead, it's a window onto a whole world of ambition and weakness, pleasure and destruction, that the detective can illuminate but never fully comprehend. The Wienberg collection works in much the same way, assembling a fragmentary image of a Malibu that's largely gone now, burned or bulldozed or simply forgotten, and the ambitions and dreams of a moment in time. There's a particular irony in the fact that it falls to matchbooks—instruments of ignition, made to be used up and thrown away—to preserve the memory of a place that fire has repeatedly erased.

A Mrs Crocombe For A New Age

drewbage1847 — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 18:34:34 GMT

Eleven years ago, English Heritage launched a historical cooking series on YouTube - The Victorian Way - and a viral star - Kathy Hipperson. She portrayed a historical head cook of Audley End House - Avis Crocombe. (Historical research, writing and occassional scullery maid Mary Ann by Dr. Annie Gray)

In 2024, due to budget cuts at English Heritage, they cancelled both the live reenactments and video segments after more than 100 episodes of glorious Victorian shade.

Recent video discoveries indicate that she had a descendent - Mrs Wilding - the post war cook at Abbot's Hall (home of The Food Museum).

Her cooking focuses on simpler fare for both the Longe Sisters (the last owners of Abbott Hall) and her husband, Pops in their cottage attached to the estate.

(Mrs. Crocombe previously)

"Treasures from the BFI National Archive"

Wobbuffet — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 07:01:04 GMT

Art online by Olga Lehmann includes war drawings (e.g. refugees, St Paul's, Soho Palace Theatre, and m a n y m o r e) and album covers (e.g. T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land) but now, via the BFI's object of the week, her costume designs for The Man in the Iron Mask (Shout!; YouTube). More objects: Penny Lane 'video' (YouTube); 1938 Film Society brochure (scan; leading BFI Southbank to show films by Dulac, Preobrazhenskaya, and Reiniger in June); cut-outs for Reiniger's other Cinderella; 'the letter that made Audrey Hepburn a star' (re: Roman Holiday screen tests); Beddoes's art for Superman and Pakeezah (Tubi; Hoopla); a 3D printer for film equipment; continuity script (Penny Eyles; her credits!); The Red Shoes wallpaper (Tubi; Kanopy; YouTube); and a toy theater for Olivier's Hamlet (Shout!; YouTube; Tubi), akin to 19th Century paper theaters (YouTube).

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