Nathaniel Downes

The addictive qualities of social media really are frustrating. One thing I appreciate about BluSky here is something that really annoyed me at first, but now I recognize is good in that it slows down the experience. And by slowing it down, the addictive qualities are significantly less.

Add this to research that suggests that as Musk took over Twitter (but before Twitter became X), the algorithm there was serving up content that leaned markedly to the right, even for users whose networks leaned left. www.arxiv.org/abs/2512.06129

Everybody knows that Pupper just won Downhill Gold

No new pictures. Where are you at mentally?

No cheating, reskeet with the most recent photo of your pet.

This Child Accurately Describes the U.S. Today From the Mouths of Babes

I spoke to the Christian Science Monitor about my song of solidarity for the resistors of Minneapolis www.csmonitor.com/USA/2026/013...

btw the 'things i need to save up for' is now a degree 😂✌️💃 ganba student-me in the year 2026!

You can test new tech ideas using the Seinfeld Test Would the product eliminate the plot of an episode? (Google maps, cell phones, paypal, battery packs) Good tech. Would the product inspire new Seinfeld plots? (NFTs, AI chatbots, crypto currency, blindboxes, metaverse land sales) Bad tech.

I really don't visit this site as often as I do Threads, and I really should. The content here is less ragebait. It strikes me that the main reason I use Threads more is just the position of the like button.

Physician Lauren Hughes was driving when another car T-boned her Subaru, totaling it and breaking her ankle. Then the bills came: $63,976.35 in total because her insurance deemed her hospital stay not medically necessary.

So, I trained an AI model using my own writing, and use it to help overcome the post-covid brain fog to fix my writing. This seems like an okay use of AI to me, but what do you all think?

Gay Bar Gay, MI

So, the president has apparently just surrendered to Iran. That was not on my 2025 Bingo card.

Staff who are being terminated from the National Endowment for the Humanities this coming week received their last full paycheck this weekend. A reminder that appropriations for full staff salaries were made through September 30, 2025. Terminating us now was never necessary, just cruel. #NEH

youtu.be/HMORDgnxNs8?...

youtu.be/sKUqdMHoPNQ?...

The new subvariant has mutations on the spike protein. This means that several vaccines may not be effective against it, especially older ones. Something we will need to keep an eye on. Mask up everyone.

“I never thought leopards would eat MY face,” sobs man who spent $250M getting the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party elected. My reaction:

Everything he touches goes bankrupt.

This is not an idle threat, either. Most publications will not only fire you, they will blacklist you for using AI. Some of our fields are small, and we talk, mostly because we tend to run in the same circles. You will be found out.

The Quakers are probably the only US religious group shooting over 90% from the field on being on the right side of history.

So when DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin tweeted last month that Abrego Garcia had been found with “rolls of cash” the reality is that he was wearing a sweatshirt that had rolls of cash depicted on it? Like cartoonish images of $100 bills? Is that really what happened here?

So, the US Treasury bond market has a maturation wall issue. This will push up rates, as more supply hits. Combine this with foreign debt holders selling off their bonds, further increasing their supplies, and foreign sovereign funds cancelling bond purchases, and we are in for a whole lot of pain.

Zuck: The average American has three friends.

Raymond Chandler, letter to a friend, January 1948. Seems relevant beyond the specific Hollywood context.

VICTORY, THEY FUCKING PROVED THE COVID/MAST CELL LINK IS THE SPIKE PROTEIN I HAVE A CONCLUSIVE PAPER TO SHOW PEOPLE WHO WHINE AT ME ABOUT MY FUCKING DIPHENHYDRAMINE PRE-VACCINE ADVICE NOW

'Aborted Fetus Debris' Is NOT RFK Jr.'s New Metal Band www.wonkette.com/p/aborted-fe...

"Get me a picture of Australians voting." "No that's too Australian".

Say it after me: Chat GPT is not a search engine. It does not scan the web for information, it just generates statistically likely sentences. You cannot use it a search engine, or as a substitute for searching. Now. Please never use an LLM for information searches ever again.

Scientists who study climate don't automatically attribute all changes to human activity. Rather, we carefully investigate every possible natural factor that could explain the planet's warming. Could these be the real culprits? The evidence is in--and the answer is NO. This thread explains! 🧵

Witnessing the horror show of US politics today, I am disheartened. I should be finishing an updated edition of "The People's Constitution" to discuss the ratification of the ERA and other ways to interpret the CAA, but I just can't get the energy. For the current edition;

Division Bell for me

"When Richard VanMetter tried to buy a sandwich, he didn’t realize he was dead." Read @merylkornfield.bsky.social & co on a scenario that could happen to many more people as Musk moves aggressively to transfer more names to the government's "Death Master File" www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

Needless to say anti-trans motions by an NZ political party along with everything else going on are really causing me to experience significant anxiety. The anxiety has been with me since ending up in hospital with pericarditis.

FUCK. THIS. All of this.

Comfortable in my skin, care about people, not parts.