@cassolotl we've got one of these - from 4y/o's birthday, and everyone whose had a go with it loves it. Not quite endless fun, but pretty bloody pleasing in it's weird way.

https://www.printables.com/model/927393-spiral-cone-fidget-toy

Two DJs played a 24-hour set in an unfinished arts centre in Kampala — not for clout, but to help build it. Locals danced, kids joined in, and their livestreamed gig raised money to get the job done. As DJ Kampire puts it, "The only antidote to despair is to do something." https://continent.substack.com/p/a-24-hour-rave-to-build-ugandas-first

@maxleibman

Normalise not finishing your slides 😳 @TodePond

#ShamelesslyStolenFromSomewhereElseOnTheInternetHonestlyICantKeepTrackOfThisStuffAnymore

The Tolkiens knew how to party!

thing i love about old jazz men is that if they are singing you a song about how they got the blues, they will tell you what type of blues they got right up at the front of the song. shows a great deal of respect for peoples time

If you judged by the news coverage over the last 24 hours you would think that Nigel Farage's Reform party had taken over the Conservatives as the second biggest party in Local Government in Great Britain.

In fact they are the fifth biggest party, coming some distance behind the Greens.

Labour has eight times as many seats as Reform and the Conservatives more than five times as many.

https://opencouncildata.co.uk/

Would you rather be on a Mastodon instance moderated by 1 gorilla or 100 men

I missed this terrific piece on burnout from @grimalkina
"It's alarming to write something really simple like, people deserve to have environments that don't destroy them and have it resonate with a lot of people."

This resonates hard. I say similar things every week to my reports, to colleagues, and to folks across the tech industry — and it's routinely far more unusual and impactful than it should be.

Every manager should say things like this (and, more importantly, *back it up with actions*). It should be an indictment of the industry that not only does this not happen, but rather burnout remains a perennial issue that continues to get worse, chasing women and Black folks out of the industry.
https://www.drcathicks.com/post/burnout-us

Reuters put an absolutely bonkers amount of production and design effort into this story explaining what cozy games are.

https://www.reuters.com/graphics/VIDEO-GAMES/MENTAL-HEALTH/akpeewkqgpr/

LLMs are still very useful in a bunch of domains but here’s an article explaining (from a paper with a novel bound on computational complexity) why improvements in reasoning seem to have run out of steam.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/chatbot-software-begins-to-face-fundamental-limitations-20250131/

If anyone wants a horrible python program that will write integers in cuneiform sexegesimal (base sixty) using unicode so you can paste it all over the place in emails, documents and text messages I have just the thing. Use with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plimpton_322

For maximum amusement.

https://trinket.io/python/3023f6104c42

Is it bugs? 📊

Has anyone else noticed that when time travelers grab you by your shoulders and ask what year it is, and you tell them, they don't reply, "Then I'm not too late," anymore?

That's rather concerning.

Inside each of us there are two wolves

Both of them are saying: "mate, those aren't resurrected direwolves, they're just modern wolves with a few gene tweaks and a ludicrous amount of hype."

If Zefram Cochrane had found another disc... 📀

#StarTrek

1/6

#StarTrek

I have tariffed
the penguins
that are on
Heard Island

and which
you were probably
assuming
did not export goods

forgive me
they were taking advantage of us
so cunning
and so cold