Flax Blue

The man who crashed his own casinos just rolled out the military war machine

Prediction is hard. Especially about the future. That Yogi Berra gem proves that you don't have to be a sf writer to get irritated with people insisting that you must know what's going to happen tomorrow, but (as a sf writer), I can tell you that this is one of our main occupational hazards.

Hi, my name is Alex Goldman -- you may know me as the host of Reply All. These days I am making a longform narrative podcast called @hyperfixedpod.bsky.social . I am making a small thread to ask to consider becoming a premium member of our completely independent show. hyperfixepod.com/join

Bolsonaro-friendly mayors appear to be sabotaging public transport on Election Day. Buses aren’t running in Lula-friendly areas, flights and ferries mysteriously canceled. Traffic lights have gone out and people’s power cut in Salvador, indigenous people’s travel restricted

By “grapples with the fall out”, it means sharing a sandwich with people he arrested, letting them make goodbye calls, keeping this same job (with extra), doing it the same way (with extra), getting the same pay (with extra).

You can read the full story here (w/ @propublica.org + @nytmag.bsky.social) www.nytimes.com/2026/10/25/m...

But the weight of what Alexander was doing started to settle on him late last year. He said he gets flashbacks about a specific traffic stop, when he handed ICE the husband of a woman he knew. It was between Christmas and New Year’s. She was less than 2 weeks postpartum.

I hope when I click it’s just shocked Pikachu

Enormous news. A melanoma vaccine, one of the most deadly cancers out there. Science is good and helpful and there should be more of it. www.washingtonpost.com/health/2026/...

There’s details in this that are notable, but overall absolutely amazing. I imagine most of us will eventually know someone who’s life was saved because of this. Star Trek level technology here.

This is wild. The lint roller at the end? I’m stuck with idea that this is the dream of a lint roller Like an SNL sketch of a humanoid lint roller guy

The amazing thing is that he isn't getting Copilot to do it from scratch - it is very much the direct plagiarism thing I have been talking about!!! bsky.app/profile/keta...

Ai, like Theranos before, addresses a real need. We need to make the world more doable by/for ordinary people. But in both cases, the tech doesn’t deliver that. And the companies steal from people along the way. Making everything harder for the people they were supposed to help. 

its the "hard times create hard men, hard men create soft times, soft times create soft men, soft men create hard times" thing for Boomers being the only generation in American history that got to experience a cradle-to-grave welfare state bsky.app/profile/jack...

I left a church. A memory: Ive struggled with renting/housing. They knew this. The person told me that the church should start thinking about housing costs. (Cool cool) Because new double income young doctors could not afford houses. I was all, also poorer people? They were all, the doctors

I’m out of the lit crit world. I wonder where what’s left of the 80’s/90’s deconstuctioneers landed on ai: pro meaninglessness as proof of concept? anti meaninglessness as professional commitment?

This might be why i’ve liked ghosts very recently—something matters so much that they stayed around. Like the ghost solves a narrative need

she said "you can do anything in fiction as long as the situation afterwards is more interesting that the situation before." since then i have been keeping an eye on character death in fiction. many writers seem to think that character death "raises the stakes" but actually just makes things boring

Oh, that didn't take much digging. They asked people to solve stupid fraction problems. One group got to ask AI, the other group didn't. Then they took the AI away from the AI group. Those people started fucking off. The non-AI group didn't magically know it was time to start fucking off.

I paint in order to be present. #mm52. #mm52w41 #watercolor #gesneriad

Suck it, other book collectors.

There are many ways in which every billionaire is a policy failure, but the most corrosive and destructive way in which billionaires are policy failures is this: billionaires, despite being unelected and unaccountable, possess the power to control - and ruin - millions of peoples' lives.

This is why ai feedback on art is so preposterously pleasant, banal, and TROUBLE

About the person getting voice trained ai to read to kids as if it is the parent … … yeah, no. My memory of the reading time is both finding out what adults pay attention to and also actual time with parent in mutually fun moment

Oct. 7, 1926: Opal Lee, a teacher-activist who became known as the “Grandmother of Juneteenth” for leading the campaign to establish the federal holiday that commemorates the end of slavery every June 19, is born in Marshall, Texas. She turns 100 today.

McDonald's is facing a federal lawsuit that alleges its AI-enhanced pricing tool violates antitrust laws because it shares nonpublic data with competing franchisees.

Main character syndrome, symptom 11: anything heard happening to someone else happened to the main character, but **!worse!**, too, uhhuh Corollary: the worst stories are amplified and shellacked with “believe you me”

OMG I had to check my work emails regarding an extra case in court tomorrow and I've just read this from an HR person. "on a knee to nose basis" A KNEE TO NOSE BASIS 😳

In July, we released Courtney 50.0. It may not be the fastest writing machine, but it has been honed fifty years of intensive language training. Based on the benchmarks demonstrated by this chart, Courtney 50.0 crushes the competition so significantly that we should have used a log axis.