So it's been 18 months since Apple launched Vision Pro. At the time I expressed some skepticism based on the 170-year history of failure for stereoscopic 3D products, which generated heated replies from some fans. Is it seeing any significant use?

So many conspiracy theories, so few conspiracy experiments.

Sometimes I think I'm over my "someone is wrong on the Internet" syndrome. Then I look at the orange place and pow, I'm right back in it.

Movie you’ve watched more than six times with a gif. Hard mode: no Stars (Wars nor Trek), LOTR, or Marvel, Disney Animated or Pixar.

I'm unreasonably excited to get these!

This turned up in my email. At $5 for 12 minutes, plus surely more time to get and use the reward, seems like they're selecting for one of two groups: People who are well under the median income (and therefore are not big users of financial services), or people […] [Original post on sfba.social]

While using my IR camera for a little home maintenance, I shot a quick video of a pot of water on the stove. There's so much beauty around us that we don't normally see.

Very concerning for wildlife! A fire at a weed farm in Minnesota in December. Right during prime arctic tern migration season, too. It surely left no tern unstoned.

One possibility is that Apple is bad at "AI". Another is that Apple is still good at making user-focused products, which is not compatible with the current "AI" zeitgeist. https://www.theverge.com/news/835466/apple-ai-chief-john-giannandrea-steps-down-siri

There's one pinball vendor that is the oldest of old school. So much so that you order by emailing them. They send you the parts and an invoice, and then you pay on receipt. I am old enough to get it, but I have no idea what somebody who grew up with online shopping would make of it.

In my darker moments I suspect AI coding will win out not because the code is any good, but because so many of my fellow developers are used to working in large, no-good code bases that won't even notice the problems.

@williampietri Mine is "I don't get it". As in someone sees something they don't understand and instead of acquiring more information and then making an educated opinion, they just judge it based on peer pressure "opinions" and then go live their life with that opinion set in stone about the […]

One of my least favorite online phrases is "I don't see why" used to mean "I think you're a fool". It implies the speaker is the wise, objective judge, and them not seeing something is equivalent to it being wrong. Lately I've been taking it as if they actually recognized they were not seeing […]

@sue These people need an education in programming just so they internalise that "I don't know how this works" is exactly equivalent to "I don't know if this works" or even "I don't know what this does".

I think the basis for this misunderstanding is the belief that LLMs are a new abstraction for coding, but as I've said before I think that is totally wrong framing here. Code generation does not equal a programming abstraction.

So back in 1944, a German U-Boat Commander named Heinz-Wilhelm Eck did exactly what US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth ordered US military forces to do - kill the survivors of a destroyed boat at sea. Now, as then, this is considered a War Crime. In 1945, Commander Eck was tried, found guilty […]

I sometimes see people describing resistance to LLM assisted coding as gatekeeping and I get that, software engineering culture is absolutely rife with gatekeeping, I quite literally dedicated dedicated my career to developer education because I want more people to have access to these […]

Is there some way I can either search or get a list of my followers? There's a server that every time I see it in my mentions it's somebody being a dick. I'm trying to figure out if I should just block the whole server.

Question for dog fans: My downstairs neighbor just adopted a dog. Every time I walk down the stairs, he barks a lot. I thought I'd make friends with him, so we arranged a time for me to walk down the stairs and say hello. I of course brought a bag of treats. He was skeptical at first, but once […]

USPS keeps emailing me to say that a package is coming from "HQ - ECNS". I had no idea what that was, so I searched my email. Turns out I had received a package from them in February, so I searched USPS for that package id. It told me that tracking was not […] [Original post on sfba.social]

We're delighted to announce that there is no bad news about the economy to report!

How very CEO of him. https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/krafton-ceo-allegedly-asked-chatgpt-to-help-him-find-a-way-out-of-paying-subnautica-2-devs-their-bonuses-because-he-wanted-to-avoid-the-professional-embarrassment-of-being-seen-as-a-pushover/

Ok, I want to try something that social media's not good at: collective analysis with empathy and nuance! There's a guy I met at a Lean conference years ago. I like him. He's very smart and analytical, but his experience is in manufacturing, not software. He's since retired, and has been trying […]

Glad to see these people fucking all the way off. My gratitude goes to all the people of Chicago who pushed back, and to the media like Block Club who diligently exposed the nonsense and awfulness […]

This is brilliant. But eventually it's going to get noticed by the "AI" companies and added to some sort of list of things to optimize for. And we have to keep in mind that a lot of "AI" appearing to work is really you asking it for something that was a previously discovered failure. Each time […]

I often fact-check memes, just to know what's true. This one started out funny but before long I was staring into the abyss. Not the existential abyss that God is dead and life has no intrinsic meaning, I hasten to add. I've lived next to *that* abyss for years. It has a lovely view once you […]

my husband made it so the home assistant voice assistant can use full-on ollama to interpret instructions. then he told it to turn the lights on. it's been explaining its thought process for over five minutes now and the lights are still off.

The Economist, generally a pretty sober publication, is clearly getting alarmed about the state of American corporate finance and the AI bubble […]

Just got back from Mexico City, which I loved, but I have to share this photo of the worst electrical outlet I've ever seen.

Have any tips about Trump's businesses or other money-in-politics info? Email: [email protected] Mobile/Signal: 202.804.2744 OnionShare (requires Tor): 224medfh4632g3ze5otkskg5onhe27ssw3vghy3swknmdng5yj4n3eqd.onion Suggested reading—

"Thank you for your service" Experiences vary.

Men replying to women with some sort of perceived gotcha and as their first interaction, this is the masto shit that would earn you a sore face where I come from, say what you like about glaswegian men but they are overwhelmingly not that stupid

It's almost as if letting the ultra-rich own the entire mainstream press and also all the big social platforms had a downside.

Anybody using a standard calendar date picker for a birthdate should be immediately arrested. Signed, An old

Saw a joke about burying the inventor of USB and I nerd-sniped myself. How would you design a coffin/grave combo so that it looks like they're putting in the right way but it doesn't fit, so they have to take it out and try again? Bonus points if the way they put it in the first time was […]

I'm beginning to think the message isn't getting through.

The central lie — the key dishonesty — of modern conservatism is that being judgmental about the ethnicity or language or culture of the person next door is fine and acceptable, but being judgmental of that attitude is elitist and arrogant and closed-minded. What vapid bullshit.

Even during Trump's first term, if the FBI said something like this I'd give them the benefit of the doubt. But now I have no reason to think a content-free announcement like this isn't something ridiculous.

/2 Anyway it’s great to see Heritage recognize and support the philosophical core of “free speech culture”: judging Jews as inherently suspect or harmful to America is just another opinion, but judging someone for saying that is unacceptable in a free society.

Suppose you get a jackass reply from a server you've never heard of. How do you decide between blocking the account and the whole server? (I have my own approach, but I'm very curious how others decide.)

I'll be fine, but just so others know what's going on, my no-subsidy Bronze ACA plan is going up by about 35% on Jan 1. A colleague says it's about 30% for them. It's going to be grim times for a lot of people soon.

I don't want to make you feel old, but the American Cancer Society recommends that this year Young MC should get a prostate exam.

There are people who treat the word "antisemitism" as a term to hurl at anybody whose politics they don't like. Just had an encounter here with another one of them. I spent 2 years building a machine learning system to detect antisemitism in social media posts, working with a variety of experts […]

@daniel Hi! Today I encountered somebody from your server for the first time, motzmichel. I see your number one rule is "Please treat each other with respect." Do you see that account as meeting your server's standard for that rule?

I need to extract certain information from a bunch of images. I'm a Python developer, but know little about this niche. Can somebody suggest particular toolkits to start with? The problem: The placement of flippers on pinball machines has a rich history. There are thousands of different pinball […]

Urbs in horto. #chicago

I'm sure there's nothing that could go wrong with billionaires directly paying the salaries of the US military. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/25/timothy-mellon-donor-military-pay-shutdown

Just finished reading "Built to Fail" about Blockbuster's failure, written by one of their best franchisees. I loved it. I always assumed the cause was Netflix, but really, it was sustained executive dumbassery. The author definitely has an axe to grind, but deservedly so, and I think he's […]

I for one think the Epstein Ballroom will be magnificent. I love the decor theme of “what if Uday Hussein ran a Ramada Inn.” And giving it a theme song everyone will associate with it is a stroke of brilliance! “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” is very catchy.