A guy asking ChatGPT to review a series of fart sound effects and getting a serious kiss ass response that calls it atmospheric

I can't stop laughing at this post. It's perfect.

Proof of Thoughtfulness: Writing in the Age of AI | Rob Moore What changes in a world where human thought becomes the minority

love the term "proof of thoughtfulness"

A dark-background infographic showing 12 nested timelines, from the formation of the universe 13.8 billion years ago down to the author's birth in 1993. Each row zooms into a highlighted region of the one above, illustrating how brief human existence is relative to cosmic time. Pastel colored horizontal lines represent each era, connected by shaded trapezoid shapes that show the zoom relationship between rows.

just a lil existentialist chart!

Armageddon is terrible, but our only other option was diversity trainings at work.

Cat in a hammock catching a sunbeam

bliss

A quote from my piece "Is Music Just Sound?": Advocates will sometimes compare AI music's effect on music to photography's effect on visual art as a way to suggest that resistance to new technology is just fear of change. But photography created something new and announced itself as such. Shulman has said it "doesn't make sense to have an AI world and a non-AI world of music". The goal is indistinguishability, not a new medium. And unlike photography, which built its own identity from scratch, AI music was trained on the entire corpus of human music without consent and now competes directly with the people it learned from. There's no reason to think that new technology will always yield the same positive outcomes as it has in the past. There's a clear difference in scale when we compare AI music generation to historic technological disruptions in music. Drum machines and samplers didn't autonomously generate 7 million songs a day and distribute them to streaming platforms with most of us being unaware. The speed at which AI music is being created, distributed, and recommended means that the usual process of culture adapting to new technology just doesn't have time to play out like it has in the past.

Past tech disruptions don't guarantee the same outcomes in the future.

Things will be the way we collectively shape them to be.

(excerpt from my recent piece about AI music!)

love it!! I really need to look into physicalizing some of my digital doodles

it might be rose-colored glasses, but I look back on everything I've ever spent hours upon hours designing, coding, and debugging in the "before times" with a lot of reverence

Inspired by @shrikhalpada.dev, it's my #30DayChartChallenge day 2, "pictogram." Circles are pictures, right? Arguably just jittered sampled points... I like how it shows the "density" of people/income. And a fun coincidence that nice round numbers break the total income earned into roughly quarters.

Tulips at the Netherlands Carillon in Arlington, VA

♥️

Cat looking at rainbow wand

insanely locked in

Been feeling a lot of dread about this era of hyper-personalization

But also some hope recently. At least anecdotally with me and my social circle, I've felt a stronger sense of yearning for humans to do human things together. I hope that's the side that wins!

oooh that'd be a fun hypothetical thing to add to this

Opinion | Technology Weakens Our Minds. It’s Time to Resist. Just as we changed our thinking around physical fitness, we need to change our attitude toward cognitive fitness.

In @nytopinion.nytimes.com

“In a short span of time, we transformed the way we thought about health,” Cal Newport writes. “I’ve come to believe that a similarly rapid revolution is possible in how we respond to our diminishing ability to think.”

The Census of India has never been very reader-friendly. But in 1970s, a series of events led to government putting effort into publishing very interesting, truly "Indian" #dataviz for the average reader. My new story, with an explorer and some comics! More ⬇️

🔗 diagramchasing.fun/2026/portrai...

Today marks 50 years since of DC metro!

Feels like a fun time to reshare this project: an interactive metro map I worked on using Three.js last year

perthirtysix.com/tool/dc-roads

Wikipedia bans AI-generated articles Wikipedia is done with AI slop.

The update, which was added to Wikipedia’s guidelines late last week, cites the tendency for AI-written articles to violate “several of Wikipedia’s core content policies” as the reason for the ban.

one subtle thing that GenAI CEOs do a lot: use strategic ambiguity about their product based on who they're talking to

how can something be both "just a tool for creative people" but also have its entire fair-use legal argument predicated on that it "learns like a human"?

The Jetsons lied to us

"What you made with Sora mattered" is one of the least true things that has ever been written

Sure. How much do you think you should pay me to use my name? It's really important to think about attribution and think about impersonation, and so on. As an expert, you have a trade you make on the internet. The idea is that when you put content out there, myself included, you hope people use it. You want to refer to other people's content. You want people to link to you. You really, really hope they attribute you when they do. When somebody uses your content, should they attribute you? Of course. And to attribute you, you have to use your name. There's a different line which is, should people be able to impersonate you? And I think that is a very different standard. And we saw the lawsuit. Respectfully, we believe the claims are without merit. The idea that the feature is impersonation is quite a big stretch. Every mention was very clearly, "This is inspired not only by this person, but also inspired by a specific work from this specific person, with a clear attributed link to get back to them." It's far from that test lof impersonation].

Here’s my interview with Shishir Mehotra, the CEO behind Grammarly’s “expert review” feature which attributed writing advice to people - including me lol - without permission. Or, as you will hear us talk about a lot, compensation. www.theverge.com/podcast/8987...

Cherry blossom trees

the one week between winter and debilitating pollen allergies 🥰

2006 internet: RSS feeds, forums, communities of hobby blogs, where people post about interior design, fashion, and music for free

2026 internet: sponsored content, paid partnership, buy my merch, try my supplements, invest in my crypto, click link in bio to unlock the secrets of life for $30

My PerThirtySix data essay on AI music and royalties, featured in GIJN's weekly Data Journalism Top 10 roundup

wow, really honored to have had my interactive essay about AI-generated music shared in @gijn.org's roundup of top 10 data journalism pieces for March!

gijn.org/stories/data...

A picture of DC from the Smithsonian gardens

first day of spring in dc

Ed Hawkins' "Climate Stripes" visualization

thank you!!

I was inspired by Ed Hawkins' famous "Climate Stripes" visualization, in terms of conveying important data more urgently and intuitively (but still accurately)

A visualization showing American wealth inequality as stick figures taking up space. The top 0.1% has 14.4% of the space while the bottom 50% has 2.5%

Charts that show the absolute wealth distribution over time and wealth share over time from 1989 to 2025 across the top 0.1%, next 0.9%, next 9%, next 40%, and bottom 50%

I updated my interactive data piece about American wealth inequality to pull in the latest available data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics! It now goes up to 2025:Q3.

perthirtysix.com/tool/america...

‘Another internet is possible’: Norway rails against ‘enshittification’ Absurdist video urges policymakers and users to resist deliberate deterioration of platforms and devices

‘Another internet is possible’: Norway rails against ‘enshittification’

calico cat in a green laundry basket

"i have conquered this green laundry basket"

Senator Tuberville on x writing a response to the @endwokeness account Original tweet from @EndWokeness - “less than 25 years apart” Image 1 - the twin towers as they are hit by a the planes on 9/11/2001 Image 2 - Mayor Mamdani sitting on a prayer rug while hosting an Iftar at city hall Quote tweet from Senator Tuberville - “the enemy is inside the gates.”

Let there be as much outrage from politicians in Washington when kids go hungry as there is when I break bread with New Yorkers.