On AI coding: "i'd rather wash dishes or stack shelves than submit myself to the horrors of remaining accountable without cognitive ownership, agency, and responsibility." ㅤㅤㅤ

In 1990, ABC executives bet on "Cop Rock", a weekly police procedural that was also a musical. Think CSI: NY, but they break into power ballads and gospel numbers 5 times per episode. That really happened. (For any confused youngsters: broadcast networks back then ran on nepotism and cocaine.) ㅤ

To those mid-tier bands that complained so much about piracy in the '90s, are you better off with streaming and almost no piracy than you were with physical media sales and some piracy? My friends in the music industry tell me the '90s with piracy was a far better deal for writers and performers.

"Clavicular's friend Androgenic reveals the pentastack looksmaxxers use to stream." This was here, on Bluesky. I can't even begin.... What the fuck does that even mean?

"So what do my miraculous sunglasses tell me? Many things. They inform me, in the voice of Princess Anna from “Frozen,” that my dog is a golden retriever mix (he is not) and that a tree I am looking at is probably an oak (it is not). They tell me to walk north when I know I should be walking south."

"Disney has laid off nearly the entire visual development team at Marvel Studios. Only a skeleton crew remains in place to coordinate hiring on a per-project basis...." Full-time VisDev offers world and character consistency you can't get with project-by-project. The worst kind of cost cutting :(

Black Sabath's "War Pigs" is a masterpiece.

mood

The Onion's still got it.

"We're going to put you all out of work over the next few years. We've got no plan for that beyond getting richer and more powerful. Take up any concerns you have with your city council or something." Then they feign surprised when people retaliate. RESIST (in what ever way feels right to you.)

I really should get that "guy throwing Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's mansion" t-shirt made. No reason not to capitalize on his misdeeds and the resulting misfortune that's befalling him. Maybe a riff on the Banksy Molotov work would work.

Six weeks ago, Claude users reported degraded model capability. An Anthropic marketing replied saying users were imagining things. Today, confronted with evidence, Anthropic says it did make changes, to "lowers total cost for users across the request mix." These AI companies cannot be relied upon.

How I understand Tolkien's Orcs. Happy to be corrected. Orcs and Goblins are the same race, probably the corruption of Elves or Humans by Morgoth. Uruks are larger, stronger Orcs. Goblin-men and Half-orcs are Saruman's Orc–Human hybrids. Uruk-hai are Saruman's improved, sun-tolerant Orcs.

Hammond through a fuzzbox is such a trip.

These AI companies, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc. keep telling the press their programmers no longer write code and it's all prompting, but where are all the customer testimonials saying the same. Any I've seen written about are been dwarfed in volume by all the self promotion.

CNBC: Sam Altman's house was targeted with a Molotov cocktail I think a t-shirt with a guy throwing a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's house would probably sell well. I'd buy one.

Reuters: John Deere agreed to pay $99M into a fund to settle a 2022 right-to-repair class action lawsuit, and make digital repair tools available to farmers for 10 years A win for right-to-repair.

It's easy to hate on robots when the worst people in the world are building them for ill, drones blowing up schools, laundry folding humanoids reporting our home lives to Big Tech, but we don't have to accept that. Robots could be awesome. R2D2 is awesome. Data is awesome. Let's build toward those.

Making movies is hard work. Even that one that recently let you down, teams of people busted their asses to bring it to us. Be disappointed, but don't drag them on effort because it didn't land for you.

I worked with a really neat guy at Mozilla named Jesse who wrote early fuzzers, tools that feed apps random data to break them, often exposing security bugs. Some industry players warned that fuzzers were too dangerous to share because bad guys might find bugs. Today, fuzzing is a standard practice.

Hold my calls. console-classics.com/retro-games/...

After the web and mobile revolutions, Silicon Valley ran out of ideas, but not money. We got a decade of gilded garbage like NFTs and the metaverse, a trash heap that proved to be a perfect breeding ground for snake oil. Sam Altman didn't just thrive there; he became the biggest weed in the lot.

I'm sorry, "thought partner" is not a real thing. You check in on startup pitch decks. You're an advisor.

Mozilla development schedule diagram I made and maintained in the summer of 2002 for our text-heavy roadmap document. Our system was pretty simple. Developers landed code with standard code review except during stabilization periods for releases where the project committee's approval was required.

If you've only played pinball on a computer, and never at a pinball machine, you've missed out on about 50% of the joy.

Ronan Farrow on Sam Altman: "We interviewed more than 100 people... a majority of those people really did say some variation on the theme of: he's a pathological liar." "multiple people... used the term 'sociopath.'"

90 second non-skippable ads hitting YouTube. Just great. :(

I bailed on Spotify when it started adding video nonsense. I checked back last year and it was 10x worse. I still don't have a good solution besides torrenting and my NAS, but the headline that Spotify now lets you turn off the video stuff might win me back. What do you all use?

Re-watching The IT Crowd. So many good tees.

For my taste, there has been no better television this century than the tenth episode of Andor's first season, "One Way Out." The themes, writing, direction, and acting are a perfect ten across the board. What a triumph. If you have not watched this series, I implore you to do so.

White Spindles (also called Fairy Fingers) growing in our back yard. They really like the damp redwood litter.

In case you haven't me her yet, this is Mochi. We rescued her from a pretty awful situation two and a half years ago. She was almost entirely "shut down" when we got her (first photo) and she's still very chill, but she's come a long way. We're really happy to have her in our family.

I grew up in the era of mall arcades and NES. Sure, I had a C64 at home before then, and I sometimes played Nintendo alone, but most of my childhood gaming was an in-person social thing, either a big gang of us at the arcade or a few school/neighborhood friends on the living room floor. I miss that.

I've noticed that if I remove a history item in Firefox, links persist their visited color even with a forced reload, and it's not until I open the page in a new tab/process that the links return to the un-visited style. Is this expected? If so, why? #Gecko

Each time the Moon rotates once, it also orbits Earth once, so we always see the same side. This is because Earth’s gravity stretches the Moon slightly, and because that stretch is a bit off-center, it creates drag that slowly syncs its spin with its orbit. (Excellent visualization from NASA.)

Anthropic has been throttling users of even the most expensive tiers and appears to be compute constrained. I wonder if their "Mythos is too dangerous to release to the public" claims are really just cover for not having the compute to support that model at scale.

I think I'm gonna get a ham license. Any of you taken the technician test? What should I expect for study time? I grew up in a CB and ham household (and community) and had some station training in college radio, so I'm not a total novice, but I'm also unsure what to expect. #AmateurRadio

I rarely follow very popular accounts. One of my heuristics for curating my feed is that post quality is inversely proportional to the number of followers. People with big audiences tend to cater to their audience, and fan service is just not my thing.

"Everyday, once a day, give yourself a present. Don’t plan it, don’t wait for it. Just let it happen."

36 years ago today, David Lynch, Mark Frost and Angelo Badalamenti changed everything.

Many good people and things in my life can be traced back to this wonderful little contraption. I've owned three, the second and third after giving away the first and second. I've owned far more expensive and featureful cameras, both film and digital, but there's really nothing like your first.

Remember this gem from 2019? It was always marketing. The AI barons have been full of shit since the beginning. slate.com/technology/2...

How much is AI being used simply to suppress wages? We know it's being used as an excuse for entirely unrelated layoffs, but I presume the threat of being replaced by AI also means workers are less likely to ask for a raise, or consider risky moves to other companies for better pay.

The AI moguls are pivoting. Only last year, they were still promising do-it-all models. Now, running out of runway, they’re focused on enterprise niches like coding & logistics, and their models are worsening for general use. AI is not world-changing, it's just another shitty enterprise tool.

I said this when that Meta and Google verdict came out. It's a "Big Tobacco" and maybe "Opioid Pharma" moment for Big Tech. Those resulted in the Tobacco Master Settlement and the Global Opioid Settlement. Maybe we'll get a Big Tech Settlement that takes these fuckers down a peg or two.

Bloomberg: OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are sharing information via the Frontier Model Forum to detect adversarial distillation attempts that violate their ToS They can steal all the worlds information to train their models, but it's wrong for others to train on their models. Fucking hypocrites.

The Information: Source: Meta shutters an internal, employee-built leaderboard, dubbed Claudeonomics, tracking staff token usage, due to the data “being shared externally” Nice. Apparently it was bad press, so they're at least pretending to change.

NPR, on cities ending Flock surveillance contracts, mostly because of public push back. "In the end, it was just clear that this wasn't going to be a technology that was going to be well received or that we could continue to use." Flock is not inevitable. RESIST www.npr.org/2026/02/17/n...

mood

I did so much stupid shit when I was young, and I am immeasurably grateful we didn't all have cameras in our pockets to document it. I really feel for kids today. They have to worry that all that normal nonsense of growing up will be recorded and shared online. That's gotta suck. Damn.