Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
The word of the month is Tired. We bought what I hope is the final home we will ever have. Our forever home as folks like to say. With that comes boxing up and lugging boxes and furniture from one place to another. We hired bonafide professional movers for a day to get the bulky items to our new place. Now we’re making runs to the old home to pickup stuff and transport it to the new home. It is, quite honestly, exhausting. It took me two days to recover from the initial big push on Wednesday. Today we’re going to be back at it, in the rain no less. 😂
I told Kim — my lovely bride — I’m never moving again. I said I’d just walk into the back yard, lie down, and she could put dirt over me. I’m done. 😂
Once we’re settled I know I’m going to love being in the country. We’ve always talked about having a bit of land in the countryside and we’ve managed to pull that off.
I hope you enjoy the links.
I’m now back at home after a red-eye, and rather than go to bed in the early afternoon, I’m going to write a post about winning the Hugo Award for Best Series.
I, for one, and very happy for Mr. Scalzi. I’ve only read book one of the Old Man’s War series but I enjoyed it very much, I’d started The Ghost Brigades but haven’t read in quite a while. I also really like his personality and his web presence. He’s had a site since September 13, 1998 and has a great blog.
He also seems to be a very nice human being. I really like that.
Congratulations, Mr. Scalzi! 🥳
And I can’t help but feel that maybe we were better off before we knew everyone’s hot takes on everything.
The town coffee shop was just a coffee shop. We weren’t publicly shamed for going there because one of the owners was an ass. It was just a place to hang out with our friends.
Our casual work friends were just casual work friends. We didn’t expect them to take positions on the world’s most complicated conflicts. We could just talk about weather and TV shows, and maybe sometimes get a beer after work.
And our neighbors were just our neighbors.
Really great piece by Marco. I don’t ask my neighbors their political views but it’s often easy to figure out because of the flags and signs decorating their yards. But most are very kind and welcoming.
I had friends at my old coffee shop of choice who were not aligned with my views. It was ok. We found things to talk about outside of politics. It was fine.
Bill Gates calls for some jobs to be ‘Human Reserved,’ suggests taxing AI tokens and robots — billionaire says that ‘AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history’
It seems to me AI is progressing way too fast and has no rules around ethics. How should we allow it to behave? What kinds of safeguards should be put in place? There’s far too much turmoil in the world today without introducing mass layoffs because one of the many LLMs can be used to replace someone. So far we’ve been using them as a production accelerator, a really fast assistant.
We have seen LLMs go rogue and we have to figure out how to stop that. Yes, stop that. It can’t continue to happen. It’ll turn into the biggest waste of money and resources in history if it continues and who knows where it could ultimately lead. These things can be used for evil, just as they can for good.
The technology is incredible but we should approach it with a bit of fear and trepidation.
In a bit of a late-August surprise while the world awaits word on the next generation of iPhones, on Tuesday Apple announced two new processors, the M5 Ultra and M6, which help power new iterations of its Mac Studio and Mac mini desktop computers. Both models are available to pre-order now and will ship on September 22 and will run macOS 27 Golden Gate.
For folks who want their Supercar of computers I’m not sure if Apple delivered that with the new Mac Studio or not but they’re very nice, and very pricey for a fully loaded model, just like a Supercar. Thank you LLM builders for the hike in RAM and storage. 🤬
It would be very nice if Apple could make expandable computers but they just don’t do that anymore. I don’t think it’s some kind of money grab. I think it’s all about size and speed. The complete integration of the SOC delivers both but in the end it makes them extremely expensive. Sure, Apple could lower prices but they’re very much into making lots of money so they have to maintain that huge margin they like.
It’s all about shareholder value and idiots like us keep buying them.
TC Sottek and Jacob Kastrenakes • The Verge
1Password faced immediate backlash from customers this week over a $300,000 pledge in support of a Linux distro created by David Heinemeier Hansson, who has regularly published overtly racist blog posts that include comments calling for deportation of ethnic minorities in Europe. The popular password manager is now a “distinguished corporate patron” of Omacom, the nonprofit foundation that oversees a popular Linux distribution known as Omarchy.
Yep, 1Password has stepped in it. They haven’t been the darlings they used to be for many years now. As soon as they made the choice to become an enterprise company and accept investment money the scrappy little Canadian company that could stopped being that.
Seeing anyone from 1Password support a nazi asshole is tough to watch.
Legendary Windows developer Dave W. Plummer has been busy finessing his revamped Task Manager. His latest release, dubbed TMOG (Task Manager OG), was vibe coded by feeding Claude “a 107-page spec,” says the mind behind the original 80KB Task Manager, which debuted publicly in Windows NT 4.0 (1996). TMOG doesn’t just work natively on modern Windows 11 systems though; it struts its neon stuff on macOS and Linux, too.
Now for a bit of fun news. This is a really nice story to read in the midst of all the crap happening in the world. It’s interesting to me because you have an “old school” developer do the old school thing by writing a huge specification. I haven’t seen one in years. Most folks just make drawings and talk about behavior. Anyway, this specification is kind of the perfect prompt for an LLM to go off and make something for you. In the end what did he get? A very niche bit of software that not only runs on Windows but runs on Mac and Linux. Each app is fully native, not some Electron abomination. By using an LLM to do the work he was able to use Swift on Mac, Win32 on Windows, and Qt for Linux with a shared C++ core. What a great piece of work!
I shared this a week or two ago with John Gruber because I know how much he hates Electron. This project is everything he appreciates and given some feedback I’m confident TMOG could be a real Mac-assed-mac-app.
Nitter, an open source project that allowed people to read X posts without logging into or even opening the X app, has received cease-and-desist letters from X demanding that it shut down. The news was shared via a brief message posted to the project’s website, and follows X’s earlier attempts to knock Nitter offline by technical means.
It was bound to happen. Space Karen doesn’t want anyone reading his crappy website without signing up. He, like Facebook, breaks the internet with his walled trash heap.
I don’t know much about Nitter except that I’d find links to it in my Mastodon feed occasionally. There are still folks on that disgusting site I’d like to read but refuse to use the system. Nitter at least allowed me to see what was happening when others linked to it.
Chris Schulz • West Virginia Public Broadcasting
West Virginia is largely untouched by data centers today. When completed, the 1.3 gigawatt Monarch Compute Campus currently breaking ground on the banks of the Ohio River north of Point Pleasant will become the state’s first and likely the largest on Earth.
This is a real shame. I understand why places want these data centers. They want them for the tax revenue and “jobs” creation. On the flip side you’re going to destroy any good will the town, or jurisdiction, has with its citizenry and drive up the cost of electricity and water. Not to mention any other environmental impacts we can’t see.
The article includes a picture of a man watching a bulldozer build a berm just outside his back yard. No thank you. I’d find a way out of there as fast as I possibly could and I HATE MOVING! 🤬
We need strict regulation on data centers, especially around environmental, water, and energy harms. Oh, yeah, and the people.
Apple is the most important hardware company in AI right now. Without having built a single multi-trillion parameter model. OpenAI bought tens of thousands of Mac minis and Mac Studios. Not for employees. For training computer-use agents through reinforcement learning. Headless machines. No screens. No keyboards. AI agents running thousands of parallel sessions learning how to operate a computer the way you do. Anthropic is doing the same. Renting Mac minis at scale through AWS. Why Macs? Apple’s licensing doesn’t allow macOS on non-Apple hardware. If your agent needs to learn a Mac, you buy a Mac. Thousands of them. The demand got so intense that Apple pulled high-RAM configs from sale.
Can you imagine what’s going to happen with all of these computers when they decide to upgrade them? we should be able to find them for next to nothing. Of course they’ll probably be very outdated by then but could be useful as internet browsing and email computers.
A lot has changed since 1979. Since firing the singer who fronted the band on their first eight albums, Black Sabbath have hired and parted company with three more vocalists – Ronnie James Dio, Ian Gillan and previously unknown American singer David Donato – and now exist in name only, with original bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward having exited stage left too.
Meanwhile, having been dragged out of the darkness by his wife and manager Sharon, daughter of Sabbath’s hard-nosed manager Don Arden, Ozzy Osbourne is now a major star, his most recent solo record, 1983’s Bark At The Moon, already certified as his third successive multi-platinum US release.
I linked to this because I remember Bark At The Moon so well. It was huge at our high school along with the likes of Iron Maiden. I remember a lot of Ozzy and Eddie t-shirts roaming the halls. That Killers t-shirt is so iconic.
Good times. ❤️
On a recent Sunday, 30-year-old Collin Russell was desperately visiting open houses, looking to buy a place in the city that his wife is from. They left two years ago so he could go to graduate school, and they moved back to San Francisco in June, just as the housing market here has exploded.
“I couldn’t have timed it worse, honestly," he lamented after touring a condo in the affluent neighborhood of Presidio Heights.
San Francisco has minted a bunch of new millionaires and billionaires and they’re out on home shopping sprees. It’s hard to imagine a $1.6mm dollar home being inexpensive. Wow. 😳
On Tuesday, Johnston and a handful of other entrepreneurs announced the “Fermi Explorer” mission. In concept, it is simple. They seek to raise $15 million to build a small spacecraft, carrying a 1-kg payload, and launch it to Alpha Centauri such that it reaches that system in less than 80,000 years. Why? In conversations about the Fermi paradox, Johnston realized such a mission would knock two “filters” off the list: Species won’t want to send spacecraft beyond their home star, or species will find that interstellar transit is too difficult.
Talk about being patient! An 80,000 year journey? Maybe it will find a civilization capable of travel at the speed of light who could come visit our dead world. No, I can’t imagine this planet being livable in 80,000 years. If it makes it another 100 years I’d be shocked.
Pagecord is a one-man band. I use AI to assist with the running of the business. This page documents where and how AI is used.
TL;DR: Pagecord blogs are not used to train AI models, and Pagecord has no AI features in the product. I use coding LLMs (currently Claude Code) as an assistant when writing code. Pagecord also uses OpenAI’s content moderation service to check for illegal content, as well as spam signups.
I have a Pagecord account but I don’t use it. I supported it because I think we need more blogging systems, not less. Olly, the proprietor and sole developer, is doing an amazing job with the platform. He’s on top of things and is constantly adding new features to make it even better.
If you need a blogging platform Pagecord might be a good choice? Go check it out.
San Francisco-based Uber plans to eliminate about 3,300 jobs, or 10% of its global workforce, in the company’s largest round of cuts since the coronavirus pandemic. The restructuring was designed to reduce management layers, simplify the company’s organizational structure and free up money for growth, innovation and autonomous vehicles, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in a message to employees Wednesday.
More layoffs. 😔 It’s so frightening to think about.
