Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
I had a heart stress test this week and I guess I’ll find out the results sometime next week. I’ve seen the results but it’s all medical speak and from what I can see I have a problem with one of the chambers of my heart. No doubt my poor life choices are catching up to me quickly. I was encouraged to see that some of what was mentioned said it was reversible. No doubt diet, exercise, and dropping about 100lbs will be the thing I need to do. Easier said than done. 😃
Jessica Murray and Yassin El-Moudden • The Guardian
Thousands of fans lined the streets of Birmingham to watch Ozzy Osbourne make his final journey through his home city, with his tearful family laying tributes as crowds chanted the late singer’s name.
Being loved by so many is something to behold. Most of us will die quietly, hopefully surrounded by family. That’s my sincerest hope.
RIP, Ozzy. 🪦
This week, Substack apologized after sending a push alert promoting one of the pro-Nazi blogs on its network.
Here we are. Substack “accidentally” promoting a Nazi blog.
There are so many great writers using that platform and I really wish they’d get off of it. 😔
Michaela Towfighi • New York Times
Taylor’s account is that he purchased the guitar from a road manager for the Stones while playing with John Mayall, then brought it with him in 1969 when he joined the Stones for five years. His version has been recounted by music journalists, guitar aficionados and a Stones historian.
This is a fascinating story. I love a good mystery! 🕵🏻♂️
The first foldable phones hit the market six years ago, and they were rife with compromises and shortcomings. Many of those problems have persisted, but little by little, foldables have gotten better. With the release of the Galaxy Z Fold 7, Samsung has made the biggest leap yet. This device solves some of the most glaring problems with Samsung’s foldables, featuring a new, slimmer design and a big camera upgrade.
It sounds like foldable are finally getting really good. This may be why we’re getting rumors of an Apple foldable. The technology is finally there.
Amazon Web Services pulled an application for a 7.2 million square foot data center in Louisa County last week, after a surge of resident opposition.
I didn’t even know an Amazon data center was going in near us. I wonder how many folks Amazon hires for big joints like this? What types of jobs do they hire for?
All the data centers being built around the country concern me. So many natural resources and environmental issues follow along with them. Biggest among them is water usage. I’m from California and we lived in a constant state of water conservation. That mindset has followed me to Virginia but most folks ‘round these parts don’t seem to care much about it. It rains a lot so water seems plentiful. Folks probably don’t think twice about data center water consumption. It’s a real problem. One that needs solving.
Lest you forget that many CEOs are more than willing to fire you and replace you with a shoddy AI model with sociopathic glee, here are the words of one such executive at the forefront of displacing human labor.
I use LLMs on occasion and from my experience they’re just really good reference material. I use them tangentially. I’ll ask how I can setup a GitHub action and things like that. I can see using them for more complex programming problems but so far I haven’t had a need for that. I just truck along writing code, solving problems on my own, and generally love doing it.
When push comes to shove at the day job I’ll step up my usage because I’ll have to. Until then I’ll keep using my little side kick like I’ve been using it. It’s actually useful as a research assistant.
The idea of WordLand is to do all the block-oriented work once, outside of the writing environment, then flow the writing through it, far away from the heavy lifting. It’s always how I’ve done my blogging tools.
Dave has been building writing tools for over 30 years. His latest creation, WordLand, is very similar to something I’ve wanted from WordPress. It’s a down to earth writing environment based on Markdown that lets you write. Dave is also good about hooking his work up in such a way that it flows outbound to other systems, like Mastodon or Micro.blog or Bluesky.
I want this in a native desktop app, much like MarsEdit, but I want to build my own. I have for years, just like I’ve wanted to build my own Visio clone. I finally gave up on that idea. It’s too big for one person to pull off, but the blogging tool is small enough for a one man show.
It’s too bad all of these blogging platforms can’t decide on a unified API so we could build tools on top of all of them without implementing a client side library for each one. That makes it such a chore.
I think MicroPub is the best choice to pull all these services together.
Of course, as Dave has been championing, having a way to import an RSS feed to your social media site or blog is another fine way to make this work.
I would still like to have a common programmable way to do it. 😃
Johnathan Thompson • High Country News
But “sustainable” bitcoin mining is an oxymoron, given the enormous amounts of power and water data centers consume.
Again, see my comments about the Amazon data center that pulled out of Virginia. Environmental problems abound.
These companies are essentially saying to some employees that they’re so valuable that they’re worth paying not just a lot of money, but more money than basically anyone in the world gets paid – including, often, their own CEOs. And yet to others, they’re basically saying they’re worthless – I mean literally not worth paying anything to any longer.
This feels really terrible. Reading what some of these CEOs say about human beings they’re firing and replacing with LLMs is distressing. So callous, so inhumane. Soulless.
But hey, shareholder value! Keep the rich, rich, at all costs! 🤬
I’m so very thankful I have a job.
I’ll just say it: liquid glass is a quintessential example of form over function. There are some UI changes as well to the OS 26 platforms, but the core visual design is clearly optimized for “it looks cool most of the time” rather than how practical it is to use.
I was showing Liquid Glass to our youngest daughter and she said “Oh, I don’t like that!” and “Oh, that’s cool!” depending on what I was showing her.
I’m seeing some strange behavior, like text jiggling back and forth as UI elements shrink or controls jumping into place instead of animating smoothly. I do suspect all of these things will be fixed by ship time, or not long afterwards. It’s not bothering me too much. I trust Apple to fix things in such a way that everyone benefits. That’s what frameworks are for! Fix it once, we all benefit! 😃
At least that’s the goal. 👍🏼
