Matt DePero

The final Calvin and Hobbes, which appeared in papers 30 years ago today.

What Actually Makes You Senior The one skill that separates senior engineers from everyone else isn’t technical. It’s the ability to take ambiguous problems and make them concrete.Retry

The thing that actually makes you senior isn't architecture or communication or ownership. It's being the person who makes fuzzy things concrete.

terriblesoftware.org/2025/11/25/w...

Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen ‘slop’ as the 2025 Word of the Year.

Meta halted internal research suggesting social media harm, court filing alleges Meta is alleged to have halted internal research suggesting social media harm, according to court documents.

Meta halted internal research that purportedly showed (young) people who stopped using Facebook became less depressed and anxious, according to an unredacted legal filing released on Friday. www.cnbc.com/2025/11/23/m...

ladies and gentlemen...we got him

This is the beauty of BlueSky. No-one will be force-fed this via algorithm. Trolling draws blocks rather than amplification.

Comic. [Three people standing behind podium labeled math department. Person with bun holds up a paper. Behind them is a projector screen displaying the equation 💀>26 x 10^21] [caption] Good news: Mathematicians have put a new lower bound on the *Cursed Number That Destroys the Minds of All Who Perceive It!* It’s at least 22 digits, which means it’s unlikely to be seen by any human no matter how many random numbers they look at. They say it’s once again safe to view large random numbers without eye protection.

Cursed Number

xkcd.com/3137/

GPT-5

The marketing: "It's like having a team of PhDs in your pocket!"

Also the marketing: This y-axis🤷‍♂️❓

#DataViz #ChatGPT

The Anti-Abundance Critique on Housing Is Dead Wrong Antitrust critics say that homebuilding monopolies are the real culprit of America’s housing woes. I looked into some of their claims. They don’t hold up.

Antitrust critics of Abundance claim homebuilding oligopolies are holding back supply and driving up prices, esp in Texas.

I did something really simple. I called up their sources.

Everyone I spoke to told me the same thing: Their claims are bullshit.

www.derekthompson.org/p/the-anti-a...

slurpee machine with one crashed screen

I'm drinking the Bios Crash slurpee I hope it crashes my bios I hope I blue screen

Great reporting from @josephcox.bsky.social and @jasonkoebler.bsky.social here. And it confirms @thorbenson.bsky.social's prediction from nearly 3 years ago: www.wired.com/story/licens...

In the world of online trackers, hearing that the state of California sells undocumented status data to over 60 different entities is maddening

How California sent residents’ personal health data to LinkedIn – The Markup The state’s health insurance exchange transmitted pregnancy and domestic abuse data during a marketing campaign. It is reviewing its website practices.

🧵Californians: this state health insurance site has been sending your sensitive data to LinkedIn.

We investigated how with @calmatters.org: themarkup.org/pixel-hunt/2...

“RAISE HELL!” ✊ Maria Bustillos (@mariabustillos.bsky.social) calls on writers & readers to defend libraries & demand ebook ownership, not rentals. Attacks on libraries are attacks on knowledge itself. 📚

Full video ➡️ youtu.be/lu8jK_27vF0

#LibraryAdvocacy #DigitalRights #InternetArchive

‘Remarkable’ Bletchley Park code breaker Betty Webb dies aged 101 Veteran lauded for helping preserve history and legacy as well as vital role played during second world war The Bletchley Park code breaker, Charlotte “Betty” Webb, has died at the age of 101, the Women’s Royal Army Corps Association (WRACA) has confirmed. Arriving at Bletchley from the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) aged just 18, Webb spent four years during the second world war at the code-breaking centre working in various roles. Continue reading...

‘Remarkable’ Bletchley Park code breaker Betty Webb dies aged 101

It's our pleasure to introduce two new watches that closely follow the original Pebble DNA. Both are available for pre-order starting today.

- Core 2 Duo: black/white display, $149, ships in July
- Core Time 2: 64 colour display, $225, ships in Dec

Pre-order today at store.rePebble.com

I got laid off today, with the rest of 18F.

18F was an elite federal software shop. We made gov't websites work better, more efficiently for the American people. We saved taxpayers from getting screwed over by contractors. And were fired for it.

We made this website to tell our story:
18f.org

Comparing a BERT Classifier and a GPT classifier for Detecting Connective Language Across Multiple Social Media

Figure 1

Table 3

Table 4

A BERT classifier outperformed a GPT classifier in detecting connective language on social media, finds @jolukito.bsky.social, Chen, @ginammasullo.bsky.social, @taliastroud.bsky.social, with an analysis on how connective language relates to other types of language aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-m...

Reason N+1 bluesky is the best social platform: custom feed algorithms that are useful rather than extractive

Thanks @elan.place for pointing to this one, now I can follow @npr.org again

bsky.app/profile/did:...

‘Murder Hornet’ Has Been Eradicated From the U.S., Officials Say The hornet was discovered in a corner of Washington State. Five years later, a massive mobilization has eliminated the invasive species, at least for now.

At least the murder hornets are gone www.nytimes.com/2024/12/18/u...

Spending a month on Bluesky has created a whole new model of a fight we need to be having right now. Not liberal vs. conservative or whatever, but respect vs manipulation.

I am tired of being manipulated everywhere I go. That’s why I like it here, I feel like I’m in charge for once.

NBC quotes Ashton Pittman, editor at the Mississippi Free Pres. “We have posts that are exactly the same on Twitter and on Bluesky, and with those identical posts, Bluesky is getting 20 times the engagement or more than Twitter,” Pittman said. “Seeing a social media platform that doesn’t throttle links really makes it clear how badly we were being limited.”

From: Journalists flock to Bluesky as X becomes increasingly 'toxic.' By www.nbcnews.com/tech/rcna181...

Here is my one pithy post:

Approximately half of the country's population is looking at the same man yet seeing and hearing completely different things. That should freak you out no matter how you slice it.

A professor showing on his blackboard the sentence « every single person who confuses correlation and causation ends up dying »

Live from NPR News, we’re now on Bluesky 👋🎙️

Welcome to Bluesky, everyone! We opened access yesterday, and we just crossed 4M people total on the network. 🎉

• 800k+ new users have signed up
• Averaged 8.5 new accounts/second
• 2M posts were created in the last 24 hours

We're so excited to have you here!

Greenhouse Effect xkcd.com/2889

Beyond Skepticism: Framing Media Literacy Tips to Promote Reliable Information

Image description Figure 1: Media literacy tips in the Trust Condition (A), the Mixed Condition (B), and the Skepticism Condition (C)

Image description Figure 3: Estimated difference in true and false news ratings compared to the Control Condition

Image description Figure 4: Estimated differences in true and false news ratings by treatment condition and proportion of true news

Despite most media literacy tips typically emphasizing skepticism of misinformation, mixed messages of skepticism and trust are the most effective at helping people discern true from false news, finds @sachaltay.bsky.social, De Angelis & @emmahoes.bsky.social doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Space Typography xkcd.com/2863

Urban Planning Opinion Progression xkcd.com/2832