Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Well, well, well, it’s been a couple weeks since my last post, I think? Life is busy around the Fahrni household from early October through the end of the year. We love Halloween, host Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and have grandkids we love to hang out with.
Our youngest daughter has been living with us for the last five years. She finally decided she’s had enough of Mom and Dad and moved back to California. Of course we miss her but she has her own life to live.
We’re still moving stuff out of our storage unit and I have some lumber to pick up at the old house today, but we’re pretty much done, and now I can start organizing our shed out back with the storage unit stuff. Busy, busy, busy.
Work has been crazy for the last few months right on top of our moving busyness. I’m looking forward to enjoying a quite day on the weekend. Getting back to working on Stream on Sunday morning is going to be incredible. I have so much to do and hope to ship minor updates as often as I can. Stream for Mac has been an obsession for me and it’s going to go out the door, soon, I hope. 🤞🏼
I have a couple of catch-up things to do with Stream for iOS, then I can hopefully get some parity in them, where it makes sense.
Aaron Couch • The Hollywood Reporter
Patrick Stewart, the sophisticated actor who brought a Shakespearean touch to Star Trek and X-Men as he made an otherworldly transformation from British stage veteran to sci-fi icon, has died. He was 86.
Godspeed, Captain. 🪦
⚠️ WARNING: The link above goes to Substack, yes, that Substack, the one that supports Nazi’s and white supremacists. I wouldn’t normally link there but I think Krugman’s message is important. I really wish all these great writers would go somewhere else.
Which reinforces the point that control of Starlink must, one way or another, be taken away from Elon Musk. It’s a matter of national security: we cannot let private individuals make foreign and defense policy, and it would be totally irresponsible to leave a crucial military asset in the hands of a racist, authoritarian conspiracy theorist.
I’ve heard a number of folks, from journalists to podcasters, say the government should take over SpaceX. If Space Karen continues to behave this way it seems like a decent option once we have an actual real government back in place.
Asked about supply chain shortages, like the ongoing RAM shortage, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an interview that it’s “terrible” to have RAM in personal PCs instead of data centers.
Kiss my butt, Sam. Y’all drove the price of RAM through the roof and it’s not all yours to have. Us little folks need to get some scraps once in a while.
It’s crap like this that will have the peons — like me — outside your gates with pitchforks, tar, feathers, and a rail to ride you out on.
Start your own damned RAM manufacturing plant right next to OpenAI and make your own RAM. AI can fix it, right? Get going.
You hear folks say chemotherapy sucks, but until you go through it yourself, you don’t really know how bad it can be. It remains a popular activity only because it’s better than the alternative.
It’s nice to hear Craig is doing better. Cancer sucks and so does the treatment. Also, at some level, aging sucks.
GOOD TO HAVE YOU BACK OLD TIMER.
Microsoft offers voluntary buyouts to 60,000 employees as AI leads to efficiency push
More scary stuff with AI at the center. Potentially 60,000 people out of work. How the heck do you fix that? If AI is going to result in computers taking over all these things then we need social safety nets that pay folks so they can survive.
Someone better come up with a good plan, and soon. I listened to a great episode of Decoder with Nilay Patel and Bill Gates, and Gates kept talking about abundance. What abundance? Folks will lose everything if AI takes their jobs. That’s not abundance, it’s cruelty.
I suppose I can get a job at Starbucks, which I’d be perfectly happy to do, but what if I have to compete with a few thousand other unemployed folks for one job? Yeah, it’s something I, unfortunately, think about often. I have survived at least five rounds of layoffs at my job. It’s not fun worrying about this every day. Yes, I do that, and it sucks.
Rant off.
I sped up the Tapestry timeline by over 350% by getting rid of SwiftUI.
As a developer it feels amazing when you pull off something like this. It’s a time to feel smart and puff out your chest if only for the moment — because in 10 minutes’ time you may feel like the biggest idiot the world has ever seen.
Congratulations, Sean! That’s a big accomplishment.
I’ve decided that Stream is going to remain UIKit and AppKit for the main timeline view, which is a UITableView and NSTableView for their respective OS’es, and everything surrounding the UI in service of its main function will become SwiftUI.
For Thunder Chicken I’m going all in on SwiftUI.
Tapestry is a really great choice for a Unified Timeline style application that works with a number of services like Mastodon and Bluesky. It even works great with RSS, but you should use Stream for that. 😁
Tapestry runs $39.99/year and is worth every penny. It’s my daily Mastodon and Bluesky driver and gets better day-by-day because of Sean. ❤️
I hope to someday be as good as the people at The Iconfactory. Until that day comes I’ll keep plugging away at my craft. 🔨
Bruno Ferreira • Tom’s Hardware
Concerns have been mounting everywhere about the environmental impact of data centers, with alarms ringing at various environmental think tanks. The Sierra Club, one of the oldest environmental preservation organizations in the U.S., has now put forth an estimate that by 2030, U.S. data center buildouts will be outputting as much carbon dioxide as the entirety of Mexico, pushing back progress on greenhouse gas reduction by 15 years, Bloomberg reports.
What a terrible thing to think of. Hey, at least we’ll have great shareholder value as the world burns, right, RIGHT!? 🤬
One of these AI folks is going to get hurt or killed over this at some point. People will eventually have enough and we’ll see another Luigi Mangione emerge.
I’m not looking forward to that world, in either regard.
Allie Benegar • The Sun Gazette
EXETER – A new space for entrepreneurs and remote workers has come to the hub of Exeter.
The Colab opened in Exeter on Oct. 29 at 122 S. E St., bringing a space where entrepreneurs, remote workers and more can gather downtown. There, they’ll have a place where they can connect with others through a lively work environment or make use of the quiet spaces available at the site.
This is wonderful news for the little town of Exeter, my hometown! I was raised there, graduated high school there, and we raised our kids there, with little stints in Seattle and San Luis Obispo in between.
It’s a great little town and having a place like this would’ve been perfect for me if we were still living there, alas, we are not. But I hope some Exeter’ites take advantage of this lovely shared space and help it thrive.
I’ll be dropping by some day to say “Hi!” to y’all! ❤️
Reddit is ending support for RSS feeds on 13 November and shutting its public API entirely by March 2027. The announcement went up on 30 September in r/redditdev.
Reddit’s stated reason is that RSS has become a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse.
This is pretty sad for those of us that love using RSS to read news. Stream and all other feed readers could easily grab RSS from your favorite subreddit and display it. I used it for the NASCAR subreddit.
Not any more. C’est la vie. 😔
Jason Torchinsky • The Autopian
Wait, what? Discovery has an upside-down ‘s’ in its name? How the hell did that happen? Discovery was usually considered, by astronauts and NASA people, the jewel in the Space Shuttle crown.
As Jason says, once you see it, you can’t unsee it, and it’s only on one side of Discovery! Obviously a mistake! 🤣
But, this makes the legend of Discovery even more fantastic! Little mistakes like this make for great stories and the history of our once great space program.
But according to Chris Lattner, CEO of AI software startup Modular (recently acquired by Qualcomm, where he now serves as executive VP of software engineering), chip companies should be wary of the limits of AI code generation. Making a kernel run fast is a very different problem from building software infrastructure we can depend on, he told EE Times in an exclusive interview.
It’s neat to see Chris Lattner’s name in the news again. I’m not sure if he likes that, but it’s nice to see he’s still doing interesting things.
When Chris left Apple for Tesla and left not long after joining Tesla I always thought he bailed because Musk was a bully and an idiot who was also a micro-manager telling Chris how to do his job. I’d put money on Mr. Lattner being a whole lot more intelligent than that con man Space Karen.
Hell, I’m an idiot and I think I’m probably smarter than Space Karen. 🤣
Despite being a Mac person since 2005, I’ve got a fair amount of nostalgia for Windows XP. The original “Bliss” wallpaper was a photo shot by Charles O’Rear in Sonoma, but there was also a modified version with a lower hill, punchier colors, and a lens flare dubbed “Energy Bliss” which shipped with Media Center Edition. Now, more than 20 years later, I thought it deserved another update.
Nifty! If you long for a little Windows in your life checkout Louie’s latest creation! Oh, and while you’re there check out his amazing collection of hand-crafted wallpaper and give him a tip. Tip Jars make the world go ‘round. 💰
HALF MOON BAY, Calif. (AP) — When fall arrives and leaves start changing color, Mike Valladao, a systems engineer at a cybersecurity company, slips into his alter ego, “Farmer Mike,” also known as the “Picasso of Pumpkin Carvers.”
Folks who can turn pumpkins into art are amazing in my book. I wish I had the talent to do this kid of stuff. I’ve done some cool pumpkins in my lifetime, but these are absolutely incredible! 🎃
Marisa Kabas • The Hand Basket
Tom Hoyle knew he had a chiropractor appointment on Thursday, and when he remembered the office was halfway between his home in Charlotte, North Carolina and Trump’s rally in Rock Hill, South Carolina, he figured he might as well attend. He planned to make some good trouble at the event, but he never expected a Fox News reporter would hand him a microphone.
If you didn’t see the short viral video of Mr. Hoyle talking to a Fox News reporter go read this article and watch the video. It’s hilarious. 👍🏼
Brendan Carr is a silly, hypocritical fascist who splits his time between destroying U.S. consumer protection standards and media consolidation limits, and abusing his position as FCC boss to threaten broadcast networks for airing stuff like comedy. Or journalism. Or politicians that the increasingly-unpopular President is clearly afraid of.
There’s a segment on The Vergecast called “Brendan Carr is a dummy” with its own little jingle and I’m here for it! 🤣
Stream for Mac is coming soon! I swear! It’s only been like, what, eight years in the making? 😳
