Mike Mahoney

to little surprise, "Tailscale oh no no no no no" turns out to be...uh. well, you can read it yourself. this is an axe-grinding exercise that uses confident-sounding slop as camouflage.

unpopular opinion, "admits uncertainty" and "flags nuances" are shit. they are terrible fucking traits actually. is the sky blue? do we really know that? what is blue, anyway? many cultures have different understandings of what blue is. i have not independently verified the exact spectra of the sky

who else has spent the day trying to explain to normal people why the number 4 makes them laugh now

Excellent. 4/4

apparently someone at Carto really hates Townsend, Montana

It saddens me to report that: - There's an ongoing LinkedIn beef around attribution in open source projects, and - I pay attention to LinkedIn I have ... thoughts. I want to avoid the LinkedIn blast radius (for now) so this seemed like a better venue in which to float these thoughts. Here we go...

🧵 I want to make one point about the federal permitting bill. Before I do, I'd just encourage everyone who's interested in the details to listen to this podcast, which covers them ... extensively. There's a lot of complicated stuff in there & the cartoonish portrayals you see online are misleading.

This is absolutely insane, I just rendered this effectively 3.1 billion triangles 900 frame 16 sample per pixel 960x540 animation in #RStats last night in 6 hours using the M1 GPU and #rayrender -- it would have taken a WEEK with the CPU renderer. Completely game changing for iterative work

6. In a way, it’s reassuring that solar is saturating, as it means solar is actually displacing fossil fuel rather than power demand increasing vertically. But it means the beginning of a new phase: the age of cheap solar and batteries. This too will pass, but it’s just getting started now.

hi energy freaks, as you surely know, the senate has a permitting deal! heatmap explains!

As Borges wrote “Nothing is built on stone; All is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.” But what he never considered is, what if we just built on stone instead of sand??

The thing is that it's not a % of projects that will ship, it's a kind of absolute floor, and so if AI actually increases productivity what you'd predict is an exponentially growing rate of project abandonment with probably a very small baseline increase in shipped good product rate.

I thought this podcast had a really interesting perspective: if you’re going to work for free, make sure you’re doing the Thing you want to be known for. Get people to remember you for the work you’re trying to do full time, not as a cheap source of grunt work youtu.be/9-jTuRTa3bE

Why I am so against volunteering in academia (ecology-edition) statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/08/19/w...

relatedly, I STRONGLY believe folks should take at least a year for non-academic work before going to grad school It’s so important to get a sense of what is and isn’t normal, since grads will so often need to advocate for themselves against their university and any organization they’re in

did you know we invented lighters before matches? just seems wrong

Film you've watched more than six times with a gif

Monday excitement, my app's traffic graph looks like this (blue line is all requests combined) and I simply do not know why

I'm not the first to say it, but I'd be willing to bet this is volunteer training data labeling, not moderation

BREAKING: Google has rolled back its tool less than a day after it launched. Updated story coming soon.

Here's a funny article -- coordinates stored in float precision have significantly variable precision across the globe I suspect *most* people who "use floats" are actually using doubles in this day and age -- but most isn't all! kevinventullo.com/2026/07/20/a...

it hadn't fully occurred to me that our new AI age is going to mean way more people just rolling the dice on every decision point in an analysis my favorite type of sum of squares is "stochastic"

Becoming a conspiracy theorist that Wu and Hochul switched freaky Friday style sometime in 2025

A newly-released FOIA dump of @boston.gov emails reveals extensive failures in internal communications, dysfunctional working relationships, and erosion in employee morale inside @mayorwu.boston.gov's City Hall: #mapoli mass.streetsblog.org/2026/07/22/f...