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Jeff Waugh

@jeffwaugh.bsky.social
86 followers 32 following 155 posts

I build castles* in the sky* made of fairy floss*. 😎⛅️

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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
This comparison is unfair. But it is funny. Stallman quibbled about attribution and precision, having lost control of a brand. But this convo is about systems that gain trust by exploiting our empathy. How we talk and think about them has psychological and cultural ramifications… (cont'd)
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Regulating how it's built is a feel-good nothing-burger. Regulate how it's used. With gusto. And make it crystal clear that operators will be held legally responsible for the actions of their agents. With gusto. A conga line needs a disincentive at the head and the tail.
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Etymology is frequently delightful, and deeply human. 🥰 Faced with an astonishingly versatile and hardy tuber from the New World, the French took one look and said, "ground apple", and almost everyone else agreed. Not the Spanish, who stole it in the first place. Or the English, who admire theft.
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
c'mon buddy it pretty much started in the wrong hands www.bbc.com/news/article...
bbc.com
King Charles warns of 'existential danger' of AI falling into wrong hands
The comments were made at a summit in Ayrshire with participants from AI giants including Nvidia, OpenAI and Anthropic.
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Fascist-aligned operating system projects will never receive attention from the most powerful limited resource in Linux and open source: trans catgirls.
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steve o’grady @sogrady.org · 11/09/2026
a sportswriter's take on your p/doom available options
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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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Mx. Fee @mxfee.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Ridiculous. I'm glad they're replacing it but also, the fact it got this far is pathetic and we know it is a VERY common occurrence when it shouldn't be happening at all. Disability aids aren't toys and the airlines need to stop treating them as such.
abc.net.au
Qantas changes tune over broken wheelchair after ABC questions
Qantas has backflipped and says it is now planning to replace an expensive powered wheelchair broken beyond repair on one of its flights, after questions from the ABC.
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Enjoying Rust projects occasionally means worrying a new tool doesn't work, but it's just That Fast. github.com/bdrung/3cpio
github.com
GitHub - bdrung/3cpio: manage initrd cpio archives
manage initrd cpio archives. Contribute to bdrung/3cpio development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Welfare is rarely top of mind in corporate drama, but I hope the board, Matt, and the whole team (current and former) take care of themselves and each other through more uncertainty. Letting go feels awful… but could change one okay future into two great futures. techcrunch.com/2026/09/09/a...
techcrunch.com
Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence | TechCrunch
Mullenweg said in a company Slack message that it was against his will.
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
# GRUB lacks write support for lvm, so recordfail support is disabled. ^ use LVM and UEFI on Ubuntu? surprise, you get to wait 30s at the grub menu every time you boot
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Especially in FLOSS circles, you might’ve heard: “If you didn’t run code written by assholes, your machine wouldn’t boot.” [1] Which is true. And sometimes we have to work with people we don’t like. But questioning your complicity is a worthy exercise.
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
The Third Culture (1998) says a lot about the present moment: LLMs didn’t spend enough time in the lab with scientists; they were pressed upon our world by impatient nerds. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
science.org
The Third Culture
Kevin Kelly is the executive editor of Wired and author of Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World.
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
It was bad enough when zombie fascism was getting in the way of climate action. Now we’ve got oligarchs and idolators building bigger fossil fuel burning power plants than ever before.
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Instagram reckons I should follow the private account of a descendant of a 14th Century noblewoman that I’ve been studying. 🤔😬
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
tfw you have the courage of your convictions
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
👀 whoa ducklabs.com/news/2026/08...
ducklabs.com
DuckLabs to Join AWS, Projects to Remain Open Source
DuckLabs provides services around the DuckDB in-process OLAP data management system directly from its main developers.
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Dolly wouldn’t hate ’em. But she’d be very disappointed.
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Nina Metz @ninametz.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
All social science core classes at the University of Chicago will transition to an “analog” approach for the upcoming academic year, restricting in-classroom technology use and banning AI-assisted writing and grading for students and professors
chicagomaroon.com
Sosc Core to Institute AI Ban, Technology-Free Classrooms This Fall
All social science Core classes will transition to an “analog” approach for the upcoming academic year, restricting in-classroom technology use and banning AI-assisted writing and grading for students...
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
Strong concur. Bonus: An amusing technical review of Omarchy. It's like bad Linux desktop fan fiction. xn--gckvb8fzb.com/a-word-on-om...
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
“it’s inevitable” and “the genie is out of the bottle” are thought-terminating clichés, and boil down to the same thing: hopeless surrender we *can* make better decisions, and fix our mistakes – and we *have*!
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Racist ideology is not welcome or acceptable. When it’s inconvenient. When they want to join your creative community. When they want to support your project. You gotta hold the line. Racist ideology is not welcome or acceptable. Tell fascists to fuck off.
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
“The Singularity happened 8 months ago so we bought an LLM API proxy.” – Shopify’s flavour of AI psychosis (whatever the merits of the acquisition, the rationale is batshit)
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
(not a lot of folks discovering the irony here… the joke within the joke…)
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Ada Palmer @adapalmer.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
In the Renaissance people theorized, since the Aeneid is great, if you wrote poems made only of words & phrases from the Aeneid rearranged they should be great too, since a great source regurgitated should yield greatness. They produced NOTHING we still read. Thinking about that a lot lately.
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
Good long read… adapted from The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State by Jill Lepore, published by Allen Lane on 25 August. www.theguardian.com/news/2026/au...
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Joseph Cox @josephcox.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
New from 404 Media: we solved which AI company is buying massive shipments of rare books, scanning and destroying them to train AI. We put an Apple AirTag in a rare book, followed it. It ended up at an Amazon facility. Its logo is a dinosaur ripping through a book www.404media.co/we-tracked-a...
404media.co
We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility
We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
Scene: A uniformed Marine puts an apple on his young son's head and shoots it with his service pistol. Rationalise all you like about dramatic effectiveness, that is a truly insane thing to put on television. (American television! Where adults and children can't stop shooting each other!)
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Suggestion: SNL with host and musical guest, Phoebe Bridgers, but the rest of the cast is trapped outside 30 Rock by a snowstorm so Phoebe and Jane Wickline have to save the live show with only their wits, a 1980s Casio keyboard, and a rubber bridge acoustic guitar.
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Emmy-worthy coordination between Ted Lasso writers and crew to block shoot an entire season of coaching scenes in London's 12 minutes of sunlight.
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
You're supposed to be a writer. And yet here we are, talking about watermarking. We're talking about watermarking. Watermarking. Not prose. Not prose. Not the prose you claim to care about, right? Prose you asked a machine to generate, right? No, we're talking about watermarking, man. Watermarking!
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Artificial Intelligence, 1588 www.folger.edu/blogs/collat...
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
PUSH ROBOTS INTO LAKES
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
we can survive unprecedented batshit stupidity in one complex system at a time, but not all of them all at once
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
Australian political cliches rarely have a pleasing mouthfeel, but allowing “back him in” in a Guardian headline? Eugh.
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
Yeah, yeah, it's fantasy, but… House of the Dragon still has too many "Hollywood medieval" tropes: - running charges - flaming arrows - "draw!" (implied "loose!" tends of seconds later) - removing helmets - no fucking colours!
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
Why [Carmody Grey] turned down Anthropic archive.is/F2bSF
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
If you’re halfway curious about space, you probably already know that Elon’s “datacentres in orbit” idea is as stupid as his doorhandles. But if you’d enjoy a truly thorough debunking… taranis.ie/datacenters-...
taranis.ie
Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea.
There is a rush for AI companies to team up with space launch/satellite companies to build datacenters in space. TL;DR: It's not going to work.
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
this is such a delightfully lateral idea… effort and risk to create a human, communal experience planetariumexperience.phoebebridgers.com
planetariumexperience.phoebebridgers.com
Phoebe Bridgers
cargo.site
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
ze germans have a knack for it: “gesamtscheiße” 😙👌🏻
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
sensible, succinct 👍🏻 Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI: Examining the most common misconceptions queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...
queue.acm.org
Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI - ACM Queue
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
most rejections of the “stochastic parrot” metaphor are quite unfair to parrots
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings.” – Ursula K. Le Guin what once gave me hope is now a splinter in my sole/soul we’ve lived under the invisible thumb of capitalism longer than the divine right of kings
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
Silo is such a dense sci-fi thriller that Season 3’s “Previously on Silo” is 5 episodes long!
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
sorry, i have to self-report a potential crime against humanity: i might think "Stuart Fails to Save the Universe" is a solid premise for an episodic sci-fi sitcom, pretty well executed, and kind of an ideal low budget original for a large streamer 😬
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
Spider-Man: Brand New Day… job well done. 😙👌🏻 May the already impressive legacy of Short Term 12 continue to grow… 💕
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
they should consider doing a movie about an extra terrestrial deadline.com/2026/07/atar...
deadline.com
Atari Signs Deal With Universal To Turn 10 Iconic Games Into Movies
Atari has signed a deal with Universal Pictures giving the studio first look at developing 10 classic Atari video game properties for the big screen.
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
it’s always slutty little glasses and never a slutty little wig
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 26/07/2026
If you’ve ever thought, “Gee, I wish Anne Twomey would do a video about The Engineers case”… good news. www.youtube.com/watch?v=e83b...
youtube.com
Changing the Constitution by interpretation - The Engineers case
YouTube video by Constitutional Clarion
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Jeff Waugh @jeffwaugh.bsky.social · 26/07/2026
The Great Gatsby is the “great American novel” because they’re not a particularly bookish people.
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