Matt “We’ve Talked About This” Ringel

I don’t understand people being so incredibly proud of the prompts they use for AI art. It’s like proudly proclaiming that you have found the optimal settings for microwaving a burrito.

I was thinking of what I could say to my Israeli friends about the elections today, and the most honest phrase I could come up with was: בהצלחה כולכם, איכשהו. “Good luck to all of you, somehow.”

I was yesterday years old when I found out Sharpie makes brush markers.

The estranged parent freak out, the divorced men vote for Trump issue, and the generalized racism is all versions of the same thing - certain groups of people think they are entitled to access and use of the bodies of certain other groups of people.

i refuse to be bound solely by what I can defend as a "good idea". no one else in politics functions under these constraints.

Move New England* into the Atlantic Time Zone. (Fairfield County, CT can stay. You know what you’ve done.)

I’d like to thank Past Me for reading all the books in “The Expanse”. Why? Because mapping Amos’s concept of “The Churn” onto large corporate politics is actually a pretty useful model.

like I suspect many of you on This Website, I think a core reason why I find Eliezer Yudkowsky and his rationalist and effective altruist satellites so intensely annoying is because I had a VERY similar “being a super weird, pretentious, hyper-literate kid” experience - I just, you know, grew up.

Those who do not know of the Freeway Revolts of the 60s and 70s are doomed to be mystified by the opposition to massive gigawatt-scale datacenter buildouts.

What all #Meta product announcements look like to me by now. #charm #muse

Harry Potter Fanfic Sex Cult La La La La Clementine.

The “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” to “Roko’s Basilisk” Pipeline is real, and the line is so straight you could prove the curvature of Earth with it.

The “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” to “Roko’s Basilisk” Pipeline is real, and the line is so straight you could prove the curvature of Earth with it.

When I get home and I’m feelin’ kind of sour I take sixty minutes to read my very own home Schopenhauer ‘Cause I Think Alone…

I remember that the weather was perfect that morning.

About a month after 9/11, I remember driving to Long Island. The *second* I crossed over from Queens into Nassau, the hyper-patriotic “we’re gonna kick their asses whoever they are” flag-wavey stuff started.

One of the more rewarding things about being a people manager is being able to tell my team “If they’ve got a problem with that, they can talk to me.” and making it stick.

A fork in the road is just a three way junction where you’ve already tried one.

MERRY MOVINGSDAY!!!

Hot music take: If you think “Mr. Brightside” is a total banger of a song, even knowing that it’s about jealousy, infidelity, and paranoia, you are *this close* to understanding why someone on the right might like “Born in the USA”, even knowing it’s about the plight of Vietnam vets.

Somebody please fix the claw machine.

“I think I'll get more RAM for my gaming box…” <clicky> “huh.” <clickyclicky> “that can't be…” <clickyclicketyclack> “ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!?!” Going to drive crosstown to find an AI training cluster to yell at. brb.

At some point in the past several months, stock pictures of Bezos have transitioned from Lex Luthor to Thanos.

WDNK 100.1 FM!!! YOUR HOME FOR…

Assertion: Faith No More was the progenitor of nu-metal. Sorry, all. It’s just true.

Good morning, Bluesky. youtu.be/Q_tPiH5nY0Q?...

ESP-ARG: 87 minutes of boring, followed by 2 minutes of interesting, followed by six minutes of ugly. 30 to go.

This. If someone is particularly impervious, I’ve also found success with “Believe That Something Happened.” If someone is willing to take the risk to speak out, there’s almost certainly a reason.

I want to live in a world where the Dems had the bench depth so that a Platner-like campaign *couldn’t* happen.

Warm take: The USMNT has finally made it to the bottom of the big leagues.

Okay… the AI-generated ads during the World Cup are getting to me, in a motion-sick “GenAI still can't keep it together for more than three seconds” kind of way.

The impressive thing about the PAR-FRA game is that Paraguay effectively threw *themselves* out of the World Cup. Just pointless aggression leading to an avoidable France PK.

However the ARG-CPV game ends, there’s gonna be a whole lot of teams watching the replay thinking “if it bleeds, we can kill it.”

LinkedIn is where you find people who say “Be the change you want in the world. I think that restaurants shouldn’t rely on tips to prop up wages. That’s why I don’t tip.”

When Boston has rendering issues…

For non-NYCers here is the relevant wild generalization you need: - the Yankees are for cops - the Mets are for Queens - yeah the Nets are in Brooklyn now but we still think of them as NJ. - football is MAGA coded and played in NJ - Hockey is for Long Island & white - THE KNICKS ARE FOR EVERYONE

Grew up on Long Island in the 1980s. The whole thread tracks.

Oh. Huh. *that’s* the future tense of the verb “bangarang”. #eurovision

Assertion: Every decade gets the James Bond it deserves. Craig’s Bond was brilliant at being “the blunt-weapon-in-a-suit who is getting disillusioned with the power he represents” which was definitely of its time. Thing is, what’s this decade’s Bond?

אחת עשרה פגישות הסתיימו, עוד אחת נשארה. נראה שבחרתי בזה.

It’s the late nineties. I had just moved to Cambridge from NYC. The first morning I wake up as a MA resident I see some guy slowly driving by with a megaphone mounted to his roof saying “TODAY IS STREET CLEANIN’. MOVE YAH CAH AW IT’LL BE TOWED.”

I hear people say “I spent $1000 on Claude tokens” with same energy as “I spent $1000 on gems in Genshin Impact.” Different path, same high.

This is a great example of someone using Masshole in the best possible way. “Is that a question?” “Yeah, kinda, like… are we being pricks? Are we trying to do nothin’? Cause it seems like we’re doin’ nothin’.”

Things I say at work: “I’ll have a video of it for the next meeting. Live demos are always tricky, especially with dairy products.”

היו לי היום עשר פגישות. מישהו אמר לי שזה בונה אופי. אני סקפטי.

This morning’s wake-up process, summarized:

Orban? Na, bro.

A made-for-LinkedIn subject line but also actually true: “How being my EVE Online corporation’s deranged spreadsheet guy taught me how to enjoy JIRA.” #youcannotjudgemeinanywaythatmatters