Sign in

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.

PostsRepliesMedia
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
000
Reposted by bk
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.
0173
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
000
bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
The obvious begged question being: doesn't Firefox default to third-party endpoints for Smart Window by default? Yes, but I trust anonymization about as far as I can throw it, and so should you!
000
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
110
Reposted by bk
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.
1283
bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
I'm going to name my first 2 children Chandra and Surya after these OCR models
000
bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
Not a tech bro. I replied neutrally, if not helpfully. You met me with the smugness first from a position of obvious ignorance. But oh well. I tried. Buh-bye now
000
bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
I didn't say most token usage was people fucking around, either. And I didn't claim ownership of the 10x projection. You spoke of the business's viability as a whole. I don't know how that morphed into this specific requirement here
000
bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
Not a claim I made or a claim anyone sane is making. Try again, maybe a little more respectfully, if you're capable (lol)
100
bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
Not the right signal. Uncapped token budgets and managerial exhortations to maximize usage cause incidents like this, which is a culture and incentive issue. They had employees asking an LLM about the forecast instead of using built-in weather apps and running 24h nonsense loops to top leaderboards
100
bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
LLMs represents a sea change for software engineering. That debate is over, and that use case alone may well be enough given the myriad applications of that practice. The vast majority of all token spending right now goes to code generation and that's unlikely to change soon
200
Reposted by bk
David Brooks @dgbrooks.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
One of many gnarly japanese maples at Portland Japanese Garden: WOW…. just WOW! #PNW
2648
Reposted by bk
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.
417015
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
000
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
000
Reposted by bk
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.
193
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
000
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
000
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
000
bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 23/05/2026
Haha congrats shoulders, up top 🖐️
000
bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
Joining the dog pile. On the side of the dog. And the pile
040
bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 26/04/2026
2028 rather than 2032 is cause for celebration
000
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
000
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
000
bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 17/04/2026
Peptides don't erase sin 🙏
000
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
010
Reposted by bk
Time Spinner @spinny.bsky.social · 05/04/2026
Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson, 1992)
0435
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
000
bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 29/03/2026
You should consider disclosing this as well
010
Reposted by bk
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'"
522030
bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 27/03/2026
I can articulate some of my preferences, but not usefully for discovery through any interface I know. Is there no farmable delta in bridging this gap? Is it prohibitively expensive to do so? Do people generally just not care enough for the value prop to realize? One day I'll Google this
000
bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 27/03/2026
I remember being so excited by Pandora on the web, by SenseMe on my PSP 20 years ago. I haven't looked into it but I understand music recommendation algorithms to be based largely on social listening proximities now? My tastes are idiosyncratic enough that every single service completely sucks
110
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
110
Reposted by bk
Jordan @jordanpfot.bsky.social · 26/03/2026
Might be the greatest opening paragraph of anything ever.
125140284034
Reposted by bk
Kip Conlon @kipconlon.bsky.social · 25/03/2026
First, the good news. The bathwater has been disposed of.
5169021352
bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 24/03/2026
media.tenor.com
a pixel art drawing of a person 's hands with red and yellow bracelets
ALT: a pixel art drawing of a person 's hands with red and yellow bracelets
000
Reposted by bk
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.
29111
bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 23/03/2026
Auditing is hard? Shove it in a box. Lint it. Bind it to a graph. Grade outputs and set thresholds. Can't trust chain of thought? Don't even bother. It's just one signal. Whatever gets the outputs right. Code is lucky enough to have this baked in. Other domains are more nebulous but it's doable!
000
bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 23/03/2026
For practical purposes, "alignment" concerns governance and scope, not the eventual machine uprising. Who in the human chain OKed this deployment and why. Who owns maintenance. What do correct outputs look like. How do we handle incorrect ones. Basic questions you ask about any production system!
110
Reposted by bk
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.
122
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?
100
Reposted by bk
Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 19/03/2026
We did it. We defeated Mandelbrot
22779122
bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 17/03/2026
Case in point. The people are speaking (and want people to speak) bsky.app/profile/euge...
010
bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 17/03/2026
Mirror's Edge, Prince of Persia (07), Return of the Obra Dinn, Jeanne d'Arc, Portal, Okami, Kunitsu-Gami, Midnight Club: LA, and weirdly enough Far Cry 2 come to mind immediately
150
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
000
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
020
bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
Many, in fact!
000
bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
I'm having trouble understanding the use of income taxes paid as a useful proxy for productive or necessary work accomplished
100
bk @bnknndy.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
They do like semantic compression, but if you had more experience with them, you'd know this attempt at a gotcha is pretty silly. Anyway, this is no longer (and I guess never was) productive, although I hope maybe it's usefully demonstrative for some third party down the line. Enjoy the block
000