Tonight he was hitting one of his usuals, a clothing donation bin just off Van Nuys Boulevard. Getting in required some finesse, but if you found something to stand on, held the door just so, and crawled halfway in, you could retrieve stuff people had donated. It was a good spot for bin-diving—next to a Wells Fargo parking lot, across the street from a Kingdom of Jesus Christ church. Nobody was going to bother you there on a Friday night.
Dennis started pulling himself headfirst into the chute; he got his head all the way in, and his left arm too. Then something slipped.
Maybe it was a hand, maybe it was a foot. The chute’s pull-door swung down, crashing onto Dennis’s throat. He struggled, hands and feet free of the ground—like Superman in flight, but all wrong. He couldn’t get traction on anything. The metal door cut into his skin and crushed his larynx; he couldn’t get air through. Dennis couldn’t breathe. He was asphyxiating, and he was alone. With his head still upside down, the blood ran out of his nose. His limbs ceased their frantic motions. Superman’s heart stopped.
The endless traffic of Van Nuys Boulevard pulsed all night, indifferent.
Month: April 2026
Buttermilk & Molasses: Clarifying Gusts
“I hate pancreatic cancer,” he says on the podcast. “I would never wish it on anyone, but I would never want to go back to a time in my life where I didn’t know the prayer of pancreatic cancer.”
The prayer of pancreatic cancer. The prayer of a difficult birth. The prayer of a marriage broken. The prayer of losing the person who knew you longest.
That’s the winnowing. The long moments of clarifying prayer.
What does it take for us to actually see our life, as it is, while we’re still in it?
CLARIFYING GUSTS – by John Sarvay
From Early Nirvana To Phish, A Chicago Fan’s Secret Recordings Of 10,000 Shows Are Now Online
After a blast of guitar feedback, 22-year-old Kurt Cobain politely announced to the crowd at the small club called Dreamerz: “Hello, we’re Nirvana. We’re from Seattle.” With that, the band, then a quartet, launched into the riff-heavy first song, “School.”
Jacobs surreptitiously recorded the performance, documenting the fledgling band in raw, fiery form more than two years before Nirvana’s global breakthrough with the album “Nevermind.”
Jacobs went on to record more than 10,000 concerts, with increasingly sophisticated equipment, over four decades in Chicago and other cities. Now a group of devoted volunteers in the U.S. and Europe is methodically cataloging, digitizing and uploading them one by one.
Working with agents doesn’t feel like flow — Bill de hÓra
When I work with agents, I’m usually doing some version of this: set direction, trigger action, watch what happens, evaluate, intervene, adjust, try again. That reads lke a game loop rather than a single uninterrupted act of thought. There’s an ongoing cycle of action, feedback, and response. That feeling then is much closer, for me, to sports, or to video and board games, than to the usual idea of being ‘in the zone’ or deep work.
— Read on dehora.net/journal/2026/working-with-agents-doesnt-feel-like-flow
Adobe secretly modifies your hosts file for the stupidest reason – OSnews
If you’re using Windows or macOS and have Adobe Creative Cloud installed, you may want to take a peek at your hosts file. It turns out Adobe adds a bunch of entries into the hosts file, for a very stupid reason.
— Read on www.osnews.com/story/144737/adobe-secretly-modifies-your-hosts-file-for-the-stupidest-reason/
The New York Times Got Played By A Telehealth Scam And Called It The Future Of AI | Techdirt
Medvi’s success has very little to do with “AI” and quite a lot to do with fake doctors, deepfaked before-and-after photos, misleading ads, probable snake oil, and the kind of old-fashioned deceptive marketing that has been separating marks from their money for centuries. The only thing AI really “turbocharged” here was the company’s ability to generate bullshit at scale. Oh, and also the NYT somehow missed out on the FDA already investigating the company, as well as the multiple lawsuits accusing the company and its partners of extraordinarily bad behavior.
— Read on www.techdirt.com/2026/04/07/the-new-york-times-got-played-by-a-telehealth-scam-and-called-it-the-future-of-ai/
Banksy, Satoshi & The Unmasking Impulse – On my Om
How do humans become capable of treating other humans as objects? By refusing to see them. By reducing them to a category, a story, a fact that can be processed and moved past.
Social media has made this our default mode. Everything is content. Everyone is a take. I wrote in 2023 that social platforms stopped being social the moment they needed to generate profit. By then we were all hooked on likes, hearts, and retweets, and the boost they gave to our egos. The algorithm doesn’t see a person. It sees a signal. As I argued in 2020, the command is always the same: corral attention at any cost. Journalism at its worst has caught the same disease. The unmasking story is just attention farming. The moment happens, clicks follow, and then you are part of yesterday’s terabyte. That Banksy and Satoshi are real people with real exposure on the other end of it is incidental.
— Read on om.co/2026/04/08/banksy-satoshi-the-unmasking-impulse/
The Last Quiet Thing
What if the exhaustion everybody feels isn’t a moral failure but the completely rational response to being made responsible for an ecosystem of objects that never stop asking?
…
This is not your fault.
The tiredness is not a character flaw. The guilt, the sense that you should be handling all of this better, more gracefully, with less friction, that guilt was manufactured. It was placed inside you by an industry that profits from your participation and a wellness culture that profits from your shame.
Both need you to believe the problem is you.
It isn’t.
The Last Quiet Thing | Terry Godier
Artemis II
The photos coming back from Artemis II’s trip around the Moon are incredible – some to the point of seeming unreal.
Can’t wait to go through the full NASA image gallery with the boys.
NY Times: This Is What Will Ruin Public Opinion Polling for Good
A recent Axios story on maternal health policy referred to “findings” that a majority of people trusted their doctors and nurses. On the surface, there’s nothing unusual about that. What wasn’t originally mentioned, however, was that these findings were made up.
Clicking through the links revealed (as did a subsequent editor’s note and clarification by Axios) that the public opinion poll was a computer simulation run by the artificial intelligence start-up Aaru. No people were involved in the creation of these opinions.
The practice Aaru used is called silicon sampling, and it’s suddenly everywhere. The idea behind silicon sampling is simple and tantalizing. Because large language models can generate responses that emulate human answers, polling companies see an opportunity to use A.I. agents to simulate survey responses at a small fraction of the cost and time required for traditional polling.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/opinion/ai-polling.html
This is polling via Yelp reviews. The loudest folks are usually those with a complaint.
So when LLMs are fed the internet and more to use as a filter to the lowest common denominator, and the internet mainly reflects one side of an argument because the other side has better things to do, well, how’s that gonna turn out?