I wish I could be an AI skeptic when it comes to software eng. Having seen it in action, at scale, even with current capabilities and codebases not designed for it, I can’t find that. Today that looks like solving problems that, for years, required developer pain and monotony. Worried for tomorrow.

Closest I could get to Ouarzazate, the world’s largest concentrated solar power generator - 580MW, saw it peeking above the horizon from 40+km away and had to divert to see how close I could get. A delightful piece of engineering to be nerd sniped by

In which Google AI sends me a Google attributed notification with a strong opinion, provides MSN as a source of that opinion with an article that doesn’t talk about the topic, and only attributes the opinion to Variety when grilled about it.

Spending the week exploring Morocco, trying to avoid dwelling on the gradual erosion of software engineering and/or the United States. (CW tannery, animal pelts)

getting really sick of my friends telling me the cursed blade is warping my mind. it's LITERALLY fine. i can stop fucking using it whenever i want. i think they're just jealous. like they know it'd corrupt them but i'm clearly stronger than its influence. in fact, i'm stronger than all of them...

VR has existed too long: I realized today the high score I couldn’t beat in the VR fitness game I was playing was set when I was 26. Usually you have to be a professional athlete to get this kind of existential dread.

A note to 2025 halloween party planners: inflatable frog costumes take up approximately 1.5 people of room capacity, you're going to get some inflatable frogs

So, one of my weaknesses has always been and will likely remain AR/VR/XR hardware. It is WILD how hard it is to buy the new Meta Displays. In store only, only cities I’ve found with them are Chicago, SF, LA, NYC and Austin. This is despite having *best buy* and *lenscrafters* as partners.

Laughing at the idea of some lucky Oracle employees being told this week they now work for “American TikTok”, and all the follow-up questions they would have to ask before understanding what that even means

I wonder how many quantum computer engineers have been asked if their computers have LLM potential by a product person recently

Now that the Disney Plus boycott is over, does this mean we’re back on schedule for America’s “politiicians quoting Disney Plus Original Series Andor™” era?

Upsides of being trapped in a train for 36 hours: I actually called my representatives today, for the first time in an embarrassingly long time.

Who tf thought this was a good idea: “oh no, we don’t have descriptions for these items, maybe we could just hallucinate some with no context or information for the model to go off of other than the name?”

Burning Man Update: the playa was once a lake, and so it shall be again

I was obsessed with the concept of “printing”, so much so that my parents had to hide the USB cable for the printer at some point.

@rob-sheridan.com - Taken at Burning Man/Black Rock City

Faig Ahmed aka Faiq Əhməd (Azerbaijani, b.1982, Sumqayit, Azerbaijan) - Textile Arts, Carpet Weaving Source: faigahmed.com

one of these days I'll find time to learn atproto

I wonder how many people are living in a constant state of incorrectly thinking that a bulb of garlic is a clove

I feel like the root of Apple’s issues with notification summaries is one of context - it kind of ironically requires app makers to give more readable context behind their app and each notification to be summarized if it’s ever going to work well.

Slack custom emoji culture is still one of my favorite elements of the platform. (I’ll use discord more someday)

The only Andor discourse I have to add is that I think the uncanny valley nature of having holograms be cg doubles instead of real footage is actually nice, and a good stylistic choice if intentional.

@swiftonsecurity.com you are an inspiration, in that you post the wildest shit with no regard for your clout

Hotspotting my phone and downloading all the data from T-Mobile I can get before leaving the country feels like a criminal act: “Hah you fools, by the time your traffic shaping catches me, I’ll be out of this continent”

If I ever find myself involved in a business serving food, I am going to make that business have a conveyor; this is your warning

Has someone figured out the best way to use #atproto to make the social media platform that just lets you post cross platform timestamps and lyrics of songs that moved you It’s important that’s the only thing you can do, so no one can blame you for doing it

Oh no - I (a person who doesn’t care very much about Lil Woody’s or the Mariners) found out that the Tokyo location did an exclusive merch drop in Japan of a Mariners X Lil Woody’s hat. And they were sold out of all the hats but the displays. (The “oh no” is that they let me buy the display)

Found this guy at a mall in Shibuya, I had to

Unironically love how my Bluesky is mostly political discourse from people passionate about it, that also sometimes post about nothing but baseball instead for a day or two

Last thing - most LLM companies hide their system prompt from you, but people find ways to extract them, usually through social engineering the bot itself to tell you, sometimes just via bugs. Here was (probably) grok’s prompt from a few months ago as an example: www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA...

I was literally talking the other day about how funny it was that they couldn’t manage to turn Grok into a sycophant This is awful, but as a bonus it is a fun public lesson in the dangers of context hijacking being caused by priming bias.

My hotel in Kyoto has a special side door into it from the 7-11 that you have to use your hotel card key to get into. My tv in the room also has a normal hdmi port that just works, and a remote with an input button. Incredible amenities, America take notes.

Why’s the Shinkansen gotta be so good

Grant is cool, hire Grant

Generally, I think giving X any additional data on you or humanity is universally bad at this point. Elon has smart, morally bankrupt people working for him, don’t let his incompetence make you underestimate their ability to build a shitty Rehoboam that’s still good enough to fuck up humanity.

I feel like the world would be a better place if this floating action button lined up with profile pictures as you scroll, it makes me sad every time it doesn’t.

I think about this comic at least once a week

I finally dug in on id.me, because I was surprised to see the US government providing an identity service with NIST IAL2 guarantees of one-wallet-per-human. It all makes so much more sense now, id.me is not the federal government at all, the fed is just a customer. Less excited, less surprised. 🙃

One thing Bluesky has reminded me is how nice social media without constant brand bombardment is. I do miss the days of being able to @ every small brand under the sun and get a response, but it turns out that might not be worth the consequences, actually, and maybe shouldn’t come back.

What an excellent use of screen real-estate I’m not allowed to disable, very good thank you YouTube, consider me delighted

I think I’m finally giving in to the truth that most of what I’ve ever had to say on social media is about user experience and software development. This is your warning so you can unfollow.

Your sound card works perfectly! #GilbertGottfried

Almost everywhere in iOS where you can pick a photo from the photo gallery, you are also given the option to take a photo directly with the camera. The wallpaper selector is a rare exception this: this is where they’ve chosen to draw the line where common sense exceeds user choice.

it’s 2025, setting up lights on a schedule is incredibly easy with a smart plug, and yet every single LED grow light on Amazon that isn’t a bulb has an inline timer that is both impossible to automate without mods, and destroys your ability to automate it externally says something, not sure what

@netail.dev - hey, about the changes you merged to changesets recently dealing with git paths. Have you confirmed that's fixed in published? Just finished a deep debugging session on it, think it's still broken? github.com/changesets/c...

a thing i was unprepared for in taking cross country road trips was the everlasting paranoia that you haven’t actually paid all the toll road fees. so anyway that’s why i don’t go through Iowa anymore @iowastatepatrol.bsky.social

today is a “watch retirement brokers yell at each other and their phones in an airport lounge meeting room” kind of day 💸

I sometimes fall asleep with a YouTube video playing. Lately, I wake up to my cat staring at whatever it’s autoplayed to.

Okay but hear me out: North Carolina enacts a resolution to change their flag to a white N on a plain red background, but it only takes effect if South Carolina enacts corresponding legislature to change their flag to a white S on a dark blue background.