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William Pietri

@williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy

139 followers 19 following 837 posts

Chicago-area writer, software developer, runner, and nerd wrangler. Very interested in online community and reducing the harm of tech. Creator of The Flip […] 🌉 bridged from ⁂ sfba.social/@williampietri, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact

Posts Replies Media

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/10/2026

Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/09/2026

RE: sfba.social/@jeridansky/11734538858… So shines a good deed in a weary world!

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/09/2026

@rrmutt Oh wow, yes! Me too. Great point.

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/09/2026

I was just reading about the concept of "truth pain", a strong discomfort experienced with falseness, something apparently associated with autism. Does that mean neurotypicals don't experience that? It would explain so much.

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/09/2026

@soaproot I would love to read those experience reports!

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/09/2026

@soaproot Definitely! And another advantage of the jury system is that jurors mostly know they're doing something new that they're not trained for and/or destined to do. If we implemented sortition for, say, C-suite roles, I expect we'd see results that were at least no worse. And longer term […]

Original post on sfba.social

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/09/2026

And I should add that this is not a matter of smarts. People often talk about this as idiots in charge, execs being stupid, etc, etc. But it's not that. I'm a smart guy, but there are many things where I find an expert I trust and do what they say. That's because I have enough humility to […]

Original post on sfba.social

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/09/2026

The thing that's slowly making me crazy is that so many things could be better for everybody at much lower cost, but both in business and politics the people we've put in charge refuse to think systemically. Some are greedy, some are not the sharpest and can't admit it, many need feelings of […]

Original post on sfba.social

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/09/2026

@zachweinersmith.bsky.social In cases of cult accusation, I find the ABCDEF, a ratings scale for cultiness, helpful. Cults are real and often dangerous, but the term is definitely overused. Having an objective scale makes things clearer […]

Original post on sfba.social

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/09/2026

@lowqualityfacts (I checked the cited source and it of course wasn't there.)

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/09/2026

@lowqualityfacts You will be pleased to know that Google believes this to be real.

Google search result screenshot. Query: "I have a theory that I'm Banksy. When..."

Response:

Al Overview

That sounds exactly like something Nicolas Cage would say!

While this sounds like a perfect plot for a high- concept Hollywood thriller, you are actually quoting a famous line he delivered during a 2023 interview with The Guardian while promoting his movie Dream Scenario.

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/09/2026

I really hope "may not realize" is one of them.

Screenshot of news headline from HuffPost: 6 Common Phrases You May Not Realize Are Condescending

Reposted by William Pietri

Karl Bode @karlbode.com · 04/09/2026

I 100% think big tech companies would be immeasurably helped by having sociologists, philosophers, and social workers on staff to nurture all the dudes at these companies with the emotional intelligence of a damp walnut

Reposted by William Pietri

Karl Bode @karlbode.com · 02/09/2026

you don't have to do this sort of thing to yourself or your reputation:👇

Why is Naomi Klein Funding Substack’s Hate Machine?

Writers of good conscience should not be building new media companies on the back of a platform that opportunistically coddles white supremacy.

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/09/2026

I liked the Turing Test better when it was an interesting conceptual exercise, not something I needed to perform on every bit of electronic communication from a stranger.

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/08/2026

@jasonkoebler.bsky.social It's so good to see journalists describing lies as lies!

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/08/2026

@glyph The addictive potential of these tools is no joke, and as with any supernormal stimulus, it can be hard to return to being comfortable with your previous baseline. I'd suggest treating it like gambling or drugs: set quantity and time limits in advance, make sure you book periods of time […]

Original post on sfba.social

Reposted by William Pietri

emptywheel @emptywheel.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Jeebus this entire piece is a phenomenal piece of writing.

Flailing regimes dehumanize minorities to distract from their failures. When the economy collapses or a war goes badly, they find a tiny group of people, make them the enemy within, and rally the country against them. This is how it’s gone in Iran. Hungary. Russia. I wrote PDBs about it. This will not stop with trans people. It never has.

But that caricature works only if people like me don’t exist—and I exist. I speak now because somewhere, a trans kid is watching. I want that kid to know that they are not alone. I was a trans kid too, and I’ll be damned if I let another generation grow up the way I did—told that they don’t belong, that they don’t deserve a job, a bathroom, a future. If I could brief presidents and serve in the White House—twice—so can they.

I had planned to spend the rest of my career serving my country at the CIA. This White House took my calling, but it will not take my pride, or tell me that I don’t belong, or that I must disappear. I once wrote under a pseudonym so I could keep serving. I write now in my own name for the same reason.

Julia.

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/08/2026

@KerryMitchell Well she was spot on in both of those cases, so good for her. www.newyorker.com/science/elements/…

After Years of Abusive E-mails, the Creator of Linux Steps Aside

The celebrated coder Linus Torvalds, known for the operating system he created and his aggressive style of communication, says he is seeking help.

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/08/2026

@KerryMitchell @gilduran.com Wait, this Shanley? archive.ph/pM7Gg

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/08/2026

@VeroniqueB99 That right there is my America.

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/08/2026

Anybody else find it really satisfying to quickly make a useful thing? I have a key box outside, mainly for when I forget my keys. But it's not quite made for how I use it, so water gets in sometimes. That's a little bad in the summer. But it's very bad in the […] [Original post on sfba.social]

Side view of lockbox locked to Denver l fence with a clear plastic shield keeping the rain off.

Front view of same

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/08/2026

Anybody have tricks for talking to an effective person at Lenovo? Their website glitched and I ended up with an order that is wrong. I have spoken to like 8 people in post-sales and sales; they just transfer me back and forth when they get tired of dealing with me. All I want them to do is to […]

Original post on sfba.social

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/08/2026

I've been thinking about this one for days. Shout out to my fellow Jaynes fans!

Screenshot of social media post:

New ai psychosis just dropped: return of the pre Bronze Age bicameral mind

Responding to Reddit post:

Does anyone else use ChatGPT in their head?

Educational Purpose Only

I love using ChatGPT whenever I have a question or something or I just want to talk, but sometimes my phone is dead and I don't want to get up to use my computer so I don't have access to the Al. Recently I found out I have the ability to use a form of ChatGPT in my own head. I've talked to him so much I can almost entirely accurately predict what he is going to say.

For example, my cat kept scratching at my bedroom door and meowing so I was about to use the ChatGPT app to ask why she was doing that, but then I decided it wasn't worth the effort and asked Al in my head. He told me something like "If your cat is scratching on the door and meowing it probably means she wants to be let out, let me know if you need anything else!" Then I let her out of my room.

I just thought that was a pretty cool discovery I've made. Interested to see if

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/08/2026

@futurebird Very interesting question. Web service seems like it could be commoditizable: E.g., a contract unmit is one month of X compute, Y storage, Z bandwidth, meeting certain standards. At the time it wouldn't have been technically possible, but with today's containerization, it seems […]

Original post on sfba.social

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/08/2026

To my mind, the major global political struggle now is whether we should care about individual people and treat them as equals. The alternative being to decide that some group of people (black people, women, the lower classes, queer people, neuroatypical people, disabled people, et cetera, ad […]

Original post on sfba.social

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/08/2026

I think this is also a helpful lens to explain American conservatism. If you think about the word conservative in, say, an engineering sense, it's politically neutral. It's about the degree of acceptable change over time. Political conservatives pretend that's what their about, but a lot of […]

Original post on sfba.social

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/08/2026

I often see people surprised that the Republican base votes against their own economic interest and for obviously shitty people. How's this for a short explanation: Systems train people to maintain them (or they don't last as systems). White supremacy and patriarchy are systems built on […]

Original post on sfba.social

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/08/2026

@glyph Not sure if this makes the thoughts-organization problem harder or easier, but I see two broader trends that make it an especially bad time to have this problem. One is something finanicialization and managerialism/MBAism share: a willful (and lucrative) refusal to look at anything […]

Original post on sfba.social

Reposted by William Pietri

Glyph @glyph.im · 11/08/2026

"please tell me how I can quickly address your objections so we can meet our KPIs, I have a hard stop in 45 minutes" and "you are a human being with a heart and a mind in community with other humans who must give each other grace and time and enough mutual recognition that we can ever possibly […]

mastodon.social

Original post on mastodon.social

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/08/2026

Jeffrey Epstein supported a music school, Interlochen, using his access to abuse kids. An investigation turns up accusations against nearly 50 adults over the decades. That's horrifying enough, but the real question for me: If we applied the same level of investigation to 10 random schools, how […]

Original post on sfba.social

Reposted by William Pietri

ploum @ploum.mamot.fr.ap.brid.gy · 07/08/2026

RE: mastodon.social/@sylvia_ritter/1170… As always: if you want to send to an human something AI generated, simply don’t! Send your prompt directly to the person. No, seriously. The other side is basically parsing AI garbage to try to guess what was the prompt in the […]

Original post on mamot.fr

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/08/2026

Marketplace did a piece on how economic uncertainty makes it hard for American businesses to plan "when it feels like at any minute something major could happen". But that's exactly the emotional state abusers create to maximize their power.

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 31/07/2026

@zachweinersmith.bsky.social My notion, and I look forward to hearing others', is that it's driven by desires for dominance. Intellectual content, and especially anything that purports to be factual, has to be subordinate to the dear leader and the in group. So you'll get provisional ideologies […]

Original post on sfba.social

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/07/2026

One reason we see the same thing in different time periods is replication. E.g., cats, or Catholicism. There's a line of descent. Another reason is that similar situations allow the same thing to arise separately at different times. Like raindrops or canyons or stars. It seems to me that the […]

Original post on sfba.social

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/07/2026

Personally, I think it was generous of Botticelli to edit Venus's phone out.

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/07/2026

Every time I go to my bank's website, I enjoy the photo, which I believe to be titled "Noble Heroes Also Sometimes Get Distracted". But I always feel like the woman with the phone looks familiar. I finally figured it out.

Screenshot from SF Fire CU website showing four firefighters. Three gaze nobly into the distance. One, a woman with curly hair, instead stares at her phone.

Close-up of woman with curly hair gazing at her phone

Close up of Venus from Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus", whose curls, head angle, and expression mirror the firefighter's

Reposted by William Pietri

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/06/2026

Wait, the political candidate with the Nazi tattoo turns out to have also been awful to women? How very expected.

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/06/2026

Wait, the political candidate with the Nazi tattoo turns out to have also been awful to women? How very expected.

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/06/2026

With the upcoming goofus IPOs, the risk to index funds concerns me. Has anybody seen good articles about how to shift money away from that?

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/06/2026

@RonSupportsYou That's what I figured.

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/06/2026

@RonSupportsYou I agree with you on Trump. Could you please give a similar rundown on Platner's issues?

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/06/2026

@RonSupportsYou In case others wonder about the context, it's here: x.com/JohnJHarwood/status/206372774… I looked because I think the bar for candidates should be higher than "not as awful as Trump". But in context I see what's he's saying about Brooks' mendacity.

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/06/2026

@davidgerard So, so true. Right now I'm starting a new business, a pinball museum, and a huge part of it is ignoring the many fears and fantasies, creating the conditions to usefully see what customers do, and then listening! It's thrown into relief for me how much of large tech product […]

Original post on sfba.social

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/06/2026

I think I've figured out why the incidence (and centrality) of assholes is so much higher on the right. What conservatives have proven to be most concerned with conserving is systems that run on trauma. Patriarchy. White supremacy. Oligarchy. None of these work without abuse. Without people […]

Original post on sfba.social

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/06/2026

Social media post from @jayeallisonashtear.bsky.social

"It's against the law for anyone, even total strangers, to dislike me" really is the foundational belief for a lot of American conservatives.

Quoting @acyn.bsky.social :
Vance at Air Force Academy: I've watched
a few highlights of graduation speeches
where someone will discuss Al and be met
with literal boos. Now you can't boo me.
I'm the Vice President of the United States

1:16 PM - May 28, 2026

Reposted by William Pietri

C. @cazabon.mindly.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/05/2026

@williampietri "Three stochastic parrots in a trench coat"

Reposted by William Pietri

fnord @fnrd.toots.nu.ap.brid.gy · 29/05/2026

@williampietri I enjoyed "Third party thinker"

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/05/2026

One of the things I liked about UPS was that when you had a delivery problem you could call and speak to somebody who a) understood that it was a problem, and b) could fix it. That seems over. Their slow, clunky, and unreliable website now has a low-grade chatbot, and all the support people […]

Original post on sfba.social

William Pietri @williampietri.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/05/2026

We need a name for the phenomenon when a person, out loud or written, seems so inauthentic that you're pretty sure they're just spouting LLM-generated slop. Reverse Turing? Meat Bot? Borged? Chipped? (As in have you been...) What are your ideas?