Sorry, if you say you’re not doing something for the money, my mind goes straight to Spaceballs

This is a deeply important point: the deeper the blue wave, the more consistently fash will be the GOP remainder.

Earlier today in a Slack community I'm in, an AI-skeptical dude asked a multi-part question about how people are dealing with AI in client work. A few of us brought up vibe coding; the guy said thanks but he wasn't interested in vibe coding, he was asking about _other_ AI stuff WHAT OTHER AI STUFF

Oh, they know. I would bet this is the NYT intentionally withholding dark mode from the website to drive app adoption. Same with "stay logged in" — of course you can 'stay logged in' to a website, but the NYT wants you in their app.

Oscar gets the emails where Criterion is always having an insane 50% off sale, and he’s like, hey you know what’s even better than paying $20 for a gorgeous 4K Blu-ray of _Seven Samurai_…

“One or two people can do what would have taken dozens, so we are hiring dozens/hundreds of these people who will be, like, infinity productive. We’re gonna be so productive, we’ll copy new Snapchat features months before they’ve even thought of them.”

Fortunato (coughing): You’re certain the Criterion Closet is down here Montresor (picking up a trowel): Definitely. Have you thought about your picks yet

For autism awareness month, I’d like to better understand whether online autism influencers — a phrase that I can’t believe is a real thing — think it’s helpful to tell folks that they were measured against the wrong standard while having no advice re what to do about it?

Morally: totally agree To the extent Jeffries is like, “people want to hear about cost of living, not the insane fascist in the White House”: super agree Pragmatically and practically: Ain’t no way a divided Congress will convict and remove and trying would DDoS our political system for months

Before I left corporate Big Tech, I’d heard so many times from leaders making 3-4x my salary how the biggest problem was “slow” decision making with “too much discussion”, and that faster delivery would unlock “innovation”. These leaders are still there, more powerful, and of course they looove AI

See, how this is supposed to work in an economy that hasn’t gone bonkers is: - ONE incumbent tech giant makes an eight- to ten-figure investment in a hot new company - If that goes well, before long the giant acquires or merges with the upstart Instead: arstechnica.com/ai/2026/04/g...

Some days working with AI is like spending half an hour carefully explaining something — taking care to measure words so as not to overwhelm the listener — only for the AI to just ignore everything, while grinning and offering to fuck things up some more.

Here’s the thing about the racism (from someone who grew up in super racist Alabama): From an outsider POV, ie to folks who aren’t white supremacists all the way to the marrow in their bones, racism is choosing to exclude and vilify black and brown people. But to the racists, it’s existential.

The only good thing about MSFT rebranding their gaming unit as "Microsoft Gaming" was sheltering "Xbox" — which is coming back as their overall gaming brand — from being associated with some of the dumbest business moves in recent memory www.theverge.com/report/9174...

Monitors with industry-standard video inputs AND/OR complete Thunderbolt docking stations built-in. Basically the 2012 Thunderbolt Display, but with a modern panel and webcam.

“Filmed in IMAX” is hilarious for a game so many of us played on Steam Deck or PS4 or whatever old gaming PC we had around because it looks great (and will kick your ass thoroughly) on any hardware

you really have to look out for baseball players these days. they’re everywhere. a few minutes ago i turned on a baseball game and there were like 12 of those fuckin’ guys

whenever people assume I am excited about a movie or show based on something I loved when I was 8 I just think about how weird it would’ve been if my dad got all pumped up about a Howdy Doody movie in 1986

Exactly one year ago today:

I'm sorry to do this to everyone, but there is also video of this sleepy but hungry moment

I don't recall any previous transformative technologies that had to be sold to the public so hard. No one in 1999 was going, "Guys. Cell phone? It's coming, whether we like it or not. I think it's important, FOR WOMEN ESPECIALLY, to learn about cell phone. So that we're not left behind!!"

“I enjoy watching the TV show The Pitt” - this is what all you The Pitt fans sound like 🙄

Before I left/got shoved out of the Big Tech PM game, one of the big points of friction between me and stakeholders was execs’ insistence on having a 12 month roadmap — with *committed* OKRs — that would be stale in less than a quarter. I made the mistake of saying that was a silly waste of time.

More and more I realize that in today’s world you can only survive if you’re the type of person who loves having a spotlight shine on them and can make the most of it. If for any reason you want to just live a quiet, private life where you don’t have to sell or hype yourself to others, TFB

Sometimes I’m in a photo and I’m like My god My head is HUGE. Does this explain why I’ve always felt so… different? All these years, have I always been… a FunkoPOP?

I see a lot of techies perplexed about the venom the rest of society has about AI. here’s just one sample of why so many people reflexively loathe AI

Tangential, but I’ve been trying this year to make a go of using Linux on a Framework laptop. It’s fun to basically build a whole OS from weird little terminal commands. It’s also incredibly inconvenient, and *at best* I have a weird toy system that can’t run any standard apps.

One of the hardest things to get across to most software people with great intentions is *how strong defaults are* and how tired everyone else is of dorking around trying to get things to work, but this understanding is the thing that made Apple, for all its many flaws, such a giant.

Soon AI use will be disrupted by the cheaper and more reliable alternative that's sweeping the business world: hiring human experts to do the work instead

Ironically, a lot of the tax incentives around capex assume that companies are investing cash in factories, warehouses, bricks & mortar stores — stuff that will presumably create jobs for people. The tax code didn’t anticipate a world where you could spend capital but _also_ cut jobs.

100%, but also capital spending gets better tax treatment and has less risk of liability which is to say it’s systemic against labor in more ways than one

This past week I rewrote a vibe-coded app myself, because while the AI version was like 70% OK, it didn’t look very nice and I am 1000% faster at implementing CSS than any robot. The twist: the whole thing was a side quest. I didn’t need this app, and if Lovable didn’t exist I may not have bothered

Sometimes readers are skeptical when I tell them that retailers would rather pay for self-checkout kiosks and product lockup systems and all manner of other questionable in-store tech rather than staffing because of an ideological preference for capital spending over labor spending and, well,,,

Add a food to a movie title: Chicken Wings of Desire

Some observations after eleventeen or whatever months as a “web agency owner”: - “Agency” is assumed by a lot of folks to mean “team of randos who build stuff” and the first questions will be how many randos and how much you charge - Most clients *and fellow owners* are defiantly non-technical

hello 👋 i have developed a new tool called blüuümpíi. blüuümpíi will convert every file on your hard drive to a .wav file without asking you, maximize your system volume, and play them on every bluetooth speaker you have ever connected to. if you offer feedback on blüuümpíi i will take legal action

What are you talking about? That dispensary has been open for months. You’re just imagining the paper in the windows.

I realized earlier that there are two big reasons why Starfield wasn’t a giant megahit on release and also seems to piss people off: 1. it’s a game by and for 40-something nerds who grew up on 1990s sci-fi 2. If you’re gonna promise “Skyrim in space” a lot of those nerds are gonna hold you to that

One of the under-reported issues with vibe coding is the thing where the LLM says it built something — say, a feature that generates a PDF and emails it to the user — but is just lying.

This is an awful lot of words for Grammarly’s CEO to use to say “you get paid in exposure.”

Starfield came out 2.5 years ago and people have been dragging it on Reddit ever since …until this week, when Bethesda announced a bunch of extremely cool-looking, super reasonably priced new content and it turns out everyone loved the game after all bwahahahaha

Love this dystopian hellscape where the only way to make money or survive is to be the sort of person who’d absolutely dupe their friends into joining a pyramid scheme

IRISH AVENGERS: Sure if we don’t have to stop Lucky from gatherin’ all the Infinity Charms, or else won’t he snap his wee fingers and pinch half the universe so

What a lot of people don’t know or don’t consider when offering hot takes about the Oscars: 1. Awards are voted on by a giant mishmash of random industry people 2. Oscar wins don’t represent any critical or popular verdict, though they sometimes overlap with what critics and audiences think

Is this video sped up, or are these gentlemen so used to listening to things at 1.5x+ speed that they’ve developed a speech pattern that sounds like listening to sped-up podcasts?

…in _this_ economy?!