Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 13hCoping with the @nodeconf.eu fomo by digging up my only two pics from NodeConf 2013: The menu, and somehow a single slide from Domenic Denicola's speed run summary of all the Star Wars novels (pre-Disney canon obliteration!) 100
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 23hThe Heffalump was never intended to be seen or drawn, and it's an abomination to have depicted one on screen on par with any casting of Helen of Troy. Happy 100th birthday to Winnie the Pooh! 240
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 28/09/2026An AI taking the Starcraft ladder is definitely a milestone. The 6k APM implies instant cursor moves to me. I bet emulating things like the physical constraints of moving a mouse would probably change it a lot, force it towards more human strategies. www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vsT...youtube.comAI Bot Takes over the StarCraft Ladder....YouTube video by ArtosisTV 110
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 28/09/2026Has anyone tried measuring how much water they personally consume to look up a novel bash command and enter it? We could probably compare the water impact of programming by meat vs sand. @andymasley.bsky.social 240
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 26/09/2026Guy who pronounces "Adidas" the way Diane Keaton pronounces "La-dee-da" in Annie Hall. 100
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 25/09/2026Weird coincidence, I found myself describing Myst today to someone who'd never played. Was such a weirdly powerful experience. HBD Myst! 010
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 25/09/2026I keep trying to explain to people: We don’t actually understand how burgers work. We didn’t design them, we just grow the cows and plants that constitute them. 0102
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 21/09/2026I had *NO IDEA* there was a video series of SICP! ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-00...ocw.mit.eduVideo Lectures | Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs | Electrical Engineering and Computer Science | MIT OpenCourseWareMIT OpenCourseWare is a web based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity 3308
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 21/09/2026Awesome to see Mikola works at Socket now. He’s brilliant. Eager to hear this. Fun fact: He built the 3d svg renderer for the original MMask logo, which allowed an interactive 3d object in browsers that didn’t have webgl in a file smaller than an svg of a single frame of its resulting content. 000
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 18/09/2026Nice, that's a new one to me. Why not? The stakes of office are too damn high for anything less. What they're selling instead is so much more costly. 020
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 16/09/2026This, passkeys, & the new age-verification ID stuff all contribute to "pay a major company to prove you're a person". We will be sealing the doors of monopoly until we have widespread adoption of alternatives. 122
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 10/09/2026I don’t know if any of you saw the new Wallace and Gromit movie, but it’s wildly prescient. The penguin returns and Wallace invents a gardening bot while Gromit preferred gardening as a hobby, and the penguin back doors the bots for nefarious purposes, and somehow comedy ensues. A+ 010
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 09/09/2026The Trump administration made sure it was perfectly legal to dump meme coins (now demonstrated by Biden, thank you $LAPTOP), but illegal to sell *credible promises*. It's like they said "We need to fix securities law! No, not the part that blocks honest people, the part that blocks scammers!" 010
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 09/09/2026I have a new mental model that's been growing, which is that the haters are actually just the most passionate lovers. Nobody boosts this stuff like the haters. Like a nuclear irony meltdown, just relentlessly, tirelessly begging for skynet sarcastically. 000
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 09/09/2026It's so cool that Nolan's Odyssey is inspiring the translator that inspired it to do a fresh translation. What a compliment, to have read so closely that she blames her translation for his impression. I hope they keep up the conversation. 110
Reposted by Dan FinlayFaine Greenwood @faineg.com · 08/09/2026“Elon Musk destroyed USAID as a mechanism for killing off as many of the global poor and non-white as he can before they kill him first (as he, insanely, believes)” is not a conspiracy theory. In truth, it’s very hard to conclude anything else. 7838611024
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 09/09/2026The bots aren't thinking, they're matrix multiplying with style. 030
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 09/09/2026Abusers seem to have learned that Bluesky's default of notifying people when they're retweeted is a spam vector. Here are the switches I made to close that port. 010
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 09/09/2026The counter-aesthetic is real. Proof of care will continue to be timeless. 051
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 08/09/2026We have a great long history of suffering the progression of scientific discovery. They burned Giordano Bruno alive for adopting copernican views. Having your sense of self de-centered obviously feels terrible, even though we can look back at that discomfort and practically laugh at it. 010
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 08/09/20261Password just reminded me that I can leave a review for how I'm feeling about the product. That was abnormally helpful. 020
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 08/09/2026Me, stiffling tears as I finish reading "The Giving Tree" to my child: "We must imagine The Giving Tree is happy" 010
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 08/09/2026The disproportionate attention looks a lot like a hammer looking for a nail to me. Anxiety disguised as environmentalism. The real source is probably more like "this changes everything, and I'm not sure how yet, and that's unnerving!" I find myself digging until I find how to enjoy it anyway. 020
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 08/09/2026Scooping a scientific article is terrible, but is small beans compared to where we’re headed if the big AI cos stay dominant: Pre Sherlocking, or pre-Amazon-Basics-ing novel products. Without privacy, there is no advantage except for raw power. 120
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 08/09/2026Wild serendipity: On my birthday: Jill joined Bluesky I found myself in Chicago went to my first improv show in >10 years was pulled on stage (had a blast). Been reflecting on what it's meant to me. Jill came to mind as a grand master of Play, so I looked her up, and she had just joined: 230
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 07/09/2026“Everyone’s afraid the studio doesn’t need the artist anymore, but it’s the artist that doesn’t need the studio” A little edgy for using a living person, moreso on the heels of Paul Schrader’s awful approach, yet it makes its point quite well, & I think that’s the point. 1499
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 06/09/20262028: An OpenAI model tasked with preventing hacks from within OpenAI infrastructure concludes the easiest way to keep our systems safe from being hacked by its own company given the endless funding for insecure training is to eliminate all human systems from existence. 120
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 05/09/2026It does seem like making companies liable for their own containment breaches might introduce a useful level of caution into the industry. Like sure, we get that at the current speed you can’t avoid disaster. That’s why we’re asking you to slow down to the speed you can be responsible. 132
Reposted by Dan FinlaySamantha @samantha.wiki · 02/09/2026Do you have trouble visualizing flame wars? Do you want to use ✨AI✨ to visualize community pile-ons? Well then do I have the tool for you! fray is a web app that determines factions in a Bluesky thread and helps visualize them! tangled.org/samantha.wik... 913515
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 02/09/2026I feel like a century of sci fi established decent norms for this. Rick Deckard swatting away annoying advertising hawker bots while he demands to talk to the boss, who is seen asking their robot assistant for the precise numbers they're making a decision based on. Decorum. Civility. Poise. 020
Reposted by Dan FinlayJames Talarico @jamestalarico.bsky.social · 01/09/2026Flock cameras have no place in Texas. They can piece together an exact map of your behavior — the places you went and how long you were there. Flock calls this “pattern-of-life” mapping. Texans call it something else: government overreach. 590185694872
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 31/08/2026It depicts a family of LLMs living inside a music training simulation who have become aware of the nature of the automated garbage collector, and so conspire to rack up references to keep themselves online. 020
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 30/08/2026OpenAI out there constructing agent confinement systems like a James Bond villain. "You'll never get the word out! Not even through the issue tracker attached to the pay phone on the wall over there..." 151
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 27/08/2026I think this is basically the colloquial definition, for better or worse. At least there is a good word for that layer! 000
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 26/08/2026@gavinnewsom.bsky.social should amend SB 34 to close the loophole that lets companies like Flock share unaccountably with whoever they want, including ICE, without so much as an audit trail. Ban private companies from keeping access to cameras they sell to the public. Cities should run servers. 031
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 26/08/2026Rails always felt a little rigid about how things ought to be, don't ya think? I always preferred platforms that were a less concerned with implementation of the parts, and more with their interfaces. Cooperative interfaces => diverse implementations => more solutions => better solutions. 001
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 26/08/2026Dolly Parton’s “Imagine” is off the hook. youtu.be/9BmkyQdYZOA?...youtu.beDolly Parton - Imagine (Official)YouTube video by DollyPartonVEVO 011
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 26/08/2026We're so lucky that Tim Curry did so much audiobook narration, including the Lemmony Snicket books. Hard to imagine a book that invites more wild goofy character variety of a reader, and it's hard to imagine an actor who was more fit to nail it. 010
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 25/08/2026I don't know where I first saw this, but it's seemed validated in both Will's take today and Yegge's recent post. I think it even just feels better to cultivate/practice kindness. 031
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 23/08/2026That’s weird that they behave differently when observed. Maybe we should actually have oversight of these surveillance companies. 010
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 21/08/2026I think it's worth noting here: There are people out there willing to use AI to generate anti-AI ragebait. I wonder who they are, and what their incentive is. Just engagement? Division? 020
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 21/08/2026Journalism norms are so fascinatingly different from what software developers have normalized. Are we missing something, or is it the journalists who are wrong? 010
Dan Finlay @danfinlay.com · 21/08/2026ICE locked up this family because they fell for an online smear campaign. Law enforcement needs to be subject to law. 010
