Joys of camping: book spot one year out, battle traffic for hours, pull into a packed parking lot with trees, listen to kids complain about crap internet, fall asleep early exhausted, wake 1 am 2 am then 3 am, fall down in the dark trying to pee, up at 5 am, leave early after kids threaten mutiny.

Just got GPT-5 and the first test (oddly I know) is whether voice mode can speak in Spanglish. Passed with flying colors, switching back and forth flawlessly for the first time.

The Niche Machine is here. We are now not just seeing AI slop about current events and natural disasters, we are seeing hyperpersonalized AI slop that combines "news" and disinformation with any interest / celebrity / hobby you could possibly imagine www.404media.co/the-ai-slop-...

“We have never graduated coders. We have always graduated software engineers.” www.geekwire.com/2025/coding-...

@theverge.com Hey how can I tell on mobile web which story is free and which is premium?

Of course it did. And there will be more reports like this. www.nbcnews.com/world/europe...

Amazing how much CGI looks Ike AI now.

Seattle is at risk of becoming an “old tech” town — nearly all AI innovation is squarely back in Silicon Valley/SF. Microsoft is powering a big part of it, but faces increasing risks as AI upends software ecosystems. Amazon… ugh… had a huge head start with Alexa, and now…?

Microsoft cuts people to help offset the high cost of AI data centers. Then as AI gets even better, it will cut more people. Double whammy for tech workers.

Worst Father's Day JCPenney ad photos ever.

Fascinating data point from Cloudflare’s CEO: click rates to AI source citations are plummeting because people trust the results more. In a ratio of pages scraped to search visitors, OpenAI was 250:1 six months ago, now 1500:1. m.youtube.com/watch?v=H5C9...

A moderately common event is someone confidently tells me that LLMs can't solve their specific puzzle, I whack it in o3, it spins up a python programme that solves it in 12 seconds, and it turns out the person had only ever tested it on the free versions of ChatGPT and Grok

New from 404 Media: ICE is using a new facial recognition app to identify people, leaked emails show. Point camera at person, reveal their identity. It uses the CBP system that records peoples' faces as they enter or exit the U.S. Now, turned inwards to be used by ICE www.404media.co/ice-is-using...

Good overview of how AI is playing a larger roll in elections — for better or worse. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/t...

Unsurprising — and as AI makes it easier to get the news, fewer Americans will pay (at least directly).

I like this. Context engineering.

Not a fan of these kinds of user surveys. Reducing information friction is always popular if you design it well. Users struggle to articulate features — or even recognize that AI is at play. Anti-AI fears skew numbers, too. 1/2

When someone is talking with their AI in voice mode, it’s rude to interrupt. 😏

👎👎👎 OKC 👎👎👎 #Sonics

We as a community are rooting for Indy and not this dishonorable basketball, yes?

What is up with all the Achilles injuries in the NBA? Can’t remember it happening this often over the years. #nbasky

AI is changing how we speak www.theverge.com/openai/68674...

Completely agree, and feeds and lists don’t help when there’s so little niche content to begin with. If engagement mostly rewards political posts, there’s not much incentive to post anything else. The architecture invites content diversity but the culture discourages it.

Excellent thread 💯

NEW from me and @thiccreese.bsky.social: Disney is suing Midjourney for copyright infringement, but Midjourney's new video tool still produces animations of some Disney characters (including stuff like Wall-E with a gun or Yoda smoking weed): www.wired.com/story/midjou...

Agree — this is why Bluesky engagement is steadily declining. bsky.jazco.dev/stats

These @erikwemple.bsky.social media Q&A columns are great and illustrate 1) people have deserving questions 2) the media has a long ways to go to be transparent and 3) the oddity of qualifying transparency as “opinion,” as it is here. www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

I’m always amazed by the lack of geographic detail in local news reporting. Can have unintended effect of making localized events appear to be widespread.

Rooting for the Pacers to destroy the Sonics Stealers. #nba

The Last of Us Season 2 was garbage and it has nothing to do with the actors. Looking forward to Stranger Things...

One of those ☀️ days in Seattle

Wow: after 15 years, YouTube has taken down the original 'Rick Roll' video due to a "licensing issue," likely due to the acquisition of Astley's record lable. The metadata remains, but if you click through it goes to 'video not found': www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4...

This is some good journalism

Excellent NYT graphic. In the space of about 3 months, tariffs on China: -- doubled; -- went up ≈ 2.5X from there; -- roughly doubled again; -- went up ≈ 40% from there; -- and now have dropped ≈ 80% from the peak -- but are still 3X what they were in February. www.nytimes.com/article/trum...

This headline hurt my brain. “Boy hits car” is the name of a band. I had to read this a few times

This is one of my biggest frustrations with tariff news coverage — it’s lazy and/or illustrates a lack of depth in business and economics. It’s like covering COVID through statements, not science.

Sunday's @nytimes.com carries the photos of 15 medics and rescue workers shot and killed by the IDF in Gaza in March, collected from their families and colleagues. QR links out to video reconstruct, Six Deadly Minutes. Please share. www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWhN...

“This is the most difficult misinformation environment I’ve ever encountered.” blog.factal.com/2025/05/how-...

Incredible story and novel use of AI www.npr.org/2025/05/07/g...

It's honestly kind of insane how the last few months have been logistics companies and OEMs staring off into the distance at impending oblivion while the companies that use those services are in complete denial of what's going on and assume the tariff otaku will change his mind at the last second

Y’all, the shortages are coming and they are baked in. Even if all the tariffs disappear tomorrow the resulting surge will logjam the system. Also it doesn’t seem like they are disappearing tomorrow. Just cause multinationals can navigate this doesn’t mean countless small businesses aren’t toast.

New from 404 Media: the Signal clone the Trump administration uses was just hacked. TeleMessage makes a modified version of Signal that archives messages for government agencies, Waltz used it. A hacker got some users' messages, group chats. Hugely significant breach www.404media.co/the-signal-c...

I find it amazing that most Americans don’t see — or choose to ignore — the Covid-size economic disruption that’s about to hit. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/01/b...

Sovereignty beats Journalism. Typical.

He’s 94. Not shocking.

Two airliners abandoned landing attempts at Washington’s Reagan National Airport on Thursday afternoon when an Army Black Hawk took a “scenic route” near the flight path and circled the Pentagon before landing at a military heliport.

When you roll it all together in one column, it certainly illustrates the systematic effort to weaken freedom of the press www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

> @nytimes.com

always a little weird to see in politicians' footnotes