Apple just turned the most popular camera in the world into an AI slop machine. After insisting that a photograph is "something that really, actually happened", now Apple's telling iPhone users that photos are whatever they want, entirely mutable by Apple's AI. :-(

12 year old me lusted. Lusted, I tell you. ㅤㅤㅤ

birthday mood

"Scientists make sourdough bread using yeast found in 5,000-year-old mummy" I enjoy food and I'm happy with how much I've expanded my appreciation for different foods. This is one I think I'll sit out.

Over 25 years I've used Mac, Windows, and Linux PCs interchangeably. I've done the same with smartphones. And you know what? They all suck, big time. Being a fan of one or hating on another is foolish. It should be us against them, demanding better, not bickering with each other like sports fans.

I think I could pull off Thoreau's neck beard. What do you all think? Should I give it a go?

24 years ago, Mozilla released its first browser, Mozilla 1.0. I know this because I helped ship it. I remember this because it's my birthday :D

xAI is leasing out its data centers to Google and Anthropic for a combined $25B/yr. I wonder why xAI isn't using all of that capacity. It's almost as if the company overbuilt. Either that, or their LLM efforts have stalled out early.

According to Apple analysts, its new CEO has fully abandoned VR goggles for AI glasses. This is the right move. What goes unsaid here, however, is this is Apple abandoning its new PC form factor and potentially lucrative app store for an iPhone accessory that, at best, will be Watch for your face.

The MAVEN orbiter around Mars has been declared dead after about a decade of service. That leaves Nasa with two satellites there, Mars Odyssey launched in 2001, andMars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) launched in 2005. Nasa's next spacecraft, Mars Telecommunications Orbiter (MTO), could launch in 2028.

TIL: David Solomon, the CEO Goldman Sachs, is an EDM producer and DJ that performs under the name DJ D-Sol.

I'll eventually get a good lens for shooting our trees, but the smartphone will have to do for now. This coast redwood, our largest, is over 225 ft tall and right at 7 ft diameter. I estimate the aboveground part weighs well over 100 tons, perhaps as much as 150 tons.

The California Buckeye are once again in bloom. I love these flowers.

GREED I$ THE VIRU$

Qualcomm & NVIDIA vs AMD & Intel? IMO, gaming is a boat anchor for Windows on ARM. I've been using the QC laptops for over 7 years, and while just fine for browsing, they're terrible for gaming. Can NVIDIA Spark change that? Could ARM64 displace x64 as the preferred target for Windows developers?

For years I thought movie lighting looked bad to me because I was watching overly-optimized streams on mediocre laptop screens. But today I have a great OLED laptop, and I'm back to high-bitrate downloads, yet the lighting in most new movies I watch still looks terrible to me. What happened?

It's possible I'm biased. But after careful consideration of every generation since the beginning of civilization, I have to say: Generation X is the best one.

mood

It turns out that a basic understanding of regular expressions was the only lasting bit from my attempts at writing Perl in 2000 and 2001. I never got far with scripting, but regular expressions have saved me more time than I could have imagined back then, so I'm glad I made the attempt.

From the web: Amazon has reportedly scrapped its internal AI leaderboard as costs soared, with a senior executive telling staff: “don’t use AI just for the sake of using AI.”

About nine months ago I started censoring myself here, adjusting my writing to avoid semicolons, em-dashes, certain words, and other bits folks now associate with generative AI text. Fuck that—I'm done letting the noise around AI slop disrupt and degrade my writing. Don't think it's me? Move on.

This one made me happy so I don't feel too bad about the C&P.

It's that time again.

Finished another Twin Peaks marathon and, wow. What a great show. David Lynch is my vibe.

If you have to send your chief designer to major media outlets to explain his reasoning for all of the design decisions, the design is probably bad.

HAHAHAHAHAHA! "An AI consultant tells Axios one of their clients recently spent half a billion dollars in a single month after failing to put usage limits on Claude licenses for employees." HAHAHAHAHAHA! Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. HAHAHAHAHAHA! HAHAHAHAHAHA! HAHAHAHAHAHA!

From the web: "Uber’s COO says heavy AI spending is getting harder to justify, as higher token usage fails to show a clear payoff in consumer features."

For years I had Netflix, HBO, Apple TV, Disney+, and Prime Video. I've since cancelled all but Disney+ (free add-on w/ my phone plan) and Prime Video (free add-on w/ Prime shipping), and I barely touch those. I'm back to the pre-streaming days, torrenting 95% of my movies and shows. Feels good.

mood

Jony Ive is not a great designer. He's barely competent. This is awful in just about every way an interior could be awful. My 1980 Honda Accord had a more attractive interior.

Ferrari's former president: "If I say what I think, I'd harm Ferrari. There's a risk of destroying a legend. I'm very, very sorry. I hope at least they remove the prancing horse logo from that car"

What's the movie or show you've seen the most times, and over what timespan? For me, the movie is Lord of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, closely followed by Raising Arizona. On the TV side, Andor (2022–2025), has just passed Daredevil (2015–2018, and in short order.

The Time Grappler is probably my favorite non-speaking character on the screen. I feel it when he opens those scenes. In my body. It's visceral. I'm bound to his movements. I am a part of his community in those moments. For my taste, cinema doesn't get better than that.

Power doesn't panic.

Hard to imagine an uglier Ferrari.

Bryan Catanzaro, vice president of applied deep learning at NVIDIA, the top AI chip maker, told Axios, "For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees."

Top 10 favorite supporting characters in a movie, favorite couple for sure:

Randal Graves is a real one.

For my taste, the hottest male rock vocalists:

1920s fractal vice, restored by Hand Tool Rescue. It's got 30 jaws that work together to hold oddly shaped objects. I love it. I don't need one, but I want one. www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBeO...

‪Spider-Man's all over: Forest Hills, Rego Park, Midtown South, East Midtown-Turtle Bay, West Village, East Village, Lower East Side, SoHo-TriBeCa-Civic Center-Little Italy, Chelsea-Hudson Yards, etc. Daredevil's mostly in Hell's Kitchen, yet he regularly calls that neighborhood "my city." ㅤㅤ

Bank CEO calls workers "lower-value human capital." These pig fuckers need to be run out of town on a rail.

Worth keeping an eye on: airesistlist.org

We're finally getting correct headlines. It's not AI replacing workers, it's workers being shit-canned so Big Tech can continue to gamble on AI. "Tech layoffs have already passed 100,000 in 2026 as the industry cuts jobs to fund AI" www.techspot.com/news/112493-...

I’m practicing high-speed auditory reading with NVDA and just hit "comfortable" at ~500 WPM for prose (targeting 700). That’s similar to a podcast at ~3.3x. Synthetic voices over natural let me break 3x. Synth: eSpeak NG / Variant: Max / Rate: 35 (Boost on) / Pitch: 40 / Inflection: 0 / Punc: None

The only decent-seeming, vibe-coded apps I can find were not actually vibe-coded. They had vibe-coded demos, but as soon as they got any traction, they hired actual programmers to make them decent. Anyone got leads on finding a great web or mobile app that was entirely vibe-coded, no pros involved?

Where are all the "vibe coded" C++ programs. It seems all I can find in the wild is pretty shitty web apps and a few mobile apps written in Swift or React Native. Why no C++?

mood

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