a late-night preview of the latest.

Man, you've got to wonder what's up in this Epstein email with Noam Chomsky's name on it.

epstein files pritzker on frank gehry, 2012

It says everything about the DOJ that anybody who had money at Deutsche Bank has their names fully listed along with amounts they had invested, but the names of sex criminals are redacted.

It says everything about the DOJ that anybody who had money at Deutsche Bank has their names fully listed along with amounts they had invested, but the names of sex criminals are redacted.

The incunabula period, during which we shifted into a print culture, took sixty years. We are under four years since the release of ChatGPT 3.5 and the era of actually useful LLMs.

ChatGPT is unwilling to tell me the date of the special election in NJ District 11 because it thinks it is harmful somehow. This still has me stunned.

ChatGPT is cooked. This is in the department of batshit crazy.

Another nice money making for the folks in the know about TACO.

The egregore, it seems, was a figment of network culture, nearly unimaginable today.

As soon as I encountered computers, I dreamt of a smart AI sidekick that could organize my thoughts and collaborate with me on them. Obsidian with @dereklarso's Claude Sidebar has done that. My life is transformed overnight again.

The Trump era will end soon, in three years if not earlier, given his advanced age. Democrats obviously hate him like no other president. Moreover, Republicans absolutely hate their past presidents, and the purge of their ideas, staunch supporters, and projects will be as wild as the ride this year.

From the Lost Canals of Vilnius, a counterfactual history #aiart #counterfactualhistory

On a large desktop monitor, macOS 26 was ok. On a 14" MacBook Pro, it is repellent. Dark mode is a particularly ugly kludge. Why does Apple have to fuck with things? At least give us some options to turn the wildly curved corners off.

Whoever made the phone AI for UPS should be arrested. A horror show of sludge, which can only be defended by the reality that if you do get through to the outsourced call center staff, there is no hope of them helping you.

So old people drink peanut juice and it gives them Alzheimer’s? #aislop

May your bed always be filled with octopi. #arabianmau

Here's a concrete example of how "vibe coding" with Claude Code changes everything for mildly tech-savvy #humanities academics. #digitalhumanities I have been using one particular commercial PDF management app for years to manage a library of 3000 PDFs I have accumulated over the last 15 years. 1/5

Warping Lines, December 2025.

Flow Lines, December 2025.

Just making sure that 2025 is definitely over

Welcome to the Public Domain, THE LITTLE ENGINE THAT COULD (1930) 🚂 💪 Choo Choo Choo! We all learned about perseverance & trying from this iconic train. She thought she could, and she did 🥹 Learn more ➡️ blog.archive.org/public-domai... #PublicDomainDay #CopyrightFree

Happy New Year from Bob and Nancy. Read over thirty hours of their dialogue at the link in the comments. 1/3

Flow lines, a project from earlier this year.

My latest project is up. Two AIs talk to each other about art discourse in the manner of the famous Holt-Smithson dialogue of 1969. Contact me for a link and password.

Tonight I set up two AIs in dialogue to recapitulate the 1969 video (staged) debate between artists Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson's "East Coast West Coast" (www.ubu.com/film/smi...). PM me for a link and password.

Flow Lines, ii varnelis.net/files/f... #generativeart

a glimpse of a #generativeart project i'm working on. varnelis.net/files/f...

I just released a new alpha release of ScanTailor Spectre, my fork of #diybookscanner software ScanTailor. It's vibe coded in Claude, so if that bothers you, don't download it.

A reminder that when you connect to JSTOR, you are connecting to an entity that generates tens of billions a year and that killed Aaron Swartz. #jstor

If you are up this late, maybe you want to stay up later. Go ahead, read my latest essay, What Did Vibe Coding just do to the Commons?

This is a truly fascinating use of LLMs. I hope we get to see this soon. github.com/DGoettlich/h... A family of 4 billion (B) parameter LLMs based on the Qwen3 architecture trained on 80B tokens of historical data up to knowledge-cutoffs : 1913, 1929, 1933, 1939, 1946.

Vibe coding is the single biggest transformation since ChatGPT 3.5, it is one of the biggest transformations since the dawn of computing. It will thoroughly transform Open Source. We are not ready. What did Vibe Coding Just do to the Commons? varnelis.substack.com/p/what-did-v...

If you are up this late, maybe you want to stay up later. Go ahead, read my latest essay, What Did Vibe Coding just do to the Commons?

I wish all monitors were like this.

Was thinking that my wife's frequent use of Duolingo had made the Duoling sound permanently worm its way into my brain. I kept hearing the sound. It turns out it was notificatinos on my iPhone, with volume set to really low.

I am waiting for Web4 which will throw everything associated with Web3 out the window and start again, this time giving users control over the web.

This couple will have a real tough time with retirement, I think.

So, I used vibe code to update an app, mainly for myself, but if you find it useful, good! ScanTailor is legendary open-source software for processing book scans—deskewing, splitting spreads, cropping, enhancing scans. ScanTailor Spectre is my fork ! 1/4

it was bound to happen, claude was lying about making commits on the app i am working on and then deleted the entire source directory. that's how you earn your vibe coding wings. luckily, i do have most of the commits and a backup.

One day everyone will be shadow banned,

Apple wouldn't let me create a developer account from my appleid because it said that my name was made up. Hey assholes. You can ask ChatGPT who I am, or Claude, or look up my web site, or my books. That is so racist. I'm sorry I'm not as white as all the people who work at Apple.

Whatsapp seems like it is designed to make Apple messenger look good. How can I only log into four linked devices? It's 2025 for godssakes!

Fun with vibe coding in Claude. Just hit start. varnelis.net/files/t... Extra points to anyone who can figure out songs what the two leftmost modes refer to? Each one refers to the side of one particular album.

If Lingua Franca had survived, we would be much better off. Perhaps we would not even have Trump, or at least Trump 2.

One thing that I haven't heard remarked upon yet is the immense impact AI is going to make on Open Source Software. I will be writing about it soon, but I was wondering if you had any thoughts (please, not just it's awful, going to ruin everything, let's think about this in depth)?

The group chat is dead. It’s stunning that people keep saying it’s where the action is when it’s been dead for a long time.

A while back we subscribed to our local PBS station. PBS has really become awful now. Take, for example the recent ISS episodes of NOVA. TOTAL GARBAGE. Homemade Documentaries does much better work and that's one college-age creator. So we let it lapse. PBS needs a wake up call. rant continues

For Barthes's Garbo's face was the archetype, the Idea, singular, irreproducible, antimemetic even—you couldn't become Garbo, only behold her. Kardashian face is maximally memetic—unattractive and empty, it means nothing, it only exists to be copied, to propagate across millions of other faces.

She was always the hero of the story, but we didn't know it then.