When I first heard this news, I thought that this must be the result of either incompetent ICE agents - lacking fundamental knowledge about the protections afforded to embassies - or the administration once again deliberately pushing the boundaries of established norms to see what they can get away with.
Then I had the even more unsettling thought: could it somehow be both of these at once, though?
An administration purposefully sending ignorant agents to push boundaries that competent staffers want to test?
https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cvgpdx1yr15o
Art sales of any kind are a hard market to crack.
At least the Foundation team stepped up to the plate, made contact with the ball and got on base.
Not every at-bat gets to be a home run.
Does anyone here have a relatively deep understanding of @manifoldxyz contracts and how they display on my Manifold profile? I would like to discuss a question in a direct chat.
I've also pinged the Manifold team's X account in a DM (they haven't casted here in a year), but they have never responded to my earlier DMs so I don't have a lot of hope on that route lol.
I just saw the future of my art
I can't justify the monthly subscription fee in anything even closely resembling my economic reality (not poor, but not _that_ well off)
it's a deflating feeling
@clairesilver has a great quote about artists in the age of AI: "taste is the new skill"
I might expand that for people doing business more broadly in the age of AI to "lived experience, taste, judgment, and the ability to synthesize ideas into something coherent and situationally aware are the new skillset"
(but it's clearly not as pithy)
"Sometimes, parenting feels like planting trees you may never sit under.
Days like today make the feeling of resting in the shade of those trees very real."
This really resonated. @tinyrainboot nailed something in the video below that I was literally just talking through with my twin about their work and the direction they want to take it.
As AI commoditizes outputs – art, music, writing, analysis, even entire business workflows – the durable value shifts away from what gets produced and toward who is doing the producing, and how.
What becomes scarce isn’t competence or speed, but intentionality: lived experience, taste, judgment, and the ability to synthesize ideas into something coherent and situationally aware. Mass markets will move to cheap, scalable AI products. That’s inevitable.
But there will continue to be a parallel demand for high-touch, bespoke services where the value is the person behind the work: your lived experience, pattern recognition, and capacity to deeply attune to a client’s specific context and deliver it one-on-one with a level of connection that only a human can achieve (for now).
You’re no longer selling an outcome. You’re selling a process, a way of thinking, and the trust that comes from having actually built, failed, adapted, and executed in the real world.
AI can replicate outputs.
It can’t replicate a human who knows why something should exist: and how to bring it into being with care (yet).
That’s the moat (for the foreseeable future).
Adapt and overcome.
Another super-proud dad moment.
Six months ago, my 13-year-old son’s dentist noticed very early-stage cavity development between his two front teeth. She caught it early enough that it fell within the effective window for a newer treatment called Curodont (link in thread if you're interested in discussing with your child's dentist), which can help restore enamel if conditions are right.
Gemini’s surprisingly clear summary: “an FDA-approved, non-invasive, drill-free professional dental treatment designed to reverse early-stage tooth decay (white spot lesions)”.
Today we had the follow-up.
The dentist said it looks like the treatment is working: _really_ working. She was initially almost in disbelief. By the time she was done with his follow-up, she seemed visibly impressed.
She told us it doesn’t always work at all – let alone this well – and that the biggest factor here appears to be that my son actually followed through on the guidance she gave him six months ago about how to improve his thoroughness when brushing, flossing and using mouthwash.
She also said she’s _proud_ of him.
They reapplied the treatment today and she’s optimistic the enamel will fully recover. She showed me the X-rays from six months ago and from today: the faint dark spots that indicated early decay have almost completely disappeared. The visible deterioration she saw back then is nearly gone now too.
This brings me to a broader theme.
I was recently talking with my twin about how we wish things like the associates degree program my son has applied to for high school next year even _existed_ when we were kids. Programs like that can save thousands of dollars and literal years of your life if you continue on to a bachelor’s degree.
I wish treatments like this existed back then too.
But I also have to recognize something important: my son is doing things my twin and I didn’t do as kids. He’s putting in the daily work: with his teeth, and with school. He’s earned consistent A-B grades that make programs like that even possible, and he takes standardized testing seriously enough to score in the 80-90th percentiles.
I think it helps that my wife and try to underscore the importance of topics like this through our behaviors as parents. That it’s modeled, not just instructed.
For the past couple years, my son and I have been brushing our teeth at the same time, side-by-side at the sink. My wife and I also hold him to high expectations about his schoolwork that we genuinely believe he can meet, because he has proven capable: and then reward the effort in meaningful ways when he does.
I wish my own mom, drowning as a single parent far below the poverty line and working 2-3 jobs at a time, had had the space, resources or energy to help my twin and me understand how much healthy teeth matter. Or how much early academic momentum matters. Or that there had been systems and treatments back then that could actually give you a second chance if you were trying but imperfect.
I often tell my son: “I’m trying to raise you to be a better person than I am.”
His teeth. His schoolwork. Programs like the AA track.
These are concrete examples of what I mean: helping him do the annoying, unglamorous work now so that life is easier later, at a point when it’s often already too late to catch up.
Sometimes, parenting feels like planting trees you may never sit under.
Days like today make the feeling of resting in the shade of those trees very real.
(In the attached image, I've had GPT compile photos I snapped of the X-rays that the dentist took six months ago and today, for better comparison. The slight dark spots in the circled areas on the right are where the cavities were starting to develop. On the left, they've almost completely disappeared, showing only as really faint spots that only a professional might recognize as signs of weakening enamel. This aligns with the material improvement compared with the visible deterioration she had seen six months ago.)
In the last few years, we've replaced the single-pane aluminum windows and poorly sealed exterior doors in our mid-70s home with modern, energy-efficient units.
It's wonderful to not feel cold emanating from the windows and doors anymore at times like this, one of the few weeks in the year when it gets relatively cold (close to freezing) here in Central Florida.
If there's anything resembling a consistent theme about today's society, it's probably that people will go out of their way to discover creative and inventive ways to be offended about things that have no intention of being offensive.
Don't let that stop you from doing what you need to do.
"This isn’t about one incident.
It’s about a system that allows state violence to be justified through careful wording, where constitutional rights and basic human reactions are treated as provocation, and compliance is defined as instant, unwavering, total and silent submission: even in the middle of being assaulted by an armed federal agent acting outside of constitutional authority.
When internal reviews adopt this language, they aren’t clarifying events.
They’re pre-emptively defending force.
That should alarm anyone who still believes rights are something you exercise: not something you’re punished for invoking."
What stands out in the internal CBP review of Alex Pretti’s killing cited in the attached NPR reporting isn’t just what it says, but how it says it.
The language is doing active work to minimize and normalize conduct that, on video, is plainly aggressive and coercive. Phrases like “attempted to move the woman and Pretti out of the roadway” read as neutral, even procedural.
But the videos show that this ‘attempt’ consisted of violent shoving followed immediately by point-blank pepper spray: two actions that make it physically impossible to comply.
If you’re pushed to the ground, you can’t walk.
If you’re sprayed in the face, you’re incapacitated.
That gap between description and reality is not accidental. It’s how violence is administratively laundered.
The same pattern shows up in the reflexive ‘resisting arrest’ narrative.
In the review, resistance is asserted as a fact. But the article itself highlights eyewitness testimony that directly contradicts that claim: one witness stated that Pretti wasn’t even facing the agents when they grabbed him and “didn't look like he was trying to resist, just trying to help [a] woman up”.
This is a familiar script.
Agents initiate force; people react in entirely natural human ways: stumbling, flinching, using their arms to shield their faces, pulling away, trying to regain balance or help someone up.
Those reactions are then retroactively reframed as resistance or assault, providing legal and moral cover for escalation.
We’ve seen this move countless times: an agent shoves or crowds an observer, the observer reflexively makes unintentional contact with the agent while trying not to fall, and that accidental contact is reclassified as an intentional assault: justifying a brutal beating or worse.
This isn’t about one incident.
It’s about a system that allows state violence to be justified through careful wording, where constitutional rights and basic human reactions are treated as provocation, and compliance is defined as instant, unwavering, total and silent submission: even in the middle of being assaulted by an armed federal agent acting outside of constitutional authority.
When internal reviews adopt this language, they aren’t clarifying events.
They’re pre-emptively defending force.
That should alarm anyone who still believes rights are something you exercise: not something you’re punished for invoking.
https://www.npr.org/2026/01/27/g-s1-107608/alex-pretti-death-internal-review-immigration
