Nicolas Webb

@[email protected]
@nicwebb.bsky.social

Leader of humans and wrangler of bits. Native Texan turned PNW resident. My opinions are my own. He/him.

[Nicolas Webb @nicwebb]

Apparently a large part of being a manager is just approving things, like timesheets, vacation requests, and crazy ideas.

[derek guy @dieworkwear]

@Cobratate you sound like an "in cell"

[Joe @electionsjoe]

It turns out the 2024 election literally was this

[derek guy @dieworkwear]

invested all my money in argentinian pesos, bitcoin, and spacex stock earlier this year. excited to look my portfolio as i sit down with this delicious salad from taylor farms.

[derek guy @dieworkwear]

the one conspiracy i believe is that this place is full of bots programmed to say insane, incendiary things and they're funded by foreign organizations who want to divide americans and destabilize US society

[Aaron Francis @aarondfrancis]

I have a plumber friend that owns a plumbing company and makes many millions of dollars a year. Not sure he's ever logged on to x dot com, the everything app.

It's a big world out there, don't forget

[clara the urbanist @SlopHq]

hamilton wrote 51 op-eds in under a year on a shared burner account to win one policy argument, then died in a beef that escalated from remarks printed in a newspaper. the most influential poster in american history simply could not log off, and the constitution is the result

[Joe Biden @JoeBiden]

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a group of Americans signed their names to a piece of parchment and made a promise no nation had ever made before: that we're all created equal, endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

We're the only nation in history built not on ethnicity, or blood, or geography but on an idea. That's always been what makes us exceptional. We chose that path 250 years ago but that’s where the work began, not where it ended. Every generation has had to choose it again. At Valley Forge, at Gettysburg, on the beaches of Normandy, in the streets of Selma. Americans recommitted themselves to the principles on which our nation was founded.

Now it's our turn.

There's nothing guaranteed about our democracy. We have to fight for it, defend it, and earn it. Over and over, year after year. That's not a burden. That's what it means to be an American.

250 years in, we still haven't fully lived up to those words in the Declaration. But we've never walked away from them, and this July 4, I hope all of us can commit to one thing: that we never will. I don't believe we're as divided as we're told we are. I've bet my whole life on the American people, and I'm not stopping now.

Happy 250th birthday, America. Our story isn't finished. Let's keep writing it together.

[Seattle Weather Blog @KSeattleWeather]

73° in Seattle today.
103° in D.C.

Pretty clear which Washington is cooler

[Polly Pocketknife🌸🔪 @polypocketknife]

there’s a video where john green talks about his friend amy krouse rosenthal’s cancer diagnosis and how he wanted so badly to make things better but couldn’t, and he recalls the advice of a supervisor when he worked at a children’s hospital: “don’t just do something—stand there.”

[Nicholas Kristof @NickKristof]

Elon, I can give you many, many names of people who have died because of your aid cuts.:
*Yamah Freeman was a 23-year-old woman who died in childbirth because you stopped paying for the diesel for ambulances in her part of Liberia. I talked to her parents and sister in their village.
*Gbessey Kiadu, age 1, died of malaria because of your cuts in Liberia. I talked to his mom in her village.
*Ibrahim Koroma, an infant, died of AIDS in Sierra Leone after you interrupted HIV supplies. I talked to health workers who cared for him.
*Achol Deng was an 8-year-old girl with HIV in South Sudan who died when you cut funding for the health care worker who provided her medicines. I talked to him.
I could go on and on. In almost every village you go to in South Sudan, Uganda, Liberia, Sierra Leone or other countries I reported in, you find people dying because of aid cuts. I challenge you: Come with me on a reporting trip, and we'll talk to these moms and dads, and you'll see the dying children themselves. I think if you see the kids whose lives are at stake, maybe you'll change your mind.

[Ed Zitron @edzitron]

SELL THE COMPUTE TO WHO, ELON?

[Josh Barro @jbarro]

Straight people, we need to have a talk about installing your televisions above the fireplace (don't)

[Mark Cuban @mcuban]

It’s time for everyone to realize that the fight against data centers has nothing to do with data centers.

They have become a proxy for the hate towards AI and the concentration and accumulation of wealth it’s creating.

Until those running the big LLMs understand this and start a community tour, not to explain the benefits of AI, it’s too late for that, but to help towns and cities that may be impacted by job losses (and I’m a believer their will be a net gains in a few years), this battle is only going to get more intense and let me tell you now , no matter how much money you pay to buy politicians and races, you will lose.

One thing I have learned is being hated is not good for business.

How can they help ? They will tell you. You will need to do what they ask. Billions of dollars is a lot of money across towns and city programs. Across the major LLMs, it’s a cost of doing business.

At the same time, I would go to LA and NYC and ask the arts and creative unions what kind of programs would help and protect their artists. DO NOT GO TO THE MUSIC OR FILM COMPANIES. that will make it worse.

Don’t try to pay famous people to endorse what you are doing. That’s dumb.

Talk to artists and ask them what you can do to provide financial and creative support. Every creative I know is TERRIFIED about what AI will do to their profession. You must meet them face to face and basically do what they say.

The big LLMs have lost the PR battle. Why ? Because they all suck at putting people first. They have an SV attitude that makes them all think they are John Galt saving the
world

Given the number of data centers and power that is needed, today and going forward , If you don’t kiss the asses of the people that go to work every day, and are just trying to pay their bills, you will fall far far short of the capacity you need to make your business work.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

A note to my friends who still back Trump:

I am not here to dunk on you. I am writing because you have a working brain, and this story insults it.

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool got a $14 million paint job. Shortly thereafter the water turned green and the new “American flag blue” coating started peeling off the bottom in sheets. Trump says vandals did it. He claims, without evidence, that someone took a knife and cut a 300-foot slit, a number that grew to 350 feet while he was still talking.

Back on May 4, Trump bragged about that same coating and said, if you had a knife, you could not even cut it, so strong, like powerful rubber. He cannot have it both ways.

And the green water?

A George Mason scientist tested it and found ordinary, non-toxic algae, the kind that blooms in any shallow sunny pool. To fight it, crews dumped hydrogen peroxide into the water.

Hydrogen peroxide is also a paint stripper.

That, not sabotage or vandalism, is the obvious reason the paint came off. They wrecked their own paint job, then blamed phantom vandals for it.

The lone "vandal" they paraded is a 67-year-old Olympian who touched a flap of paint already peeling on its own.

Here is the thing. If they will look you in the eye and lie about something this small, something you can see with your own eyes, ask yourself what else they are lying to you about.

Again, you have a working brain. People like Karoline Leavitt are counting on you to stay loyal instead of exercising independent thought.

Prove them wrong.

[Paul Gundlach @PaulSGundlach]

This has to be the best Father's Day tribute ever written. Thank you Hunter for putting it together so articulately.

[Sandy Petersen 🪔 @SandyofCthulhu]

This is a really good rule.

Try it out on Loki, Draco Malfoy, Hannibal Lecter, and Killmonger. You'll see how totally correct the DeVito rule is.

[Gary Bernhardt @garybernhardt]

I'm an old programmer (by programmer standards). I use agents daily, extensively. Here's a view from the other side of "wooooow look how many lines it wrote!", taken from my work today.

[Cassie Pritchard @hecubian_devil]

This has made some libs and leftists angry, saying I’m “ceding” Halo to the Right needlessly

But in my view, “ceding a videogame to the Right” is not a real concern. I like Halo. It has bad politics. I don’t care. I can still play it, and so can you. Who gives a shit.

[Washington State DOT @wsdot]

WELCOME TO WASHINGTON, SOCCER FANS. Get acquainted with our state via this highly accurate and mostly-to-scale map.

[Team Talarico @TeamTalaricoHQ]

.@JamesTalarico: There's been a lot of talk in this race about what it means to be a real man.

Recently on the campaign trail I told the story of my adoptive dad, Mark Talarico. Every Saturday morning, he would mow our lawn, and then without anyone asking him to, he would go next door and mow our neighbor's lawn because she was a widow. My dad never talked about it — he just did it, because that's what a man does.

A man takes responsibility, upholds his commitments to his family and his neighbors, and does what's right, even when no one is watching.

Here's what real men don't do. They don't lie and cheat their way through life, sell their soul to the highest bidder, or steal from other people in order to enrich themselves. Real men serve others. Weak men serve themselves.

I welcome this debate about what it means to be a man, and I don't think Ken Paxton or Ted Cruz are in a position to tell anybody what a real man is.