rob pike

In 1922 Alfred Stieglitz made a series of photographs of cloudy skies, calling them Equivalents because they matched an emotion or mood he was feeling. This is my Equivalent for today.

The pettiest hill that I will die on is that if your cool character in a historical novel is rolling their eyes at social conventions, no they're not, eye-rolling didn't become a widely described gesture in English literature until the *1980s* books.google.com/ngrams/graph...

They found a long-dead plague flea at the library. There is so much cool stuff to be found in old books. Not just history but also biology and even genetics in the gunk. Eraser dust from cleaning, for instance, holds information about sheep pox. Libraries are cool. www.youtube.com/shorts/xKuaG...

From Apollo 9 to mapping the solar system, what a journey for #RustySchweickart! As his 91st trip around the sun wraps up, there’s one last chance to support the #SchweickartPrize and add a note for Rusty to read. Make his wishes come true today! bit.ly/48epqCo

Good weekend for elections. Keep it up!

Another transport policy oddity that I struggle to understand is why traffic signals exist only to make sure the intersection is empty in order to avoid impeding BMWs.

If they are for the exclusive use of pedestrians and electric motorcycles, why are they called bike lanes?

@avilewis.ca, head of the NDP (and husband of @naomiaklein.bsky.social) wants the Canadian government to rescue BioWare. Good for him. It's vital to do everything we can, however futile, to try to stop the Reapers, oops I mean investment funds from destroying everything.

Absolutely not. Humans evolved to live on Earth and there’s no other place that has the right amount of everything we need, like climate, liquid water, mix of oxygen and non-toxic gases in the atmosphere, magnetic field, gravity, puppies, kittens, etc.

Wildwood, the new film from the animation pioneers at Laika, is the longest stop-motion feature yet made, w/ voice performances from Carey Mulligan, Tom Waits, Mahershala Ali, Richard E. Grant & more. Not for little kids--it's scary & violent as hell--but a genuine dazzler. slate.com/culture/2026...

If you're at all interested in how difficult film restoration is, or want to see the dedication that restorers bring to the job, check this out. Also: cant wait for the 4K disc to come out! www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bgy5...

The macOS built-in curl, git, pip, python3, perl, ruby, and openssl all read /etc/ssl/cert.pem, which still has the emSign root, but they don't check revocation like Apple's Secure Transport libraries. This is, uh, a problem. git and pip especially. I added a short-term workaround to this page.

The details are now public, as of two hours ago. bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi... The secret P-384 keys for these intermediate CAs are all zeros except the last 8 bits. All not-updated software can be MITM'ed now. IOT boxes that can't or don't update are now trivially MITM'able forever.

The kind of artwork we need. Also gallium melts in your hand, a property I've never before seen used for art or protest. Well dome. reel360.com/article/ron-...

One of the many things I love about El-Sayed is that he's willing to engage with someone hostile if it gets them to admit the premises behind that hostility, to the extent that it becomes impossible to avoid the underlying bigotry. You want to go there, fine, but he's gonna make you own it.

Another huge WHAT THE &@#%@ IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE? from me. Have some humanity. We live in a shared world.

you can't be serious. This reads Meta/Facebook/Insta is looking to grant itself the rights to scrape websites across the open web - and train Meta's AI - if a company after Oct 30, 2026 uses Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or other Meta services. So every biz. Read that again. Outrageous. 1/5

Hear @annebdh.bsky.social, COO of @roost.tools (Robust Open Online Safety Tools), chat with @kateholterhoff.com about the importance of #oss tools in trust and safety, especially in the age of AI. redmonk.com/videos/anne-...

There will be metrologists partying in Paris tonight 🕺🧪 I've been following this for more than a decade and know how hard they've campaigned to make it happen. Sad day for me though, as no more reporting on the leap second. So long my pesky friend!

🧵🧵🧵 The NY Times posted a 15-minute video today in which I got to tell NYT what’s wrong with its coverage. They said they saw my critical posts on Bluesky and invited me to do a video with them to air my grievances. Weird, right? I didn’t hold back. I blasted their sanewashing of MAGA extremism.

The recent @samuelpepys.bsky.social diary entries document an epic struggle against digestive vagaries, if that's the sort of thing that tickles your fancy.

New milestone reached 🥳 Nearly 500 segments of the main mirror of our ELT have now arrived from Europe at the ELT Technical Facility at our Paranal Observatory in Chile. That is around half of all the segments being made for what will become a 39-metre eye on the sky. 🔭 🧪

My heart breaks for mathematicians whose lives and careers are being destroyed by AI — and especially this PhD student, who doesn’t even know he is a poet

Forget LLMs, what we need are more MMLs

It is ALWAYS that deep

I don't measure my steps, my sleep, my heartbeat. No interest in doing so. Never had any. I've just realized this trend is yet another way for tech to own your lives, adding stress to you and money to their wallets (while collecting your data). Don't measure your life, just live it. It's more fun.

It's important to remember that the AI doom scenario assumes not only that intelligence is a single well-defined thing, but also that intelligence solves literally every single problem, and that in every conflict overwhelming intelligence always wins. This is just not how anything works.

When Anthropic's software—designed, programmed, prompted, and activated by humans working for Anthropic—does stuff the humans failed to predict, stop saying the software has "gone rogue.” The software does not have agency. Only the humans do.

Pleased as I am by Anne Carson's win, the delight was tempered somewhat by reading that Carney congratulated her with a post on X. Politicians: GTFO there, now!

ah damn, RIP Margaret Hamilton. she took safety-critical software engineering seriously, and got people to the moon and back. news.mit.edu/2026/margare...

This event is tonight and I'm psyched! Tickets still available, but not many: www.eventbrite.com/e/emily-wils... @communitybookstore.bsky.social @emilyrcwilson.bsky.social

They hounded Aaron Swartz to death for downloading papers from jstor but society is now supposed to just accept mass theft because this thing can write that TPS report *for* you. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_S...

Holy shit.

To the person noting there is not enough money in the world to license every piece of intellectual property stolen for "AI" training: you're sooooo close to the point, friend, keep going, you'll get there if you try

This is enraging. www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/chat...

We've got you covered for Experimental Comics Fall! Four new mini kuš! about to drop by Anna Malicka, @maggieumber.bsky.social, Lucie Lučanská, and @reneefrench.bsky.social! Find out more:

At Bell Labs, where locally-made inferior computers called 3B machines were foisted upon us, one lab named their machines after birds. When the 3B-2, the feeblest of all, was delivered, they chose to name it Junco. Management was not pleased but the name stuck.

By @quinnypig.com: “I said it years ago and it’s pretty clearly correct: web1: You are the audience web2: You are the product web3: You are the victim”

In 1985, a crew of five British Royal Marines removed a first-gen Ford Escort's inline-4, bolted it back in, and drove the car for 32 yards in just 42 seconds.