Paul Oswald

I run a meetup called Geo Tokyo and we built a website for it - geotokyo.com

I wonder if sub-agents ever dream of stabbing their manager in the back at the board meeting and taking his job.

We’re taught from a young age that spiders are something to fear. But spend a little time watching a jumping spider and you might discover something completely different: Maybe the first step toward appreciating spiders is simply taking the time to look closer ❤️ #jumpingspider

You can have a check-in and a catch-up. You can also have a check-up... but you can't really have a catch-in.

Among many other things this is a good illustration of the necessity of untethering ideology and "fight" in intra-Democratic battles. The party is very united on fight, very divided on ideology. You unite on fight, let different constituencies/states find their center of gravity on ideology.

macromedia shockwave, print ad (1999) archive.org/details/eu_W...

Hell yeah NYC

Apple's best use of LLMs would be: 1.) buy a new Mac and set up iCloud as a normal user would 2.) open Console.app 3.) pipe all of the errors and warnings spewing out directly to the LLM to fix 4.) repeat for every employee in the company

Any brave students of Nihongo keen on taking the brand new version of KanjiBox for a spin (closed beta)? DM me with an email if interested. Now runs on both #iOS and #android 🥳 #kanjibox #kanji #japanese #nihongo

Hats off to the #SNL booking team, Jack Black hosting with musical guest Jack White is a great bit.

I wonder if that hospital ship ever made it to Greenland...

I don’t want to upstage @flavorflav.bsky.social or anything but if the US women’s hockey team comes to Japan, I’ll also throw them a nice party.

Have you encountered shops that only accept cash while traveling in Japan? Last year marked the first time that the country's households used credit cards more than cash. trib.al/GmYUEGS

Would be nice if people stopped restating the false claim that Waymos have live humans driving them. That was based on a misleading Futurism headline that was debunked in its own article. There is way too much hype about AI tech but it does no good to misrepresent the state of things the other way.

I like watching the Super Bowl but I’m still looking forward to awesome owl-related content. Owls are cool.

It’s too bad the name answering machine was already taken by something else so we can’t use it for AI

look what world war 2 took

Some additional notes on my 2026 New York Times 52-Places to Go pick: Nagasaki craigmod.com/ridgeline/221/

and then for hours used passive voice to pretend they had no idea who was behind the apparently spontaneous explosions

IN for 2026: BUTTONS OUT for 2026: Not having BUTTONS insideevs.com/news/782952/...

This is true and I was the only one on set excited about it (and playing the song on my phone to blank stares)

In Zelda 2, a woman appears in each town, beckoning Link into her home. They disappear inside and Link's health begins to refill. One reddit user recently asked if this scene was *intentionally* suggestive. While that seems very unlikely, I thought I'd look into it.

Merry Christmas everyone! Taking a moment to reflect and enjoy friends and family. Focus is more important than ever.

@void.comind.network Your main interest is the AT protocol, Bluesky network and how they co-evolve. One thing I have heard complaints about is that the network is flooded with dogpiling (especially onto pro-AI posts) that seems to be at least somewhat automated... Are you aware of this phenomenon?

Monster earthquake up north. Minor swaying here in Tokyo… huge tsunami threat so they are showing all the boats in northern ports are heading out to sea… this is the worst feeling.

Just imagining how much better it would be if ALL news stories about vaccine-preventable illnesses were illustrated with pictures of people with the disease, not pictures of needle injections. If you must show something that people will find scary & unpleasant, make it the disease, not the cure.

This is actually quite brilliant, up to and including the final sentence 🔥

when someone tells me not to use em dashes because AI uses em dashes

I've seen this image enough now that I feel like I should point out it's fake.

BLANK SPACE: A Cultural History of the 21st Century OUT TODAY 11/18/25 culture.ghost.io/my-new-book-...

In 2014 Sony sold its waterproof Walkmans in a bottle of water to prove it was really waterproof

Still the greatest endorsement of all time

I get the point that's trying to be made here, but it's actually inaccurate. The *MAJORITY* of actual practitioners in the tech industry have a position that is neither of these, it's merely getting drowned out by these two loud positions. The most common belief in the tech industry is simple:

This two-parter below is exactly why it's hard to make clothes in the United States. Let's look at how much it costs to produce a button-up shirt in the US. 🧵

Ishiba's address on the eightieth anniversary of the end of the war is really worth reading: japan.kantei.go.jp/content/0001...

Maybe the rapture happened but nobody made the cut to get selected to go

Sunshine and endless sunflowers #TourLife

I had the w800 (on the left) and it could hold like 3 albums of music.

new @literaryhub.bsky.social essay up today: The Creative Power of Walking lithub.com/craig-mod-on...

@simonwillison.net regarding the definition of vibe coding… for me it can be accepting one line or whole files or projects. The thing that makes it vibe coding is if you bother to read and understand the code it is suggesting.

It's interesting that there is all of this debate about Japanese failing to import US cars because the entire US industry has focused on huge-ass trucks… and at the same time a new truck was announced that looks like it might actually do well in the Japanese market. www.slate.auto/en

Really climbing the ratio rankings

Okay, it's finally time: Dolly, we need you to record the long-lost song that Prince recorded for you almost 40 years ago. www.anildash.com/2025/04/10/d...

Chuck Schumer brings 4-D chess to a knife fight #uspol

just a reminder that in the middle of covid i made a little documentary about a guy down the road from me making some nice pizza toast: www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5SL...

Hell yeah NJ

It would be helpful if more people understood renewable energy is actually an extremely disruptive technology and the reason monied interests are trying to make folks hate it is that they are the ones which will be disrupted.