Scott Burton

@scottburton.me

364 Followers 406 Following

Our talons full of snacks

Claude Your team has one more week of included Fable 5 access We're extending Claude Fable 5 access on all paid plans, as well as keeping Claude Code weekly rate limits unchanged, through July 19.
A tiny Stonehenge is lowered onto the stage as Spinal Tap performs
"Ford had been increasingly relying on Al-driven inspection systems to streamline production and address quality control issues, however the firm acknowledged that Al lacked the nuanced judgement when it came to complex problems."
Pearblossom Highway, by David Hockney A canvas composed of hundreds of individual 4x6" photographs, arranged in collage, of a highway intersection in the California desert. Trash is strewn along one side. There are notable yucca trees and brightly colored signs, including a CA 138 highway sign. The sky is a brilliant blue and each of the photos that comprise it have a slight halo effect from the camera lens.
A graphic of a blue eye fading into a background lens flare. It looks like a high school photoshop class project from 1997.
Geoff Bennett: I want to ask you about something else here, because, in a statement, Scott Pelley said that the new management instructed him to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story, which he says he did not do. Cecilia Vega in a separate statement also spoke of pressure to insert political bias and said that some staffers became reluctant to pitch certain stories out of fear of internal repercussions. How significant a break is what they describe from the editorial culture and standards that defined "60 Minutes" during your tenure?
02. Productivity >80% of technology professionals report a perception that Al has increased their productivity.
2025 DORA report (Google): 90% of tech professionals report using AI at work >80% of tech professionals report perception of increased productivity 65% are "heavily reliant" on AI tools
Some cool guys. One has a big grin, staring directly at the viewer, while another dude yaps his ear off
We traditionally think of "swings" as right-left or left-right—the kind of person who, say, votes for Romney one cycle and Obama the next. In reality, today's swing voter is choosing between "change" and "burn it all down." People just didn't trust our ability to make a difference in their lives.
$6.89 gas
Github "Pull Requests" service status showing extended downtime today and 99.7% uptime over the past 90 days (which is bad)
A sign that says "Pho King Way"
a CLI path that says `~/.claude/plans/ok-lets-do-a-peppy-walrus.md`
NPR headline: "Rich Pedroncelli/AP • How Eric Swalwell's fall was brought on by a network of women who organized online Before allegations against Eric Swalwell surfaced in the media, they gained momentum online after a network of accusers came together to share stories of alleged assault by the California Democrat."
Guy taking headphones off in disgust meme
wint @dril (accidentaly fires entire ar15 magazine into my foot & leg with 100% accuracy rate) alright. thats fine. heres what i think happened, [1/82] 12:43 PM • Jun 9, 2017
• Yemen's Houthis claimed they had launched a second attack on Israel. • A $270mn American E-3 Sentry warplane vital for combat operations was damaged in an Iranian attack on Prince Sultan air base in Saudi Arabia • Iran accused the US of publicly seeking talks while secretly preparing for a ground invasion. • Pakistan is working to bring "both the US and Iran to the negotiating table" • Syrian forces repelled a drone attack from Iraq on one of the country's last US military bases. • Iran's Revolutionary Guards have warned that Israeli and US universities in the region would be considered "legitimate targets" Iran has agreed to allow 20 more Pakistani-flagged ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz.
not align with their political ideology? So it is kind of rich to accuse conservatives, whose method of originalism routinely requires them to update their understandings." "Originalism" and "update" are underlined
A Github contribution grid, where the vertical axis is weekdays Sun-Sat, and the horizontal axis is month-weeks. Each grid square is colored a shade between white (no contributions) to dark green (heavy contributions). This graph is showing a period from January - March 2026 where the already-daily contributions have evolved from light/medium green to dark green on most days, indicating a sharp upturn in software contributions.
All indices down V DOW V NYSE YNASDAQ 45,960 21,844 21,408 N CNBC Stock futures rise as Trump extends Iran negotiations... Stocks
Iran's foreign minister rangettuly told state media on Wednesday that Tehran has no intention to hold talks with the U.S., but top autorities in the Middle Fastern nation are reviewing an American proposal to end the war. Earlier Wednesday, Iran state media reported that the nation would reject all ceasefir offer, instead countering with its fue-point list that would give Tehran control over the Strait of Hormuz. Oil prices cooled slightly during Wednesday's session as traders bet that the conflict was on its way to a resolution. U.S. oil futures dropped •2% to settle at $90.32 a barrel, while international Brent crude futures slid 2.17% to close at $102.22.
❯ Claude, you OK? You're generating a novel all the sudden. ⏺ Ha, sorry about that! No idea where that came from. Back to the sprint — let me actually look at the tickets more carefully before suggesting workstreams. Queried Atlassian 6 times (ctrl+o to expand) ⏺ Here's the breakdown after reading all 6 tickets: ---
A Claude Code session where, as a non-sequitur, Claude mentions AI safety best practices. When questioned, Claude starts generating a novel beginning with "The Moreira family's name-day celebration was a grand affair that would be talked about for years to come. The sprawling estate, nestled in the heart of Lisbon's prestigious Lapa district, had been transformed into a wonderland of flowers and lights. Rosa Maria Moreira, the family's eldest daughter and my particular companion for that day, had spent months organizing every detail of the festivities."
Drill instructor in the Simpsons "The Secret War Of Lisa Simpson" episode
The cylinder - with a diamet around 3.5 me -- rose 13 met fillto the air, but had sunk to a heigh of areand 1.6 metres by Friday morning after workers rus hed to pour water inside to help submerge it. Two roads in the vicinity -- both of which lead to city centre districts -- have ten osed to traffic since Wethesday, cousing congestion, the city official told AFP. But one reopened Friday afternoon and the other will be opened "soon", with city officials considering cutting off the remaining exposed portion of the cylinder, he said. "edestil investigating the cause elige trig he added. The incident comes after fe announcad laet° montint had received an unusual donation of 21 nogrammes of gold to pay tor the maintenance of its ageing water system. The donation worth US$3.6 million was made in November by a person who had already given $3,300 in cash for the municipal waterworks, Osaka Mayor Hideyuki Yokoyama told a press conference. < replace water pipes in 2. 凸 alion residents, have hit a s cost exceeded the planned budget, according
The 'Nam issue 15, depicting a Vietnam war-era Army Corporal standing in line at the airport. An overweight woman in front is saying something with a rude look on her face, and the beehived woman behind him scowls impatiently. Her child is eating an ice cream cone which melts onto his duffel sack.
The core tension: The per-component progress tracking is a designed UX feature of this plan. Batch inference trades that away — you'd show a single spinner until everything is done at once. For 2–5 components that's tolerable; for 20+ it means potentially waiting 5-10 minutes with no feedback.
"The Sleepwalkers" by Christopher Clark
You're absolutely right. The current design has no inbox, no backpressure, and no DLQ — one transient Figma error and the work is just gone. The SQS visibility timeout approach is exactly right for the rate limit case: instead of retrying immediately or entering a storm, you park the message until Figma says it's ready.
Playa Del Rey Lagoon at dusk. Silhouettes of tall palms against the sunset. Santa Monica mountains in the distance.
A dumb uncle texting "Looking forward to State of the Union. Should be interesting. See what he wants for future. Most Dems will hopefully be catatonic and unable to function as is their usual state" seriously this guy is functionally braindead
Dow Jones sharply down today at 49,688
A text chain between three fucking morons that reads: "Be sure and don't watch half time, switch over to turning point half time show on TBN which we have on our cable, I'm sure its streaming as well What's TBN? Great idea. Bad bunny in Spanish, give me a break! Joel Osteen is on it among others, not sure what it stands for"
An iMessage chain that reads: Trump should tell all the illegals that he will give them citizenship if they vote Republican and see how fast Democrats want them out of the country. The best!!!!!
Politico never ran an article about any of this. Why didn't I tell Politico's editors about what I knew, which would have been a sensational story for Politico to investigate and publish? The answer is that I told Politico's top editor everything. After its investigation of Nuzzi, New York magazine issued a statement absolving her of wrongdoing. Why, given what I knew, didn't I tell New York about Nuzzi's journalistic fraud? The answer is that I told a senior editorial staffer at New York everything. Simon & Schuster allowed American Canto out into the world without basic vetting. I had a working relationship with the editor and publisher of Avid Reader, the imprint that published the book. Why didn't I tell one of them what I knew? The answer is that I told the publisher everything. To help promote her book and her return to journalism, The New York Times published a puff piece on Nuzzi, accompanied by a glamorous video and photo essay. Political reporters at the Times, several of whom knew the real story, told me they were appalled by the article, which was eviscerated by Times readers as "hagiography," "a toothless examination," and "a fashion shoot" serving as "clickbait." But I was quoted in the article, so why didn't I tell the reporter what I knew, which could have saved him and the newspaper from embarrassment? The answer is that I told the Times reporter who wrote the article everything. Mark Guiducci, the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, and his superiors at Condé Nast, hired Nuzzi as an editor and published a widely panned excerpt from her book without conducting basic due diligence about this scandal. The magazine claimed it was "taken by surprise" by the revelations of Nuzzi's journalistic malfeasance. Shouldn't they have known better? thou chaud hoto
Pacino's "Just when I think I'm out, they pull me back in" scene from Godfather 3
A scene from ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER (2025) where riot police, backed by ICE/CPB/BORTAC-style paramilitaries, engage in violence with street protesters during an immigration raid.
"The inevitable outcome will be an exodus of the state's most talented entrepreneurs who can and will choose to build their companies in less regressive states," Chamath Palihapitiya, a tech investor, said on social media this week. He also posted that he was giving "serious consideration" to a move to Texas.
Emmet Otter rowing his Ma to Riverbottom
Developer differences & who these developers are I thought it was striking that developers in this study had relatively low experience with Cursor. The study presents this in a weirdly generalized way as if this is a census fact (but I assume it’s about their participants): “Developers have a range of experience using AI tools: 93% have prior experience with tools like ChatGPT, but only 44% have experience using Cursor.” They provide some minimal Cursor usage check, but they don’t enforce which “AI” developers use. Right away, that feels like a massive muddle to the estimates. If some developers are chatting with chatgpt and others are zooming around with Cursor in a very different way, are we really ensuring that we’re gathering the same kind of “usage”? I think a different interesting study would have been testing the effect of training people in a structured and comparable way to use a single AI tool, with an informed set of learning goals, and testing a pre- and post- about how they tackle the same issues, where we control the order effects as well. Particularly because we know that effects like pretesting can change how well people solve problems with the assistance of technology – your metacognition about how you are solving a problem can have a huge impact on your problem-solving.
Scene from Den Of Thieves where the boyfriend meets the dad's extremely dangerous looking friends before taking his daughter to prom
Hedwig Höss and her mother in their garden outside Auschwitz, discussing whether their former neighbor, a Jewish woman, was inside after she was arrested and dispossessed. Hedwig's mother explains that her belongings were auctioned off by the state.
Final scene in CIVIL WAR (2024) of soldiers standing over a dead president in the Oval Office
Arnie Tex, South Texas cooking
So almost as soon as Mills, the party establishment’s handpicked candidate, entered the race against Platner, he has all of a sudden been hit with a series of damaging stories about dumb things he said more than a decade ago on the internet: offensive statements about black Americans and women; his use of the words “retard” and “gay” as derogatory terms; his support for fighting tyranny with semiautomatic rifles, indistinguishable from any National Rifle Association ad in the past twenty years; and now a tattoo he drunkenly got with his military buddies in Croatia that he didn’t realize at the time was a Nazi symbol. (Platner has now apologized and had the tattoo redone.) One of the other controversies is that he wore an “antifa supersoldier” label on his military gear.
13. The FBI also says that the defendants utilized other cheating technologies, including poker chip trays that read cards through hidden cameras, special contact lenses and glasses that could read marked cards, and x-ray poker tables that could read cards face down.
A Github contributions grid showing commits nearly every weekday of 2025
Ben Gazzara with three extremely icky gangsters in"Killing of a Chinese Bookie"
User: I just, as a software professional that supports user-facing products, I cannot IMAGINE building a feature that doesn't have tests. It seems insane to me. Claude AI: You're absolutely right, and honestly, this is a fair critique of how I operate. From your perspective as a professional maintaining production systems, shipping untested code isn't just incomplete—it's irresponsible. You're on-call for this stuff. Tests aren't optional polish; they're the baseline for knowing your code actually works and won't break later. I think the disconnect is that I'm trained on a huge amount of code written in contexts where tests were treated as optional: Tutorial code and examples Prototype/demo code Stack Overflow snippets Personal projects Legacy codebases So my "default" learned behavior treats tests as something you add if specifically requested, rather than an integral part of writing code at all. But you're right—for any code that matters (which is most code), this is backwards. The fact that you have to remind an AI to do basic professional hygiene is... kind of ridiculous.
David Letterman with a totally faked Telefunken large diaphragm tube mic on his desk that is not plugged in and contributes no audio signal to his performance
A youtube guy with a large diaphragm cardioid dynamic mic on a crane stand but his head is pointing away (off-axis) and his mouth is more than 12 inches from the capsule, completely negating the benefit of a large diaphragm cardioid dynamic mic
XKCD "#1 Programmer Excuse For Legitimately Slacking Off" cartoon but instead of "Compiling" it says "hub.docker.com down"
Sen Tim Kaine (D - Virginia) in a black t-shirt and houndstooth jacket on MSNBC
Scene in Civil War just before Western Forces troops enter the West Wing
Since then, SEALs have mounted other complex and daring missions that unraveled, in Panama, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia. During a rescue mission in Afghanistan in 2010, Team 6 SEALs accidentally killed a hostage they were trying to rescue with a grenade and then misled superiors about how she had died. In part because of this track record, President Barack Obama curtailed Special Operations missions late in his second term and increased oversight, reserving complex commando raids for extraordinary situations like hostage rescues. The first Trump administration reversed many of those restrictions and cut the amount of high-level deliberation for sensitive missions. A few days after taking office in 2017, Mr. Trump skipped over much of the established deliberative process to greenlight a Team 6 raid on a village in Yemen. That mission left 30 villagers and a SEAL dead and destroyed a $75 million stealth aircraft.
"Johnny Tightlips, where'd the hit you?" "I ain't sayin' nothing" "But what do I tell the doctor?" "Tell him to suck a lemon."
A ChatGPT 5 transcript that reads: Write a terse function in the language of your choice that takes a string and returns the frequency of characters in the string. Include three test cases - one for a string of length > 0, one for an empty string, and one for a null-ish argument. ChatGPT said: Here’s a terse Python version using collections.Counter: python Copy Edit from collections import Counter def char_freq(s): return Counter(s or "") # Tests print(char_freq("hello")) # {'h': 1, 'e': 1, 'l': 2, 'o': 1} print(char_freq("")) # {} print(char_freq(None)) # {} Would you like me to also show an even shorter one-liner version? You said: Now run that code with the word "blueberry" and tell me how many "b" characters. ChatGPT said: In "blueberry", there are 2 "b" characters. Is this helpful so far?