It feels like a huge failure on multiple levels that there's so little attempt to articulate an alternative to totally unregulated big-corporate ownership of technologies like AR and AI, which have some actually real use cases just vastly outweighed by the harms of their business models

During the PC era, people used to say writing slow code was fine because faster CPUs were coming in a year or two, thanks to Moore’s Law. Now it’s “let AI write code you don’t understand, future AI will fix the bugs.” True or not, it’s a bleak view of the profession either way.

Anil hits the nail on the head. Can confirm as someone in tech that it is getting harder to express moderate and measured opinions on AI lest you be seen as a hater or non-believer.

For your professional goals, make a habit of just steadily putting points on the board, consistently doing a little bit steadily, even if you’re bad at it sometimes. You’ll be amazed at how quickly successes start to compound. Don’t let your job get in the way of your career.

show this to anyone else you know who also assumed DHH was just a normal conservative dude rather than a raging white supremacist lunatic

lol the production quality of this review is insane www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC7I...

Jotted down some quick thoughts about the new iPhones. Very curious to see how much titanium is used in the iPhone Air! vesper.computer/are-we-looki...

Q. Who aligns the aligners? A. alignmentalignment.ai Today I’m humbled to announce an epoch-defining event: the launch of the 𝗖𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝗔𝗜 𝗔𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗖𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀.

Google’s position is now that the open web Is thriving but open web ads are in rapid decline… because of course all the attention and money leaving a platform is irrelevant to its health lol

"PhD-level experts in your back pocket" is a completely nonsensical description of AI but a pretty good description of social media if you follow the right people

"of course u do have to buy my glasses to benefit from this future" -mark zuckerberg

"Consumer Watchdog found that the best deals were offered to the wealthiest customers—with the worst deals given to the poorest people, who are least likely to have other options." fortune.com/2025/07/16/d...

Look, speaking as a physicist, it is hard for me to put into words how batshit crazy this is.

My god these guys are such spectacular morons gizmodo.com/billionaires...

When we throw up our hands and say none of it matters, we're doing the fascists’ work for them. They don't need to hide their corruption if they can convince us it's pointless to look. They don't need to silence truth-tellers if we've already decided truth is meaningless.

Amazon Fire Phone walked so the iPhone could run, more than a decade later.

Dan's article really resonated with me. Sadly, I see this attitude of things being "good enough" a little too often around me. dansinker.com/posts/2025-0...

"Cook chose poorly."

Yall wanna hear something extremely embarrassing? Before Trump’s election, a bunch of academics who lumbered rightward after being criticized by the left (Pinker, Dawkins, Krauss) wrote essays for a book that is coming out in July about the threats to academia from the left. YALL, THE TITLE!!

Gotta love the moment of panic when Apple Intelligence says your (barely used) credit card bill is a random 4 digit number. Turns out it took the last 4 digits of my account number to be the bill 🤡

How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia? Before you open this thread, take a guess. Settle on a number and then compare it to what you'll learn in this thread. 🧵

Me, a 25 year broadband policy expert: Ezra Klein's complaints about rural broadband suggest he didn't do his research because he misrepresents some programs, and ignores others that accomplished exactly what he's asking for. Klein fans: you just don't understand what he's saying! (repeat 40x)

I remember when they said they'd make DMs end to end encrypted.

The New York Times is the first to put out comprehensive estimates on the cost of a year without U.S.A.I.D. and they’re higher than I thought: - 1.65 million deaths from AIDS - 500,000 from lack of vaccines - 550,000 from lack of food aid - 290,000 from malaria - 310,000 from TB

Can stuff happen more slowly? I still haven’t caught up with all the stuff that happened in January.

We tried out the new productivity app Touch Grass, which just came out for iOS. It blocks apps of your choosing and only unblocks them after you take a picture of your hand literally touching grass.

Visiting friends in New York

I had some ideas about how one could make podcasts more interactive with the listener and write them up here. Feedback is welcome. vesper.computer/thoughts-on-...

american masculinity is so amazing. caring about clothes as a man apparently makes you "gay" but our position on geopolitics totally depends on whether you wear a suit

Apple shareholders have agreed with the company’s management that diversity, equity and inclusion are “critical” to the company’s success by rejecting proposals to end its DEI efforts.

Zuck has embraced the Trumpian approach to managing in multiple ways.

I recall inflation over 2% being the most important issue in American history, but now that consumers expect 4.3% inflation over the next year (highest since Nov 2023) and the bond market expects 2.57% inflation over 5 years (highest since Mar 2023), it's no biggie.

The people who think they are good at everything because they are good at coding are also bad at coding.

NIH appears to have canceled/postponed all of its study sections—the independent review panels that approve federal grants for health research. Such grants fund the work/salaries of 300k people at more than 2,500 institutions

My dentist yesterday pointed out 3 times that they were using "AI" to detect cavities in my teeth. Somebody help me.

I really, really don't want to do this, but let's do a bit (just a LITTLE BIT) of fact checking about what Zuck said on the Joe Rogan podcast, because this is something I not only followed closely, but also spent time *talking to the actual people at Meta who dealt with this* which WAS NOT ZUCK.

Chrome. Please. Stop. Help.

Meta has repeatedly deleted our articles, including ones about Instagram's censorship and disproportionate moderation against trans people. It put a "fact check" warning on an article we did about hurricane helene AI spam proliferating on the platform www.404media.co/facebook-is-...

Now they're going after VPNs. *Pay attention* to what's happening in places like Turkey, India, Russia and China — and how tech companies are complying, or not, with state surveillance. As we've seen in the past month, they'll do the same when prompted here.

I often warn about the risks of relying on large platforms to disseminate news and information. For years I have had a Substack page solely to tell people I'm not on Substack with a link to @democracydocket.com. Apparently that displeased the corporate overlords, so now my account is suspended.

Employees at Musk’s companies have consistently said the opposite: he has a short fuse and they prefer when he’s focused on anything else because when he starts paying attention to their department they get hit with unnecessary work and stupid requests. He doesn’t know nearly as much as he thinks.

Do you also, like me, feel weird watching the Apple Intelligence ads? I tried to put into words why I feel this way, let me know what you think: vesper.computer/why-apple-in...

Okay, now that we're thinking about Substack and both its cultural influence and its business model, can I walk you all through the economics? Because they make no sense, and we can use that to predict how things are going to go... (Caution:🧵)

The Verge Editor-In-Chief @reckless.bsky.social breathes fire on Elon Musk and Donald Trump's Big Tech enablers: "All of these men are now hopelessly trapped in a problem their own platforms and algorithms created." Full Q&A in Status: www.status.news/p/nilay-pate...