📷 Late summer days. 🍦 by the lake.
📷 Late summer days. 🍦 by the lake.
Meet me by the Jimmy Dean’s breakfast sandwiches in the frozen food aisle.
Zotero just dropped their update from version 9 to 10 and I am once again in awe that you can just download this software for free and utilize almost every single feature on device or through a self-hosted server.
Announcing Zotero 10, with powerful new features for searching and managing your library, a major improvement to Read Aloud, and a new Reading Mode for PDFs
https://www.zotero.org/blog/zotero-10/
Seeing photos from the Historic American Buildings Survey makes me wonder what an exhibit of a suburban retail center combination Chipotle+Clearchoice Dental Implant might look like in 150+ years.
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 A historic black-and-white interior photograph (labeled NY-5418-F) depicting a densely packed traditional carpenter's workshop. A long, heavy wooden workbench sits beneath a large multi-pane window, covered in hand planes, chisels, wooden blocks, and hand tools. Dozens of hand saws, clamps, and various woodworking tools hang densely on the exposed timber walls.](https://nic.babarskis.blog/uploads/2026/e9d4f6335a.jpg)
 A historic black-and-white photograph (labeled NY-5418-A) of a two-story wooden clapboard house with a large mature tree in the front yard. Overgrown vines climb parts of the exterior facade and an adjoining wooden shed on the left. A simple wooden picket fence borders the front of the property alongside a paved street.](https://nic.babarskis.blog/uploads/2026/e974a1adab.jpg)
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 An architectural blueprint on graph paper labeled 1st Floor Plan from a Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS NY FN-203) record. The handwritten schematic details the floor layout of a historic structure, featuring annotated dimensions, a central forge, brick hearth, workbench placement, and rooms labeled Main House and South Parlor. Annotations note specific construction details like Seaweed insulation and structural timber posts.](https://nic.babarskis.blog/uploads/2026/0648c46705.jpg)
Everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy.
Via Ian Leslie, a beautifully designed page on ordinary abundance.
This Fender CEO quote on AI and Music broke me a little bit:
Cole’s philosophy is that AI in music is nothing new. “I think AI has existed in music as long as there’s been recorded music,” he says. While the biggest barrier to playing guitar is the time it takes to learn the instrument, it’s the second barrier, writing songs, where he believes AI plays a part.
“I actually believe cover music has been sort of analog AI for a long time,” says Cole. Those that don’t yet have the skills to write their own songs can play the songs written by their favourite artists instead. “I listened a lot to REM, U2, The Smiths and The Cure, and at some point I got sick of just listening to them. I wanted to play it, so I learned to play guitar.”
🎩 Tip to @theverge podcast for surfacing this. I think a fundamental worldview divide between our techno[would be]-overlords, their enablers, and the rest of us is sincerely believing that a sufficiently complex computer chip or server running the appropriate protocols is fundamentally no different than an embodied human when it comes to consciousness. As if gestalt cognition is what defines human existence.
The five year old is starting to express occasional interest in the music of my youth and its always intriguing what sticks in terms of repeatability. She’s on a Deadmau5 kick right recently.
Omg, @flotisserie you should absolutely turn this into a @micro.blog plugin because I would love to use it, but have neither the time nor technical skill to do it myself!
Computah: Make it a link: flotisserie.micro.blog
The judges aren’t contending that state voting rolls can be inaccurate, nor are they arguing that the DOJ isn’t a key player in enforcing federal election laws. But they are saying that the DOJ does not have the authority to compel states to hand over protected voter information that the states themselves created…
…Hidden beneath the DOJ’s losing streak is an important reminder about federalism, especially when it comes to elections in the US. Federal elections are purposefully decentralized. State and local governments are tasked with carrying them out in adherence to the federal protections and requirements Congress has deemed necessary. As we’ve seen, it can be a messy arrangement, but one that protects all of us from a federal government — and president — who wants to take over the process.
I don’t know what else to say about this other than this video is basically just thumbing through my CD carrying case circa 2008.
In a world where so much of the retail reviews genre are AI slop or optimized for algorithms you can rely on Brains Report to be a human driven resource for making good home related purchases (I also think its great that they are Lansing, MI based):
You must always be posting. To stay in people’s minds, to stay in good standing with the platforms, to take another whack at the slot machine that is the attention economy.
I’ve reflected elsewhere about the intersection of organizational behavior and culture warring. IMHO injecting more culture warring into the civic and social welfare organizational ecosystem makes it likely that religious NGOs face future public subsidy pressures when the partisan winds shift.
After USAID was gutted primarily under the pretense that it was a hornet’s nest of “wokeism” I have a hard time interpreting the news that the Feds are now bestowing mountains of cash on evangelical NGOs as anything other than partisan patronage. The accusations feel more like confessions of intent.
After USAID was gutted primarily under the pretense that it was a hornet’s nest of “wokeism” I have a hard time interpreting the news that the Feds are now bestowing mountains of cash on evangelical NGOs as anything other than partisan patronage. The original accusations feel more like confessions of intent.
Saying White evangelical support for Trump is unsurprising given previous support for Bush and Romney misses something essential. It is like saying “a great many people enjoy eating bleu cheese, so it shouldn’t surprise us that even slightly more people enjoy eating mold.” Or “Since campfires are very popular with many people, it is understandable that these same people eagerly endorse arson.”
I have several theories on how white Evangelicals got to where they are, but they essentially boil down to an anecdote shared in a couple different forums by Skye Jethani who, when asking an evangelical parishioner if they would prefer their child to marry a Republican or a Christian was given the response “what’s the difference?”
🎩tip to John Fea for link to original quote.
A cherished college memory was blowing off exam prep and going to see Death Cab for Cutie live at The Rave in Milwaukee. They still got it.
📷 Summer Marigolds
Please, please don’t take vaccination guidance from this administration.
Instead of ensuring every family can access life-saving vaccines for measles, influenza, RSV and more, federal leaders are once again spreading misleading claims.
I can’t think of another piece of media or a tech related product that I’ve one-time purchased that has received as much substantive continued support and ongoing improvement as No Man’s Sky.
Sometimes I wonder whether our discomfort with penal substitution is part of a larger discomfort with materiality itself. We would prefer salvation to happen in the realm of ideas. We like it when Jesus teaches, inspires, and models love, and all of those things are wonderful and true. But Christianity insists on something stranger.
A body hangs on a cross.
Blood pours down.
Death takes our Lord.
Because they suppose themselves on the right side of history — because they imagine history has sides at all — they cannot abide even mild dissent.
This could apply to any number topics of discourse but here @eastbrad is applying it to AI adoption.
🇱🇹 🇺🇦They’re featuring a Ukrainian dish here, but the Lithuanian half of me is excited to see that cabbage and root-based soups are having a moment. Now they just need some deep fried dark and dense rye bread smothered in cheese.
Robin Sloan on LLM company ‘Labs’:
“Lab” evokes Bell Labs, of course; it evokes deep science, Nobel Prize-level horsepower, a certain purity. I don’t deny that there are labs inside these companies … although I don’t believe any of them are operating with anywhere near the distance from practicality that Bell Labs maintained. And, either way, when you are hiring “Growth Account Executives”, you are a company.
