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Michael Engard

@engard.me
763 followers 403 following 3.3K posts

Writer and web developer. Rochester, NY. Of late: WordPress, TTRPGs, the open web. You may never read my book but at least I’m writing it.

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Reposted by Michael Engard
Iris shitting in your brains @irisofigb.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
I am a plant physiologist and it's more of a threat coming from me because I am touching grass in novel and risky ways.
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Michael Engard @engard.me · 28/09/2026
A good person I know is heading to rehab for alcoholism. His best-case scenario is walking out with his life, his health, and only $40,000 in medical debt. There are people who choose for us to live this way. They have names.
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Butt teeth! Butt teeth! Butt teeth! @panic.gay · 26/09/2026
I just feel like if you design a piece of technology and you're like "wow! This technology doesn't do what we want a lot of the time and we aren't really sure how it works!" that isn't a brag that's just a sign you're really bad at your job
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Butt teeth! Butt teeth! Butt teeth! @panic.gay · 25/09/2026
THIS. AI isn't "going rogue" any more than those exploding Samsung galaxy phones from 2016 went rogue. Human engineers poorly deployed a technology and there were negative consequences. The responsibility falls entirely on humans.
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Pookleblinky @pookleblinky.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Reminder that in Canada upon becoming an engineer you get an iron ring made of a collapsed bridge, purposely designed to be uncomfortable, to remind you that your ethics demand you give a fuck even about the boring grudgework of such as double-checking your math. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring
en.wikipedia.org
Iron Ring - Wikipedia
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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 21/09/2026
8. often, when people say LLMs "can do" something they mean LLMs can produce output that looks like the output of doing something 9. producing something that looks like the output of doing something is not the same thing as doing it
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Nitro 🐻‍❄️ 🔜 Asfurmeet @es.nitrobear.gay · 06/08/2026
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TekknoNerd - Commissions open @tekknonerd.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Voyager, walking on those tiny legs.
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lauren @lauren.rotatingsandwiches.com · 22/09/2026
there are so many amazing, life-changing things you can do with computers and i think it's a serious problem the companies that make them keep trying to sell them by saying "do you hate everyone in your life? are you less of a person than a hollow automaton waiting to be told what to do by me?"
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Thomas Lecaque @tlecaque.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
I'm French. I will vote for bad people to stop fascists. But I will be mad as all hell doing it and I won't contribute a single fucking dime. And I will criticize them every god damn step of the way with the lone exception of the polling place itself, and then only because it is illegal.
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Smooth Dunk @smoothdunk2.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
3 panel comic titled “Logging into Bluesky”

Panel 1: 
A Pink Guy bursts into Bluesky wearing a t-shirt that says “Fun”. His little face looks so happy.

Panel 2: 
Six Bluesky users turn to look at the Pink Guy. They all look dour and angry because they have been overdosing on the discourse. Having the current state of the world mainlined into their veins for 22 hours a day has left them real grumpy.

Panel 3:
Pink Guy slowly removes his t-shirt and quietly says “sorry”. He won’t soon forget that Bluesky is the home of Serious Discussion. If he wants “Fun” maybe he should log into the Barney the Dinosaur forums.
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Dilek Sayedahmed @dileksayedahmed.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
I truly, deeply, sincerely do think the guy flipping burgers at McDonalds should be able to afford rent, bills, and groceries with his paycheck alone. That's kind of the whole point of having a job and I can't believe this is considered a radical position.🤷🏽‍♀️
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Puff the Magic Hater @mskellymhayes.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
The OpenAI "breaking containment" story stems from the company's own failure to build a secure sandbox. They relied on a single local proxy to "contain" the program. They could have air-gapped the thing. It's not like they lack resources. It was advantageous to them for the agent to "get loose."
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Seth Masket @smotus.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
My hot take: We are not arguing about SSRIs. Some of us are using them as prescribed by our doctors to treat mental health difficulties. This administration has decided that's a problem based on no actual research.
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Effie Seiberg @effies.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
post by @ItsAndyRyan


Her: who's your favorite literary vampire?
Me: the one in Sesame Street
Her: he doesn't count
Me: I can assure you that he does
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Michael Engard @engard.me · 17/09/2026
What makes my skin crawl is that I could almost handle it better if they were competent. Like, amoral, greedy, bloodthirsty, etc., but with some philosophy, some half-coherent sense of geopolitics behind it. But they’re not. They don’t even understand what they’re destroying. They can’t *see* it.
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Michael Engard @engard.me · 17/09/2026
We can’t have a conversation with them, we can’t “debate” them, the things we love and value and depend on in the world are meaningless to them, they’re just mouth sounds. It’s 80 years too late to explain to Donald Trump that other humans are real.
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Casey Johnston @caseyjohnston.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Watching tech people tremble before the awesome power of AI feels like when an actor is “attacked” by a wild animal in a movie but they are just holding a raccoon pelt to their neck and pretending to wrestle with it
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Prof Gavin Yamey MD MPH @gavinyamey.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
This is wonderful
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Dare Obasanjo @carnage4life.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
There are real risks and harms from AI usage but the current panic about destroying humanity based on poorly run security testing is theater. LLMs are fundamentally unreliable and shouldn’t be the sole decision maker for consequential decisions. That’s the huge risk. Everything else is noise.
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sarah jeong @sarahjeong.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
a lot freaks me out about AI but 0% of my anxiety is about AGI. i think this is the part that freaks me out the most right now -- the many many indications that no one is at the wheel and no adults are present
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huck mason @tylerhuckabee.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
rip annie dillard
One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.
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Colin Dickey @colindickey.com · 16/09/2026
“Have no antecedents, no established character, no cultivation, no ideas, no manners; have Shares.” Charles Dickens eviscerating the investment class, from Our Mutual Friend (1865):
The mature young lady is a lady of property. The mature young gentleman is a gentleman of property. He invests his property. He goes, in a condescending amateurish way, into the City, attends meetings of Directors, and has to do with traffic in Shares.? As is well known to the wise in their generation, traffic in Shares is the one thing to have to do with in this world. Have no antecedents, no established character, no cultivation, no ideas, no manners; have Shares. Have Shares enough to be on Boards of Direction in capital letters, oscillate on mysterious business between London and Paris, and be great. Where does he come from? Shares. Where is he going to? Shares. What are his tastes? Shares. Has he any principles?
Shares. What squeezes him into Parliament? Shares. Perhaps he never of himself achieved success in anything, never originated anything, never produced anything? Sufficient answer to all; Shares. O mighty Shares! To set those blaring images so high, and to cause us smaller vermin, as under the influence of henbane or opium, to cry out, night and day, "Relieve us of our money, scatter it for us, buy us and sell us, ruin us, only we beseech ye take rank among the powers of the earth, and fatten on us!”
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Meredith Rose @mrose.ink · 15/09/2026
People treat world building as a question of “what’s different?”, but it’s just as much a question of “what’s the same?”
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Philo of Alexan @philoof.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
They’re helping
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Terence Tao @teorth.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
A group of 25 Fields Medalists, including myself, have made a joint declaration on Math and AI: mathandai.org . We welcome additional signatories. See also this article in the Economist announcing the declaration: www.economist.com/science-and-...
mathandai.org
Declaration — Math and AI
Read the declaration and add your name.
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Michael Engard @engard.me · 11/09/2026
Excited to experience this new update to Dropbox where it takes 50 hours and counting to re-scan and re-download all 1.3 terabytes of my data and prevents any application on my Macbook from actually reading files until it’s all done.
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Michael Engard @engard.me · 11/09/2026
A famous ad for Maxell cassette tape, showing a man in sunglasses sitting in a chair in front of a speaker, bracing himself, as his hair, clothes and furniture are being visibly blown backwards by sheer sonic power.
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kepano @stephango.com · 10/09/2026
This is Knap. It's a new language I created that turns data into Markdown. Knap should feel familiar and comes with a wonderfully pleasant syntax to modify and format plain text.
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Rima I Anabtawi @rimaanabtawi.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
This remains an essential Sept 11 read. In 2003, Tom Junod chronicled the photograph's origin and enduring legacy. www.esquire.com/news-politic...
esquire.com
The Falling Man
Do you remember this photograph? In the United States, people have taken pains to banish it from the record of September 11, 2001. The story behind it, though, and the search for the man pictured in i...
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Thomas Fuchs 🫯 @thomasfuchs.at · 10/09/2026
If a machine does harm it’s always, without exception, ultimately a human decision to use a tool that’s unsuitable for a given task in a given situation. If I use a chainsaw to cut my toenails it’s not the chainsaw deciding to “go rogue” and make foot carvings.
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Ky @ky.fyi · 09/09/2026
they keep makin phones bigger and featurerer. i want phone that is smaller and featuren't
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Michael Engard @engard.me · 09/09/2026
Apropos of nothing, I have a dev on my team who: - knows their shit, - cares about quality, - can be trusted to do things right, and - proves it through the work and I am unbelievably grateful for that today.
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Paul Byrne @theplanetaryguy.com · 09/09/2026
Astrophotographer Adam (AJ) Smadi caught this image a few hours ago from Washington state. A thin crescent Moon, sunlight illuminating the rugged lunar surface. And 2,400 times farther away—and on the other side of the Sun—mighty Jupiter, and its moons Io (left) and Ganymede (right).
A crescent Moon seen during the day, arcing from upper left to lower right of the frame. At lower centre is the full disk of Jupiter; the small dots to its upper left and lower right and Io and Ganymede, respectively.
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Maggie Tokuda-Hall @maggietokudahall.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
In 2023, I nearly died when an ectopic pregnancy burst, taking out a corner of my uterus and one ovary with it. I bled 2 liters out internally, and the whole time kept asking am I dying because it FELT like I was dying bc I WAS. It was excruciatingly painful. That's how these people are dying.
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John Brooks @johnbrooks.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
L'Arc de Participationne
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Elle Cordova @ellecordova.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Rough Draft vs Final Draft
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Michael Engard @engard.me · 03/09/2026
When you disrespect Lake Ontario, she gets mad.
Photo of a TV screen, showing a weather report with severe tornado & thunderstorm activity in the area of upstate New York along the Lake Ontario shoreline.
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Adam @adamcobb.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
I’ve been getting some slightly alarming government ads recently along the lines of ‘Try to toilet train your child before they start school’ and ‘it’s good to teach your child to read‘.
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Michael Engard @engard.me · 31/08/2026
I guess it’s an endorsement of this Leatherman knife that I opened a Chewy box using the back of the blade and didn’t even notice until afterward.
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Anil Dash @anildash.com · 31/08/2026
On Tim Cook's last day as Apple CEO, a reminder of how he destroyed his own legacy, which at one point was a striking contrast to Jobs' unwillingness to let Apple engage with any social issues. Now, all of that good work, and good will... squandered. www.anildash.com/2025/09/09/h...
anildash.com
How Tim Cook sold out Steve Jobs - Anil Dash
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 30/08/2026
the older I get the more I deeply understand and envy Bill Watterson and his total disgust with pretty much everything in our culture. I can only imagine how he’s feeling right now.
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Cam Banks 🇳🇿 ❌👑 @rustysellsword.com · 26/08/2026
GAMERS! New Cortex TTRPG licensed content just dropped. @jeremyforbing.bsky.social has revised CORTEX LITE, a swift & sturdy build ready to run at your table, and it’s now on DrivethruRPG! Grab it now for a low price! www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/5...
drivethrurpg.com
DriveThruRPG - The Largest RPG Download Store!
Your one-stop online shop for new and vintage RPG products from the top publishers, delivered fresh to your desktop in electronic format.
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Micah @rincewind.run · 26/08/2026
the famous line about how michael caine treated the muppets as fellow actors and tim curry treated himself as a fellow muppet keeps running through my head we have a lot of brilliant actors, but how many of them can really pull off 'unhinged muppet' the way curry could? what a tremendous loss
static.klipy.com
Tim Curry Laughing as Pirate Captain
Alt: Tim Curry as Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island laughing
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Lexi ⛯ @ash243x.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
i regret none of the times i was kind, and every time i was mean.
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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 25/08/2026
I got nothing.
The most tech-savvy parents have built their own tools. Sarah Baldeo, a cognitive neuroscientist, spent the past year traveling for work, so she built a custom GPT of herself to chat with her 15-year-old son when she's unavailable. Baldeo tells me she programmed the chatbot with her personality, uploading screenshots of texts between her and her son, along with documents about her values, the family rules, and challenges she felt in parenting.

Baldeo wanted her son to ask the chatbot advice, and he did prompt it with questions he may have fielded to her, like, How do I diplomatically tell my teacher I'm overloaded with assignments? But he also asked the mombot how to convince his human mom to let him hang out at a coffee shop in Chicago in the evening — something Baldeo had been hesitant to allow.
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Eric Bailey @ericwbailey.website · 24/08/2026
One thing that I'm particularly delighted about was a great GitHub engineer partnering with the accessibility team to quietly push this out. A lot of people use GitHub via the command line and email, and folks there often forget it: github.blog/engineering/... www.osnews.com/story/144892...
osnews.com
The text mode lie: why modern TUIs are a nightmare for accessibility – OSnews
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Deva Woodly @devawo.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
It’s important to be clear that the truth value of a subject does not become debatable just because somebody wants to debate. Ether. Wandering wombs. Devils in red heads, the cursed left handed. Flat earth. Phrenology. Humors. Race science. “Debate me bro!” It’s fine for the answer to be: no.
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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
There are going to be Democrats who say we shouldn’t rip it all out — it’s already built, we have other priorities — but removing the visible signs of Trumpism is absolutely necessary.
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