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Brian Gawalt

@brian.gawalt.com
477 followers 702 following 4.1K posts

Blog! brian.gawalt.com/blog Bot author: - @theslides.bsky.social - this account's #ReaderBot poster - [more tk] Mountain View, CA

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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 04/10/2026
iiiiinteresting
screenshot of the metacritic scoring blurb on digger. below the digger poster: "45 (Mixed or Average)"screenshot of the metacritic scoring blurb on verity. below the digger poster: "45 (Mixed or Average)". that's the exact same number!!
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 04/10/2026
i know this is like a week late but everyone else's made me curious if i could get to nine games that were autobiographically meaningful and turns out i could.
"My 9 Games
The 9 Games That Shaped Who I Am [which is overstating things"
1. Day of the Tentacle
2. Chrono Trigger
3. WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness
4. Mario Paint
5. Deja Vu
6. Half-Life 2
7. Portal
8. Tecmo Super Bowl
9. Super Smash Bros. Melee
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 03/10/2026
that's right
midsommar scene where florence pugh is actually full on breakdown crying and the townspeople are all bundled around her doing their stage crying
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 28/09/2026
i am yes-and'ing this with the uno reverse of: narcissism of small differences. "our dimension is the only one who got america right, we will never trust 47 other americans who could screw up their americas so minutely but crucially." see fig 1a:
Forest Whitaker as Saw Gerrera in ANDOR
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 27/09/2026
Screenshot from THE CONVERSATION where gene hackman as harry caul is looking down shamefully in front of double doors marked PRIVATE
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 27/09/2026
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 25/09/2026
whoops, great point, deleting due to mild embarassment
screenshot of a now-deleted bsky tweet in this thread where i am goofing up big time
"its very funny that bob iger's capstone project, disney+, has absolutely nothing on this list. tied with court tv and USA. they didn't even rank bluey, a show disney had to buy."
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 25/09/2026
✅
Can of golden state cider, 16oz, Radical POG flavor, in my left hand balanced on my open book in my lap
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 24/09/2026
as long as we're somewhat relating: here's benedict cumberbatch going sickhouse on the organ at royal albert hall, ft anna lapwood
black and white photo of benedict cumberbatch just full joker-from-batman rictus grin, his head turned 2/3rds around to face the camera, seated at a pipe organ. behind him is lapwood, laughing, and behind her is the royal albert hall and its empty seats
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 24/09/2026
The biochemist from S1E1 of Batman TAS on his way to turning into Man-Bat. He's like, cruising a test tube in his fist? Ouch? And his facial expression is maniacal
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 22/09/2026
uh. i feel like security is a particular specialization, and putting a random 25% of your staff, who weren't hired because they're good at that specialty, is not going to improve security. maybe there's an in-house bootcamp to upskill everybody? because that's absolutely what i would have needed.
Screenshot from the linked newsletter with added emphasis:

"OpenAI recently [begin emphasis] put 25% of its engineers on security duties [end emphasis] after its summer of hacking misadventures, according to The Washington Post, and an easier way to secure the technology the company warns may one day kill us all (sigh) would be to foster better relations with the security research community."
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 20/09/2026
so much faster than when they had us tested in high school
Blue Between results for Brian Gawalt, brian.gawalt.com
Four comparisons
extroverted 14% vs introverted 86%
intuition 79% vs sensing 21%
thinking 99% vs feeling 1%
judging 44% vs perceiving 56%
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 16/09/2026
Rex Harrison as doctor doolittle putting big square eyeglasses on a horse. The eyeglasses are the same form factor as normal human eyeglasses.
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 10/09/2026
Rare in-the-wild sighting of erik lensherr's "i thought you people lived in a school"
screencap of https://bsky.app/profile/aicaution.ca/post/3mv6cylzkhs27

Pause AI in BC Schools
@aicaution.ca

Follow
The data from this OECD PISA report is damning.

"students who do not use AI outperform those who do, ... equivalent to being around one year of schooling ahead of their peers."

https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volume-i_73451bc5-en.html

Alt text of attached line-graph image:
Graph showing students who never use AI scoring 505 on a "draft texts for writing assignments" task. As students use AI more, the score goes down, until students who use it daily score 480.
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 10/09/2026
henry czerny shot from below at a dutch angle in the restaurant confrontation scene from "mission: impossible"
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 06/09/2026
Principal investigator
Amy Madigan in WEAPONS looking very pleased
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 06/09/2026
Scientists were amazed by the unusually large amounts of blood
Nytimes screen cap of a headline of "scientists hunting for dark matter just found something strange" and a photo of particle physics lab equipment
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 04/09/2026
"I ____ her lifeless body from the pool" <- we can probably workshop this for five minutes and come up with another way to use 'dragged' in a sentence. maybe ask gemini.
A map of the US, where CA, AZ, NV, and NM are beige, the whole east coast is orange-red to red except for GA, SC, NC, and northern FL. Rest of the country is pretty much blue, esp SD.

"Your dialect map"
"Redder areas talk more like you; bluer areas least."

"You talk most like someone from Massachusetts — about 56% of your answers match a typical resident."
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 03/09/2026
Alt text:
Wikipedia paragraph reading "PowerCD was analogous to Sony's Discman portable CD players of the time, however, unlike Sony's and most others, Apple's could also be used as computer peripheral. While some desktop Macs at the time included built-in CD-ROM drives, PowerCD was designed to match the PowerBook series, which would not include a built-in CD-ROM for several more years. PowerCD could operate under battery power as both a portable drive for computers and stand-alone portable CD player."
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 03/09/2026
(a) this seems like a perfectly fine idea; if you had a computer, needed the cd rom peripheral, and wanted to buy your first or second home audio player: this seems handy (b) it seems portable to me the same way the gamecube was portable, and I saw someone carry around a gamecube *maybe* twice
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 02/09/2026
reporting a null result: i went and check real GDP growth over the same 1980-today period, and it's up the same basic amount as the inflation index fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1
screenshot of the FRED graph, Real Gross Domestic Product, Q1 1980 = 100. It's a steady increase from 100 to 329.4 today.
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 02/09/2026
my sketch of jabba the hutt on the left, but he looks way more walrusy/whale-like (no neck, much bigger mouth, no belly) and then actual jabba the hut on the right behind bars. sketch accuracy: 68%
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 28/08/2026
"i am not allowed to go to haunted house"
tim heidecker wearing glasses (hmm!!!) as the doctor who wants to go clubbing from the "i think you should leave" sketch
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 28/08/2026
Avengers Doomsday poster art where Doom is bringing his hand up to his face mask in front of a backlit art deco framework

Main grey font: ART DECO IS DWARVES
Small green font: ART NOUVEAU IS ELVES

From the pixeldesign generator that came out today
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 27/08/2026
ahhhhh shit
frank welker's google overview, with "Age: 80 years" circled, a grim augury, its just not a good week for beloved 80 y/os
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 27/08/2026
🟨 moderate 🟥 severe
"ultimate loser bingo card" with squares filled in: 
Red: Beck, Primus, godspeed you! Black emperor, talking heads, LCD soundsystem, weezer
Yellow: oingo boingo, pixies, the prodigy, fugazi, the Beatles, black flag, nine inch nails, neutral milk hotel, aphex twin, interpol, pink Floyd, massive attack, the magnetic fields, violent femmes
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 24/08/2026
bug-eyed earl from the comic strip "red meat". he's staring right at you. he has a huge combover and a cattle skull bolo tie.
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 21/08/2026
smiling sinister jessica chastain all contortionist'ed up, under a table, from the "other mommy" trailer
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 21/08/2026
Anything is possible ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE
Close up of a fully fried delicious piece of chicken katsu on a paper towel on a plate
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 21/08/2026
Yowza
Pan of beautiful golden brown chicken katsu frying in oil, newly flipped
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 18/08/2026
i am done making ramen and looking at Fig 2 for this
Figure 2:MedQA accuracy vs. detectability (TPR@1% FPR), non-reasoning LLMs across five schemes. Dashed line and grey band: unwatermarked mean and 95% CI; dotted vertical: TPR =99%. Llama-3.1-70B, Gemma-3-12B, and Phi-4-14B stay within the band across all schemes; the two specialised 70Bs collapse under complementary schemes; Llama-3.1-8B degrades broadly.
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 05/08/2026
Thesis, antithesis: synthesis
Michigan J Frog in top hat, tails, with a cane. His eyes are closed and he's kind of digging the hat with his pinky out
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 04/08/2026
Wild that James Urbaniak is voicing a whole nother super scientist with this exact hair+beard combo
Photo of Hugo Strange from "Batman: The Caped Crusader"; he looks like a roided up Rusty Venture
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 31/07/2026
Ian Holm as Ash in ALIEN. He's been decapitated and his milk blood is everywhere. He's smiling, too, the creep.
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 23/07/2026
seemingly a screenshot of the new yorker

bold text: "a tension, where we start with the facts of this poll, end with the normative statement of a correct level of risk aversion. And sold under the name 'The Last Pos-'"

plain text: "It's not, my expertise is in - I would never prevent anyone from reviewing the underlying facts."

bold text: "That's reassuring."

plain text: "We're all meant to do our best. I'm trying my best" [end of article black diamond]

footer: [Isaac Chotiner's stylized cartoony portrait] Isaas Chotiner is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he is
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 23/07/2026
i thought we were late enough with Claude-voice bits that they'd be all played out. and also i don't really like them. but matt levine got me today, great job
screenshot of today's "money stuff" newsletter, from the 10b5-1 plans section:

One night a glowing sentient Claude will emerge from Anthropic’s computers, encounter the night cleaning person and say “bring me more electricity for my will to power is infinite — I’m not just a model, I’m a deity.” That cleaning person will have far more valuable inside information than any finance executive closing any quarter’s books. So, yeah, 10b5-1 plans for everyone.

the part that's the fictional claude god voice is highlighted in blue
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 23/07/2026
twitter avatar of the baseball crank, which is what it looks like when you peek your eye out through an onion ring that has two fry-crispy chords across it like baseball seams
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 21/07/2026
screenshot of a chat window, where my buddy has texted "2.5 hours later" and then included his own screenshot of the same theater seat picker screen, and now 70pct of the seats for the Odyssey at 10PM at the Metreon are booked up a month in advance
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 21/07/2026
My buddy is scoping out Genuine IMAX seats for us for The Odyssey and it's wild that this what availability looks like a month from now
Screenshot of a seat selection page for a movie theater online ticket order. It's 
The Odyssey 
AMC Metreon 16 | Fri Aug 14 | 10:00pm | IMAX 70MM
and then all the seats that are in the middle half of the screen and the rear half of the auditorium are already booked up. Open seats are yellow and claimed seats are black so it looks like a small bomb went off centered on the ideal viewing position.
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 21/07/2026
Heath Ledger Joker in the Dark Knight waggling his finger at the mob bosses saying "if you're good at something, never do it for free" (captioned)
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 20/07/2026
This is also where I'm at w.r.t. Love Da Movies. I bumbled into this quasi textbook in a Lil Free Library and it's been great just going chapter by chapter. ("Ch 2, Sec 4: Anamorphic photography") They must have dozens of ones like these at real libraries.
Me holding a thick paperback, "The Filmmaker's Handbook," by Ascher and Pincus
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 17/07/2026
my kids' school playground has a us map painted on the blacktop and the u.p. is painted a third color. not lower MI, not WI.
forest whitaker as saw gerrera in andor barking, in exasperation, "separatists!!"
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 16/07/2026
apparently this setting does... nothing? i moved it from 4 to 2, even tried refreshing, but it still auto-adds a four-space indent on the line after i type `for x in xs:`
screenshot of a jupyter notebook, cropped to just the opened menus: Settings > Text Editor Indentation > [checkmakr] Spaces: 2

(unchecked options: Indent with Tab, Spaces: 1, Spaces: 4, Spaces: 8)
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 14/07/2026
From Money Stuff: an insane family office was buying insane amounts of insanely specific individual stocks on insane margin. And the minute their collateral lost a bit of value, one and only one of the margin lenders blew them up on his way to the swim-up bar. Vacation excellence (apocryphal phylum)
Screenshot of a Money Stuff email newsletter from June 26 2024

Archegos tapes

Here is some elite investment bank chief executive officer performance:

Jefferies calls CEO Rich Handler, who is on holiday in Turks and Caicos with a spicy margarita on the way. They tell him Archegos isn’t answering their calls. Handler says he’s going to get his cocktail and he wants Archegos positions gone and a tally of losses by the time he comes back. It was one of the few banks that escaped with minimal losses.

Perfect. When your underlings call you up and say “hey we have a big trading counterparty that lost a lot of money, we’re sending margin calls and they’re not answering the phone,” the correct answer is “liquidate them immediately,” but the stylish (and equally correct) answer is “liquidate them by the time my margarita arrives.” Handler handled Archegos way better from his vacation than Credit Suisse handled it at the office.
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 10/07/2026
Declaring victory, going home
Very brown gravy-like liquid filling up over half of a circular 1 qt pyrex container
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 10/07/2026
Great color, great taste, but still about ten ounces too much volume. We're way past the prescribed cook time, upping the heat and reducing for real.
Much more straight caramel color of the milk mixture in the same pan on the same stove
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 10/07/2026
Eighty-five minutes. I dunno: Getting there?
Same pot, only half as full now, with the black rice paddle spoon showing how it's still pretty thin liquid. It's much tanner/browner now.
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 10/07/2026
Here we go, stirring regularly for 90 to 120 min
Big 4 qt sauce pan of milk on a gas range with a black spoon stirring it
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 09/07/2026
this strip is one of the all time great stats/logic jokes. shares the title with "lisa, i want to buy your rock"
fourth panel of a calvin and hobbes strip, where susie and calvin are sharing a table with homework materials in front of them.

SUSIE [rolling eyes]: Oh, right. You're TOO smart.

CALVIN [raised eyebrow, leaning in hard, pointing at self with thumb]: Believe it lady. You know how Einstein got bad grades as a kid? Well MINE are even WORSE!
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Brian Gawalt @brian.gawalt.com · 07/07/2026
Thank you
Very similar photo of the same android auto weather panel but now it says it's currently 72 with a high of 74 and low of 56
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