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bk

@bnknndy.bsky.social
24 followers 113 following 63 posts

Heartless, thoughtless, lawless, and flawless. Writing and reading about design and communication, sharing photos, griping about product annoyances and so on.

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bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
I'm reading a copy of *The Martian Chronicles* that, despite being 47 years old, has apparently never been opened before, and thinking about all the books which have been printed but never read before being destroyed, or which will never again be read now that LLM companies are winnowing them all
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conputer dipshit @davidcrespo.bsky.social · 21/06/2026
gift link
bloomberg.com
Signal's Meredith Whittaker: The Push for Online Safety Risks Mass Surveillance
The president of the encrypted messaging app says autonomous AI agents, device scanning and digital advertising are converging into a new architecture of surveillance.
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bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
Pulling out the 650s after not being able to use anything but $20 bluetooths for a month and a half feels like the aural equivalent of putting on glasses for the first time all over again, almost worth the interim
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bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
I'm in a weird camp where I'm unwilling to use Chrome but totally fine with their decision to ship some model weights. I'd much rather a small, CPU-runnable model be baked into Firefox for their Smart Window feature instead of me having to juggle my GPU between my local workload and browser features
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George Steffanos @gsteffanos.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
Blaze of autumn, west slope of the Giant's Head, Sleeping Giant State Park, Hamden, Connecticut. October 10, 2025, 5:08 PM. #hiking #autumn #forest
A soft blue evening sky with a few clouds. Walking along a mountainside looking downhill through a lush forest. Two deep green hemlocks frame the sides. In between a maple with dazzling red foliage and other hardwoods cloaked in gold and yellow. The straight trunk of another hardwood perched atop a rocky ledge is foreground left.
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bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
I'm going to name my first 2 children Chandra and Surya after these OCR models
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David Brooks @dgbrooks.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
One of many gnarly japanese maples at Portland Japanese Garden: WOW…. just WOW! #PNW
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Den 🇮🇪 @denterrick.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
I haven't posted any trees or forests in a few days so I guess I'd best remedy that. Have a good day. We have some sun here this morning so I'm off to the mountains. 👋 #Hiking #Photography #Scape #Trees #EastCoastKin #Dublin #Ireland
A messy, thick, green carpeted forest at the foot of the Dublin mountains. One of those places where you can only really find your way through once you're familiar with the place. Easy to end up fighting your way into the woods only to end up stuck and having to backtrack. But once you find a few ways through, it's a good escape when there are crowds on the main paths.
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bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
Wish I had a better camera for shots like this, but I don't! So here's a lonely and somewhat blurry hawk
A hawk sits at the top of a leafless tree, back to the camera and the sun, against a blue sky
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bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
I'm curious to know what percentage of people lauding this would instead revile it if they realized it was entirely LLM-generated, for better or for worse
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Piccalilli @piccalil.li · 15/06/2026
From the archives: A fun little side quest to show you how applying styles to alt text can really elevate your user interface. piccalil.li/blog/you-can...
piccalil.li
You can style alt text like any other text
A fun little side quest to show you how applying styles to alt text can really elevate your user interface.
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bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 13/06/2026
A spring morning from earlier this year
Backlit early spring forest, pond visible through glowing leaves, sky and clouds peeking through where leaves have yet to fully fill in
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bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
I'm here to be a community, talk trash, and post nasty pics in little private rooms. And I'm all outta community
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bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
Today, among 3 other songs it knows I've heard 2 dozen times minimum, YouTube Music thinks I need to "daily discover" Sunshine Of Your Love
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bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
I've seen many YouTubers decry the new summary generation feature, but they don't seem to have stopped to consider that many of us deeply resent having to sit through their interminable scripts
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bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 20/04/2026
I wish dearly that I could convey the smell of the loam
A forest scene, fresh-budded leaves  screening long trunks of various species, bright despite a gray sky peeking through the gaps in the canopy
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bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 14/04/2026
Completely derailed from making a haircut appointment because I noticed that the barber's booking site is randomly switching between Abel and Averia Serif for the display font and now I have to crawl the full site to see if they've made any other incredible choices
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Time Spinner @spinny.bsky.social · 05/04/2026
Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson, 1992)
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bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
Hard to overstate my antipathy for the portfolio websites of lauded, long-career designers who use sub-AAA color schemes for their dark mode pages
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Microplastics Sommelier @eephus.mov · 28/03/2026
there are those who have questioned my vision
Drawing of a spherical subterranean city underneath Manhattan by Oscar Newman in 1969. The top is labeld "Suckers, experiencing events", beneath "Me, 'going mole style'"
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bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 27/03/2026
Every day for 2 weeks YouTube Music has placed "Which Witch" by Florence and the Machine in my daily discover, as though I didn't discover it yet, and hadn't "discovered" it a decade ago
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Jordan @jordanpfot.bsky.social · 26/03/2026
Might be the greatest opening paragraph of anything ever.
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Kip Conlon @kipconlon.bsky.social · 25/03/2026
First, the good news. The bathwater has been disposed of.
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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 23/03/2026
If you want mass adoption and you don't already have dominance, I think you have to get people who genuinely enjoy understanding the problems and needs and desires of Actual Others involved from the beginning. I do not think there is a cheat for empathy and taste.
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Jonathan Speights @jspeights.bsky.social · 05/03/2026
We do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy.
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bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 23/03/2026
That old IBM slide smuggles a lot of assumptions about what AI can actually do, and makes no useful policy prescriptions. More practically: > AI CANNOT MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION > > THEREFORE A HUMAN IS ALWAYS ACCOUNTABLE Workflows don't instantiate from thin air. Someone authorized them. Who?
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 19/03/2026
We did it. We defeated Mandelbrot
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bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 17/03/2026
I have never seen a steelman that was anything more than a coward's superficially polite or generous strawman
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bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 17/03/2026
Ditto "you reap what you sow." I see some people sowing continuously. I see many people reaping what others have sown. I think there's more to the story
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bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
Increasingly confused by the lack of a "turn off retweets" setting per profile on this app. Also increasingly confused by otherwise sane-seeming people who retweet each of their fairly new posts 4-5x over the course of a few days
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Cat Hicks @grimalkina.bsky.social · 14/03/2026
I have an unfinished paper about how tools shape our thinking, but also, here our thinking shapes our tools. Malleable interfaces offer that. To me the ways we are able to share strategies with each other & offer each other small experiments in shaping our tool use differently is really remarkable
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David Crawshaw @crawshaw.io · 11/03/2026
macOS already ships age verification
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bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 11/03/2026
I so unbelievably, greatly appreciate that this app doesn't auto-refresh every time I open it after getting distracted into other apps by links or messages
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bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 11/03/2026
Incidentally, those detection tests poorly map to actual issues of LLM composition, which tend to be --syntactic and ++semantic (surprise surprise), unraveling over more context than ~100 words. They're improving but still a long way off from mapping the galactic Pareto frontier of >graph quality
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bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 08/03/2026
Choosing to interpret this as it having a loose or tangential commitment to agency without intelligence
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bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 07/03/2026
Split the difference and let it live in a podman container with your project folder mounted, as god intended
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bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 05/03/2026
More interesting than whether most writing is drudgery, or the value of a voice, are the questions of when and how much something needs to prove work done by a human. Increasingly I bounce immediately when asked to put effort into parsing effortless text outside of, say, docs. It's never worth it
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