Jon Udell
judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy
Jon Udell
@judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy
Patron saint of trailing-edge technologies, grateful resident of the nation-state of California.

[bridged from https://social.coop/@judell on the fediverse by https://fed.brid.gy/ ]
It's funny when people say things like "that's a false chanterelle" or "a Douglas fir is not a true fir" as if the mushrooms and trees are trying to fool us.
December 6, 2025 at 8:39 AM
I am two episodes into Jad Abumrad's new twelve-parter on Fela Kuti, it is excellent.

https://www.npr.org/2025/10/15/nx-s1-5539126/fela-kuti-podcast-fear-no-man
November 23, 2025 at 8:17 PM
Just a typical item in today's news that would, as recently as 2015, have seemed like a passage from a work of dystopian fiction.
November 20, 2025 at 6:38 PM
Reposted by Jon Udell
Should we start referring to ICE and CBP as the "brute squad", or is that inconceivable? (If my nomenclature is adopted, I think that that makes Stephen Miller a rodent of unusual size.)
November 18, 2025 at 1:22 AM
"Or imagine instead that you are the vice-president. Your grift is that you claim to understand poor people, whose problems, you say, are the fault of gays, immigrants, and billionaires; and then you rise to power thanks to the money and support of a gay immigrant billionaire." […]
Original post on social.coop
social.coop
November 16, 2025 at 4:12 PM
Writing reproducible setup documentation was historically a thankless chore. Now a team of AI assistants can help you walk through the steps, write the doc, then read it and follow the steps to validate the procedure. Is this "just next-token prediction"? Metacognition? It's wildly useful no […]
Original post on social.coop
social.coop
November 11, 2025 at 4:21 PM
Well this is the coolest BYTE archive ever.

The home page, a grid with cover pages down the left side, functions as an infographic that charts the rise and fall of the magazine. (I arrived long after the glory days of 450-page issues.)

"This zoomable map shows […]

[Original post on social.coop]
November 10, 2025 at 12:59 AM
"if this kind of infrastructure doesn’t exist yet, it can be built. “I think the most important lesson from Chicago right now is that anyone can do this and everyone should do this”"

https://organizingmythoughts.org/in-chicago-we-run-toward-danger-together/

#chicago #resistance
In Chicago, We Run Toward Danger Together
"Faced with unrelenting state violence, Chicagoans have refused to be cowed," says Mariame Kaba.
organizingmythoughts.org
November 9, 2025 at 10:57 PM
"The leading large language models, like GPT-5, are** defaulting to React and Next.js** when asked to create web apps or sites."

Like @ricmac I am annoyed by these choices. I spoke last week to a team who are interested in XMLUI but wish it wrapped native web components rather than React […]
Original post on social.coop
social.coop
November 7, 2025 at 11:27 PM
"As of November 5th, it estimated that U.S.A.I.D.’s dismantling has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children."

Early on I estimated the scale of Musk's mass murder to be on the order of Pol Pot's. He is on track, already a third of the way there […]
Original post on social.coop
social.coop
November 7, 2025 at 2:36 PM
“They weren’t sure what was going on. ICE, an attack on the school — they didn’t know,” Meadow said.

A day in the life of an American child in 2025.

"School shooter? No, lucky day, only a Gestapo raid." […]
Original post on social.coop
social.coop
November 6, 2025 at 8:18 PM
Speaking from personal experience, it hurts like hell when a publisher kills a great magazine you poured your heart into.

But BYTE's fate wasn't political, as Teen Vogue's almost surely was.

Sorry folks, I really do feel your pain. You will be missed […]
Original post on social.coop
social.coop
November 5, 2025 at 2:00 AM
"The tractor beam that pulled me in was the special exhibit of Ray Harryhausen’s orginal animatronic models and drawings. Here’s the Kraken from Clash of the Titans."

https://blog.jonudell.net/2025/11/02/release-the-kraken/

#miniatures #harryhausen #dynamation
November 3, 2025 at 2:49 PM
XMLUI's Markdown component supports codefences that can define complete apps: a Main, one or more user-defined components, and an API. You can express quite a lot of interesting behavior in a few dozen lines of code written between triple backtics. I've been really excited about this capability […]
Original post on social.coop
social.coop
November 2, 2025 at 4:00 PM
Reposted by Jon Udell
I had a pull request on an open source github repo the other day that was basically a couple of typo fixes in code comments, but also other commits that were unexplained and not mergeable, so I explained this and the person came back saying copilot made those changes.. Then they made more […]
Original post on glasgow.social
glasgow.social
November 1, 2025 at 12:07 PM
"I’m not sure you’ll see a bank robber assessed as having made “a startling departure from traditional cash withdrawals.”

Nice essay on the media's startling departure from plain language.

https://newrepublic.com/post/202475/media-euphemism-trump-sanewashing-departure
This Is the Media’s Worst Euphemism for Trump’s Tyrannical Abuses
Readers beware—and be on the lookout for the “departure.”
newrepublic.com
November 2, 2025 at 2:11 PM
"In a series of experiments, chimpanzees revised their beliefs based on new evidence."

If only more humans could learn that trick.

https://www.404media.co/chimps-are-capable-of-human-like-rational-thought-breakthrough-study-finds/
Chimps Are Capable of Human-Like Rational Thought, Breakthrough Study Finds
In a series of experiments, chimpanzees revised their beliefs based on new evidence, shedding light on the evolutionary origins of rational thought.
www.404media.co
October 31, 2025 at 7:24 AM
There's nothing like a big dose of the majesty of California, a friend likes to say. It sure was powerful medicine today.

https://blog.jonudell.net/2025/10/30/a-day-in-sequoia-national-park/
A day in Sequoia National Park
Exactly one hundred and fifty years ago John Muir walked around in the same grove of giant sequoia trees that I walked around in today, and stood next to the same two thousand ton behemoth that had been growing for two and a half millenia. It has only been known as the General Sherman tree for a tiny fraction of its immense lifespan. I imagine it standing there blissfully unaware of its association with a cruel and destructive human being, indeed unaware of any human activity at all. But we are making our presence known. _ “Death of large sequoias (over 4 ft in diameter) in wildfires prior to 2015 was very rare” _ This was my first trip to Sequoia National Park. I explored the tiny section shown on this 1927 USGS topological map. (_Wikipedia_) It’s worth clicking through to the high-res version, zooming in, and imagining what it was like to reach that place in 1875 before there were roads and cars never mind GPS-connected handheld computers. On the Congress trail in this densest of Sequoiadendron giganteum groves, other magnificent specimens suffer by comparison to notable Americans, most painfully this cluster called The House. (There’s a Senate too.) I live among coast redwoods and was delighted to finally meet their shorter and stouter cousins. If you’ve been thinking about a visit, know that the park is open but unstaffed. I only saw one ranger and he was on latrine duty, nobody is collecting the entrance fee, yet another bit of economic fallout from the shutdown. After walking the Congress trail I headed down to the museum (which is closed), hiked over to Moro Rock, and walked up the steps to take in the view. (_Wikipedia_) Someday I hope to ascend Half Dome using the cable hand rails but this was an easy way to enjoy the view from a big granite dome. Whitney is only a dozen miles away but “the Great Western Divide rises high enough to block it”. My day started in Three Rivers and ended in Tehachapi after a long and rewarding detour into another section of the park. The road up to Lake Isabella winds gradually through Sierra foothills that seemed mellower and more mesmerizing than the ones I’ve seen farther north. The road down follows the Kern River as it flows over endless pillows of granite. There’s nothing like a big dose of the majesty of California, a friend likes to say. It sure was powerful medicine today. ### Share this: * Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email * Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X * Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook * Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit * ### Like this: Like Loading...
blog.jonudell.net
October 31, 2025 at 5:48 AM
Reposted by Jon Udell
"How are [Wikipedia] competitors doing, the ones you all insisted students use instead? That’s right, they were supposed to go to the American Journal of Social Sciences, Powered by OpenAI. Or museums, like the Smithsonian’s Charlie Kirk Shrine to American Greatness. I guess they can still count […]
Original post on sauropods.win
sauropods.win
October 28, 2025 at 3:56 PM
Reposted by Jon Udell
Social media is important. It’s not pointless gossip or just a waste of time. It’s the news and information distribution system of our world.

We can build things like the wikipedia, like the fedi OR we can keep pretending it’s all just a side game, unserious and not worth the effort of making […]
Original post on sauropods.win
sauropods.win
October 27, 2025 at 2:08 PM
Cars are fundamentally anti-social. As we transition to a world with fewer of them, how might we improve the sociality of automous EVs?

https://blog.jonudell.net/2025/10/25/reimagining-car-culture/
Reimagining car culture
The Volts podcast continues to be my favorite listen. Climate change will wreak ever more havoc on the world, that’s just baked in. But the transition to clean energy is also now baked in. David Roberts delivers a steady stream of hopeful news on that front: plummeting prices for solar panels and batteries, “reconductoring” to grow the capacity of the existing grid, agrivoltaics, new geothermal techniques, and much more. Cars are a big part of the story. Switching to EVs is great but if we only do that we are still stuck with too many large heavy vehicles that clog roads when moving, waste vast amounts of space when parked, and harm people who move through the world on foot or on bicycles. We don’t just want cleaner cars, we also want far fewer of them. This episode, with the authors of Life After Cars, explores the “tyranny of the automobile”. American car culture always seemed wrong to me, for many reasons. On this show David Roberts crystallized one of them. > When you ride a bike through Amsterdam, you are a dozen times every minute making small adjustments to other people, and you are accommodating yourself and coordinating with other people in these micro ways over and over and over again as you ride through Amsterdam. > > And it just has an effect. You realize you’re living among other people and you’re involved in a common project and you live in a common place and you’re together in the place. I have long been fascinated by a video called A trip down Market Street. Filmed in San Francisco in 1906, shortly before the great quake, it’s a long shot that moves down Market Street toward the Ferry Building. You see a free-for-all of trolleys, pedestrians, bicycles, horsedrawn carriages, and cars. You can already tell that the cars are going to win but in this moment cars are not yet hermetically sealed shells, they have open tops so drivers see one another and make the same kinds of micro-adjustments to cyclists and pedestrians. In a San Franciso with fewer and more autonomous cars, can we imagine a way to recapture that kind of sociality? ### Share this: * Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email * Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X * Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook * Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit * ### Like this: Like Loading...
blog.jonudell.net
October 25, 2025 at 7:10 PM
Reposted by Jon Udell
Thank you again to @jaz for joining me on Fireside Fedi. Please check out Jaz and @iftas . Jaz's work in #trust and #safety on the #fediverse is absolutely vital.

#peertube #vod - https://video.firesidefedi.live/w/rfCpqU15ifB59eiaeovpKk
#castopod #fedicast - […]
Original post on social.firesidefedi.live
social.firesidefedi.live
October 21, 2025 at 8:00 PM
This lovely paean to the roundabouts in my former home town omits the traffic disaster at Keene's core. Central Square (which is a circle) awkwardly combines a roundabout with intersections and traffic lights: the worst of both worlds.

I love you anyway, Keene! […]

[Original post on social.coop]
October 22, 2025 at 2:56 PM
Good overview of how TikTok-style moderation has led to wider enshittification. But the defeatist tone annoys me, and a nod to the fediverse would have been appropriate.

https://radiolab.org/podcast/content-warning
Content Warning
The story of how TikTok changed everything you see online.
radiolab.org
October 22, 2025 at 4:15 AM