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Ron Bronson

@ronbronson.com
3.9K followers 1.1K following 5.2K posts

Asst. Prof. of Practice in Urban Tech, UMich. makingpublicwork.com / ronbronson.design Host of the sound bulletin on freeform portland. Built beachwave.app / varsityapex.com / oregontennis.org / mallo.fi / capbuffet.com

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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 24/09/2026
On the bright side Vimpeli's improbable basically wire to wire @superpesis.bsky.social title will power me well into the winter. So it's okay. #pesis
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 23/09/2026
Being away from home means trying on stuff from my bag o' decants. Today was Risvelium from Orti Parisi. #scentsky #fragsky
Scent notes from Risvelium from Orto Parisi 

main accords
citrus
musky
amber
fruity
fresh spicy
powdery
aromatic
sweet
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 18/09/2026
Vimpeli taking on Sotkamo in Game 3 of the men's Finnish baseball finals today. It's a storied rivalry called El Klasikko and Vimpeli (my fav team) are up 2-0 in the best of 5. A win today would be our 7th men's title in club history. It's been a dominant year a win at home would be sweet #pesis
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 06/09/2026
I went looking for this typeface the same way I hear a sample and want to know what the source is.
statement from the big ten on blue text and black font -- not very readable -- using a custom font on the Western Michigan/Michigan game on Saturday 9/5/26 where the refs added 1 second back on the clock after it appeared the game ended.
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 05/09/2026
somewhere in heaven mr. collins my hs band teacher (who was also my elementary school band teacher) is smiling down.
a bleuesky starter pack for academics who listen to free jazz too
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 29/08/2026
lol..
a claude.ai screenshot that reads thinking about concerns with this hostile and abusive request (in response to the machine being called a water wasting lie machine & a waste of space)
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 23/08/2026
Got an ad for this book "developing citizen designers" by elizabeth resnick and request an exam copy just in time for the semester (my first exam copy of anything) as I put the finishing polish on how I'm going to approach Interaction Design & Urban Experiences this semester
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 22/08/2026
Welp www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-a...
Grills, who is 33 and lives in San Francisco, typically works 10 hours a day and takes one weekend day off. She went through the Y Combinator startup accelerator program in 2024 and saw firsthand the effects of pushing too hard. A fellow founder in her cohort was hospitalized after failing to eat solid foods and living off mostly meal-replacement products. (Y Combinator says it has long advocated that its founders take care of themselves.)
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 19/08/2026
I mean what the hell
WHO AGREES TO HAVING YOUR FIRST DATE PHOTOGRAPHED? SURELY HE MUST HAVE GOTTEN A FRIEND TO STAGE THIS? DOES SHE WORK FOR THE TIMES?
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 17/08/2026
needless to say publicalerts dot org got inundated with pdx people wanting updates about the centennial mills demolition oops
403 error on publicalerts.org signup page
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 15/08/2026
Mos Def - The Ecstatic isn't streaming anywhere so the vinyl reissue was tempting enough to pull the trigger on.
Mos Def - the ecstatic reissue on vinyl
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 11/08/2026
I'd probably prefer to hear someone say "our resident witch suggested" said over "Claude said..." anyday.
Just heard about a very prominent tech executive who hired a witch for his new company.

In a world that is only getting more complex and uncertain, I think we will likely see more of this: people turning to witches, psychics, or AI for guidance and direction.

Anything that looks like clarity.
5:37 AM · Aug 10, 2026
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Bounty
@bountyAIhunter
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14h
so clarity becomes a product you can buy

and the tech exec treats it like any other saas subscription
Allie K. Miller
@alliekmiller
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13h
No, he's treating it like a salaried employee.
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 09/08/2026
East County Library truly gorgeous, they did such a good job. Wish it were possible for US libraries to be as busy as Nordic ones with cafes & chess games and all that but still a really nice, well designed spot.
Atrium shot of the east county library in Gresham, Oregon
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 09/08/2026
my fictional state of Jefferson was a lot more expansive than the "real" one, I took parts of Southern Oregon, Northern California, Nevada and Idaho to make mine. I'll spare the lore, but the high schools, mascots and city names are all very intentionally designed.
the fictional state of Jefferson that the demo uses. Think West Coast TexasWikipedia entry for the fictional state of jefferson
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 09/08/2026
I didn't know where to write this or share it. Basically since newspapers are dead high school sports scores are heavily paywalled or not covered at all. Schools and HS leagues have minimal sites. Lots of ingested data from diff. sources.
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 08/08/2026
Found a conventional use for atproto (replacing high school state associations/athletic conference/school sports websites) the other day and built a spec because I couldn't help myself. it's live but I'll share a blog post about it before sharing
Working protoype of a site called varsityapex which uses standard.site and is stacked so you can have a high school athletics site, an athletic conference and the association site all integrated without hosting them in the same place/platform
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 05/08/2026
Super rad to finally make it to @pdx.atproto.camp meetup. Great energy, welcoming space & some cool ideas flowing about. Very neat.
A person standing at a dais with a screen behind talking about social computing while a crowd watches
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 04/08/2026
Still laughing about this
tweet from kristin merrilless "nowhere in richard scarry’s busytown is there a “gtm engineer”"
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 29/07/2026
i mean i guess if you can do weezer why not tvotr but i feel like it'd only be remotely good if you had a live band. you'd just have to black tf out to really do it well. Terrible digital camera photos from their Boulder show in 2006, then again in Denver in 2007.
TV on the radio in Boulder in 2006 TV on the radio in Boulder in 2006 TV on the Radio live in Denver in 2007
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 29/07/2026
Going to add this story to my Public Mechanics syllabus for the Fall.
the inciting incident occurred three weeks ago when a staff member from Portland Solutions (ironically named), the city's homelessnes and livabiltiy office, found a person sleeping on the waterslide, which had been damanged by a fire.
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 27/07/2026
Bjork - PostFiona Apple - TidalCounting Crows - August and Everything After
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 19/07/2026
😅 my friend texted me "They just showed you on screen!"
Me at the game apparently
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 18/07/2026
A wooden dock with metal swim ladders extends into a calm lake, where sunlight sparkles across the water. Tall grasses and large rocks line the shoreline in the foreground, while dark pine branches frame the top of the image with the sun shining through them. A dense tree line stretches across the opposite shore beneath a blue sky filled with scattered white cloud
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 16/07/2026
The future sucks
Age verification gate on bluesky via wifi in Canada
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 14/07/2026
Glad I was able to find this from my 2024 airbnb in Michigan
A printed sign mounted on a dark wall asks, “Are We Earning a 5-Star Review?” beneath five gold stars. The sign explains that short-term rental platforms treat ratings below 4.6 as negative and asks guests to contact the host to resolve any issues before leaving a review. At the bottom, it provides a suggested rating guide: five stars for “I enjoyed my stay here,” four stars for “There are many issues to fix,” three stars for “Major problems with my stay,” two stars for “This should not be listed,” and one star for “I left early it was so terrible.” The sign ends with “Thank you.
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 14/07/2026
i can't resist the 90s ass chain era sharables
my pantone birth chart
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 14/07/2026
A few miles away I saw Weird Al Yankovic with my best friend's since middle school for his birthday. he was a big fan back then & never saw him live. Weird Al has that old school performer work ethic, 2 hr set, costume changes, backing band & everything. A testament to timing & consistency.
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 10/07/2026
on today's episode of service design in everything: GEICO is paying my claim to pay to me & I pay the dealership and the app goes beyond just EFT (or a paper check) one option is debit I can just imagine how well this works for unbanked people. Great affordance surely informed by research!
Mobile webpage for receiving an insurance payment. A heading reads, “Choose how you want to receive your payment,” followed by instructions that the entered information must match bank records and that a check will be mailed if the payment is not accepted by the email’s expiration date. Payment options are grouped by speed: under “Money in minutes,” radio buttons offer debit card transfer to a bank account or PayPal account transfer; under “Money in days,” a radio button offers bank account transfer in 1–2 business days. The page is open in Safari on ay.geico.com.
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 08/07/2026
They played Aerials It was pretty metal
An outdoor concert takes place beneath large leafy trees in a neighborhood park. A musician in a black-and-white patterned outfit plays a marimba at center stage while a seated cellist performs beside her. An audience fills rows of chairs in the foreground, with microphones, trees, and apartment buildings framing the intimate performance
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 06/07/2026
The opening lyrics to motion city soundtrack 2003 song.
the irony here is the song starts with "i'm on fire.."
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 05/07/2026
Today's plane read
Michael Pollack's new book Sidewalk Nation; the life and law of america's most overlooked resource
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 04/07/2026
Taps the sign.
A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 04/07/2026
A crowd gathers on a grassy waterfront at dusk to watch a live music performance on an outdoor stage lit with blue lights. A green steel lift bridge spans the river in the background, its lights reflecting on the water beneath a deep blue evening sky. Trees frame the right side of the scene, creating a lively festival atmosphe
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 30/06/2026
What a wild romp truly 1 of 1 cyberpunk. Glad no one has ruined it with a remake, total period piece
I want to get online. I need a computer. Screen cap from the movie
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 29/06/2026
I took this a step further and started doing performance revews with ai agents, obviously YMMV and only works best in the same session not asking a future agent about past work, same with AARs I generate them on meaningful PRs or feature adds. Agnostic to the LLM platform. They follow the template
Human-Agent Performance review, where the human steers the agent through questions about what it did in a segment of work
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 29/06/2026
Before I started using them in work projects, it began with hobbyist things. As a long-time sports text simmer/one-time game designer (of a real sport) I built myself a bunch of sims that are just for me. Having AARs in the repo really cut down on agent spinning when working w/multi-agent teams
an example of an AAR from my repo for my hybrid baseball simScreenshot of my fictional college team tennis simMy draft lottery lab simulator
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 29/06/2026
The Soviet AI killed its creator and so he had to convince the officemate that she had to be his mistress so they could talk, but Dr. Forbin has to beg the AI for privacy and have somewhere to talk. Apparently, a cocktail bar wouldn't have delivered these screens
The computer screen fills with the statement, “THERE ARE MANY KINDS OF LOVE,” in bold red lettering on a dark CRT display, framed by the machine’s industrial metal housing.A large CRT monitor asks in bright red capital letters, “HOW MANY TIMES A WEEK DO YOU REQUIRE A WOMAN,” presenting Colossus’s clinical, impersonal questioning in a minimalist control room.The monitor begins a new prompt with the words, NOT WANT REQUIRE,” as an off-screen speaker starts to answer, “My— My emotional life,” shown in subtitles at the bottom of the frame. The scene highlights the tense exchange between the supercomputer Colossus and its human operator.A vintage CRT monitor displays glowing red text reading, “AGREED A WOMAN FOUR NIGHTS A WEEK,” while built-in shelves and another monitor sit blurred in the background, emphasizing the film’s retro-futuristic computer interface.
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 28/06/2026
They're all agape at how smart Colossus is & reading the print outs and how the machine is learning stuff they don't know. I'm impressed by the set design of this silly thing. Nobody knows how the two AIs actually work, but Forbin's rhetoric indistinct from a modern SV ceo
A flat-screen TV mounted against a beige wall displays a scene from a vintage film or TV show. Three people stand closely together in an office or laboratory setting: a man in a light blue shirt leans over a large sheet of paper in the foreground, a woman in a mustard-yellow cardigan stands beside him, and a man in a gray suit with an ID badge stands behind them. White subtitles at the bottom read, “It’s like five years at Caltech in 15 seconds.” Reflections are visible on the TV screen, and part of a houseplant appears in the lower-left corner of the photo.
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 28/06/2026
Their TV phones were high tech, no latency. Their AI? Already taking over the world 20 minutes in.
Screen cap from Colossus
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 28/06/2026
Me voice commanding my IDE I guess
Screen cap from Colossus, 1970 sci-fi film about an intelligent AI
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 28/06/2026
Federal Baseball (1922) which gave major league baseball an anti-trust exemption. no other pro league has. Also, the FDA would be a better metaphor, but realistically it's Freddie Mac meets Experian meets Salesforce. Living in an arcade of intelligent weapons. Kōbō Abe’s Inter Ice Age 4
However, now the risks are clearly here. It is time to go beyond transparency to more serious and binding regulation of AI. I believe the best analogy, at least at the current stage of the exponential, is to cars, airplanes, or drugs—powerful technologies essential to the modern economy, but capable of killing large numbers of people if designed or operated poorly. I therefore believe we should model AI regulation on agencies like the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Frontier AI models, like airplanes, should be required to go through technical testing and auditing, and their release should be blocked or reversed as a threat to public safety if they do not meet high standards of safety. I am grateful to see the Trump administration’s Executive Order move incrementally towards a greater role for government in AI, though Anthropic’s proposal recommends even further action. Our proposal includes the following elements:
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 26/06/2026
Platformisation: I want something→ I open the platform → the platform fulfills the demand Hyperplatformisation: I am uncertain, lonely, busy, anxious, or simply open to suggestion → the agent surveils my situation → the agent proposes a path → the platform ecosystem fulfills the path
mckinsey report on "the automation curve in agentic commerce"
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 25/06/2026
should be on the radar of all city councilors / legislators / mayor as they negotiate. I'm not sure a single one of them is aware of how pervasive the issue is and how solvable it is. You want kids off phones? Welp, one of many ways to do it.
Salem student athletes will once again have to pay to play sports at school as a three-year athletic fee hiatus ends in the fall — but district leaders and nonprofit groups say fees shouldn’t pose a barrier for any student who can’t afford them.

The Salem-Keizer School District is reinstating fees for middle and high school athletics after covering the cost of sports programs through grant funding since 2020.

High school students will pay $125 for the first sport in a school year, $75 for a second and nothing for a third. Low-income students would pay $50 per sport for the first two.

Middle schoolers would pay $40 per sport for the first and second sports in a school year, and nothing after. Low-income students would pay $20 per sport for the first two.

The change will affect over 8,000 student athletes at district middle and high schools.

Athletic fees were refunded to families in the spring of 2020 when schools shut down for Covid.

During the next three school years, district leaders used state grant money from the Student Investment Account to cover the cost of sports programs for families.

“Because we had that ability, we took advantage of it,” said Lara Tiffin, the district’s coordinator of athletics and activities.

Local schools offered fewer sports programs during the 2020-21 school year when classes were held mostly online, and waiving fees cost the district about $390,000.West Linn 

Athletic/Activity Fees for 2025-26 School Year

We have an important update regarding athletic and activity fees that will be in effect starting this fall season for the 2025-26 school year. We are implementing these fee adjustments to accommodate for the cost of our programs, to increase clarity, and to create better equity across our co-curricular programs.

Starting for the 2025-2026 school year, the cost for athletic and activity programs will change to the following: 

$250 for each sport a student participates in (OSAA sports & lacrosse)

$250 for each activity a student participates in (OSAA activities, Theatre & Robotics).

The family cap will be set at $1,000 (this means that the maximum amount a family will need to pay is $1,000 total if they have multiple students participating in athletics/activities).

There will continue to be many other clubs and opportunities available to students at each high school where these fees are not required. 

Families who choose to pay through MySchoolBucks will be charged an additional service fee of 4.6%. To avoid this additional fee, please make payment directly to the Bookkeeper's Office.
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 24/06/2026
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 21/06/2026
Seems fitting for the scent of the day on an unusually cool summer morning for "To My Father" from Vilhelm, an underrated gem #sotd #fragsky #scentsky
The scent notes to vilhelm perfumems to my father fragrance
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 19/06/2026
Dang inflation has reached the swedish fish economy
Holding a bag of Swedish Fish  chews
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 18/06/2026
This morning's pre-meeting feature loose-leaf tea is this delightful Wuyi Black tea. It's bold, not as malty but sturdy for people (never me) who take milk in their tea.
Wuyi Black tea from Miro Tea in Seattle
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 17/06/2026
Unintentionally doing local, participatory events annually I guess. 2022: Death to UX participatory design event for PDX DF 2023: A Parliament of Neighbors at Lloyd Center Mall chimaera art gallery popup (www.ronbronson.dev/projects/par...) 2024: Design For The Public 2025: PDX Digital Corps
PDX Digital Corps closing event last JulyDesign For the Public 24 Day 1 at Revolution Hall Show Bar
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 15/06/2026
Oregon Coast
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Ron Bronson @ronbronson.com · 15/06/2026
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