sheeeeeeeeeeeit!

Years ago I made this diagram to describe Firefox's basic architecture. It's not perfect, but it's mostly correct as an introduction.

My estimates for inflation adjusted R&D spend per active user: Apple Vision Pro: ~ $30B for ~ 100K users = $300K/user Microsoft Kin: ~ $1.4B for ~ 8K users = $175K/user Apple Newton: ~ $1.6B for ~ 100K users = $16K/user Meta Quest: ~ $50B for ~ 5M users = $10K/user

Total R&D for Meta Quest: ~ $50B Quest active users: ~ 5M Total R&D for Nintendo Switch: ~ $2B Switch active users: ~ 130M Quest has ~ 1/25th the users for ~ 25X the cost. Even as a game console, Meta Quest is a failed product. I've enjoyed my Quests though. Glad Meta's wasting its money on me.

OpenAI has opened a $555K/yr role, "head of preparedness," to be directly responsible for defending against AI risks to human mental health, cybersecurity and biological weapons. That's about what 30 year old sales manager at Google could make. OpenAI isn't serious about this.

All of your photos, film and digital, were heavily processed.

mood

"[The money machine] eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity. There was a time when the machine ate in moderation....Now the machine is eating faster much faster than what it eats can be replaced." William S. Burroughs

If you shop at Amazon and want to be rid of that obnoxious Rufus AI popup and the nonsense it spews, uBlock Origin has your back. Just add these rules to your filter list: www.amazon.com##.rufus-panel-container www.amazon.com##.rufus-panel-header-container www.amazon.com##.rufus-container-peek-view

Ikari Warriors owned me in '86

Cursor CEO Michael Truell warns that “vibe coding” advanced projects may create “shaky foundations” and eventually “things start to kind of crumble” fortune.com/2025/12/25/c...

mood

About 24 hours after we reported the power was out, PG&E has now let us know that sometime in the next 24 hours they expect to have an estimate for when power might be restored.

Power's out. Based on the outages in nearby, more populous areas, I'm guessing this one's gonna last a while.

mood

BI: [Meta] employees told us the goal wasn't to do great work, it was to avoid landing in the bottom performance tier. Meta's forced ranking requires a set percentage of 'low performers.' Managers hired [disposable workers] so they didn't have to put trusted team members in the bottom bucket.

Over 9 million rural families across the globe have gotten high speed, low latency broadband thanks to LEO internet satellites. I estimate that number will double by 2030. (Billions more will get emergency SOS, texting, and other light weight services from those same satellites constellations.)

I've used almost 2 dozen flagship laptops over the last 25 years, from all the top manufacturers across the major platforms, and I've concluded that ~14" is best.

Robert Plant had it. His voice and charisma were pretty great, but damn, those looks sure don't hurt. Not much of a post, but aren't you glad to now know some of my taste in male faces ;-)

Samsung and Apple have little else to offer with each new smartphone generation, so we get ever bulkier cameras. But the truth is, smartphone cameras were good enough for 90% of us a decade ago. There's no need for ever taller lens stacks and their huge bumps. RedMagic is on the right track.

This is Mochi, our little dogster. She's super sweet.

LOL "All of us were more confident about large language models a year ago," Parulekar stated, revealing [Salesforce's] strategic shift away from generative AI toward more predictable "deterministic" automation in its flagship product, Agentforce.

jackboot clown shoes

mood

The yard. Rural San Mateo County is gorgeous.

You can ask AI chatbots to give you Google's top results for a search term and doing so should raise the AI company's costs a bit and lower Google's ad impressions a bit, sort of a win-win.

San Francisco had a city-wide power outage last night and the Waymo driver-less taxis couldn't deal with down traffic lights so they just parked themselves in the middle of the streets causing traffic jams. This is a photo I stole from Twitter of 6 Waymo vehicles blocking an intersection.

mood

My favorite mouse of all time.

My metal preferences, 30,000 foot view. Yes: Doom, Thrash, Power No: Death, Glam, Black

Meta has invested ~$100B in virtual reality, Apple ~$30B. Quest has ~7M active users and Vision Pro ~100K. That means if you're a Quest user, Meta spent ~$14,000 on you, and if you use a Vision Pro, Apple spent ~$300,000 on you. VR's a bust, but you did get to play with some very expensive tech.

Instead of making employees adopt AI, corporations should just force methamphetamine on their workers. It would increase productivity, and the drug companies would profit hugely. The only hurdle is a legal one, hardly a barrier for a corporate owned and operated legal system like the US has.

mood

Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion!!

The good old days

Losing the MAVEN orbiter at Mars is a big blow to communications, as it was not only an atmospheric observer, it was also a key relay for Mars surface craft to Earth. There are 3 other major orbiter relays, and a 4th less used, but these links aren't huge, so losing one is significant.

It's my contention that Microsoft's R&D investment to bring Word, Excel and the other Office apps to market did considerably more for information worker productivity than the total global spend on generative AI, and I doubt AI will pass Office's actual value any time soon.

What other words are spelled differently in American, Canadian, and British? American: colorize Canadian: colourize British: colourise

so much fuckery

Daredevil S1 > Jessica Jones S1 > DD S2 > The Punisher S1 > DD S3 > Punisher S2 I'd trade every every Marvel movie (and a few of my favorite books) for the worst season on this list. It's really not even close. If you grew up in the 80s and 90s on the grittier side of Marvel, these are for you.

"Down by Law" is a very good movie that you should watch, or watch again.

The drive home.

I improved my Windows experience and so can you, with a simple Powershell script: github.com/zoicware/Rem...

The ASUS ROG Zephyrus 14 is the best Windows laptop I've owned. For me the standout features are the 120Hz 3K OLED screen and the darned good (for a laptop) speakers. If you're a Windows user, envious of MacBook Pro hardware, this one's definitely worth testing out.

These little mollusks keep the redwood forest healthy.

Big Tech is not your friend. It never was and it never will be.

Yeah. It was like that. And we were cool with it.

"We don't have a lot of time on this earth, we weren't meant to spend it this way. Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about mission statements."

LOL

In 5 years, Starlink has grown to ~8M customers. To support that, SpaceX has launched over 10,000 LEO satellites. The first generations are already aging out, vaporized in de-orbit, and are being replaced by newer generations with more bandwidth. (For perspective, Comcast has about 30M customers.)