Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Well the day of sleet we got on Sunday really left us in a mess. We had somewhere between 8-10in of sleet on the ground, which turned into a crust of ice overnight. Temperatures have been frigid so that ice continues to thicken. Breaking it out is a pain so I hired someone with a skid steer and he did a great job clearing off our driveway. The gentleman who did the work is just a random dude helping out his neighbors. Absolutely worth the $50. Our youngest daughter is terrified I’m gonna drop dead while shoveling snow, like a man down the street did last week. 😔
Work is fine. I’m on the second week of a new project on a very focused, small, team. We are using LLMs to great effect. No, we are not vibe coding. We’re all processional software developers who know how to build product. We all check our work and will instruct the LLM when it needs to be corrected. It’s working better than I expected and our code matches the work, in terms of style and architecture, as the work done previously. It’s also accelerated our delivery. 😀
Hope you enjoy the links.
Andrew Dalton and Jocelyn Noveck • AP
Catherine O’Hara, a gifted Canadian-born comic actor and “SCTV” alum who starred as Macaulay Culkin’s harried mother in two “Home Alone” movies and won an Emmy as the dramatically ditzy wealthy matriarch Moira Rose in “Schitt’s Creek,” died Friday. She was 71.
This one hit me because I’ve always had a bit of a crush on her. She’s so funny and seems to be a genuinely kind person. I also find her to be very beautiful.
The last thing I saw her in was The Last of Us in season two. It was a great role for her. A little different role but she was so perfect for it.
RIP. 💔
On today’s episode of Decoder, I’m talking about the bidding war over Warner Bros. Discovery, which is the biggest story in the entertainment industry right now, and for good reason. It has pretty much everything you could want in a buzzy Hollywood saga — big names, big money, and big drama.
I really hope Netflix is able to win this battle because Paramount would be such a crummy deal for WB. Just look at how they’ve ruined CBS, once a trusted news source is now a running joke.
Can you imagine what they’d do to the likes of CNN and HBO? They’d become dumpster fires, full of extreme right wing talking points and entertainment. No thanks.
Amazon is slashing about 16,000 corporate jobs in the second round of mass layoffs for the ecommerce company in three months.
The tech massacre continues. As an older gentleman I’ve mentioned how much this terrifies me. Not only does it terrify me, it terrifies young folks as well.
I’m very grateful for my gig.
Sebastian de With • via Threads
Some big personal news: I’ve joined the Design Team at Apple.So excited to work with the very best team in the world on my favorite products. ✌️
I’m more than a little surprised Sebastian returned to Apple. He cofounded Lux Optics with Benjamin Sandofsky and they managed to create a most beloved camera app named Halide.
My hope is the Apple Design Team reached out to Sebastian because of his piece describing what he hoped the new iOS 26 design would look like. The post predates WWDC 2025 when Apple announced the extremely controversial Liquid Glass and I think Sebastian’s design is so much better than Liquid Glass.
If he’s not there to work in his design to the various OS’es, then why hire him? 🤞🏼
Power. Comfort. A seat at the table. Or, in this case, the crushing weight of a trillion-dollar valuation that demands constant appeasement. MG Siegler puts it plainly: Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, is captured. And so is the rest of the technology community. This is what happens when valuations trump values.
I would hate to be a CEO in the era of Marmalade Messiah. I don’t know Tim Cook, or any “important” people for that matter, but I had hoped he would push back against this horrible administration.
He’s taken a stand when it was easy but taking a stand when it’s difficult is what leaders do.
If he didn’t feel he could uphold the standards expected of an Apple employee then he should’ve retired. Heck, he should retire.
Maybe he believes in Trump and the horrible things they’re doing? It’s hard to believe he’s boot licking just to serve shareholders?
It makes me wish macOS and iOS weren’t Apple products.
In recent weeks, rumors have flown around the newsroom about the size of the cuts and when they would be implemented, but the conversation reached a fever pitch late last week, aided by unverified reports about section-wide eliminations. The Post has largely remained silent, leaving staff to read the tea leaves in conversations between individual editors and reporters: Some editors have quietly been suggesting to staff across various verticals, including sports, that it may not be a bad idea to begin looking for other jobs, Semafor has learned, and one Post source said editors would not answer questions about whether there would be a sports section after the cuts at all.
Here’s another boot licking oligarch ruining an American gem.
At one point I know Kara Swisher was interested in putting together a group to buy the Washington Post. What happened to that?
The Post needs an owner who can guide it through this dark time in American history and tell the difficult stories that need telling.
There are many interesting, useful, and fun C libraries in the software ecosystem. While one could go and rewrite these libraries in Swift, usually there is no need, because Swift provides direct interoperability with C. With a little setup, you can directly use existing C libraries from your Swift code.
I need to sit down and read and understand how this works but to be perfectly honest creating a tiny Objective-C class that calls the C code is super easy and the resulting code is easy to use from Swift.
Your mileage may vary. 😃
