Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Another week in the books. As I’ve aged days fly by which means weeks and months and years zip past me.
I’ve fallen into routine I should probably change. I get up, drink coffee, read Slack and email. Poke around code, do code reviews, maybe work on a feature or bug, then shower, and go to standup. Work for a spell then have lunch and head into the afternoon. Coffee around 2PM then finish out the day. It’s the same thing day-in and day-out. Wash, rinse, repeat.
I need a change. I’m thinking about going back to the office at least once a week. Maybe? Will lazy me win or will the old adventurous Rob win? We’ll find out.😃
I’m on my third cup of coffee. All the links and snippets I wanted to talk about are complete. It’s a little before 8AM, Flynn is in my lap, snoring. Time to be opinionated and finish this post off.
I hope you enjoy it as much as I do sharing it.😄
There’s an alarming number of otherwise smart people who are suddenly convinced that their computer software has become self-aware. Like renowned evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who was the subject of some raised eyebrows last week after he boldly declared in an essay that he believes Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot is fully conscious:
This is fascinating. Some folks are beginning to believe these LLMs are becoming intelligent and conscious. They’re a bunch of bits arranged in a way their inventors don’t understand. Our tech overlords are in a race to see who can build the ultimate LLM. The one that may possibly result in the extinction of the human race, but let’s get one thing clear: they’re not conscious. They’re code. Built by humans. Flawed humans racing each other to some end. But to what end? I haven’t the slightest clue.
Matthias Pfefferle • ActivityPub Blog
The Radical Speed Month bet: ship three protocol adapters in four weeks, and prove the Reader can become a universal aggregator. RSS / Google Reader API (so any reader app can use WordPress.com as a sync backend), ActivityPub (so Mastodon, Pixelfed, and friends show up natively), and ATProto / Bluesky (because that’s where a real chunk of the social-web conversation has gone). One Reader, every protocol you care about.
This is an extremely cool project. As the developer of a feed reader I’ve seen a huge uptick in readers and sync services. I myself have a GINORMOUS backlog of features to add to Stream. Some of those features were unique and I’ve fairly recently seen a number of them implemented in other readers. So many have done it that I will look like the copycat. 😁 You snooze, you lose, right?
Anywho, this is ultimately good for the feed reading market and feed reader developers. We’ll all continue to push each other in all the best ways, I hope.
Stream doesn’t currently have a sync system and some folks consider that a complete failure and nonstarter for their feed reading needs. I get it. I want that too! Seeing services glom on to standard ways of syncing is encouraging. I just wish we had something better than the old Google Reader API for doing it.
Could we work together to build one all feed readers can agree on? I mean a subset of what your sync service supplies today. That would allow us to use the feed reader of our choice and use whatever backend we want. Sure, you can still charge for your service. Why not? It’s just a spec for everyone to support or not. Ultimately the sync service is your product, not the front end. Open it up so more folks will pay you to use it.
You knew. And you signed off anyway. Because the alternative was losing the job, and the job was the mortgage, and the school fees, and the visa, and the version of yourself who’d fix it later once things stabilized.
This is a fun read and hits home for me. The paragraph I chose to use above was very intentional. I’m older than, I’d bet, 90% of my colleagues. With each generation those young folks come out of school way smarter and more prepared than me. Add LLM use into the mix and I wonder every day if today is the day I’m dismissed from work. It’s seriously a terrible way to live. But, it’s my reality.
One encouraging thing! My company has invested heavily in LLM usage but the stated goal is for us to be more efficient and become experts in the field. Experts so we attract more clients. That gives me a bit of hope and I need it.❤️
Claire Barber • Inside Climate News
For the first time, California discharged just over 12,000 megawatts, equivalent to 12 large nuclear plants, of energy from its battery arrays. That’s enough to meet over 40 percent of the state’s energy demand.
Folks love to bag on California, especially some orange turd living in the Whitehouse, but I think it’s out of jealousy.
I’m biased of course. California is where I was born and where my soul yearns to be.
Seeing them in the forefront of renewable energy in the United States makes me very happy.
Amazon’s data centers in Bahrain and the UAE have been hit multiple times by drone and missile strikes from Iran since the U.S. started bombing the country in February 2026. This left the company’s ME-CENTRAL-1 and ME-SOUTH-1 disrupted, with the AWS Health Dashboard indicating that it will take months before they can go back online
When the war with Iran started I fully expected them to hit as many American companies as they could with a presence in the Middle East. Microsoft and Google have a presence there. I’m not sure about Facebook but it wouldn’t surprise me to hear that they do. Heck, are there any big AI data centers there now?
Anyway, it wouldn’t surprise me to see more western, especially American, companies hit with Iranian drones.
With our current knuckleheads in office I’m surprised they haven’t pulled off the assassination of a top government official. Maybe the FBI still has some adults doing the real work, even with a drunkard at the helm.
Alexander Hanff • That Privacy Guy
Google Chrome is reaching into users' machines and writing a 4 GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking.
Naughty, naughty. Google can, and should, fix this. Just ask. That’s all it takes. If the user nopes out, so be it. Respect your users.
The Turlock Irrigation District was California’s first such agency when it formed in 1887. On Wednesday, it showed off another pioneering feat.
TID got a $20 million state grant in 2022 to test solar panels atop two short canal stretches. The arrays reduce evaporation of the Tuolumne River water while helping supply the district’s power customers.
More California goodness! If you’ve ever travelled through the San Joaquin Valley of California, especially along I-5, you’ll notice high berms of dirt with concrete water canals running through them. They’re a very necessary part of California infrastructure that take up otherwise valuable land. Why not cover them and get a twofer! Deliver life saving water and generate power at the same time!
Love it!❤️
Andrew Cunningham • Ars Technica
Apparently, this news surprised Ho as well, who claims that the Mac version and its author, Andrey Letov, are “using the Notepad++ trademark (the name) without permission.”
High drama in the Notepad++ for Mac port story! Apparently the creator had no idea this was going on and didn’t sign off on the use of the name. Yikes!
It sounds like things are getting sorted. Good.
Cathy Bussewitz • Associated Press
Meegan is among the wage earners engaging in “microshifting,” a flexible scheduling approach that involves tackling job duties in short, productive bursts instead of a single nine-to-five stretch. The paid labor fits around and between non-work responsibilities and priorities. Performance is judged primarily by output, with less emphasis on the number of hours logged behind a screen.
I think a lot of us who work from home break up our days in ways different from folks in the office. It’s not a bad thing as long as your company is cool with it.
I can roll out of bed at between 6-6:30AM and start working. I take a break at 9AM to shower. It’s my thing. It works for me.
As I said above I’m ready for a change, but I understand the lure of a microshifted schedule because I live it, kind of.😁
I’m sort of a sucker for looking at pictures of [mock versions] bc(https://spyglass.org/iphone-fold-ipad-mini-ios/) of the iPhone Ultra/iPhone Fold, and certainly watching videos on the matter. I think it’s a good thing as it means I’m clearly excited about the device, perhaps in a way I haven’t been about an iPhone in quite some time.
There’s a link to a video of a mockup that apparently came from the factory. The form factor is kind of weird at first glance. I think I’d need to use one for a while to decide if it was right for me. The dude on the video says it’s more of an iPad Nano than a foldable phone and I can definitely see it.
Apple doesn’t always get it right and I cannot see them ever having another hardware product as profitable and industry altering as the iPhone. But, they have to keep trying, right?
Vox Media is in late discussions with James Murdoch’s investment firm, Lupa Systems, to sell its podcast network and part of its publishing business, a source confirmed to Axios.
Hoo boy. I feel like this would destroy the Vox Media Podcast Network. I listen to Pivot and I cannot see Kara working for these folks. Hopefully she has the rights to take Pivot anywhere she wants, like doing it on her own.
Side note: They talk a lot about how media is drying up and podcasting it where it’s at because you don’t need a big company with hundreds of folks involved with the production of your show. She and Scott are right, you don’t need a big production, but they have a media company behind the production of their podcast. What happens when/if it’s sold? Does Pivot continue on as if nothing happened and Kara sucks it up or does she take it or does it cease to exist?
The plot thickens!
