Author | Lightnews

Sean Barrett @nothings.bsky.social · 21h

I archived one series of them, but there were others now and then not included. nothings.org/writing/hall...

Sean Barrett @nothings.bsky.social · 23h

Tom Swifties Written By An Author Willing To Go To Any Lengths To Make A Tom Swifty Thus Resulting In Constructions That Often Require More Work For Readers Than For The Author

1. "I'll worship any god who helps me steal people's trousers," Tom said pantheistically.

nothings.org/writing/swif...

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Sean Barrett @nothings.bsky.social · 1d

the kids aren't alright

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Sean Barrett @nothings.bsky.social · 1d

google search for "but a bisque ain't one" showing 10 hits

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Reposted by Sean Barrett

spooky mental haunted house @jesseltaylor.bsky.social · 1d

this is an absolutely wild use of passive voice, where you have to get through layers of narrative to figure out an ICE agent smashed a car window with his gun like an idiot, which went off and shot two people

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Sean Barrett @nothings.bsky.social · 1d

I weep for humanity. bsky.app/search?q=%22...

bsky.app

Reposted by Sean Barrett

jeff com-BOO-ters @helldude.bsky.social · 1d

corruption is such a helpful lens for understanding so much of what is broken right now. all of these people actually need accountability. allowing them to act with impunity just lets them make all manner of bad decisions. we need to help them rediscover boundaries

David Sirota @davidsirota.com · 1d

Every now and then I go back and read the Citizens United ruling to see if it is as unhinged as I thought, and every time I do that I see it is actually far more deranged than I remembered.

levernews.com/book

Supreme Court ruling: "This Court now concludes that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption. That speakers may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that those officials are corrupt. And the appearance of influence or access will not cause the electorate to lose faith in this democracy."

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Reposted by Sean Barrett

Drew Harwell @drewharwell.com · 2d

An OpenAI executive said GPT-5 found solutions to 10 "previously unsolved" math problems when in reality all it did was find online references to places where people had already solved them

techcrunch.com/2025/10/19/o...

OpenAI’s ‘embarrassing’ math | TechCrunch

No, GPT-5 did not solve a bunch of previously unsolved math problems.

techcrunch.com

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Reposted by Sean Barrett

Rob Sheridan @rob-sheridan.com · 3d

In this Very Serious country where we are Very Concerned about incitements of political violence, people were fired from their careers for quoting a podcaster’s own words but it will barely be remarked upon that the president posted a video of himself bombing his own citizens

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Reposted by Sean Barrett

Nash @radiodeadair.com · 5d

BY THE WAY

If you've updated to Windows 11 recently, you're probably on version 25H2.

There's a new setting in Settings: Privacy & Security.

Scroll aaaaaaaalll the way to the bottom and you'll see "Text and Image Generation."

TURN IT OFF.

Screenshot from Windows Settings>Privacy and Security>Text and image Generation.

"Text and image generation uses on-device AI technologies to quickly respond to requests. Turning this settings off will not affect apps and features using cloud AI technologies.

Text and image generation
Windows and anyone using this device can use Text and image generation.

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Reposted by Sean Barrett

Judd Legum @juddlegum.bsky.social · 2d

1. ICE has sharply increased its spending on weapons in 2025, according to an analysis of federal gov't data by Popular Information.

Records reveal ICE has increased spending on “small arms" — a category that includes guns, armor, chemical weapons, and explosives — by 700% compared to 2024 levels

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Sean Barrett @nothings.bsky.social · 2d

somehow i am only just now realizing that "the children" and "my children" imply entirely different things about ages.

like, I'm sitting here going, "surely 'my children' is wrong, there must be something else you call them when they're older... uh... 'my... spawn'"

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Sean Barrett @nothings.bsky.social · 2d

So as long as you used the array access macros, you'd get a 'field does not exist' if you used the wrong index type. (Arrays were generally pseudo-globals in a context object, so it was a macro per ARRAY not per ARRAY TYPE that you gave the context object & index, no danger of using wrong macro.)

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Sean Barrett @nothings.bsky.social · 2d

Last unshipped UI project I worked on at RAD was all indices (mostly for size, 16-bit instead of 64-bit), but it was C not C++ so no *proper* solution w/types. Faked it: each index type was a single-field struct with differently named fields, and per-array, macros to index using right field name.

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Reposted by Sean Barrett

Dan Schmidt @dfan.bsky.social · 4d

A long chat with Łukasz Ściga of the Wookash podcast about my career at Looking Glass Studios and Harmonix Music Systems, making games like Ultima Underworld, Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri, and Guitar Hero: www.youtube.com/watch?v=II9L...

Behind Great Games | Dan Schmidt

YouTube video by Wookash Podcast

www.youtube.com

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Sean Barrett @nothings.bsky.social · 3d

Guillotine Caucus

Reposted by Sean Barrett

Comfortably Numb @numb.comfortab.ly · 4d

Same energy

NYT 1931: HITLER CONDEMNS RIOTS.; He Says They Were Provoked by Paid Agents in Germany.

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Sean Barrett @nothings.bsky.social · 3d

(phone rings)

Scottish seaside town with red phone booth, from the movie Local Hero (1983)

Sean Barrett @nothings.bsky.social · 3d

And why is there no "datappointment" analogous to "disappointment"?!!

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Sean Barrett @nothings.bsky.social · 4d

Clearly you must be doing AI Simlish

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Reposted by Sean Barrett

Aparna Nair @disabilitystor1.bsky.social · 4d

The only thing that anyone ever needs to know about Bill Ackman is that he once joined a group of avid long distance bikers from NYC to Montauk and back without training or preparation, arrogant in his ability to "lead the pack" and ended up screaming in agony

The others fell in behind, at first struggling to keep up with the alpha leader. But soon enough Ackman faltered—at Mile 32, Ackman recalls—and fell way behind the others. He was clearly “bonking,” as they say in the cycling world, which is what happens when a rider is dehydrated and his energy stores are depleted.

While everyone else rode back to Loeb’s East Hampton mansion, one of Loeb’s friends, David “Tiger” Williams, a respected cyclist and trader, painstakingly guided Ackman, who by then could barely pedal and was letting out primal screams of pain from the cramps in his legs, back to Bridgehampton. “I was in unbelievable pain,” Ackman recalls. As the other riders noted, it was really rather ridiculous for him to have gone out so fast, trying to lead the pack, considering his lack of training. Why not acknowledge your limits and set a pace you could maintain? As one rider notes, “I’ve never had an experience where someone has gone from being so aggressive on a bike to being so hopelessly unable to even turn the pedals…. His mind wrote a check that his body couldn’t cash.”

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Sean Barrett @nothings.bsky.social · 4d

I'm no booster of current AI, but Searle's Chinese Room experiment is even dumber than Pascal's Wager and nobody needs to know about it or understand it. It's utterly broken and irrelevant.

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Reposted by Sean Barrett

Josh McConnell @joshmcconnell.com · 6d

Chef's kiss.
cc: @thelouvreof.bsky.social

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Sean Barrett @nothings.bsky.social · 4d

Unbelievable[*] that bsky STILL hasn't closed the live moderation list problem[**] by allowing you to either block everyone currently on a list, or to fork the list.

[*] Utterly believable, actually. Let's go with 'infuriating'.
[**] Trusting the list as it stands vs. trusting the list owner

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Reposted by Sean Barrett

eva (^_^)/ @eva.computer · 5d

white house has joined bluesky
click here to block all official us government accounts instantly

bsky.app/profile/did:...

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