Had to run to our storage to get our ice chests, corn hole stuff, and ice cream maker and found this fella. Yeah, he’s long dead, but very impressive!
Our grandkids love putting “makeup” on our happy garden monk. 😃
Our little bunny friend is in the front yard tonight!
The Sad State of our Nation
Stunning how media has turned passage of the Abominable Bill into a will they-or-won’t they romcom with a July 4th deadline for Cinderella to kiss the prince, rather than a situation in which multiple members of Congress say they’re terrified they or their families will be killed if they cross Trump
This is what we’ve come to. I hope these member of Congress stand up and do what’s right for our nation.
Let me be specific about what I mean. This week, Donald Trump posted explicit orders on Truth Social directing federal law enforcement to conduct “Mass Deportation Operations” targeting “America’s largest Cities” because they are “the core of the Democrat Power Center.” He used the term “REMIGRATION”—language borrowed directly from European fascist movements. He accused Democratic officials of treason for opposing him. He framed resistance to his orders as hatred of America itself.
We are a fascist nation and that’s disgusting. My sincerest hope is we can force that orange asshole out of office after his four year reign of terror is over.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Yes, it’s Sunday morning. We had our grandkids stay with us for a couple days which is fun and exhausting. So, yeah, I’m a bit late this week. Rather I was a bit late last week? 🤔
Enjoy the links.
Shelby Talcott and Morgan Chalfant • Semafor
The US bombed three Iranian nuclear facilities on Saturday evening, President Donald Trump said.
I put this here because it’s important and should probably warrant its own post. I don’t feel great about what “we” did to Iran. Yes, it’s a terribly oppressive nation with theocratic leadership and a model of what not to be as a nation. Yet, I wish we hadn’t bombed them. So far things seem to be as stable as you could expect after doing something like this. Apparently the Iranians moved their nuclear material out of the sites. While it hasn’t been refined to its most dangerous state they could still put together a dirty bomb to drop on Israel. That’s frightening and I’m not excited about the prospect.
In a way, one could say Liquid Glass is like a new version of Aqua. It has reflective properties reminiscent of that. One could also say it’s an evolution of whatever iOS 7 was, leaning into the frosted panels and bright accent colors. But whatever Liquid Glass seems to be, it isn’t what many of us were hoping for.
Louie has been around the design block more than a few times. I like his takes on UI and design and enjoyed this piece on Liquid Glass. I’d expect a sizable series of posts related to the new design.
As for my take? I don’t really have one at the moment. I’m just going to adapt Stream to the new design and move on. I have so many things to add to Stream I find it difficult to get wrapped up in the debate around the new design language.
At some point I may have an opinion but not today.
The first thing I installed after the WWDC25 Keynote was the beta for iPadOS. There was only one reason: it had the windows we have all wanted for so long.
The iPad seems to have gotten a lot of love this release cycle and that’s great! I’ve seen more than a few takes but Craig is an old timer in the Mac and iOS ecosystem and understands the OS’es really darned well.
All that’s missing is a timeline viewer, and that’s what I’m working on now. It’s coming together pretty nicely, imho. Not an easy project, though on the surface it looks like it should be. Also there’s nothing proprietary about my timeline viewer. There could be a thousand of them. Anyone who has written an RSS feed reader will have all the low-level bits they need.
I’m curious to see what Dave is going to produce. I suspect his timeline viewer will be a lot like Stream’s. Just a flow of blog posts in chronological order, no sorting, no folders, etc.
Having a timeline based feed reader is exactly what motivated me to create Stream in the first place.
Maybe Dave has other ideas? I’ll be keeping an eye out for whatever he creates.
In less than a week of work I migrated my 7 year old React Native app to Expo. The app Is called Blur, and is a fun party game that gives a group of friends challenges, questions, and mini-games to do! In addition to simple (and complex) React Native components, this app includes an iOS widget, notifications, custom fonts and a good list of dependencies.
If you’re a React Native dev with an old app you’d like to upgrade to Expo here’s a nice article for you. Enjoy.
Brian Morrissey • The Rebooting
Substack is a consequential company in the rebooting, if you will, of media. It has emerged as shorthand for the decentralization of media.
Decentralized? I’d argue it’s completely centralized. All these authors rely on Substack for their entire publishing system. From writing to distribution they’re built on a single system. And it’s a horrible company to boot.
No matter how many times I’ve told folks on Substack about their embrace of Nazi’s they continue to publish there, this includes some Jewish writers, which is shocking to me. There are alternatives. Molly White has done the work so you don’t have to.
In Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror classic _The Shining, _the camera zooms in toward a black-and-white photograph hanging in the hallway of the Overlook Hotel. It’s dated July 4, 1921. Dead centre stands Jack Torrance — played by Jack Nicholson — smiling in a crowd of partygoers.
I had no idea there was a mystery surrounding the source of the picture. Problem solved!
My coworkers don’t want AI. They want macros.
I understand where Ruth is coming from. Folks just want to do their jobs and if they think macros are better than AI, that’s fine. AI is just another tool in the toolbox. Use it, don’t use it. Doesn’t matter.
New York City Council member Keith Powers has partnered with our friends at Bodega Cats New York to pass legislation that would make it completely legal for these loyal felines to stay in their favorite spots in neighborhood convenience stores all around the five boroughs.
I’m cool with this idea! I love cats and Bodega Cats are a big deal in New York City.
I’m sure some folks will push back on the idea of allowing them permanent residence but I’d welcome it.🐱
Elon Musk fired Tesla’s head of operations in North America and Europe, amid declining sales in both regions and the electric vehicle brand’s falling popularity, according to people familiar with the matter.
Oh, the irony! Space Karen made himself the most hated man in America. He caused Tesla to fall. He caused folks to sell their Tesla’s and avoid them like the plague. Just like the Marmalade Messiah he has to blame everyone but himself.
Tesla needs good leadership. They need a CEO who’s invested in the company. They need to fire Musk.
My grandson loves Spider-Man.
Here are the various different types.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
I’ve been experimenting with another read later app called Flyleaf this week. I’m finding I love Plinky for saving links to articles, mainly about development, I can read at anytime. I normally do this with Notion but Plinky is really great at it.
As for read later style apps, Flyleaf does a great job stripping away all the cruft and presents text in a way that’s easy to read with my aging eyes. 👀
I realized a couple days back that Kim and I graduated from high school 40 years ago. That’s wild. That means we celebrate our 38th wedding anniversary this August. 40 is just around the corner. 😳
I’ve added a new feature to Stream for my friend Ashur Cabrera. It allows you to invoke a custom URL scheme to make Stream add a new subscription. Kind of easy to do and the code was in really good shape to make it easy. Ashur did find a bug so I’m off exploring that and I ran into a crashing bug just running Stream in the usual way. It all seems to stem from building with Xcode 16.x. I managed to easily fix it on iOS but iPadOS still crashes. That has to do with my Split View and how it’s being created. It’s a weird one. I’ll get it fixed soon, I hope, so I can finish off this new feature. 😃
Enjoy the links.
My biggest takeaway from WWDC 2025 is that Apple seemingly took some lessons to heart from its unfulfilled promises of a year ago. This year’s WWDC wasn’t merely focused on what Apple is confident it can ship in the next 12 months, but on what they can ship this fall. I might be overlooking a minor exception or two, but every major feature announced in the WWDC 2025 keynote was both demonstratable in product briefings, and is currently available in the developer beta seeds. I was also told, explicitly, by Apple executives, that Apple plans to ship everything shown last week in the fall.
It seems Apple’s gonna give us a bit of Apple Intelligence with Xcode, which is really nice, and better support in Shortcuts to really make your apps shine. But one of the things I’m actually super interested to try is the on device models. I think Stream could use it for a recommendation system. We’ll see.
Oh, right, and that whole Liquid Glass thing is happening too.
My hope is to get Stream for iOS updates to Liquid Glass and add a recommended feeds list that is hand curated and generated using on device models. That should make for a swell update.
Enga Perez • Caring Minds United
Scientists have spent four years diving deep into the world of remote work and stumbled upon a powerful truth: working from home genuinely makes us happier.
I could’ve told you that. 😃 But I have been thinking about going to the office one or two days a week.
I use AI a lot for work, pretty much all day every day. I use coding assistants and custom agents I’ve built. I use AI to help code review changes, dig into bugs, and keep track of my projects. I’ve found lots of things it’s very helpful with, and lots of things it’s terrible at. If there’s one thing I have definitely learned: it does not work the way I imagined. And the more folks I talk with about it, the more I find it doesn’t work like they imagine, either.
Pretty long post but worth a bit of time.
I’m not using LLMs for that much in my day-to-day dev work, yet, but I continue to use it for generating scripts and finding good answers to strange bugs in code. I’ll probably use it to help solve the iPadOS bug in Stream, since it just cropped up after updating to a newer version of Xcode since I last released it.
While more than 3.5 million people have spent the last couple of weeks glued to a brand-new Nintendo Switch 2, X user PatRyk (@Patrosi73) decided to invest their time elsewhere: trying to run iOS on the original Nintendo Switch. And they did it! Sort of.
I love hearing about folks hacking stuff into place to make things work where they shouldn’t. This is a prime example of that hacker spirit.
Microsoft is unveiling its own command-line text editor at its Build conference today. Edit on Windows will be accessible by using “edit” in a command prompt, allowing developers to edit files within the command line. It’s part of several improvements aimed at bettering the Windows experience for developers.
Since Microsoft has embraced open source tooling, Linux, and Mac more they seem to have gone back to more command like tools development. They did a brand new shell, that can host other shell types, and now they’re building a brand new command line editor? Wild. 😃
Can you make it compatible with Brief? 🙏🏼
The module looks nothing like an iPhone. It intentionally resembles the broadcast camera module, and Apple even had to match the weight so that its version wouldn’t alter a car’s specs. The inside, however, is completely different. (Apple gave us a peek during WWDC last week alongside an F1 car.)
It’s too bad this quality of video isn’t streamed out of the current camera setups on the cars.
Maybe that’ll be the next “big thing.” Go Pro like devices that stream super high quality video?
Rather than pausing new investments or considering divestment, many pension officials and asset managers are instead pressing Tesla’s boardto get Elon Musk to return to working full-time at the company, as if the core problem is simply that Musk is too distracted. However, this assertion overlooks a far more serious problem: Musk’s reputation is so tarnished that Tesla won’t be able to thrive as long as he remains the CEO.
Musk needs to go so Tesla can be remade into a great company.
We’re already well into 2025, and it has been a huge start to the year for Mastodon. We want to bring you an overdue update on exactly what we’re working on, from a strategic perspective.
It’s great to see Mastodon charging forward. We absolutely need this open ecosystem for social networks.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Tuesday that the company expects artificial intelligence “will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains” over time.
“We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people do other types of jobs,” Jassy added in a memo to Amazon’s workforce.
I’ve had really mixed feeling about “AI” (I don’t find it to be intelligent, at all.) at WillowTree we’ve been pushing hard on using these LLM services to help us move faster. Hey, we’re in the client services business, we have to move fast. And the more I learn about it the more I’ve come to realize it’s just a really good sidekick. We will continue to need to think through problems and come up with interesting designs and solutions because these services only “know” what they’re trained against. We still need to invent new things, right? It’s a hammer, nothing else.
Kim’s berries are looking pretty happy. They’ve struggled for years to produce berries.
Coffee with Bug this morning.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Heat has moved into the Charlottesville area along with humidity. The heat isn’t so bad and I think I’m finally getting used to the humidity. As me how I feel about it in a couple months, I may change my mind. 😃
Nothing spectacular going on. It’s been a pretty average week.
The affected Anker PowerCore 10000 power banks were sold through Anker’s website, Amazon, Newegg, and eBay between June 2016 and December 2022. Given Anker’s popularity among Apple users and the fire risk these batteries pose, you should immediately check if your power bank is affected by visiting Anker’s recall webpage. Affected units are eligible for a free replacement or a $30 gift card.
I have one of these and love the darned thing. Guess I’d better see if I have one of the recalled versions. I’d happily take a replacement because they’re wonderful! (Except for that whole possibility of catching fire thing.) 🤣
Today, we’re going to learn how modern programming languages are governed. I’ll explain how Swift’s dictatorial structure is uniquely terrible, and demonstrate to you how bad the situation has become.
I doubt that is a popular opinion, but I do share it. Some of the latest changes have made the language even more complicated than it was before.
I’m also old and somewhat set in my ways, until I’m not. I have yet to dive into the power of async/await and sendable types, which at a high level makes sense to me, and Stream could absolutely use it. The big question is, what reason do I have to do it when the networking code I have works fine the way it is?
I have project Rooster on the drawing board. I’ll use it there along with SwiftUI. It’ll take me 10-years to complete the work. 😃
Jason Hellerman • No Film School
‘Sinners’ is the Highest-Grossing Original Film in 15 Years
I want to see this film so much! I’m gonna have to convince Bug, our youngest daughter and movie buddy, to go see it with me. Probably won’t take much convincing. Looks like we’ll have to see it at home.
A British man has walked away from the wreckage of the Air India crash that killed 241 people in an extraordinary tale of survival.
All I could see was that scene of Bruce Willis in Unbreakable waking up in the hospital after the train crash.
Apple embraces the blurring lines between iPad and Mac. Finally.
I played around with this in the Xcode 26 simulator for a bit. It’s really interesting and makes me think Stream on iPad could really make good use of it. We’ll see if my creativity can stretch far enough to do something interesting.
Violent Night 2 sets December 2026 release, with Tommy Wirkola returning to direct the sequel
Sign me up! We loved David Harbour as the Viking St. Nicholas and it sounds like this film may lean into that a bit!
I know we’ll see this one in theatres.
Barnes & Noble has updated its Nook app for iPhone and iPad with a new “buy on BN.com” button that redirects users to the company’s website to complete e-book and audiobook purchases
Another big name taking advantage of new App Store policy that allows folks to link out to a payment system not Apple’s.
I really wish Apple would cave on this and allow third party payment systems in app. Apple has always been about the User Experience and allowing folks to use other payment systems right inside their apps would deliver that. Jumping outside the app is a forced limitation. Apple wants devs to use their IAP, so they force a bad experience by making users jump to a web page if the app chooses to use a third party system.
We’ve had online payment on the internet for years and years now. There are many trustworthy third party payment systems to choose from that could keep payments above board.
If Apple would drop their fee to five percent I doubt few companies would choose to use a third party solution.
Alas, they will continue fighting against it. 🥺
Vivaldi browser might not be the first to come to mind when you’re looking for the best browsers on the market. But after switching from Arc and giving it a proper try, I’m officially hooked. Vivaldi is packed with features, making it one of the most underrated browsers available today.
I’ve installed this but I haven’t given it a good look yet. It’s yet another app built using the Blink rendering engine (part of Chromium.)
I wish someone would go off and do a really cool WebKit based browser with a 100% SwiftUI GUI. WebKit is the guts of the browser, it’s everything from networking to parsing to rendering. It’s basically the browser minus the UI surrounding it.
Looks like Finder isn’t the only Mac application to see big icon changes in macOS Tahoe. Poor Otto had his arms, legs, and pipe taken away:
The new #LiquidAss, yes, I know, it’s LiquidGlass, UI introduced at WWDC this year is a big change in all the various operating system flavors.
It’s fine. I’m just going with the flow on this one. I have some ideas to make Stream embrace it a bit. More on that later. I really wish I could go work on this full time until iOS 26 ships in September. I think I could do some really cool stuff between now and then. As it is, I’ll do the best I can with the time I have.
The original Black Sabbath line-up - Iommi, Ozzy Osbourne, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward - will reunite once more to play their farewell show at Birmingham’s Villa Park on July 5, and, in common with his bandmates, the guitarist admits to a certain amount of trepidation as to how the day might play out.
I wish the entire Sabbath lineup a perfect show and send off. I’d love to be there. 🇬🇧
But here at Multiline Comment HQ we don’t measure Apple’s leadership team by their penchant for bootlicking or falsifying testimony in federal court, or even by public opinion. No, our tools are different: we use headshots, and lots of ‘em.
Over the years I’ve gotten to know Ashur a bit and he’s a super nice, super smart, and super creative dude. Follow him. He does nifty web experiments on occasion and other interesting stuff like this! ❤️
On the one hand, it echoes and amplifies the training distribution argument that I have been making since 1998: neural networks of various kinds can generalize within a training distribution of data they are exposed to, but their generalizations tend to break down outside that distribution.
To be honest this article makes me feel a bit better about what we refer to as AI today. Our man made AI is only as good as we’ve been able to make it. It’s not self aware, nor is it thinking, it’s just dumping balls into the top of the pachinko machine and making choices based on its inputs. That’s it.
Is this a rant against LLMs? Nope. They’re darned useful but you still need to question the answers you get. Validate them.
From a coding perspective they’re pretty darned good. They’re the next evolution in IDE tool tip style help. I’ve seen them used to great effect generating unit tests for existing code and even produced nice solutions for other problems.
Keep in mind those outputs are only as good as the inputs used to train the LLM. It’s code that already exists in the world. It’s just been digested by the LLM so it can spit it out quickly.
Cody Williams • The Daily Downforce
After a 13-year absence, and a lot of speculation this week, it was finally made official in Motor City: Dodge is coming back to NASCAR!
I am super excited by the return of Dodge to the Truck Series! Now, let’s get a new Cup team set up and how about an IndyCar and F1 team? More racing, more American horsepower on the various grids!
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
I’ve been on vacation/holiday/or whatever you call it. Work calls it Paid Time Off, or PTO. I call it time with the grandkids.
Kim and I spent most of the week camping with our grandchildren at Myrtle Beach State Park. This was our first trip to the park and I really enjoyed our time there. The amenities at the park were excellent. We had power and water at our campsite hooked directly to our trailer, a bathhouse about 30-yards away, and a nice camp store just around the corner. Oh, right, not to mention the beach about 100 yards from the campsite. We spent Tuesday and Wednesday mornings at the beach and kind of chilled or puttered around other places Myrtle Beach had to offer.
There are so many places to see and things to do we didn’t even scratch the surface. Next year we have to do seven to 10 days with our entire family in tow. ⛱️
Brian Merchant • Blood in the Machine
☢️ WARNING: Substack
Like a lot of figureheads in the AI industry, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says that ordinary people are not ready for the changes AI is about to unleash on the world. In a widely circulated interview with Axios, Amodei warns we are on the brink of what his interviewers describe as a “job apocalypse” that will wipe out half of entry level jobs and cause the unemployment rate to rise up to 20%.
I’m more torn than ever about using AI in the workplace. As I mentioned last week, I used AI to help with a CI/CD GitHub Action I was setting up and it provided clues to my issue but I never really found a true answer to the problem. It took an experienced human to figure out what I missed in my setup.
Poor prompting on my part? Probably. This is why AI will replace me someday. 😃
By that time I hope to be retired.
You’re probably wondering what happened. One day we were all-in on Arc. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, we started building something new: Dia.
This piece feels rambling to me. It’s obvious the author has a lot to say and feels the need to justify their move to sideline Arc. I don’t blame them. I know folks who love Arc and have gone all in on it. They’re extremely disappointed. Hopefully the like Dia. 🤞🏼
Jonathan M. Gitlan • Ars Technica
Verstappen slowed to let Russell through, then sped up into turn 4, opening up his steering and colliding with the Mercedes. Call it petulance or frustration; it was an inexcusable lapse of judgment from a driver. Using one’s car as a weapon against another competitor on track is unacceptable, and the 10-second penalty that Verstappen earned as a result dropped him to 10th place at the end, ruining his own race more than anyone else’s.
I don’t know Max Verstappen but I’ve never really liked the guy. Temper tantrums like this don’t have a place in racing but they do happen. Professional athletes get to their positions by being the best at their craft and often have large egos to go along with the skill. Verstappen is a prime example of ego and skill.
Firefox could be put out of business should a court implement all the Justice Department’s proposals to restrict Google’s search monopoly, an executive for the browser owner Mozilla testified Friday. “It’s very frightening,” Mozilla CFO Eric Muhlheim said.
It would be absolutely tragic if Mozilla was out of business. We need more browser engines, not fewer. Microsoft giving up on their browser was a huge blow to the ecosystem and competition.
The thing is, the only companies who could afford to bail them out want to control the internet and have corporate interests to fulfill.
Who could be a good steward? Facebook? Definitely not. They’re a super scummy company. Apple? They don’t need another browser. Google? Don’t need another browser. Microsoft? They should have their own browser and seem like a logical choice, but they wouldn’t embrace the open web as Mozilla does. Remember ActiveX controls in IE? Yeah, total nightmare in an otherwise good browser. And to think Microsoft was arrogant enough to declare IE complete.
The internet used to be limitless, open to anyone with an idea. Now, it’s a polished prison run by tech giants. Is this the future we signed up for? Here’s how Big Tech quietly turned freedom into captivity.
I think you could piece together a lot of what the big silos offer but it wouldn’t be as complete or cohesive. Blogs, Mastodon, and Micro.blog are great for social network replacements but so many people rely on Facebook for all of those activities. Heck, many businesses only have Facebook pages.
Side note: I once built a little website for a nano brewing company in Exeter, CA. I offered them the keys to it and they turned it down because Facebook gave them what they needed.
Also, they have a website now! Good move! The domain I got for them was better, but this works. I picked up bellcraft.beer for them.
They could’ve also picked up bellcraftbrew.co instead of the .com, but to each his own. I think that just proves the power of .com verses everything else.
It did not take any particular skill in forecasting to predict, at the end of 2024, that the unprecedented partnership between Donald Trump and Elon Musk would come to a dramatic ending. Both Trump and Musk are independently famous for their erratic leadership styles and abrupt purges of once-close allies, and neither shows any long-term patience for anyone who opposes them.
I’m here for the Space Karen and Marmalade Messiah breakup. Bring it! They’re both such petty man children. Each smoking his own supply and blaming everyone but themselves for their problems.
I can’t wait to be shot of both of them.
Please, send them to Mars to start a colony. They can own it and call it Muskland or Trumpville or whatever they want. At least I won’t have to hear about them ever again.
A collective of international animation unions, federations, and organizations are calling for action over the usage of artificial intelligence, citing its destructive impact on the craft and business of animation, as well as on industry workers.
I like this move. And like I’ve said before AI has its uses but for some things we should say ‘No.’
If you’re a craftsman of any kind I’d say no to using it for the craft part of my job. The thing I pride myself on. In this case it’s the artwork.
I was wondering what kinda things you, dear reader, like to read online?
I like all kinds of stuff but most of it boils down to tech related stuff. I read old timers like Dave Winer and Jeffrey Zeldman. I also like reading folks like Manton Reece, [John Gruber](daringfireball.net], and Joan Westenberg among many others!
But then in the mid 00s things changed, and since then the users have flocked to closed systems. It would be similarly wonderful if we had an open social web, but we don’t. Mastodon is open but it’s not simple like the web is, and Bluesky is simple, but it is not open. And neither supports the most basic features of the web.#
I’ve heard ActivityPub and Mastodon can be challenging to code against but I’ve also heard Bluesky is extremely difficult to understand from a technical perspective. Maybe it’s just me?
Folks are building open alternatives to many closed systems on ActivityPub. So it does work!
Dave continues to build excellent tools on top of technologies he’s created, like RSS. It’s different and it missing some of the things people like, like replies (as far as I can tell, it’s missing replies? I could be very wrong about that. I don’t know what I don’t know. Ya know?) 😃
If you haven’t seen WordLand you should give it a gander. It’s really the editor bloggers using WordPress really need. At least I think it is. It would be extremely cool if Dave and perhaps others could define a protocol for editors to connect to all different types of blogging systems. Heh, I think that’s what ActivityPub and others are for? 🤔
We need taco trucks on every corner of the White House sporting that picture, in poster size, on the side of their trucks. 🤣
And… we’re off to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. ⛺️⛱️
Our granddaughter found herself a friend. A little firefly. Her name is Sparkles.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
I went out on Monday and picked up a 2008 Chevy Silverado 4x4 pickup. Why? Well, we bought a camping trailer last spring and we discovered pulling it with Kim’s Honda Pilot felt unstable and underpowered. Basically it felt like we were on the edge of something going wrong at any time. It was just unsettling.
I’ve been without a vehicle since COVID and since I’ve always had a truck and we wanted one for the trailer it was an easy decision. Plus, as far as trucks go, it was inexpensive.
Would I love to have a new Chevy or Ford EV Truck? You bet! Am I willing to spend $60,000 plus to have one? Sorry, can’t do it.
Anywho, I like it! 🛻
This is wild. Both because they declined – again, for the first time in a decade – but more so because they have to know the signal it sends in declining.1 At best, it looks like they’re trying to avoid answering any non-staged questions about how things are going. At worst, it looks like they’re freezing Gruber out for a few recent critical posts about the company – notably, his “Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino” post about the Apple Intelligence shitshow back in March.
When I read John’s post about this years The Talk Show at WWDC I figured Apple was showing their displeasure with John’s earlier piece.
Like most big companies Apple has run into their fair share of problems, criticism, and lawsuits.
The law is finally catching up with some of Apple’s policies around their 15-30% fee for sales in the App Store, which is the only way to sell an iOS App.
They lost a case in California that says they have to allow third-party payment systems. App developers have Epic to thank for that. I’m not switching my in app purchase strategy. I’ll continue to use Apple’s system, at least for now.
Brown University Computer Science
This book is designed to help C++ programmers learn Rust. It provides translations of common C++ patterns into idiomatic Rust. Each pattern is described through concrete code examples along with high-level discussion of engineering trade-offs.
Really nice resource if, like me, you have a C++ programming background! From everything I’ve heard, Rust is a great language. I kind of wish someone would do a low-level equivalent for C++ devs moving to Swift.
Has anyone proven that Swift is just as performant as C++ on Mac, Linux, or Windows?
I know Microsoft is using Rust for some Windows APIs now. I don’t recall if it was GDI or User, but Windows does have some Rust code in it now.
As policy makers in the UK weigh how to regulate the AI industry, Nick Clegg, former UK deputy prime minister and former Meta executive, claimed a push for artist consent would “basically kill” the AI industry.
Maybe the AI industry needs to be killed or at least thrown in technical and political jail until a rational, equitable, system can be devised to pay authors and artists for their work.
How about the AI folks give us access to all their hard work? Their code, their algorithms, their LLMs, and all of their compute for free? All for the betterment of mankind. I bet they’d balk at that. 😃
Holly Cain • NASCAR Wire Service
A day filled with high hopes and trophy expectations after weeks of hard work at track and a year to contemplate the quest ended abruptly Sunday after NASCAR star Kyle Larson crashed just before the midpoint of Sunday’s Indianapolis 500 — a race ultimately won in a sprint to the finish by three-time and reigning IndyCar champion, Chip Ganassi Racing’s Alex Palou.
I feel really bad for Kyle Larson. He is without a doubt, in my mind, the greatest driver in the world today. He’s able to adapt to anything and everything, but that doesn’t mean he’s perfect. Last year he finished the race, in 16th I believe, this year he made a mistake and crashed out, taking two other cars with him.
It does happen, even to Kyle Larson. He’s a high risk high reward driver. He’s always on the edge of disaster.
After leaving Indy he got to the Coke 600, lead a number of laps, and spun out. No crash but he lost the lead and was mired in the back of the pack for the remainder of the day.
As a Kyle Larson fan I feel terrible for the guy.
Harvard Lets You Take 133 Free Online Courses: Explore Courses on Justice, American Government, Literature, Religion, CompSci & More
I’d like to take advantage of these courses! I’ve wanted a History degree for years and years. Maybe I can get some great American History courses through this program? The CompSci courses would be nice too! 😃
Daniel Rosenwasser • Microsoft TypeScript Blog
Today, we are excited to announce broad availability of TypeScript Native Previews. As of today, you will be able to use npm to get a preview of the native TypeScript compiler. Additionally, you’ll be able to use a preview version of our editor functionality for VS Code through the Visual Studio Marketplace.
The team chose Go because they did a straight port of their TypeScript/JavaScript code to Go. The syntax was very similar so it was kind of a no brainer and Go is a memory safe compiled language.
It’s too bad they didn’t use Rust.
Soon it will become something else entirely. Because it’s my website and I’m perpetually becoming somebody else.
I wish I had the skill to make my own websites. The fact that Taylor can and does is impressive. And to top it all off I love her style!
Personally I’m always after a JavaScript free site as plain HTML. That’s what I get with Micro.blog.
I do have a bit of JavaScript in my blog, at the end to see how many visits posts get. It’s minimal.
A recent experiment by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University staffed a fake software company entirely with AI Agents — an AI model designed to perform tasks on its own, basically — and the results were laughably chaotic.
You can’t rely on AI to do things without monitoring it. Think of it as an intern, only not as smart - because it’s not intelligent, it’s a pachinko machine that often times makes really good guesses.
Use it, do not trust it, and for goodness sake verify everything it produces if you’re going to use it. It could be a real time saver, or wreck your work if you’re not careful.
I used our AI product this week and while it gave me good answers it didn’t provide me with a solution to my problem around publishing npm packages to GitHub. It gave me great information on how to setup part of my GitHub Actions script but I’ve never done it before and was hoping it would “just work.” It didn’t.
I hadn’t setup the Packages section in the repository to accept packages from my own repo. Live and learn.
BTW, that is not an indictment of AI failings. It provided me with great answers to my prompts. It really did. I just didn’t know what I didn’t know.
Reading GitHub’s documentation on the matter would’ve been very beneficial to me. Next time I’ll be better prepared for my sake and the AI’s.
Tripp Mickle, of the New York Times, wrote another one of those articles exploring the feasibility of iPhone manufacturing in the United States. There is basically nothing new here; the only reason it seems to have been published is because the U.S. president farted out yet another tariff idea, this time one targeted specifically at the iPhone at a rate of 25%.
I can’t see how Tim Cook and Apple can possibly manage their way out of TACO Man’s sights. He desperately wants Apple to make things here in the states. Apple has the money to do it, but they don’t want to do it.
They could help local Community Colleges and Universities spin up training programs to teach the skills necessary to build iPhones, IPads, and other products, but that would take years and years to do and take lots of cash to pull it off.
Apple wants to make money, not spend it. Remember, it’s all about shareholder value to these folks. It’s not about helping our fellow man find a great paying job.
Your job title says “software engineer”, but you seem to spend most of your time in meetings. You’d like to have time to code, but nobody else is onboarding the junior engineers, updating the roadmap, talking to the users, noticing the things that got dropped, asking questions on design documents, and making sure that everyone’s going roughly in the same direction. If you stop doing those things, the team won’t be as successful. But now someone’s suggesting that you might be happier in a less technical role. If this describes you, congratulations: you’re the glue. If it’s not, have you thought about who is filling this role on your team?
As a Staff Engineer I’m way more valuable to my team being the glue that brings us together. I act as mentor, coding buddy, and I see projects from 30,000 feet all the way down to minute details.
I’m not nearly as smart as 99% of the developers in the world. I’ve just been around the block a few times and I’ve built lots of different things on different OS’es using a mix of languages. I’ve done everything in the development life cycle so I know how to take something from concept to shipping and know how to do it with a team. That’s my strength. Sure, I can write code, but I really enjoy doing that glue stuff. It’s often random, sometimes spur of the moment — like fixing something in our iOS app yesterday so we could submit it to Apple.
I love the mix of people I work with daily. I have excellent management surrounding me who encourage me to serve my purpose on the team. Add the amazing Software and Test Engineers I work with daily and you have the perfect formula for happiness on the job.
Given all that I’d still love to retire and work on my apps full time. Not because I hate my day job but because I desperately want to build my apps! 🙂
Less than two years later, the company has announced that it’s discontinuing Arc in favor of a new app – Dia – which it is also pitching as the future of internet usage
I find this puzzling. I know so many people who absolutely love Arc! Why not keep it running to serve the people who love it? Keep a tiny crew on it, let it evolve slowly.
In the end VCs have to get paid I suppose. This is part of why we can’t have nice things or useful software. 🤣
The Musk Files: Addled Brain
Kirsten Grind and Megan Twohey • The New York Times
Mr. Musk’s drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it.
It is unclear whether Mr. Musk, 53, was taking drugs when he became a fixture at the White House this year and was handed the power to slash the federal bureaucracy. But he has exhibited erratic behavior, insulting cabinet members, gesturing like a Nazi and garbling his answers in a staged interview.
Queue lawsuit in 3, 2, 1…
The man’s brain, like Orange Man’s, is addled. And like the TACO he’s a stable genius.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️ A day late!
We’ve had our granddaughter this weekend so yesterday was filled with activities. I managed to get started on this post but had to put it down and do things like play tea party and go to the lake and play a game she made up, as far as I know, called zoo keeper. I’m the zoo keeper and she was a black panther. 🥰
Anyway, we’ve had a great time and we’re both pooped out, in all the best ways.
With retirement imminent — this is my last job, and June 6 is my last day (maybe I’ve buried the lede here) — I want to thank my team publicly for how they’ve made me a better engineer and, more importantly, a better person. From the bottom of my heart.
Congratulations, Brent! Go read the post to get the full context. Brent talks about his biases going into his job at Audible and how it changed him. It’s a really great, heartfelt, tribute to his co-workers.
Today, Mozilla announced in a support document that it will soon end development of Pocket, its read-later app that’s been around since the early days of the App Store
Welp, there goes a piece of my workflow for Saturday Morning Coffee. Pocket sits at the middle of my process and tooling. I save links through the week and save them to Pocket. On Saturday I find all the properly tagged saves and use those to write these posts.
I’m not sure what I’ll move to, yet. Unread has a read later feature, I may give that a go. I’m also looking at Plinky.
I’ve had read later support on my Stream list of features for years. Just haven’t done it.
Son of a bitch Epic did it. This was like a double bank shot.
I had to go download Fortnight as soon as I saw they were back in the store. I still haven’t fully configured it yet and all I’m really interested in is seeing their in app purchase screens.
I wonder if this is John’s way of Claim Chowder’ing himself? 😄
I like John’s writing because he calls it as he sees it. I think the shock and surprise are real on his part.
Jensen is among an increasing number of job seekers who have found themselves being interviewed by A.I. programs as part of the recruiting process. Pitched by tech companies as a cost-efficient means of automating a laborious screening process typically done by an HR representative or recruiter, this A.I. software has the capability to “interview” hundreds of candidates, whom it can then recommend for further interviews with actual human beings. But for those on the other side of these chats, the experience of auditioning for a computer can feel somewhat surreal—and leave a rather unpleasant impression of a potential employer.
This is a bit much folks. Let’s keep humans in the interview process. I know this was a screening call and all but I don’t think I’d care for it either.
As part of my interview with WilllwTree I had to record myself answering a set of predefined questions. I understood the assignment right away and was happy to do it. WillowTree is a client services company. Even developers need to be good with the client. They wanted to see how I may operate with a client. The questions weren’t tech questions. They were easy questions as I recall. All about the interaction and presentation not about my knowledge.
I got to the next round of human interviews and managed to land the gig.
OpenAI, made the biggest acquihire in Silicon Valley’s history. Sam Altman and his crew bought Jony Ive and his coterie of ex-Apple hotshots for a whopping $6.5 billion. It is an all-stock deal for io Products, a 55-person company that is building an “amazing AI device.”
My goodness that’s a lot of cheddar! And I can’t get anyone to throw a paltry $1MM at me to go do what I want. 😂 Namely work on Stream and Rooster(my top secret project. 😂) 🐓
Hook your app to AI
MCP on Windows offers a standardized framework for AI agents to connect with native Windows apps, enabling them to easily participate in agentic interactions on Windows. Windows apps can expose specific functionality to augment the skills and capabilities of agents installed locally on a Windows PC.
This is the sort of thing iOS and Mac developers would like. Give us the ability to hook our applications up to AI agents using a well defined protocol.
While it’s not ready for prime time yet I’d imagine it will ship close to when they say it will.
Microsoft is, once again, pushing things in the right direction for developers because they know the value developers bring to Windows.
It really is too bad they missed the mobile revolution. This time they’re out front, leading.
For once I agree with the Orange Turd in the Whitehouse.
He should be the first convicted criminal we ship to a prison outside the United States.
Remember those 37 convictions? I do.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
I’ve had a pretty fun week. Our dev team is doing really great work for our client, got to hangout with my grandson at his very important preschool graduation, and I had my first physical therapy session yesterday.
Overall a darned good week! 😃
Mike Barnes • The Hollywood Reporter
Joe Don Baker, the broad-shouldered Texas tough guy who portrayed characters on both sides of the law, most notably Sheriff Buford Pusser in the unexpected box-office hit Walking Tall, died May 7, his family announced. He was 89.
I remember watching Walking Tall as a kid and thinking Sheriff Buford Pusser was a real badass. I think I’ll have to watch it again.🪦
Mike Wendling, Rajini Vaidyanathan & Paul Coletti • BBC
Microsoft founder Bill Gates said he intends to give away 99% of his vast fortune over the next 20 years.
This is really nice of him in today’s world of Oligarchs. He’d have been worth so much if he hadn’t started giving his money away. We need more kindness like this in the world.
Thank you, Mr. Gates. ❤️
Apple is trying to dissuade Europeans from using iOS apps that support alternative payment options by making them look scary.
Apple will absolutely not give up on its 15-30% cut of each app sale in the App Store.
What I really dislike about these scare tactics is how they imply that a third party purchasing system is not safe and secure. Web payment systems have been around for years and years and predate the App Store. I’d imagine there are some questionable players out there but I trust companies like Stripe and Shopify. I’m sure there are many other trustworthy companies out there.
If Apple keeps fooling around they’re gonna get some major fines in the EU.
When I started writing apps, the availability and quality of developer tools was considered to be an advantage for native development vs. the Web. These days, I still think native APIs usually lead to better apps—though there are some awful Catalyst and SwiftUI apps that would have been better as Electron—but the Web tooling has really improved. I think many would now consider it a strong advantage.
I know this article by Michael is talking about Electron but I’ve spent the last year and a half working on a project to slowly transform native iOS and Android apps into 100% React Native Apps and it’s gone really well. Same idea, different frameworks and platforms.
The start was slow and we spent the first four to six months building our bridging strategy and coding it. Once that was in place, along with React Native code to go with it, we started replacing hunks of functionality, feature by feature.
Recently a new Expo App was created and all that React Native work we started in the hybrid app has been shared via npm packages with the brand new app. It’s completely jumpstarted the new app with many features already built and tested in isolation. I’d say somewhere between 40-50% of the new app now works just by using these packages. Our networking, UI navigation, analytics, and telemetry packages were thoughtfully created to work with the native bridge code and 100% React Native code.
Anyway, I’ve written about it. Check it out if you have a minute. It’s been a really fun project.
Crypto giant Coinbase has confirmed its systems have been breached and customer data, including government-issued identity documents, were stolen.
Whoops. Will anyone ever be able to create a website and/or service that’s secure enough to not have breaches?
I’d imagine the best way to do it is not create the website or service in the first place. 😃
Warner Bros. Discovery is changing the name of its streaming service back to HBO Max. During its Upfront event on Wednesday, the company announced that it will rebrand Max this summer, a change HBO head Casey Bloys said “better represents” its offering.
I’m glad they did this. HBO has always been a place for quality series and originals. It’s a premium brand and with the addition of the Max name says “Hey, it’s the HBO you love with this other stuff we think you might enjoy.” 😆
Chiara Mooney • Microsoft React Native Blog
Let’s first talk about why Office chose to use React Native. Office has hundreds of millions of customers who expect visual consistency across desktop, mobile, and web. Currently, there are over 40 Office experiences which use React Native to build cross-platform features such as Privacy Dialog and Accessibility Assistant.
This is fascinating and weird to me all at once. Microsoft, one of the greatest software shops of all time is using React Native in Office. Yeah, you read that right, React Native in Office.
Did you know Microsoft is the primary contributor to React Native for Windows?
Can you imagine if someone did this for Mac? Oh, Microsoft did? Wait, what! I’m not sure how good this support is, but I’d love to see how it works.
It’s too bad a dyed in the wool Mac shop doesn’t take this on. Having an AppKit expert building this would make for a better framework, in my opinion. Of course Apple wouldn’t do it, but they should. I’d continue to build apps with Apple’s native tooling because I think it makes for better apps, but having something that opens the door to thousands and thousands of developers is good for the platform and might encourage more developers to create desktop apps instead of websites.
Ulrik Egede • The Conversation
While smashing lead atoms into each other at extremely high speeds in an effort to mimic the state of the universe just after the Big Bang, physicists working on the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland incidentally produced small amounts of gold. Extremely small amounts, in fact: a total of some 29 trillionths of a gram.
I wonder how much it cost to create 29 trillionths of a gram of gold from lead? 😂
It is pretty amazing. I wonder what else they’ve created in there? Hopefully not a world ending virus. 😳
Royal Enfield’s eagerly anticipated electric motorcycles, unveiled late last year under the Flying Flea brand, are now confirmed to hit the market early next year.
This is a nice looking bike. Very modern construction with the look of a bike from days long past. Not a bad option for motorcycle enthusiasts.
Microsoft is redesigning the Start menu in Windows 11 this month with a new, wider design that finally lets you disable the recommended feed of files and apps. While the new Start menu looks different to what exists in Windows 11 today, this design refresh could have looked a lot different as Microsoft has now revealed in concept images.
Finally. 👍🏼
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
My struggles continue with sciatica. Thankfully it is much better than it was a week ago but I have a ways to go. Physical therapy is just under a week away and I’m hoping they can help me get this darn impingement un-impinged. I’m getting three to four hours of decent sleep a night then I get restless.
It’s gonna get better. I know it.
I had a really great time at work at the end of the week. I was called on to help some of the iOS Devs on our team to fix a few bugs. It was a blast pairing, what a great way to end the week.
Looking for a weekend escape? The first two episodes of Long Way Home, the latest installment in Apple TV+’s best travel series, have just dropped — and it’s the perfect watch if you’re craving a scenic adventure.
The Long Way series on Apple TV have been so much fun to watch. Highly recommended. 👍🏼
Kosmos 482, a Soviet-era spacecraft shrouded in Cold War secrecy, will reenter the Earth’s atmosphere in the next few days after misfiring on a journey to Venus more than 50 years ago.
So this hunk of space debris is supppsed to crash down soon, if it hasn’t already, and it’s supposed to fall on land. Duck! 🛰️
This is a big step forward. Stripe Managed Payments is designed to handle all the heavy lifting for digital businesses from sales tax and fraud prevention to global compliance and customer support. Simply put, you can focus on growing your business.
When I read this I wondered if it could be used as a new in-app purchasing system for iOS Apps that want to bypass using Apple’s payment system? I bet it can.
The small creatures look like oval mini-sailboats that can grow up to 4 inches long. Their gelatinous bases can range in color from vibrant blue to deep purple, and they have transparent triangular “sail” on top. It’s what allows them to be blown across the surface of the open sea where they typically live — and with strong enough winds, onto coastal sands.
I lived in California for over 50 years and I’ve never heard of these. They’re beautiful. ⛵️
Many horses, including Spotify and Amazon’s Kindle Store, have already left the barn. But Apple is moving quickly to shut the external payments door opened by last week’s ruling that the company willfully failed to comply with court orders regarding anticompetitive behavior.
I didn’t think it would take long for big companies to flip that switch.
Now we wait and see if Apple can get the courts to overrule the judgement. I can’t see that happening but I’m not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV. 💸
Within hours after the news broke, our team shipped a Web Paywall Button. A new component you can drop into any RevenueCat paywall to whisk users over to a RevenueCat-hosted web checkout, complete the purchase, and then unlock access in-app as if it were a native buy flow.
That sure didn’t take long.
It makes me wonder if anyone is going to use Apple Pay for their payment system? 😃
Heck, if Apple switched their payment system to charge something like 5% I’m sure folks would use it.
I’d put money on that happening if the ruling remains in effect.
Doctors uncover link between increasing number of children getting measles and their parents being gullible morons
What a headline! I couldn’t resist! 😂
Of course it’s all about the money! DUH!
“A federal court cannot force Apple to permanently give away free access to its products and services, including intellectual property,” Apple’s lawyers wrote in the motion.
I don’t like it when Apple makes claims like this. I know my software uses their SDK but I wrote the code that is the app, it’s not theirs.
Sure, the operating system is theirs, the tooling is theirs, and the software that gives our software access to the operating is theirs. But me selling an app using a different payment system denies them money and doesn’t jeopardize their “products, services, and intellectual property.” They’re worried about the, potentially billions, of dollars they could lose.
Just say that. Say “we’re going to lose hundreds of millions of dollars if people choose different payment methods.”
Or, or, how about this! Change your percentage to 5% and call it a day. I’ll bet folks wouldn’t change their payment mechanism then, because it would be competitively priced.
I’m happy for developers who want to take advantage of the new rules. Good for them and their bottom line.
I don’t make much off of Stream and RxCalc so I’ll probably continue to use Apple’s payment system.
I had such a rough night sleeping. I didn’t sleep much due to pain and not being able to find a comfortable position.
I’m thankful I had some Hydrocodone/APAP left over from knee surgery. At least it takes the edge off. 😊
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Mike Barnes • The Hollywood Reporter
Ruth Buzzi, who was so hilarious as the lonely spinster Gladys Ormphby, the lady who swung her handbag as a lethal weapon, on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, has died. She was 88.
I’m old enough to remember Laugh-In and Ruth Buzzy was a hoot.
R.I.P. 🪦
The judge ruled that developers should be able to link to other ways to make purchases from inside their apps, so they could process payments via their own website and payment systems. In doing so, developers should have been able to forgo paying Apple’s 30% commission on in-app purchases.
Some developers are already making changes to use their own payment system. I’ve read that Spotify is preparing a new release and Epic wants to return to the store with their own payment system. John Grubers hot take on Epic returning is a good read and one I hadn’t considered. I just figured it was a done deal, it might be?
Danish consumers are boycotting Coca-Cola, Carlsberg (CARLb.CO), opens new tab CEO Jacob Aarup-Andersen said on Tuesday, noting that the brewer, which bottles the drink in Denmark, had seen Coca-Cola volumes decline while local rivals gain share.
It makes sense that other countries are abandoning American products. Prices are being driven up and who wants to pay a huge tax to buy something they can get locally?
“When we started working on ‘Moving Pictures’, everything came along just so effortlessly,” he continued. “We were well prepared, we’d written all the material, we knew what we were doing. We went in, we got sounds. We did things a little differently.
I’m pretty sure the Rush video for Limelight was recorded during this studio time. I wore that cassette tape out, it was so amazing.
Race and Commercial Breakdown of the 2025 Jack Link’s 500
Total minutes of complete race broadcast: 212 Minutes of race broadcast: 187 Minutes of traditional commercials: 25 Minutes of side-by-side commercials: 36
I’ll be checking this site out after each race this season. The total time we saw full screen racing was 186 minutes, which feels much longer than I recall.
The total commercial time was 61 minutes! An hour of commercials! One third of the time watching the race was commercials. Their side by side commercials, which they think is the cats meow, suck. The commercial takes up most of the screen and we get commercial audio.
I’ve seen action happening on the track I’d love see and hear full screen.
The coverage is very substandard. I hope Amazon does a better job than The CW and Fox. I’m not holding my breath.
Jerry Cantrell lends his voice to a song on the soundtrack to new vampire film Sinners.
It’s a nice little article and we get some insight into the directors mindset around the music for the film.
3 billion users = $15–$20 billion is not real math. It’s just bullshit. The users are only valuable right now because they perform a lot of Google web searches within Chrome. Chrome users also make money for Google by using other Google properties that show ads, like Maps and Gmail. And Chrome encourages users, in general, to use Google properties and services like Docs. If you try to work out how valuable Chrome is to Google, it’s seemingly worth a veritable fortune. But that doesn’t mean Chrome holds any value of its own, on its own.
Before reading this I was wondering how a company who forked WebKit to create Chromium is worth anything? As John points out it’s basically Google Search and Marketing. They also have great online services in Gmail and Google Docs. Read John’s piece he says it all.
Ben Smith and Liz Hoffman • Semafor
JC Chandor likes to joke that you could trade off the viewership data of Margin Call, the 2011 film that tells the story of an unnamed bank’s catastrophic 24 hours during the 2008 financial crisis.
I watch Margin Call once in a while and it’s loaded with amazing talent. Great film. It makes you realize how fragile our entire economic system really is.
Politics
So I guess we’re reaching the point where if you want to remain vaccinated against COVID, you’ll have to figure out how to buy an illegal import from this “dark web” I’ve been hearing so much about.
I’m digging the name Bobby Brainworms. I never ever thought our nation would ditch science for conspiracy theories.
American Healthcare is substandard
My trip to the ER today was a success, in a way, but also a failure.
My hope was I’d get an MRI to better understand what’s going on with the discs in lower lumbar. It’s where my pain is focused.
I arrived, got in pretty quickly, and had a great doc visit me. I explained what was going on and my hope for the outcome of the visit. She listened intently and asked a series of questions I answered.
She explained to me the only thing that would result in an MRI is the inability to empty my bladder, being unable to defecate, or weakness in a leg or legs. That’s it.
She shared that my insurance company would outright reject the MRI because I didn’t meet any of those conditions. She also said “You can pay for it yourself but I don’t know how you feel about a $10,000 MRI bill?” 😳
TL;DR - I don’t qualify for an MRI because I’m just in, at times, excruciating pain. But I can still walk (kind of) and pee and poop. 🤬
So, I got two injections; a muscle relaxer and a steroid. I don’t recall the names. The doc also prescribed a different muscle relaxer than I was prescribed prior because it did funny things to me.
This afternoon by 3PM or so the pain was back to a bearable level. In that regard, it was a success.
The lack of an MRI is a complete failure. Sure, I had X-rays a few weeks back so we know the bony parts are in rough shape, but we have zero clue how the soft tissues look. Do I have a bulging disc, or more? Who knows? The doctors don’t know and the physical therapists I visit won’t know exactly what PT plan I need to, hopefully, feel better.
We live in one of the richest nations in the world and our healthcare industry is driven by penny pinching insurance companies claiming we don’t need certain procedures, even though they don’t know.
One of the questions I was asked by the doctor was “Do you feel like hurting yourself or someone else?”
Think about that for a minute. Chronic pain can really screw with your mind. You get tired of it physically and mentally and just stop caring.
Yes, people commit suicide because of pain and insurance company games; Delay, Deny, Defend.
People also murder insurance company CEO’s because of their crap policies that delay and deny people the care they need.
I said “No” to both questions because I haven’t reached that “I can’t take this anymore” phase. I’m doing ok and I hope I’ll bet an MRI after my physical therapy, but I’m losing hope.
Oh, yeah, this seems to be the way in Virginia. I’ve had MRI’s in California that were never challenged by the insurance company. Maybe it’s because I have a different insurance company now? It’s probably the latter.
If you don’t need a back I’d recommend against having one. 🤣
Off to the ER we go. I’m hoping they’ll do an MRI so we know how much damage there is to soft tissues.
I’m so over the pain of it all.