Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

PS5 owners really want to play Xbox games, as Microsoft tops Sony’s preorder charts
From an outsiders perspective this makes sense given Microsoft’s move to purchase extremely popular game studios. They should absolutely make sure everything they create is playable on PlayStation. It’s kind of been Microsoft’s M.O. all along. Write software that runs anywhere. 👨🏻💻
The other day, I was reading an interesting article about moving away from social media siloes and getting back to basics with a domain and a web page. (Neocities is also a nice place to learn HTML markup and put up a home page.) I liked the article and was looking forward to leaving a comment, BUT when I got to the bottom of the post, I was confronted with a prompt to sign up for a membership. Really? To leave a comment? Especially on an article about the small web?
Of course this is about Substack. It is, along with X, an internet Nazi bar and it’s full of amazing writers supporting it.
Money talks, I guess. 😞
A major Tesla investor has called on Elon Musk to step down as head of the company as a nationwide boycott causes stock prices to plunge.
Ross Gerber, who owns an estimated $105 million in shares of Tesla stock, called on Elon Musk to step down as head of the company, saying that he “destroyed” the company’s reputation
Does anyone know what Tesla is up to anymore? It’s just sitting there, not making progress. It was once a bright shining star. Now it’s a losing afterthought. Wonder why?
Tesla board, fire Musk.🔥
Red Bull only has itself to blame for its driver mess
It’s really incredible to see Red Bull panicking over two races with, in essence, a rookie driver. They fire Danny Ricardo and Sergio Perez in favor of Liam Lawson — over Yuki Tsunoda — and expect the man to be top 10, or better, on day one. Absurd.
Red Bull has competition, that’s it. McLaren has caught up and Mercedes is show some of their old spark. Not to mention Alex Albon keeping Williams in a good spot.
I’d expect Ferrari to show some teeth soon. It’s gonna get really interesting! 🏎️
Once upon a time, landing a job at the likes of Amazon, Google, or Microsoft was seen as the golden ticket — offering generous salaries, four-day work weeks, and nap pods. Over the last few years, though, that image has been transformed into one that is far less idyllic, marked with mass layoffs and employees sleeping on the office floor.
Basically the BigCo’s are returning to the way they used to be. When I was at Microsoft everyone worked long hours moving as fast as we could to meet deadlines. My nap pod was the floor under my desk where I’d grab some shuteye as I worked overnight. I’d imagine I worked an average of 60 hours a week for months on end.
It’s not a good way to live. It’s hard on you physically and mentally and if you have a family it punishes them.
I do not recommend doing it.
Rebuilding Prime Video UI with Rust and WebAssembly
This link is to a video and slides for the presentation. I didn’t watch it but I thought I’d share it because I do find this interesting.
The browser as operating system feels more than a bit odd. Folks like Apple, Mozilla, Google, and Microsoft really need to put way more effort into tooling to make it better for developers. As a developer I want a full IDE with real debugging support, no matter the language I choose. Perhaps they’re already there and I’m just naive?
I’m still a bit bitter WebAssembly was chosen over a CLI implementation — ECMA-335 — that runs in the browser. But, at least we have something common for browsers and languages to target.
It is strange to take this low level language and spit out WebAssembly. ⚒️
Researchers have found that ChatGPT “power users,” or those who use it the most and at the longest durations, are becoming dependent upon — or even addicted to — the chatbot.
It was inevitable, right?
Each new version of macOS has increased the complexity of launching apps, from the basics of launchd, the addition of LaunchServices, to security checks on notarization and XProtect.
If you’d like to see a really nice overview of how macOS launches apps, this is for you! 🚀
It’s not crazy technical, an intentional choice by the author, and will give you an understanding of how things work when you start up your favorite application.
In this post, I assume that vibe coding will grow up and people will use it for real engineering, with the “turn your brain off” version of it sticking around just for prototyping and fun projects. For me, vibe coding just means letting the AI do the work. How closely you choose to pay attention to the AI’s work depends solely on the problem at hand. For production, you pay attention; for prototypes, you chill. Either way, it’s vibe coding if you didn’t write it by hand.
Vibe coding is the new way I guess.
As someone who has spent over 30-years struggling to become better each and every day I find this depressing. I know I’m an ok developer. Not the worst and certainly not the best, not even close. But to spend a lifetime at something only to see folks produce more output without even trying is extremely discouraging.
Craftsmanship goes out the window in favor of expediency. It is the new way and we’re all going to have to get used to it or be left behind.
I’ve finally become a dinosaur. 🦕

