Dustin Graves

software engineer, beard enthusiast

[tawny @tawnniee]

being under surveillance by the feds used to mean something u had to be somebody

[Hannah Riley Fernandez @hannahcrileyy]

sentencing is happening now and 5 of the defendants have received 50 year sentences. chilling and should be a huge story

[“paula” @paularambles]

you’ll ask chatgpt for a pickle recipe and it will hit you with “one thing i often do” and “i've never found this necessary.” brother you are a large language model. you have never pickled a cucumber in your life.

[Wholesome Side of 𝕏 @itsme_urstruly]

I wonder if any medieval peasants stayed awake at night replaying awkward conversations

Just lying there in the dark thinking, “I was weird at the well”

[Louise Jensen Duffy (also Ernest Jensen) @LouiseWeebe]

Always try to be helpful. Instead of saying “fuck off”, say “how can I help you fuck off”. It costs nothing to be kind.

[Kyle 🚄 @KyleTrainEmoji]

PICARD: Data, shields up

DATA: Brilliant! Shields can reduce damage we sustain. Not immunity. Not hubris. Just prudence. It's not precaution—it's strategy.

[camera shakes]

WORF: HULL BREACHES ON NINE DECKS

DATA: Here's what happened: you told me to raise shields, and I didn't

[𝓐 ⭑ @ayojoestar]

i wish i could say '???????' in real life. it would be very useful.

[S.🎧 @1ssve]

Every “urgent” task in corporate has the same ending: 3 days of silence once you submit it

[Jaid @Jaidcel]

generational mistake with a huge loss in UX that we collectively decided to put “submit input” and “insert line break” on the same key and just let everyone who has to implement this arbitrarily decide which one of them gets the modifier

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

The research behind this is wild. If you played Pokémon as a kid, you have a tiny region in your brain that exists only because of Pokémon. Not a metaphor. Stanford put people in brain scanners and found it.

The study was published in Nature Human Behavior in 2019. They scanned 11 adults who grew up glued to their Game Boys and 11 who never played. When they showed both groups images of the original 151, the players' brains lit up in one specific spot every time. Same spot across all 11 people. The non-players showed zero response.

That spot is a little fold in the back of your brain that normally processes things like animal shapes and cartoon faces. In the Pokémon players, a chunk of it had been permanently reassigned. Their brains carved out a Pokémon department sometime around age 6 or 7 and just never took it down.

And the reason it ended up in the same place in everyone's brain comes down to the Game Boy itself. The screen was 2.6 inches. Every kid held it at roughly the same distance. So those 151 characters hit the exact same patch of each kid's retina, thousands of times, during the years when the brain is still soft enough to reorganize itself. Where an image hits your retina in childhood is what tells your brain where to build the wiring.

Reading works the same way. Humans invented writing about 5,000 years ago. There's zero evolutionary reason for a brain region dedicated to recognizing words. But every person who learns to read grows one, roughly the size of a dime, in the same part of the brain.

Brain-imaging research from 2018 actually watched it appear in children's heads as they learned their letters. It grew by quietly taking over nearby tissue that wasn't doing much yet. Stanford published a follow-up this year showing this region is way smaller or missing entirely in kids with dyslexia, and that 8 weeks of intense reading practice physically grew it back.

London taxi drivers show the same thing in a completely different part of the brain. Brain scans from a 2000 study found the region that stores mental maps had physically expanded, and the longer they'd been driving, the bigger it got. These drivers spend 3 to 4 years memorizing 25,000 streets before they get licensed. About half wash out.

The common thread is childhood. Harvard researchers trained young monkeys to recognize new shapes and they developed brand-new brain regions in predictable locations. Adult monkeys trained on the same shapes never got those structural changes. The young brain wires itself in a way the adult brain cannot replicate.

If you're wondering whether a Pokémon patch in your brain means you lost something else, no. The region sits alongside your normal visual processing areas, not on top of them. Your brain has hundreds of millions of neurons in that zone alone. The lead author noted that every participant in the study had gone on to earn a PhD.

[Nomadic Warriors for Pritzker⚔️ @Nomads4Pritzker]

Director: “well, I’d say that the final cut!”

Disney Exec: “not so fast- first we have to run it by Pazuzu, the Demon that Eats Colors”

Pazuzu, the Demon that Eats Colors: “Delicious reds and greens! A feast for Pazuzu!”

[Tom Whyman @HealthUntoDeath]

AI: The verdict is the death penalty, for speeding

Human judge overseeing the AI: Overrule. Do NOT give the death penalty for speeding

AI: You're right, I'm really sorry about this. It was wrong of me to give the death penalty for speeding. My new verdict is the death penalty.

[Avery Edison @aedison]

one of the most frustrating things about there being “no jobs” is that we all walk around and see the work that needs to be done. our cities are crumbling, our people need help, our world is dying. there’s so much work to be done, if only it were good for the balance sheet

[rune sword @runesword1]

does anyone have any tips for completing the hero’s journey? i can’t get past refusal of the call

[ned! @nedsore]

the shower is the alternate dimension where I realize I'm low on shampoo but as soon as I step through the curtain I'm transported back to this dimension where all my memories are wiped like in severance and I won’t remember i’m out of shampoo until im back in the shower

[wuf @bong_rot]

You know who else was a Carpenter who spoke against fascism?

[Dustin Graves @gravebeard]

@samreich Ryan Stiles, Colin Mochrie, Wayne Brady

[first ethical space cowboy @cowboybecsbop]

when god sings with her soups, will chili not be part of the choir?

[charlie @chunkbardey]

i love having plans to go to a show and i love having been to a show. being at a show is a small price to pay for that

[Mbogo ya Nduîki @WambuguWanjohi]

Also she is the most difficult person to sing "Happy Birthday" to.