this is the platonic ideal advertisement

[alt text by NASA] The Moon, seen here backlit by the Sun during a solar eclipse on April 6, 2026, is photographed by one of the cameras on the Orion spacecraft’s solar array wings. Orion is visible in the foreground on the left. Earth is reflecting sunlight at the left edge of the Moon, which is slightly brighter than the rest of the disk. The bright spot visible just below the Moon’s bottom right edge is Saturn. Beyond that, the bright spot at the right edge of the image is Mars. Credit: NASA

Whoa 🤯

The Moon, in full eclipse, with the #Artemis II Orion spacecraft. Part of the Moon and spacecraft are lit by Earthshine, and both Saturn and Mars are visible to the lower right. Incredible. Details: images.nasa.gov/details/art0...

That's home. That's us.

This image of home just came down from the Artemis II crew.

Taken after their translunar injection burn, there are aurorae at top right and lower left, and zodiacal light at lower right.

Credit: NASA/Reid Wiseman

there’s something in our monkey brains that makes venting fear and frustration feel like we’re doing something productive with those feelings and it interacts very poorly with social media

Thinking about that phenomenon where two dogs behind a fence both start barking at someone outside, get overwhelmed, and somehow end up fighting *each other* instead

More people need to take the occasional shift at their local public library helping people in crisis apply for food stamps and unemployment online. Nothing like watching someone burst into tears because a file upload doesn’t work to understand the real world impact of bad software

A white bust sculpture is used as a knife holder, with multiple knives and a pair of scissors stuck into it, placed on a kitchen island.

#IdesOfMarch

This is excellent and really gets at something I’ve been struggling to articulate: our current system for creating senior engineers is… not very good. It works mostly by accident and very unevenly. It could use some disrupting!

I tend to think a lot of transphobia is motivated by the fear that we’ve built this elaborate system of social roles and expectations around sex and gender, but it’s not actually based on anything real. Even considering that possibility is very destabilizing for someone with a brittle worldview

I would add that this is true of most _opinions_ in general. Most of them are bad! They get better through questioning and feedback

The optimistic part of me hopes that with code becoming cheaper to write, we’ll be able to have better conversations about the real challenges of operating and maintaining systems over time. So far, not so good!

you still need some kind of feedback loop for SRE agents to integrate their investigations back upstream, or else you’re just going to burn tokens from coding assistants doubling down on bad patterns and SRE agents investigating the same problem over and over

if they’re investigating and resolving problems on their own, that means the tool has incredibly sensitive production access with zero oversight/accountability, a combination that is going to result in highly embarrassing outages and be a nonstarter in any kind of regulated environment

I’ve been a little puzzled by the value proposition of these “autonomous SRE” tools in general

Executing routine maintenance seems like a terrible use case for non-deterministic tooling - use a coding assistant and write actual automation that can run unsupervised!

pretty sure this is what I sound like whenever I try to explain my job to normal people

had a dream that I got paged because the database was “turning inside out” and the solution was to enable “möbius mode”

2026 Trans Girl Scouts To Order Cookies From! This year, consider ordering your Girl Scout cookies from a trans girl scout to make their day!

Huge announcement: Girl Scouts on our trans girl scout cookies list have sold 250,000!!!!!! Boxes of girl scout cookies, a record for EITM's trans girl scout cookie drive.

Some have only sold 20 boxes though. I put those at the top of the list.

Lets close out this season and make their day! :)

This is my "desert island," most distilled, most succinct piece of advice right now for all the technical people I am talking to who are worried about their learning.

Skeet by @mattielubchansky.com: can you imagine how fucking annoying it would be to be the like. 12th best person in the world at ski jumping. like you can’t STOP going to the competitions right? but you’re going to get 12th. your mom flew there

On the other hand, they get to go do something they really like and are very good at in a beautiful setting with a bunch of other people who also like and are good at the thing, without the temptation to build their entire identity around a medal. Ideal setup tbh

A closeup of a black cat with yellow eyes staring judgmentally into the camera

tfw you are very rudely not being petted

A tree whose leaves are nearly all a golden yellow, with a carpet of leaves below it, against a wide expanse of green grass

A maple tree with bright red leaves and broad spreading branches. It’s much larger than the house it’s in front of.

A carpet of fallen yellow leaves under a tree with wide spreading branches

Two trees on the side of a road in front of a house. Their leaves fade smoothly from a dark red at the top into orange and yellow in the middle and some remaining green leaves at the bottom

Frankly absurd levels of fall going on around here

The unbearable optimism of signing up for a new social network