Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I’m feeling a bit spicy, like that Mexican Mocha icon. A little heat, a little spice. I’m tired. Just beat and that makes me a little on edge and grouchy. It’s always been a huge personality flaw I try to keep under control but today’s writing will most likely be a bit negative at times. It’s just where my brain is at the moment.

You may want to skip today’s post if you’re looking for positivity.

Apologies in advance to those who brave the waters.

Mike Barnes • The Hollywood Reporter

Michael Madsen, the rough-and-tumble actor best known for his work in the Quentin Tarantino films Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill: Vol. 1 & 2, The Hateful Eight and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, died Thursday morning. He was 67.

I really enjoyed Michael Madsen as an actor, I especially liked him in Kill Bill. Budd was a real piece of work and his scenes with Uma Thurman and Daryl Hannah were extremely memorable.

RIP 🪦

Ged Maheux • Iconfactory

Apple’s new Liquid Glass design that was announced at WWDC25 is more than just a fresh coat of paint—it’s a signal. One that points simultaneously to the future of digital interfaces and to the past. We’re calling it neo-retro.

Ged and The Iconfactory are some of my favorite designers and app builders in the Mac and iOS ecosystem. They absolutely live, eat, and breathe all things Apple and have their own unique style to enhance your app experiences.

There is currently a lot of hate being tossed around the Mac and iOS developer community around the new Liquid Glass design language and I can understand where folks are coming from, it’s very different. Personally, I don’t care to enter the fray of opinions. I’ll just make sure my apps are as ready as I can possibly make them.

I really need some design help with Stream’s icon set and plan to hire Iconfactory to do that work if I can make it work financially. They’re very reasonably priced and their work is incredible!

Jason Torchinsky • The Autopian

Ford has been using essentially the same logo for 116 years. That little fact reminded me about that one time that Ford at least considered changing their storied logo, and the creator of that unselected new logo was one of the greatest graphic designers of all time: Paul Rand.

Go check out this logo. It’s really interesting and I don’t hate it but the original, and still used, logo is iconic and worth keeping. I hope they never change it.

Some other logos I really love are GE’s classic logo type in a circle and the Coca Cola script used for over 100 years.

Nilay Patel • The Verge

Make no mistake, WordPress is one of the most dominant platforms on the web, if not _the_most dominant. Something like 43 percent of websites run on WordPress, in one of its many flavors. That includes The Verge — the backend of our website is hosted by WordPress VIP. So this might be the first reverse disclosure on the show. Technically, we’re Matt’s customer, and like any good customer, I made feature requests.

I’m a big fan of Nilay Patel’s Decoder podcast and Nilay in general. He’s smart and he asks great questions and will push on folks. This interview with Matt Mullenweg was quite good and makes Matt’s actions sound less wild.

I know a lot of folks disagree with what he’s done to WP Engine but we can’t always agree with everything someone does, nor fully understand their motivation.

Anyway, this Decoder episode is a good one.

Laura Pippig • PCWorld

Microsoft is paywalling these features in Notepad and Paint

It’s a pretty sad state of affairs at Microsoft these days. I have a soft spot in my heart for Microsoft having worked directly for them or on contract at least four different times. Seeing them nickel and dime folks in the software they chose to include in the OS release is pretty disgusting. Hey, just leave the AI stuff out if it’s too costly to the organization to give it away. Then again as long as folks can ignore it, it doesn’t really matter much.

There are also better choices available outside of Microsoft’s included app. Notepad++ is a really great choice for a text editor and Paint.net for photo editing or pixel painting.

Yeldar Kudaibergen

To be fair, RSS isn’t strictly required — the real goal is for any social network to be able to follow any other. No need for cross-posting, duplicate accounts, or “check out my Instagram here” links. You should just be able to read what you want, where you want. That said, right now, RSS is still the most practical and universal tool for this.

Yeldar is a bit hopeful RSS can play a key role in social networks and in many ways it already does. Mastodon, Bluesky, Pixel Fed, and I’d imagine many others already publish RSS feeds. I follow quite a few in Stream and many other feed readers can too. If you’d like to aggregate a bunch of different feeds, use a feed reader. It’s all read-only and one direction but it would certainly give you a launch point for interacting with social networks.

I’ve been watching Dave Winer’s projects and writing with great interest for years, 20+ to be exact.

He’s now off creating his new weblog editor — WordLand — on top of WordPress.

Dave’s also been talking about inbound and outbound RSS. I get that. Inbound can be used by a service like Mastodon to make a post there. I use Micro.blog as my blogging platform and it does that for me, but I think that’s a little backward for what Dave is after. I think Inbound means the service looks for an updated RSS feed and automagically updates its own timeline with your post. That makes a lot of sense to me.

Outbound is what we have today. When we write to our blog we render it in two different formats; HTML and RSS, among others.

The thing I don’t understand in this particular setup is, how do you reply in that world? Does that work like it normally would and just display on a single social network or is RSS generated somewhere that’s read back by the originating weblog and rebroadcast somehow to form the thread we’ve all become accustomed to on social networks?

I’d imagine it would just show up on the social network the person answered on. That’s fine. It’s not round-tripped but that’s fine. The RSS feed would serve as a read-only source.

Dennis Lee • The Takeout

We are in peak hot dog season; they’re perfect to pluck straight from the vine (okay, refrigerated grocery store shelf) and toss right on the grill. A lot of us will be doing just that, especially on the Fourth of July, which is not only America’s Independence Day but also a certified grilling holiday. So just how many hot dogs do we eat on the Fourth? The answer, in cheeky internet terms, will indeed shock you.

Well, I’m a true American. I had a hotdog yesterday to celebrate the Fourth. I like them. Well, I like brats. Thats what I had yesterday but I ate it like a hotdog. So it’s a hotdog. 🌭😃

Jeet Heer • The Nation

Peter Thiel and his friends feel they no longer belong to our species.

This guy is a psychopath with money. Just like Musk and Trump. They seem to have been hurt by someone early in life and just want to create some strange dystopian society that allows them to do whatever they want. Want to pollute our waters? Sure, Mr. Thiel. Right away Mr. Thiel. Musk, same damned thing.

Let’s get them the money to create their dystopia, on Mars. Then we can ship the whole lot there at once and get on living.

I’m sick of these rich asshole trying to run the world like they’re entitled to it and we’re all sheep here to serve. Without all that money y’all are nothing but weirdos.

Jess Weatherbed • The Verge

AMC Theatres is making it easier for moviegoers to know the actual start time of their film screening and avoid sitting through lengthy ads. A new notice has started appearing when people purchase tickets via the AMC website, warning that “movies start 25-30 minutes after showtime.”

I can certainly appreciate theaters giving us a warning about the ads before the move so we can skip them. The last few films I’ve been to have been super frustrating at the open because I don’t want to spend 30 minutes of my day watching ads before the film I just paid to see.

Zöe Schiffer • WIRED

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is hitting back at Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent AI talent poaching spree. In a full-throated response sent to OpenAI researchers Monday evening and obtained by WIRED, Altman made his pitch for why staying at OpenAI is the only answer for those looking to build artificial general intelligence, hinting that the company is evaluating compensation for the entire research organization.

My opinion? OpenAI lead the charge for marketing what they, and the industry, refer to as “AI.” I suspect the company known as OpenAI will cease to exist, Altman and the VC’s will make a shit ton of money and move on to whatever is next. That’s why Altman wants to keep his people. He wants that hojillion dollar exit. If you believe he’s doing this for humanity’s sake I have a bridge to sell you in New York City.

While “AI” is changing things for the worse in the corporate world it doesn’t have its uses in software development if you know what you’re looking for and how to validate its correct. These companies have crawled the web and stolen all the code that exists today on the open web. That begs the question “Is this as good as it gets?”

In many ways I’m glad I’m approaching retirement age. That way I don’t have long to live in this “AI” based software engineering world. Overall, it’s not for me. I’m a dinosaur in many way. Old, not that talented, and tired of the grind.

I’m just waiting to be fired. It’s inevitable.

Starbucks is kind of my leading candidate for a new career. I like coffee and people. I feel like it’s a decent place to work.

Yes, I’m feeling more than a bit gloomy over my future, but it feels like a possibility to me. Best have a plan in mind if I can’t find another job.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Yes, it’s Sunday morning. We had our grandkids stay with us for a couple days which is fun and exhausting. So, yeah, I’m a bit late this week. Rather I was a bit late last week? 🤔

Enjoy the links.

Shelby Talcott and Morgan Chalfant • Semafor

The US bombed three Iranian nuclear facilities on Saturday evening, President Donald Trump said.

I put this here because it’s important and should probably warrant its own post. I don’t feel great about what “we” did to Iran. Yes, it’s a terribly oppressive nation with theocratic leadership and a model of what not to be as a nation. Yet, I wish we hadn’t bombed them. So far things seem to be as stable as you could expect after doing something like this. Apparently the Iranians moved their nuclear material out of the sites. While it hasn’t been refined to its most dangerous state they could still put together a dirty bomb to drop on Israel. That’s frightening and I’m not excited about the prospect.

Louie Mantia

In a way, one could say Liquid Glass is like a new version of Aqua. It has reflective properties reminiscent of that. One could also say it’s an evolution of whatever iOS 7 was, leaning into the frosted panels and bright accent colors. But whatever Liquid Glass seems to be, it isn’t what many of us were hoping for.

Louie has been around the design block more than a few times. I like his takes on UI and design and enjoyed this piece on Liquid Glass. I’d expect a sizable series of posts related to the new design.

As for my take? I don’t really have one at the moment. I’m just going to adapt Stream to the new design and move on. I have so many things to add to Stream I find it difficult to get wrapped up in the debate around the new design language.

At some point I may have an opinion but not today.

Craig Hockenberry

The first thing I installed after the WWDC25 Keynote was the beta for iPadOS. There was only one reason: it had the windows we have all wanted for so long.

The iPad seems to have gotten a lot of love this release cycle and that’s great! I’ve seen more than a few takes but Craig is an old timer in the Mac and iOS ecosystem and understands the OS’es really darned well.

Dave Winer

All that’s missing is a timeline viewer, and that’s what I’m working on now. It’s coming together pretty nicely, imho. Not an easy project, though on the surface it looks like it should be. Also there’s nothing proprietary about my timeline viewer. There could be a thousand of them. Anyone who has written an RSS feed reader will have all the low-level bits they need.

I’m curious to see what Dave is going to produce. I suspect his timeline viewer will be a lot like Stream’s. Just a flow of blog posts in chronological order, no sorting, no folders, etc.

Having a timeline based feed reader is exactly what motivated me to create Stream in the first place.

Maybe Dave has other ideas? I’ll be keeping an eye out for whatever he creates.

Alfred Lieth Årøe • Expo Blog

In less than a week of work I migrated my 7 year old React Native app to Expo. The app Is called Blur, and is a fun party game that gives a group of friends challenges, questions, and mini-games to do! In addition to simple (and complex) React Native components, this app includes an iOS widget, notifications, custom fonts and a good list of dependencies.

If you’re a React Native dev with an old app you’d like to upgrade to Expo here’s a nice article for you. Enjoy.

Brian Morrissey • The Rebooting

Substack is a consequential company in the rebooting, if you will, of media. It has emerged as shorthand for the decentralization of media.

Decentralized? I’d argue it’s completely centralized. All these authors rely on Substack for their entire publishing system. From writing to distribution they’re built on a single system. And it’s a horrible company to boot.

No matter how many times I’ve told folks on Substack about their embrace of Nazi’s they continue to publish there, this includes some Jewish writers, which is shocking to me. There are alternatives. Molly White has done the work so you don’t have to.

Catherine Zhu • CBC Radio

In Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror classic _The Shining, _the camera zooms in toward a black-and-white photograph hanging in the hallway of the Overlook Hotel. It’s dated July 4, 1921. Dead centre stands Jack Torrance — played by Jack Nicholson — smiling in a crowd of partygoers.

I had no idea there was a mystery surrounding the source of the picture. Problem solved!

Ruth Kitchin Tillman

My coworkers don’t want AI. They want macros.

I understand where Ruth is coming from. Folks just want to do their jobs and if they think macros are better than AI, that’s fine. AI is just another tool in the toolbox. Use it, don’t use it. Doesn’t matter.

Lori Doran • Laughing Squid

New York City Council member Keith Powers has partnered with our friends at Bodega Cats New York to pass legislation that would make it completely legal for these loyal felines to stay in their favorite spots in neighborhood convenience stores all around the five boroughs.

I’m cool with this idea! I love cats and Bodega Cats are a big deal in New York City.

I’m sure some folks will push back on the idea of allowing them permanent residence but I’d welcome it.🐱

Alan Ohnsman

Elon Musk fired Tesla’s head of operations in North America and Europe, amid declining sales in both regions and the electric vehicle brand’s falling popularity, according to people familiar with the matter.

Oh, the irony! Space Karen made himself the most hated man in America. He caused Tesla to fall. He caused folks to sell their Tesla’s and avoid them like the plague. Just like the Marmalade Messiah he has to blame everyone but himself.

Tesla needs good leadership. They need a CEO who’s invested in the company. They need to fire Musk.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I’ve been experimenting with another read later app called Flyleaf this week. I’m finding I love Plinky for saving links to articles, mainly about development, I can read at anytime. I normally do this with Notion but Plinky is really great at it.

As for read later style apps, Flyleaf does a great job stripping away all the cruft and presents text in a way that’s easy to read with my aging eyes. 👀

I realized a couple days back that Kim and I graduated from high school 40 years ago. That’s wild. That means we celebrate our 38th wedding anniversary this August. 40 is just around the corner. 😳

I’ve added a new feature to Stream for my friend Ashur Cabrera. It allows you to invoke a custom URL scheme to make Stream add a new subscription. Kind of easy to do and the code was in really good shape to make it easy. Ashur did find a bug so I’m off exploring that and I ran into a crashing bug just running Stream in the usual way. It all seems to stem from building with Xcode 16.x. I managed to easily fix it on iOS but iPadOS still crashes. That has to do with my Split View and how it’s being created. It’s a weird one. I’ll get it fixed soon, I hope, so I can finish off this new feature. 😃

Enjoy the links.

Daring Fireball

My biggest takeaway from WWDC 2025 is that Apple seemingly took some lessons to heart from its unfulfilled promises of a year ago. This year’s WWDC wasn’t merely focused on what Apple is confident it can ship in the next 12 months, but on what they can ship this fall. I might be overlooking a minor exception or two, but every major feature announced in the WWDC 2025 keynote was both demonstratable in product briefings, and is currently available in the developer beta seeds. I was also told, explicitly, by Apple executives, that Apple plans to ship everything shown last week in the fall.

It seems Apple’s gonna give us a bit of Apple Intelligence with Xcode, which is really nice, and better support in Shortcuts to really make your apps shine. But one of the things I’m actually super interested to try is the on device models. I think Stream could use it for a recommendation system. We’ll see.

Oh, right, and that whole Liquid Glass thing is happening too.

My hope is to get Stream for iOS updates to Liquid Glass and add a recommended feeds list that is hand curated and generated using on device models. That should make for a swell update.

Enga Perez • Caring Minds United

Scientists have spent four years diving deep into the world of remote work and stumbled upon a powerful truth: working from home genuinely makes us happier.

I could’ve told you that. 😃 But I have been thinking about going to the office one or two days a week.

Rob Napier

I use AI a lot for work, pretty much all day every day. I use coding assistants and custom agents I’ve built. I use AI to help code review changes, dig into bugs, and keep track of my projects. I’ve found lots of things it’s very helpful with, and lots of things it’s terrible at. If there’s one thing I have definitely learned: it does not work the way I imagined. And the more folks I talk with about it, the more I find it doesn’t work like they imagine, either.

Pretty long post but worth a bit of time.

I’m not using LLMs for that much in my day-to-day dev work, yet, but I continue to use it for generating scripts and finding good answers to strange bugs in code. I’ll probably use it to help solve the iPadOS bug in Stream, since it just cropped up after updating to a newer version of Xcode since I last released it.

Marcus Mendes • 9TO5Mac

While more than 3.5 million people have spent the last couple of weeks glued to a brand-new Nintendo Switch 2, X user PatRyk (@Patrosi73) decided to invest their time elsewhere: trying to run iOS on the original Nintendo Switch. And they did it! Sort of.

I love hearing about folks hacking stuff into place to make things work where they shouldn’t. This is a prime example of that hacker spirit.

Tom Warren • The Verge

Microsoft is unveiling its own command-line text editor at its Build conference today. Edit on Windows will be accessible by using “edit” in a command prompt, allowing developers to edit files within the command line. It’s part of several improvements aimed at bettering the Windows experience for developers.

Since Microsoft has embraced open source tooling, Linux, and Mac more they seem to have gone back to more command like tools development. They did a brand new shell, that can host other shell types, and now they’re building a brand new command line editor? Wild. 😃

Can you make it compatible with Brief? 🙏🏼

Julian Chokkattu • Wired

The module looks nothing like an iPhone. It intentionally resembles the broadcast camera module, and Apple even had to match the weight so that its version wouldn’t alter a car’s specs. The inside, however, is completely different. (Apple gave us a peek during WWDC last week alongside an F1 car.)

It’s too bad this quality of video isn’t streamed out of the current camera setups on the cars.

Maybe that’ll be the next “big thing.” Go Pro like devices that stream super high quality video?

Mark Pinsley

Rather than pausing new investments or considering divestment, many pension officials and asset managers are instead pressing Tesla’s boardto get Elon Musk to return to working full-time at the company, as if the core problem is simply that Musk is too distracted. However, this assertion overlooks a far more serious problem: Musk’s reputation is so tarnished that Tesla won’t be able to thrive as long as he remains the CEO.

Musk needs to go so Tesla can be remade into a great company.

Andy Piper • Mastodon Blog

We’re already well into 2025, and it has been a huge start to the year for Mastodon. We want to bring you an overdue update on exactly what we’re working on, from a strategic perspective.

It’s great to see Mastodon charging forward. We absolutely need this open ecosystem for social networks.

Steve Kopack • NBC News

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Tuesday that the company expects artificial intelligence “will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains” over time.

“We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people do other types of jobs,” Jassy added in a memo to Amazon’s workforce.

I’ve had really mixed feeling about “AI” (I don’t find it to be intelligent, at all.) at WillowTree we’ve been pushing hard on using these LLM services to help us move faster. Hey, we’re in the client services business, we have to move fast. And the more I learn about it the more I’ve come to realize it’s just a really good sidekick. We will continue to need to think through problems and come up with interesting designs and solutions because these services only “know” what they’re trained against. We still need to invent new things, right? It’s a hammer, nothing else.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Heat has moved into the Charlottesville area along with humidity. The heat isn’t so bad and I think I’m finally getting used to the humidity. As me how I feel about it in a couple months, I may change my mind. 😃

Nothing spectacular going on. It’s been a pretty average week.

Adam Engst • TidBits

The affected Anker PowerCore 10000 power banks were sold through Anker’s website, Amazon, Newegg, and eBay between June 2016 and December 2022. Given Anker’s popularity among Apple users and the fire risk these batteries pose, you should immediately check if your power bank is affected by visiting Anker’s recall webpage. Affected units are eligible for a free replacement or a $30 gift card.

I have one of these and love the darned thing. Guess I’d better see if I have one of the recalled versions. I’d happily take a replacement because they’re wonderful! (Except for that whole possibility of catching fire thing.) 🤣

Jacob Bartlett

Today, we’re going to learn how modern programming languages are governed. I’ll explain how Swift’s dictatorial structure is uniquely terrible, and demonstrate to you how bad the situation has become.

I doubt that is a popular opinion, but I do share it. Some of the latest changes have made the language even more complicated than it was before.

I’m also old and somewhat set in my ways, until I’m not. I have yet to dive into the power of async/await and sendable types, which at a high level makes sense to me, and Stream could absolutely use it. The big question is, what reason do I have to do it when the networking code I have works fine the way it is?

I have project Rooster on the drawing board. I’ll use it there along with SwiftUI. It’ll take me 10-years to complete the work. 😃

Jason Hellerman • No Film School

‘Sinners’ is the Highest-Grossing Original Film in 15 Years

I want to see this film so much! I’m gonna have to convince Bug, our youngest daughter and movie buddy, to go see it with me. Probably won’t take much convincing. Looks like we’ll have to see it at home.

André Rhoden-Paul • BBC

A British man has walked away from the wreckage of the Air India crash that killed 241 people in an extraordinary tale of survival.

All I could see was that scene of Bruce Willis in Unbreakable waking up in the hospital after the train crash.

M.G. Siegler

Apple embraces the blurring lines between iPad and Mac. Finally.

I played around with this in the Xcode 26 simulator for a bit. It’s really interesting and makes me think Stream on iPad could really make good use of it. We’ll see if my creativity can stretch far enough to do something interesting.

Kevin Fraser • JoBlo

Violent Night 2 sets December 2026 release, with Tommy Wirkola returning to direct the sequel

Sign me up! We loved David Harbour as the Viking St. Nicholas and it sounds like this film may lean into that a bit!

I know we’ll see this one in theatres.

Tim Hardwick • Mac Rumors

Barnes & Noble has updated its Nook app for iPhone and iPad with a new “buy on BN.com” button that redirects users to the company’s website to complete e-book and audiobook purchases

Another big name taking advantage of new App Store policy that allows folks to link out to a payment system not Apple’s.

I really wish Apple would cave on this and allow third party payment systems in app. Apple has always been about the User Experience and allowing folks to use other payment systems right inside their apps would deliver that. Jumping outside the app is a forced limitation. Apple wants devs to use their IAP, so they force a bad experience by making users jump to a web page if the app chooses to use a third party system.

We’ve had online payment on the internet for years and years now. There are many trustworthy third party payment systems to choose from that could keep payments above board.

If Apple would drop their fee to five percent I doubt few companies would choose to use a third party solution.

Alas, they will continue fighting against it. 🥺

Alvin Wanjala • Make Ise Of

Vivaldi browser might not be the first to come to mind when you’re looking for the best browsers on the market. But after switching from Arc and giving it a proper try, I’m officially hooked. Vivaldi is packed with features, making it one of the most underrated browsers available today.

I’ve installed this but I haven’t given it a good look yet. It’s yet another app built using the Blink rendering engine (part of Chromium.)

I wish someone would go off and do a really cool WebKit based browser with a 100% SwiftUI GUI. WebKit is the guts of the browser, it’s everything from networking to parsing to rendering. It’s basically the browser minus the UI surrounding it.

Stephen Hackett

Looks like Finder isn’t the only Mac application to see big icon changes in macOS Tahoe. Poor Otto had his arms, legs, and pipe taken away:

The new #LiquidAss, yes, I know, it’s LiquidGlass, UI introduced at WWDC this year is a big change in all the various operating system flavors.

It’s fine. I’m just going with the flow on this one. I have some ideas to make Stream embrace it a bit. More on that later. I really wish I could go work on this full time until iOS 26 ships in September. I think I could do some really cool stuff between now and then. As it is, I’ll do the best I can with the time I have.

Paul Brannigan • Louder

The original Black Sabbath line-up - Iommi, Ozzy Osbourne, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward - will reunite once more to play their farewell show at Birmingham’s Villa Park on July 5, and, in common with his bandmates, the guitarist admits to a certain amount of trepidation as to how the day might play out.

I wish the entire Sabbath lineup a perfect show and send off. I’d love to be there. 🇬🇧

Ashur Cabrera

But here at Multiline Comment HQ we don’t measure Apple’s leadership team by their penchant for bootlicking or falsifying testimony in federal court, or even by public opinion. No, our tools are different: we use headshots, and lots of ‘em.

Over the years I’ve gotten to know Ashur a bit and he’s a super nice, super smart, and super creative dude. Follow him. He does nifty web experiments on occasion and other interesting stuff like this! ❤️

Gary Marcus

On the one hand, it echoes and amplifies the training distribution argument that I have been making since 1998: neural networks of various kinds can generalize within a training distribution of data they are exposed to, but their generalizations tend to break down outside that distribution.

To be honest this article makes me feel a bit better about what we refer to as AI today. Our man made AI is only as good as we’ve been able to make it. It’s not self aware, nor is it thinking, it’s just dumping balls into the top of the pachinko machine and making choices based on its inputs. That’s it.

Is this a rant against LLMs? Nope. They’re darned useful but you still need to question the answers you get. Validate them.

From a coding perspective they’re pretty darned good. They’re the next evolution in IDE tool tip style help. I’ve seen them used to great effect generating unit tests for existing code and even produced nice solutions for other problems.

Keep in mind those outputs are only as good as the inputs used to train the LLM. It’s code that already exists in the world. It’s just been digested by the LLM so it can spit it out quickly.

Cody Williams • The Daily Downforce

After a 13-year absence, and a lot of speculation this week, it was finally made official in Motor City: Dodge is coming back to NASCAR!

I am super excited by the return of Dodge to the Truck Series! Now, let’s get a new Cup team set up and how about an IndyCar and F1 team? More racing, more American horsepower on the various grids!

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I’ve been on vacation/holiday/or whatever you call it. Work calls it Paid Time Off, or PTO. I call it time with the grandkids.

Kim and I spent most of the week camping with our grandchildren at Myrtle Beach State Park. This was our first trip to the park and I really enjoyed our time there. The amenities at the park were excellent. We had power and water at our campsite hooked directly to our trailer, a bathhouse about 30-yards away, and a nice camp store just around the corner. Oh, right, not to mention the beach about 100 yards from the campsite. We spent Tuesday and Wednesday mornings at the beach and kind of chilled or puttered around other places Myrtle Beach had to offer.

There are so many places to see and things to do we didn’t even scratch the surface. Next year we have to do seven to 10 days with our entire family in tow. ⛱️

Brian Merchant • Blood in the Machine

☢️ WARNING: Substack

Like a lot of figureheads in the AI industry, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says that ordinary people are not ready for the changes AI is about to unleash on the world. In a widely circulated interview with Axios, Amodei warns we are on the brink of what his interviewers describe as a “job apocalypse” that will wipe out half of entry level jobs and cause the unemployment rate to rise up to 20%.

I’m more torn than ever about using AI in the workplace. As I mentioned last week, I used AI to help with a CI/CD GitHub Action I was setting up and it provided clues to my issue but I never really found a true answer to the problem. It took an experienced human to figure out what I missed in my setup.

Poor prompting on my part? Probably. This is why AI will replace me someday. 😃

By that time I hope to be retired.

The Browser Company

You’re probably wondering what happened. One day we were all-in on Arc. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, we started building something new: Dia.

This piece feels rambling to me. It’s obvious the author has a lot to say and feels the need to justify their move to sideline Arc. I don’t blame them. I know folks who love Arc and have gone all in on it. They’re extremely disappointed. Hopefully the like Dia. 🤞🏼

Jonathan M. Gitlan • Ars Technica

Verstappen slowed to let Russell through, then sped up into turn 4, opening up his steering and colliding with the Mercedes. Call it petulance or frustration; it was an inexcusable lapse of judgment from a driver. Using one’s car as a weapon against another competitor on track is unacceptable, and the 10-second penalty that Verstappen earned as a result dropped him to 10th place at the end, ruining his own race more than anyone else’s.

I don’t know Max Verstappen but I’ve never really liked the guy. Temper tantrums like this don’t have a place in racing but they do happen. Professional athletes get to their positions by being the best at their craft and often have large egos to go along with the skill. Verstappen is a prime example of ego and skill.

Lauren Feiner • The Verge

Firefox could be put out of business should a court implement all the Justice Department’s proposals to restrict Google’s search monopoly, an executive for the browser owner Mozilla testified Friday. “It’s very frightening,” Mozilla CFO Eric Muhlheim said.

It would be absolutely tragic if Mozilla was out of business. We need more browser engines, not fewer. Microsoft giving up on their browser was a huge blow to the ecosystem and competition.

The thing is, the only companies who could afford to bail them out want to control the internet and have corporate interests to fulfill.

Who could be a good steward? Facebook? Definitely not. They’re a super scummy company. Apple? They don’t need another browser. Google? Don’t need another browser. Microsoft? They should have their own browser and seem like a logical choice, but they wouldn’t embrace the open web as Mozilla does. Remember ActiveX controls in IE? Yeah, total nightmare in an otherwise good browser. And to think Microsoft was arrogant enough to declare IE complete.

Joan Westenberg

The internet used to be limitless, open to anyone with an idea. Now, it’s a polished prison run by tech giants. Is this the future we signed up for? Here’s how Big Tech quietly turned freedom into captivity.

I think you could piece together a lot of what the big silos offer but it wouldn’t be as complete or cohesive. Blogs, Mastodon, and Micro.blog are great for social network replacements but so many people rely on Facebook for all of those activities. Heck, many businesses only have Facebook pages.

Side note: I once built a little website for a nano brewing company in Exeter, CA. I offered them the keys to it and they turned it down because Facebook gave them what they needed.

Also, they have a website now! Good move! The domain I got for them was better, but this works. I picked up bellcraft.beer for them.

They could’ve also picked up bellcraftbrew.co instead of the .com, but to each his own. I think that just proves the power of .com verses everything else.

Casey Newton • Platformer

It did not take any particular skill in forecasting to predict, at the end of 2024, that the unprecedented partnership between Donald Trump and Elon Musk would come to a dramatic ending. Both Trump and Musk are independently famous for their erratic leadership styles and abrupt purges of once-close allies, and neither shows any long-term patience for anyone who opposes them.

I’m here for the Space Karen and Marmalade Messiah breakup. Bring it! They’re both such petty man children. Each smoking his own supply and blaming everyone but themselves for their problems.

I can’t wait to be shot of both of them.

Please, send them to Mars to start a colony. They can own it and call it Muskland or Trumpville or whatever they want. At least I won’t have to hear about them ever again.

Amid Amidi • Cartoon Brew

A collective of international animation unions, federations, and organizations are calling for action over the usage of artificial intelligence, citing its destructive impact on the craft and business of animation, as well as on industry workers.

I like this move. And like I’ve said before AI has its uses but for some things we should say ‘No.’

If you’re a craftsman of any kind I’d say no to using it for the craft part of my job. The thing I pride myself on. In this case it’s the artwork.

Kev Quirk

I was wondering what kinda things you, dear reader, like to read online?

I like all kinds of stuff but most of it boils down to tech related stuff. I read old timers like Dave Winer and Jeffrey Zeldman. I also like reading folks like Manton Reece, [John Gruber](daringfireball.net], and Joan Westenberg among many others!

Dave Winer

But then in the mid 00s things changed, and since then the users have flocked to closed systems. It would be similarly wonderful if we had an open social web, but we don’t. Mastodon is open but it’s not simple like the web is, and Bluesky is simple, but it is not open. And neither supports the most basic features of the web.#

I’ve heard ActivityPub and Mastodon can be challenging to code against but I’ve also heard Bluesky is extremely difficult to understand from a technical perspective. Maybe it’s just me?

Folks are building open alternatives to many closed systems on ActivityPub. So it does work!

Dave continues to build excellent tools on top of technologies he’s created, like RSS. It’s different and it missing some of the things people like, like replies (as far as I can tell, it’s missing replies? I could be very wrong about that. I don’t know what I don’t know. Ya know?) 😃

If you haven’t seen WordLand you should give it a gander. It’s really the editor bloggers using WordPress really need. At least I think it is. It would be extremely cool if Dave and perhaps others could define a protocol for editors to connect to all different types of blogging systems. Heh, I think that’s what ActivityPub and others are for? 🤔

We need taco trucks on every corner of the White House sporting that picture, in poster size, on the side of their trucks. 🤣

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I went out on Monday and picked up a 2008 Chevy Silverado 4x4 pickup. Why? Well, we bought a camping trailer last spring and we discovered pulling it with Kim’s Honda Pilot felt unstable and underpowered. Basically it felt like we were on the edge of something going wrong at any time. It was just unsettling.

I’ve been without a vehicle since COVID and since I’ve always had a truck and we wanted one for the trailer it was an easy decision. Plus, as far as trucks go, it was inexpensive.

Would I love to have a new Chevy or Ford EV Truck? You bet! Am I willing to spend $60,000 plus to have one? Sorry, can’t do it.

Anywho, I like it! 🛻

M.G. Siegler

This is wild. Both because they declined – again, for the first time in a decade – but more so because they have to know the signal it sends in declining.1 At best, it looks like they’re trying to avoid answering any non-staged questions about how things are going. At worst, it looks like they’re freezing Gruber out for a few recent critical posts about the company – notably, his “Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino” post about the Apple Intelligence shitshow back in March.

When I read John’s post about this years The Talk Show at WWDC I figured Apple was showing their displeasure with John’s earlier piece.

Like most big companies Apple has run into their fair share of problems, criticism, and lawsuits.

The law is finally catching up with some of Apple’s policies around their 15-30% fee for sales in the App Store, which is the only way to sell an iOS App.

They lost a case in California that says they have to allow third-party payment systems. App developers have Epic to thank for that. I’m not switching my in app purchase strategy. I’ll continue to use Apple’s system, at least for now.

Brown University Computer Science

This book is designed to help C++ programmers learn Rust. It provides translations of common C++ patterns into idiomatic Rust. Each pattern is described through concrete code examples along with high-level discussion of engineering trade-offs.

Really nice resource if, like me, you have a C++ programming background! From everything I’ve heard, Rust is a great language. I kind of wish someone would do a low-level equivalent for C++ devs moving to Swift.

Has anyone proven that Swift is just as performant as C++ on Mac, Linux, or Windows?

I know Microsoft is using Rust for some Windows APIs now. I don’t recall if it was GDI or User, but Windows does have some Rust code in it now.

Mia Soto • The Verge

As policy makers in the UK weigh how to regulate the AI industry, Nick Clegg, former UK deputy prime minister and former Meta executive, claimed a push for artist consent would “basically kill” the AI industry.

Maybe the AI industry needs to be killed or at least thrown in technical and political jail until a rational, equitable, system can be devised to pay authors and artists for their work.

How about the AI folks give us access to all their hard work? Their code, their algorithms, their LLMs, and all of their compute for free? All for the betterment of mankind. I bet they’d balk at that. 😃

Holly Cain • NASCAR Wire Service

A day filled with high hopes and trophy expectations after weeks of hard work at track and a year to contemplate the quest ended abruptly Sunday after NASCAR star Kyle Larson crashed just before the midpoint of Sunday’s Indianapolis 500 — a race ultimately won in a sprint to the finish by three-time and reigning IndyCar champion, Chip Ganassi Racing’s Alex Palou.

I feel really bad for Kyle Larson. He is without a doubt, in my mind, the greatest driver in the world today. He’s able to adapt to anything and everything, but that doesn’t mean he’s perfect. Last year he finished the race, in 16th I believe, this year he made a mistake and crashed out, taking two other cars with him.

It does happen, even to Kyle Larson. He’s a high risk high reward driver. He’s always on the edge of disaster.

After leaving Indy he got to the Coke 600, lead a number of laps, and spun out. No crash but he lost the lead and was mired in the back of the pack for the remainder of the day.

As a Kyle Larson fan I feel terrible for the guy.

Open Culture

Harvard Lets You Take 133 Free Online Courses: Explore Courses on Justice, American Government, Literature, Religion, CompSci & More

I’d like to take advantage of these courses! I’ve wanted a History degree for years and years. Maybe I can get some great American History courses through this program? The CompSci courses would be nice too! 😃

Daniel Rosenwasser • Microsoft TypeScript Blog

Today, we are excited to announce broad availability of TypeScript Native Previews. As of today, you will be able to use npm to get a preview of the native TypeScript compiler. Additionally, you’ll be able to use a preview version of our editor functionality for VS Code through the Visual Studio Marketplace.

The team chose Go because they did a straight port of their TypeScript/JavaScript code to Go. The syntax was very similar so it was kind of a no brainer and Go is a memory safe compiled language.

It’s too bad they didn’t use Rust.

Taylor Troesh • Good Internet

Soon it will become something else entirely. Because it’s my website and I’m perpetually becoming somebody else.

I wish I had the skill to make my own websites. The fact that Taylor can and does is impressive. And to top it all off I love her style!

Personally I’m always after a JavaScript free site as plain HTML. That’s what I get with Micro.blog.

I do have a bit of JavaScript in my blog, at the end to see how many visits posts get. It’s minimal.

Joe Wilkins • Futurism

A recent experiment by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University staffed a fake software company entirely with AI Agents — an AI model designed to perform tasks on its own, basically — and the results were laughably chaotic.

You can’t rely on AI to do things without monitoring it. Think of it as an intern, only not as smart - because it’s not intelligent, it’s a pachinko machine that often times makes really good guesses.

Use it, do not trust it, and for goodness sake verify everything it produces if you’re going to use it. It could be a real time saver, or wreck your work if you’re not careful.

I used our AI product this week and while it gave me good answers it didn’t provide me with a solution to my problem around publishing npm packages to GitHub. It gave me great information on how to setup part of my GitHub Actions script but I’ve never done it before and was hoping it would “just work.” It didn’t.

I hadn’t setup the Packages section in the repository to accept packages from my own repo. Live and learn.

BTW, that is not an indictment of AI failings. It provided me with great answers to my prompts. It really did. I just didn’t know what I didn’t know.

Reading GitHub’s documentation on the matter would’ve been very beneficial to me. Next time I’ll be better prepared for my sake and the AI’s.

Pixel Envy

Tripp Mickle, of the New York Times, wrote another one of those articles exploring the feasibility of iPhone manufacturing in the United States. There is basically nothing new here; the only reason it seems to have been published is because the U.S. president farted out yet another tariff idea, this time one targeted specifically at the iPhone at a rate of 25%.

I can’t see how Tim Cook and Apple can possibly manage their way out of TACO Man’s sights. He desperately wants Apple to make things here in the states. Apple has the money to do it, but they don’t want to do it.

They could help local Community Colleges and Universities spin up training programs to teach the skills necessary to build iPhones, IPads, and other products, but that would take years and years to do and take lots of cash to pull it off.

Apple wants to make money, not spend it. Remember, it’s all about shareholder value to these folks. It’s not about helping our fellow man find a great paying job.

No Idea Blog

Your job title says “software engineer”, but you seem to spend most of your time in meetings. You’d like to have time to code, but nobody else is onboarding the junior engineers, updating the roadmap, talking to the users, noticing the things that got dropped, asking questions on design documents, and making sure that everyone’s going roughly in the same direction. If you stop doing those things, the team won’t be as successful. But now someone’s suggesting that you might be happier in a less technical role. If this describes you, congratulations: you’re the glue. If it’s not, have you thought about who is filling this role on your team?

As a Staff Engineer I’m way more valuable to my team being the glue that brings us together. I act as mentor, coding buddy, and I see projects from 30,000 feet all the way down to minute details.

I’m not nearly as smart as 99% of the developers in the world. I’ve just been around the block a few times and I’ve built lots of different things on different OS’es using a mix of languages. I’ve done everything in the development life cycle so I know how to take something from concept to shipping and know how to do it with a team. That’s my strength. Sure, I can write code, but I really enjoy doing that glue stuff. It’s often random, sometimes spur of the moment — like fixing something in our iOS app yesterday so we could submit it to Apple.

I love the mix of people I work with daily. I have excellent management surrounding me who encourage me to serve my purpose on the team. Add the amazing Software and Test Engineers I work with daily and you have the perfect formula for happiness on the job.

Given all that I’d still love to retire and work on my apps full time. Not because I hate my day job but because I desperately want to build my apps! 🙂

Ben Lovejoy • 9TO5Mac

Less than two years later, the company has announced that it’s discontinuing Arc in favor of a new app – Dia – which it is also pitching as the future of internet usage

I find this puzzling. I know so many people who absolutely love Arc! Why not keep it running to serve the people who love it? Keep a tiny crew on it, let it evolve slowly.

In the end VCs have to get paid I suppose. This is part of why we can’t have nice things or useful software. 🤣

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️ A day late!

We’ve had our granddaughter this weekend so yesterday was filled with activities. I managed to get started on this post but had to put it down and do things like play tea party and go to the lake and play a game she made up, as far as I know, called zoo keeper. I’m the zoo keeper and she was a black panther. 🥰

Anyway, we’ve had a great time and we’re both pooped out, in all the best ways.

Brent Simmons

With retirement imminent — this is my last job, and June 6 is my last day (maybe I’ve buried the lede here) — I want to thank my team publicly for how they’ve made me a better engineer and, more importantly, a better person. From the bottom of my heart.

Congratulations, Brent! Go read the post to get the full context. Brent talks about his biases going into his job at Audible and how it changed him. It’s a really great, heartfelt, tribute to his co-workers.

John Voorhees • MacStories

Today, Mozilla announced in a support document that it will soon end development of Pocket, its read-later app that’s been around since the early days of the App Store

Welp, there goes a piece of my workflow for Saturday Morning Coffee. Pocket sits at the middle of my process and tooling. I save links through the week and save them to Pocket. On Saturday I find all the properly tagged saves and use those to write these posts.

I’m not sure what I’ll move to, yet. Unread has a read later feature, I may give that a go. I’m also looking at Plinky.

I’ve had read later support on my Stream list of features for years. Just haven’t done it.

Daring Fireball

Son of a bitch Epic did it. This was like a double bank shot.

I had to go download Fortnight as soon as I saw they were back in the store. I still haven’t fully configured it yet and all I’m really interested in is seeing their in app purchase screens.

I wonder if this is John’s way of Claim Chowder’ing himself? 😄

I like John’s writing because he calls it as he sees it. I think the shock and surprise are real on his part.

David Mack • Slate

Jensen is among an increasing number of job seekers who have found themselves being interviewed by A.I. programs as part of the recruiting process. Pitched by tech companies as a cost-efficient means of automating a laborious screening process typically done by an HR representative or recruiter, this A.I. software has the capability to “interview” hundreds of candidates, whom it can then recommend for further interviews with actual human beings. But for those on the other side of these chats, the experience of auditioning for a computer can feel somewhat surreal—and leave a rather unpleasant impression of a potential employer.

This is a bit much folks. Let’s keep humans in the interview process. I know this was a screening call and all but I don’t think I’d care for it either.

As part of my interview with WilllwTree I had to record myself answering a set of predefined questions. I understood the assignment right away and was happy to do it. WillowTree is a client services company. Even developers need to be good with the client. They wanted to see how I may operate with a client. The questions weren’t tech questions. They were easy questions as I recall. All about the interaction and presentation not about my knowledge.

I got to the next round of human interviews and managed to land the gig.

Om Malik

OpenAI, made the biggest acquihire in  Silicon Valley’s history. Sam Altman and his crew  bought Jony Ive and his coterie of ex-Apple hotshots for a whopping $6.5 billion. It is an all-stock deal for io Products, a 55-person company that is building an “amazing AI device.”

My goodness that’s a lot of cheddar! And I can’t get anyone to throw a paltry $1MM at me to go do what I want. 😂 Namely work on Stream and Rooster(my top secret project. 😂) 🐓

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I’ve had a pretty fun week. Our dev team is doing really great work for our client, got to hangout with my grandson at his very important preschool graduation, and I had my first physical therapy session yesterday.

Overall a darned good week! 😃

Mike Barnes • The Hollywood Reporter

Joe Don Baker, the broad-shouldered Texas tough guy who portrayed characters on both sides of the law, most notably Sheriff Buford Pusser in the unexpected box-office hit Walking Tall, died May 7, his family announced. He was 89.

I remember watching Walking Tall as a kid and thinking Sheriff Buford Pusser was a real badass. I think I’ll have to watch it again.🪦

Mike Wendling, Rajini Vaidyanathan & Paul Coletti • BBC

Microsoft founder Bill Gates said he intends to give away 99% of his vast fortune over the next 20 years.

This is really nice of him in today’s world of Oligarchs. He’d have been worth so much if he hadn’t started giving his money away. We need more kindness like this in the world.

Thank you, Mr. Gates. ❤️

Jess Weatherbed • The Verge

Apple is trying to dissuade Europeans from using iOS apps that support alternative payment options by making them look scary.

Apple will absolutely not give up on its 15-30% cut of each app sale in the App Store.

What I really dislike about these scare tactics is how they imply that a third party purchasing system is not safe and secure. Web payment systems have been around for years and years and predate the App Store. I’d imagine there are some questionable players out there but I trust companies like Stripe and Shopify. I’m sure there are many other trustworthy companies out there.

If Apple keeps fooling around they’re gonna get some major fines in the EU.

Michael Tsai

When I started writing apps, the availability and quality of developer tools was considered to be an advantage for native development vs. the Web. These days, I still think native APIs usually lead to better apps—though there are some awful Catalyst and SwiftUI apps that would have been better as Electron—but the Web tooling has really improved. I think many would now consider it a strong advantage.

I know this article by Michael is talking about Electron but I’ve spent the last year and a half working on a project to slowly transform native iOS and Android apps into 100% React Native Apps and it’s gone really well. Same idea, different frameworks and platforms.

The start was slow and we spent the first four to six months building our bridging strategy and coding it. Once that was in place, along with React Native code to go with it, we started replacing hunks of functionality, feature by feature.

Recently a new Expo App was created and all that React Native work we started in the hybrid app has been shared via npm packages with the brand new app. It’s completely jumpstarted the new app with many features already built and tested in isolation. I’d say somewhere between 40-50% of the new app now works just by using these packages. Our networking, UI navigation, analytics, and telemetry packages were thoughtfully created to work with the native bridge code and 100% React Native code.

Anyway, I’ve written about it. Check it out if you have a minute. It’s been a really fun project.

Zack Whittaker • TechCrunch

Crypto giant Coinbase has confirmed its systems have been breached and customer data, including government-issued identity documents, were stolen.

Whoops. Will anyone ever be able to create a website and/or service that’s secure enough to not have breaches?

I’d imagine the best way to do it is not create the website or service in the first place. 😃

Emma Roth • The Verge

Warner Bros. Discovery is changing the name of its streaming service back to HBO Max. During its Upfront event on Wednesday, the company announced that it will rebrand Max this summer, a change HBO head Casey Bloys said “better represents” its offering.

I’m glad they did this. HBO has always been a place for quality series and originals. It’s a premium brand and with the addition of the Max name says “Hey, it’s the HBO you love with this other stuff we think you might enjoy.” 😆

Chiara Mooney • Microsoft React Native Blog

Let’s first talk about why Office chose to use React Native. Office has hundreds of millions of customers who expect visual consistency across desktop, mobile, and web. Currently, there are over 40 Office experiences which use React Native to build cross-platform features such as Privacy Dialog and Accessibility Assistant.

This is fascinating and weird to me all at once. Microsoft, one of the greatest software shops of all time is using React Native in Office. Yeah, you read that right, React Native in Office.

Did you know Microsoft is the primary contributor to React Native for Windows?

Can you imagine if someone did this for Mac? Oh, Microsoft did? Wait, what! I’m not sure how good this support is, but I’d love to see how it works.

It’s too bad a dyed in the wool Mac shop doesn’t take this on. Having an AppKit expert building this would make for a better framework, in my opinion. Of course Apple wouldn’t do it, but they should. I’d continue to build apps with Apple’s native tooling because I think it makes for better apps, but having something that opens the door to thousands and thousands of developers is good for the platform and might encourage more developers to create desktop apps instead of websites.

Ulrik Egede • The Conversation

While smashing lead atoms into each other at extremely high speeds in an effort to mimic the state of the universe just after the Big Bang, physicists working on the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland incidentally produced small amounts of gold. Extremely small amounts, in fact: a total of some 29 trillionths of a gram.

I wonder how much it cost to create 29 trillionths of a gram of gold from lead? 😂

It is pretty amazing. I wonder what else they’ve created in there? Hopefully not a world ending virus. 😳

Micah Toll • Electrek

Royal Enfield’s eagerly anticipated electric motorcycles, unveiled late last year under the Flying Flea brand, are now confirmed to hit the market early next year.

This is a nice looking bike. Very modern construction with the look of a bike from days long past. Not a bad option for motorcycle enthusiasts.

Tom Warren • The Verge

Microsoft is redesigning the Start menu in Windows 11 this month with a new, wider design that finally lets you disable the recommended feed of files and apps. While the new Start menu looks different to what exists in Windows 11 today, this design refresh could have looked a lot different as Microsoft has now revealed in concept images.

Finally. 👍🏼

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

My struggles continue with sciatica. Thankfully it is much better than it was a week ago but I have a ways to go. Physical therapy is just under a week away and I’m hoping they can help me get this darn impingement un-impinged. I’m getting three to four hours of decent sleep a night then I get restless.

It’s gonna get better. I know it.

I had a really great time at work at the end of the week. I was called on to help some of the iOS Devs on our team to fix a few bugs. It was a blast pairing, what a great way to end the week.

Zac Hall • 9to5Mac

Looking for a weekend escape? The first two episodes of Long Way Home, the latest installment in Apple TV+’s best travel series, have just dropped — and it’s the perfect watch if you’re craving a scenic adventure.

The Long Way series on Apple TV have been so much fun to watch. Highly recommended. 👍🏼

Stephen Clark • Ars Technica

Kosmos 482, a Soviet-era spacecraft shrouded in Cold War secrecy, will reenter the Earth’s atmosphere in the next few days after misfiring on a journey to Venus more than 50 years ago.

So this hunk of space debris is supppsed to crash down soon, if it hasn’t already, and it’s supposed to fall on land. Duck! 🛰️

JR Farr • Lemon Squeezy Blog

This is a big step forward. Stripe Managed Payments is designed to handle all the heavy lifting for digital businesses from sales tax and fraud prevention to global compliance and customer support. Simply put, you can focus on growing your business.

When I read this I wondered if it could be used as a new in-app purchasing system for iOS Apps that want to bypass using Apple’s payment system? I bet it can.

Vanessa Romo • NPR

The small creatures look like oval mini-sailboats that can grow up to 4 inches long. Their gelatinous bases can range in color from vibrant blue to deep purple, and they have transparent triangular “sail” on top. It’s what allows them to be blown across the surface of the open sea where they typically live — and with strong enough winds, onto coastal sands.

I lived in California for over 50 years and I’ve never heard of these. They’re beautiful. ⛵️

Kevin Purdy • Ars Technica

Many horses, including Spotify and Amazon’s Kindle Store, have already left the barn. But Apple is moving quickly to shut the external payments door opened by last week’s ruling that the company willfully failed to comply with court orders regarding anticompetitive behavior.

I didn’t think it would take long for big companies to flip that switch.

Now we wait and see if Apple can get the courts to overrule the judgement. I can’t see that happening but I’m not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV. 💸

Charlie Chapman • Revenue Cat

Within hours after the news broke, our team shipped a Web Paywall Button. A new component you can drop into any RevenueCat paywall to whisk users over to a RevenueCat-hosted web checkout, complete the purchase, and then unlock access in-app as if it were a native buy flow.

That sure didn’t take long.

It makes me wonder if anyone is going to use Apple Pay for their payment system? 😃

Heck, if Apple switched their payment system to charge something like 5% I’m sure folks would use it.

I’d put money on that happening if the ruling remains in effect.

Andy Matthew’s • News Thump

Doctors uncover link between increasing number of children getting measles and their parents being gullible morons

What a headline! I couldn’t resist! 😂

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Mike Barnes • The Hollywood Reporter

Ruth Buzzi, who was so hilarious as the lonely spinster Gladys Ormphby, the lady who swung her handbag as a lethal weapon, on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, has died. She was 88.

I’m old enough to remember Laugh-In and Ruth Buzzy was a hoot.

R.I.P. 🪦

Sarah Perez • TechCrunch

The judge ruled that developers should be able to link to other ways to make purchases from inside their apps, so they could process payments via their own website and payment systems. In doing so, developers should have been able to forgo paying Apple’s 30% commission on in-app purchases.

Some developers are already making changes to use their own payment system. I’ve read that Spotify is preparing a new release and Epic wants to return to the store with their own payment system. John Grubers hot take on Epic returning is a good read and one I hadn’t considered. I just figured it was a done deal, it might be?

Reuters

Danish consumers are boycotting Coca-Cola, Carlsberg (CARLb.CO), opens new tab CEO Jacob Aarup-Andersen said on Tuesday, noting that the brewer, which bottles the drink in Denmark, had seen Coca-Cola volumes decline while local rivals gain share.

It makes sense that other countries are abandoning American products. Prices are being driven up and who wants to pay a huge tax to buy something they can get locally?

Blabbermouth.net

“When we started working on ‘Moving Pictures’, everything came along just so effortlessly,” he continued. “We were well prepared, we’d written all the material, we knew what we were doing. We went in, we got sounds. We did things a little differently.

I’m pretty sure the Rush video for Limelight was recorded during this studio time. I wore that cassette tape out, it was so amazing.

CawsnJaws

Race and Commercial Breakdown of the 2025 Jack Link’s 500

Total minutes of complete race broadcast: 212 Minutes of race broadcast: 187 Minutes of traditional commercials: 25 Minutes of side-by-side commercials: 36

I’ll be checking this site out after each race this season. The total time we saw full screen racing was 186 minutes, which feels much longer than I recall.

The total commercial time was 61 minutes! An hour of commercials! One third of the time watching the race was commercials. Their side by side commercials, which they think is the cats meow, suck. The commercial takes up most of the screen and we get commercial audio.

I’ve seen action happening on the track I’d love see and hear full screen.

The coverage is very substandard. I hope Amazon does a better job than The CW and Fox. I’m not holding my breath.

Metal Hammer

Jerry Cantrell lends his voice to a song on the soundtrack to new vampire film Sinners.

It’s a nice little article and we get some insight into the directors mindset around the music for the film.

Daring Fireball

3 billion users = $15–$20 billion is not real math. It’s just bullshit. The users are only valuable right now because they perform a lot of Google web searches within Chrome. Chrome users also make money for Google by using other Google properties that show ads, like Maps and Gmail. And Chrome encourages users, in general, to use Google properties and services like Docs. If you try to work out how valuable Chrome is to Google, it’s seemingly worth a veritable fortune. But that doesn’t mean Chrome holds any value of its own, on its own.

Before reading this I was wondering how a company who forked WebKit to create Chromium is worth anything? As John points out it’s basically Google Search and Marketing. They also have great online services in Gmail and Google Docs. Read John’s piece he says it all.

Ben Smith and Liz Hoffman • Semafor

JC Chandor likes to joke that you could trade off the viewership data of Margin Call, the 2011 film that tells the story of an unnamed bank’s catastrophic 24 hours during the 2008 financial crisis.

I watch Margin Call once in a while and it’s loaded with amazing talent. Great film. It makes you realize how fragile our entire economic system really is.

Politics

Jamie Zawinski

So I guess we’re reaching the point where if you want to remain vaccinated against COVID, you’ll have to figure out how to buy an illegal import from this “dark web” I’ve been hearing so much about.

I’m digging the name Bobby Brainworms. I never ever thought our nation would ditch science for conspiracy theories.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Yesterday Kim and I were looking at homes on acreage. We’re hoping to find our final home and have enough land our kids could build on it if they want to. It’ll also be the perfect place to setup for the coming zombie apocalypse! 🧟‍♂️

Hope you enjoy the links.

Aisha Nyandoro, Ph.D. • Forbes

You come into a lot of money suddenly, and it’s like you’ve won the lottery. I had to think a lot about, “what is the purpose of money?” Why do we have money, and how much money is enough? The more I looked at it, the more I thought the money should be actually out there working to make the world better in some form. I didn’t see the purpose of holding on to a bunch of wealth if it’s not doing anything.

There are some extremely wealthy people who are empathetic to the human condition and want to help. See, not all of them are building dick shaped rockets or trying to take over the United States. 👍🏼

Ben McCarthy

For a long while, I’ve felt that the design of iOS is too top heavy. While our phones seem to grow larger every year, our hands do not and so interface elements are pulled ever further out of reach.

Reading tealeaves is not my thing any longer, but this is a really great take on what the next version of iOS may hold for us. 👩‍🎨

Ruben Cagnie • Toast Technology

At Toast, we believe that GraphQL is the right technology to build efficient web and mobile applications.

I know a lot of shops really love GraphQL for its flexibility, but I’ve never had the pleasure of working with it. It is my understanding Twitter was using GraphQL for the updated Twitter API that Space Karen scrapped.

Sujita Sinha

In a groundbreaking step for the future of construction, the first-ever 3D-printed Starbucks is taking shape in Brownsville, Texas.

How cool is that? I wish I could’ve seen the machine during the process. You can see the layers in the pictures and see a very visible seam or rib where it came together. Overall it’s extremely cool and it’s supposed to be less expensive than traditional construction. I hope these become options for young folks getting their first home.

Volt, Paper, Scissors

This magical DIY Book Lamp teaches kids about creativity and electronics. It combines paper crafting and paper circuits using conductive tape. The materials used are simple, but the result is truly fascinating.

This could be a really fun project for me and my grandchildren.

L. Jeffrey Zeldman

DESIGN WAS so much easier before I had clients. I assigned myself projects with no requirements, no schedule, no budget, no constraints. By most definitions, what I did wasn’t even design—except that it ended up creating new things, some of which still exist on the web.

This is how I’d imagine most indie software developers feel. I know when I work on Stream or RxCalc or Arrgly or [top sekret project] I find the most joy there because I don’t have to worry about someone looking over my shoulder to make sure I’m coding thing the proper way. I’m just coding, crafting an application the way I see it. I don’t have to use all these different latest creates frameworks or new patterns. I can be my curmudgeonly self and use tried and true methods of old because I’m the only one who needs to worry about it. 😃

Skip Rhudy • Texas Observer

I’ve got a post-graduate certificate in artificial intelligence (AI). I’m also an author, and I believe writers and publishers should not use AI in publishing. So that’s why I was disturbed when a reviewer asked if I had used AI in writing my recent coming-of-age novel, Under the Gulf Coast Sun.

I won’t go as far to say you should never use AI, even though I won’t on my personal projects, but you need to understand your craft so you can make an educated decision about the quality of any code you use from a third party. You do this with third party code you get from whatever packages you use, right? Why should AI be any different. In fact AI generated code should get more scrutiny than human written code. Don’t vibe your way to poor quality. 🌹

Tom Warren • The Verge

Nvidia’s GPU drivers have been a disaster over the past four months. It all started when Nvidia released its drivers for the RTX 50-series cards in January, and introduced black screen issues, game crashes, and general stability problems for new and existing graphics cards.

When I hear about something like this my brain always asks “I wonder if they rewrote the driver code.” That could definitely be a huge mistake. I don’t know if that’s what they did or if it was just rushed to get it to market but it’s not good to break something so many folks rely on. Software development is just plain difficult. All the best fixing your drivers, Nvidia!

Addy Osmani

Yes, AI-assisted development is transforming how we build software, but it’s not a free pass to abandon rigor, review, or craftsmanship. “Vibe coding” is not an excuse for low-quality work.

Ah, I mentioned this above. Check those outputs for accuracy and fix problems so you don’t get bit. ‘Nuff said.

Mark Andrews • WIRED

The Sakura might be Japan’s best-selling EV (indeed, strong demand led to Nissan having to pause sales in late 2022 because it had too many orders), but it has the potential to be far more than that. It is the EV that many city EV drivers have been crying out for.

This is a really cute little car that would be perfect for city dwellers. Heck, I drive one these to work and back daily if I could convince my wife I needed it. 🤣 As it is I work from home and need a truck for towing our camping trailer and hauling dirt and rock. (You’d be surprised how often we used to do that!)

Finally got a bunch of tattoos on my laptop. I ordered a case for it so I could keep my stickers and make it easier to cleanup the laptop when I have to turn it in. 😃

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Sippin’ on my coffee, sittin’ on the couch, typin’ this post out on my iPhone. Like most mornings the house is quiet so it’s a perfect time to write, or post a bunch of links.

The week has been good overall. Work was fine. Pretty quiet. Our Canadian and Brazilian brethren were off yesterday for Good Friday. I suppose that had a lot to do with it, well that and No Meetings Friday. 😃

Anywho, I hope you enjoy the links.

Gus Mueller

I hope someday we’ll get a version of Swift that isn’t chasing whatever the hot new coding paradigm currently is, and isn’t weighed down by ever expanding complexity. I think that could be pretty nice.

I understand Gus’ sentiment. Swift feels, to me, like a dumping ground for programming language nerds.

Apple had pushed it as a simple language to learn. Sure, the basics may be simple, but overall it’s an extremely complex language, especially all the new Swift Concurrency stuff. Does anyone really understand when to use @MainActor?

I’m behind the curve when it comes to fully embracing Swift Concurrency. I currently have one place in Stream for Mac that uses it, and it’s nice, but I’m not implementing any Sendable types, just taking advantage of Task() and Async/Await.

NASCAR

Get a first look at Daniel Suárez’s Telcel-Infinitum scheme as he makes a homecoming to Mexico at Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez on Sunday, June 15

This is cool! NASCAR is headed back to Mexico! I’d actually love to attend this event but I didn’t plan for it this year and I’m not sure how much Kim would appreciate me going all the way to Mexico to watch a NASCAR race when NASCAR is mainly a south-eastern thing. I could drive 45 minutes to Richmond Raceway if I wanted to see a race. 😃

I still think Daniel Suárez should try to get Papas and Beer onboard. 🍻

Randy Parker

After growing up using Commodore and Atari computers, the first PC I bought with my own money (as a college student) was a “Macintari” in 1987. Proper Macs were super expensive, so instead, I purchased a Mega ST series Atari computer, which ran the same CPU as Macs of that era (the Motorola 68000). If you installed a Macintosh ROM (or EPROM) chip, you could boot into Macintosh System Software (as macOS was known at the time) and use the Atari hardware as if it were a “real” Apple Macintosh computer.

I had no idea you could run MacOS on an Atari computer!

If you’re interested in one persons observations about moving from Windows to Mac, this is a good one. It’s interesting to me how much third party software Windows users use today.

I have no idea how muchuva pain it would be for me to go back to Windows. Ive been gone for so long and it’s changed so much since 2006.

Steven Vaughn-Nichols • ZDNET

Specifically, Schleswig-Holstein is dumping Windows and Office for Linux and the popular open-source office suite, LibreOffice. The Schleswig-Holstein cabinet made this decision not because of Linux and LibreOffice’s technical superiority, but because it values “digital sovereignty.”

This is another way our fascist regime has affected American companies.

On the flip side this year will be the year of the Linux Desktop! 😜

Mike Monteiro

Sister Anita eventually gave up, mostly because she couldn’t make out the chicken scratch that my right hand was coming up with, and I guess she just decided that she couldn’t save us all, and I would be an acceptable sacrifice to Satan. For which I was thankful.

Of course I latch on to the left handed thing. My folks converted me from left to right handed when I was pretty darned young because “The world is made for right handed people.”

Mateo Wong • The Atlantic

The madness started, as baseball madness tends to start, with the New York Yankees: At the end of March, during the opening weekend of the new season, the team’s first three batters hit home runs on the first three pitches thrown their way. The final score, 20–9, was almost too good to be true. And then, everybody noticed the bats.

This is a great read and why we need science in the world. 😃 Leave it to a physicist to redesign, of all things, the baseball bat. Something that hasn’t really changed in well over 100 years. Progress! Hopefully the Majors doesn’t outlaw them.

Moira Donegan • The Guardian

There are some spectacles of US decadence and decline that almost seem too on the nose – the sort of orgies of vulgar provocation or fantastic lack of self-awareness that exceed the limits of parody, so that if they were in a novel, you’d think the writer was laying it on a little thick. Among these is the all-women flight by Blue Origin, the Jeff Bezos-owned rocket tourism company, which on Monday launched a phallically shaped pod full of women – including the pop star Katy Perry and Bezos’s partner, Lauren Sánchez – on a brief trip into space.

The Blue Origin trip into space with a bunch of crazy rich people definitely seems a bit tone deaf.

At least it didn’t blow up like Space Karen’s rockets do.

L. Jeffrey Zeldman

Beloved reader, I spent 90 minutes on hold with Con Edison yesterday, getting my power turned back on after a billing contretemps.

I’ve always been impressed by Mr. Zeldman’s willingness to write about his life. You will find many posts labeled My Glamorous Life where he shares personal life stories. He’s a great writer, technologist, and by all accounts and amazing human being. I wish him nothing but the best. ❤️

Dylan Beattie

Probably the single most important lesson I’ve learned in my career, the thing that I would argue is the hallmark of “experience”, is understanding just how much work it takes to turn a working program into a viable product. It’s why developer estimates are so notoriously optimistic - and why experienced developers are so notoriously cynical.

I like this take. I’ve had numerous junior developers say to me something along the lines of “I can’t wait to see what you have to teach me.” Oftentimes that comment is met with a blank stare. 😳 The “teachings” will mostly come organically. I’ve just been around long enough to know how to build software from concept, to development, to shipping, and everything in between. I’ve had great mentors along the way and suffered through issues that seem to crop up in every product I’ve ever worked on. Experience is just age, repetition, and pain, but I do love sharing my experiences of only to help others avoid the pain.

M.G. Siegler

We all know the saying “success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan,” but reading a couple new reports about the current inner-workings of Apple, it almost feels inverted at the most valuable company in the world.

All monster companies eventually experience problems scaling up. Oftentimes it’s because they believe that standardization on some methodology is going to save them. Well, that and people.

We’re still going through growing, and transition, pains at WillowTree since the TELUS acquisition. The cultural and systems transitions haven’t been easy on anyone.

Someday I’ll write about it a bit more.

John Scalzi

A few years ago, we bought a church building. Since then, every time I mention it online and/or on social media, someone always responds, “wait, you bought a church, what” and then asks some standard questions. At this point it makes good sense to offer up a Church FAQ to answer some of those most common questions. Let’s begin!

The remodel turned out really nice and it’s great to see them embrace the community by opening the doors for events. John Scalzi is one of those folks I wish I could know personally. He’s just so down to earth I imagine he’d be a great friend.

Jan Wildeboer

Forced RTO (Return To Office) is unacceptable, that is no discussion. But please also don’t forget how privileged many of us are to be able to work from home. The factory workers, the people working in grocery stores, doctors, nurses, truck drivers — the majority of the workforce out there — never had this luxury. I have always kept that in mind. They made it possible for people like us to actually be able to work from home.

The forced return to office put in place by many companies has been hard on folks and companies alike. WillowTrees CEO likes to have folks in the office. He likes the buzz and the randomness of bumping into folks. I can appreciate that and I also appreciate working from home. I must give him props for not forcing folks to return to office because he easily could have. ❤️

Would I go back if everyone was required to return? Yes, absolutely. There is a part of me that misses it.

Andres Thoresson

Thanks to the openness of Mastodon and Bluesky, it’s possible to follow accounts across network boundaries.

And that’s the kind of openness that Tapestry, Reeder, and Surf are built on.

There is a new class of software that spans open networks and closed networks. I’ve thought about doing this for Stream ever since I learned more about ActivityPub. Folks can follow Mastodon feeds via RSS so it’s made it less important to write code to connect to ActivityPub directly, so I haven’t bothered.

The fine folks at The Iconfactory have created a pretty ingenious way to connect to any source material you’d like by writing a plug-in to Tapestry in JavaScript! Neat, right? 🙏🏼

Begs the question: What does native mean? 🤔

Anton Shilov • Tom’s Hardware

Last year it turned out that Elon Musk’s xAI had to install additional ‘portable’ generators near its facility adjacent to Memphis, Tennessee, to power the Colossus supercomputer with over 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs as local power grid could not support the load. Now it turns out that these generators were not exactly legal, yet they can keep running, reports The Guardian.

Musks genius is being a narcissist and a sociopath. He doesn’t give a crap about anything or anyone who stands in his way. He and our President are one and the same. Ignore the law and do whatever they want. 🤬

WHO DID THIS!

You deserve a medal! 🏅

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I’ve been informally working with a co-worker answering questions about building out hybrid native applications and it’s been wonderful. I also had opportunity to work on more React Native to iOS code with another developer. Total blast. It hit all my happy buttons.

All that happiness was destroyed later Friday afternoon, but that’s a story for another day. Don’t worry, I’m fine, my family is fine, everything’s fine.

Gus Mueller

Without going into details (that’s what the technote is for), Acorn’s file format is a SQLite database, with a simple three-table schema, containing TIFF or PNG bitmaps to represent bitmap layers, and a plist to represent shape layers. Acorn has kept this simple format since version 2.0 back in 2009.

At some point I’d opened an Acorn file in Base, my database editing app of choice, and realized it was actually a SQLite database. Nifty!

Given Gus is the creator and maintainer of FMDB it kind of makes sense. 😃 (I use FMDB in Stream.)

The Onion

Warning that even the slightest dent, knick, or scratch would henceforth be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Tuesday that Raymond Pratt, a 54-year-old resident of Chula Vista, CA who bumped a Tesla while parallel parking, had been sentenced to death.

The Onion’s articles, like this one, put a smile on my face.

Yahoo!Finance

Google lays off hundreds of employees in Android, Pixel group

I’m afraid we’re going to see more and more of this over the next handful of years.

I’m sure I’m living on borrowed time. Who knows, I may end up working at Starbucks?

I love being a software developer but the new world order is ready to trade craft for expediency. I hate that. I hope I can continue to be a software craftsman.

If I could retire today, I would. That would allow me to focus on Stream and [top secret project] all the time. 😀

Kate McCusker • The Guardian

Protective helmets were donned and sledgehammers wielded as Elon Musk Space Karen critics vented their frustration at the Tesla boss and billionaire by smashing up a disused Tesla bound for the scrapheap.

Oh, how much would you love to do this? I know I would.

Have you heard of the abandoned mall parking lots being used to store Tesla cars and trucks, weird, right? It would be a shame if a pack of drones flew over them and bombed them into oblivion, wouldn’t it?

[Ruben Cagnie • Toast Technology Blog]

At Toast, we believe that GraphQL is the right technology to build efficient web and mobile applications. This did not happen overnight. In this blogpost, we will cover the adoption of GraphQL at Toast, from its early days to the recent paradigm shift towards GraphQL Federation.

I love the Toast app! ❤️ It’s one of my favorite apps on my phone because it’s darned handy! There are four restaurants we love to eat at but sometimes we’d like to get takeout. That’s where Toast comes in. Their idea to build a generic ordering app was super smart. Love it! ❤️

It’s nice to see how folks build their infrastructure out. Reading articles like this is like reading about a motor rebuild. There’s always something new to learn.

I’ve always wanted to try GraphQL. Maybe one of these days I’ll get a chance at the day job? 😃

Alexander Lee • Digiday

Former Substack creators say they’re earning more on new platforms that offer larger shares of subscription revenue

Good! Nazistack needs a mass exodus of great writers.

I need to write a piece with a list of the wonderful writers I follow there, via RSS of course, so anyone who reads this can go encourage them to leave Substack. 🤬

Jason Koebler • 404 Media

This weekend, U.S. secretary of commerce Howard Lutnick went on CBS’s Face the Nation and pitched a fantasy world where iPhones are manufactured in the United States:

I’m sure Tim Cook would love to have a factory complete with worker accommodations that drives folks into the ground for pennies a day.

Maybe our new Administration plans to do away with the minimum wage too?

Mike Pearl • Mashable

It’s downright strange how little we know about the hacker or hackers who exposed the identities of over 30 million Ashley Madison users in 2015.

I watched a documentary on Netflix called [Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies, & Scandal(https://time.com/6977627/netflix-ashley-madison-documentary-true-story) a couple nights back and it was absolutely fascinating.

As far as I know the person or persons behind the hack have never been found! That is just amazing to me. Their saving grace is they did it for cultural reasons, not for money. After making their demand for the company to shut down they simply delivered on their threat to release the data they’d stolen. No money demand.

It’s worth a watch.🍿

Mitch Wagner

Mitchellaneous: Excellent protest signs

I threw this in here because I love seeing the interesting signs folks come up with for protests. There have been a lot of good ones since Marmalade Messiah took office.

Sarah Perez • TechCrunch

Tapestry, a new app designed to organize the open social web, is adding a valuable feature to help people who are keeping up with multiple social networks: It will now remove duplicate posts from your feed. That means if you follow the same person across social networking services like Bluesky and Mastodon, you won’t have to see their post appear twice in your feed if they’ve shared it in multiple places.

I remember Craig Hockenberry being asked if Twitterrific — long live Ollie! — was coming to Mastodon. He said that The Iconfactory was exploring something different. Something more for the open web.

Well, Tapestry is that app and it was brilliantly executed.

I’m looking forward to what they do with the Mac version. 😍

Oh, one more thing! Hire The Iconfactory to do your design work, I did, and the results were brilliant!

The Iconfactory is one of those wonderful companies in my list of small companies I’d work for in a heartbeat! 🥰

Matthias Endler

I have met a lot of developers in my life. Lately, I asked myself: “What does it take to be one of the best? What do they all have in common?”

Great piece. I’ve met my share of absolutely incredible developers in my time. From so many developers at Visio, too many to name, to the many excellent developers at WillowTree, hi Nish!

I like Matthias’ take on the matter.

David Eaves, Hillary Hartley • Lawfare

In March, the U.S. government shut down 18F, the digital services team tasked with modernizing government technology and services. 18F was perhaps best known for helping the IRS create a free direct-file tax website that makes it fast and free for Americans to file taxes.

This group was full of kind, caring, compassionate, designers, developers, and project managers with the goal of making world class websites for the government.

Folks like Ethan Marcotte went to work there. Yes, that Ethan Marcotte, the guy who created Responsive Web Design. Now think of an entire engineering team like that!

Phil Windley

Cory’s right, using an RSS reader will make your digital life better. I’m wasting less time scrolling past stuff I don’t care about and more time reading things I enjoy. That’s a win.

Yep, yep, yep! There are plenty of excellent RSS readers on the market, but I think you should use Stream! 😁

Aria Desires • Faultlore

C is the lingua franca of programming. We must all speak C, and therefore C is not just a programming language anymore – it’s a protocol that every general-purpose programming language needs to speak.

This piece will take a little time to read but I really appreciated the technical detail and the authors take on so many things C. Nicely done! 🙏🏼

Ghost - Building ActivityPub

Last week we explored some Threads compatibility updates, how to find and follow people across the Fediverse, and the progress of the social web beta launch. This week, we’ve got more fixes and updates to share, as well as a painful and embarrassing story that we wish had never happened.

This is Ghosts place to talk about how they’re building ActivityPub support into Ghost. It’s nice to see other blogging tools support open standards.

To my knowledge, Micro.blog, WordPress, and Ghost support ActivityPub. I’m looking forward to seeing more!👻

Cory Dransfelt

All of Apple’s services are abysmal

I’ve heard this from so many people over the years. Creating web services is hard. Especially when you’re servicing millions and millions of people, but shops like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Facebook manage to pull it off. Why can’t Apple?

TMNT Robatello!

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Pat Saperstein • Variety

Val Kilmer, who played Bruce Wayne in “Batman Forever,” channeled Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone‘s “The Doors” and starred as a tubercular Doc Holliday in “Tombstone,” died Tuesday in Los Angeles.

We lost a good one. I’ve always enjoyed Val Kilmer in his roles. My favorite is his portrayal of Doc Holiday in Tombstone but I also liked him in Real Genius, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and The Saint.

If you were a fan or are curious about Mr Kilmer give the documentary Val a viewing. It’s really well done.

Oh, I also liked his Madmartigan in Willow.

RIP 🪦

Namanyay Goel

Last Tuesday at 1 AM, I was debugging a critical production issue in my AI dev tool. As I dug through layers of functions, I suddenly realized — unlike the new generation of developers, I was grateful that I could actually understand my codebase. That’s when I started thinking more about Karpathy’s recent statements on vibe coding.

I’ve noted here frequently how slow I am to pick up new languages and frameworks. Largely it’s because I have to dig in, get to the bottom of things, and really develop an understanding of how things actually work. The more abstract — or magic — the language or framework the harder I have to work and the longer it takes for me to grok it. That takes time. For me it usually takes two times longer than most people. I’m a dumb redneck who likes computers, I ain’t that smart, so I learn via a lot of head banging and frustration, oh, and persistence and hard work.

All that to say, I love the craft of software development and I have a really hard time with the notion of using an LLM to develop and entire application for me. I can see using an LLM to get past things I’m not great at. Like my current huge struggle with auto layout in AppKit, but not for everything. 🧠

The Onion

You say ‘city,’ and I’m going to piss myself, and there’s no way I’m going to hide that wet spot just to make you libs more comfortable. I’m going to tell it like it is—for instance, I’m a man, and I’m scared of my own desires, and I don’t care who knows it!

When I think of Conservatives I think of folks who believe they’re patriots, self reliant, tough, and religious.

Often I think they’re none of those things. Being a patriot doesn’t mean wearing a flag shirt or having the Constitution tattooed on your arm or the American flag waving in your front yard.

A patriot is someone who loves their country and would do anything to protect it. That also means being critical of it and standing up for what you believe.

Many Conservatives I’ve met tend to be hateful of others and angry about what others have.

The Onion has a nice way of capturing that. 😃

Ashur Cabrera

I’ve been using the recently revamped Reeder on iOS, and after just a few weeks it feels pretty darned close to my ideal way of reading feeds.

Ashur has written a nice piece on his experience with Reeder. It is a very fine piece of software for iOS and Mac and Silvio Rizzi is an extremely talented designer/developer.

He’s taken a new direction with his beloved feed reader. It’s now more broad and can subscribe to more than RSS feeds, which is something I’ve wanted to do with Stream, and The Icon Factory have done with Tapestry.

It’s a new dawn for feed readers. They’re more general purpose viewers now. Expect to see more of this from other readers in future releases.

Also, thank you for the mention Ashur. I’m very grateful for your support over the years! ❤️

Tom Warren and Jay Peters • The Verge

A Microsoft employee disrupted the company’s 50th anniversary event to protest its use of AI.

The world is in such a strange place at this point in history and I hope we learn from it, otherwise we are doomed to complete failure. War, division, and climate change are all huge threats to humanity.

I don’t blame Israel for defending itself against Hamas. Who would? They were attacked by a terrorist organization who wants to exterminate them. We did the same thing after 9/11.

However, I do take issue with Israel attempting to obliterate Gaza and all her people.

Israel of all countries should know better. Jews were hunted by Hitler’s Nazi Germany who wanted to exterminate them. How can they turn around and do the same? 🙏🏼

Alan Ohnsman • Forbes

Elon Musk’s polygonal pickup is a polarizing sales flop that’s missed the billionaire’s volume goal by a staggering 84%. And there’s no sign that things are improving.

Yeah, the Cyber Truck. 🤣

Vojtech Novak, Shubham Gupta, Fabrizio Cucci, Riccardo Cipolleschi • React Native Developer Blog

This release ships React 19 in React Native and some other relevant features like native support for Android Vector drawables and better brownfield integration for iOS.

I hope we get an opportunity at adopt this on the project I’m on at WillowTree. It sounds like a nice step forward for hybrid apps like the one I’m working on.

Gus Mueller

Last week I bought a 13" MacBook Air in Midnight (24GB memory, 512GB SSD).

After reading this I’m tempted to go with a new Air as a personal Mac. I’ve been one of those die hard must own a MacBook Pro people but seeing a developer I have a lot of respect for say it works beautifully for an app like Acorn gives me confidence it would be a great choice for my less substantial projects, like Stream. 👍🏼

Tasha Robinson • Polygon

Warner Bros. dropped a new sneak-peek teaser for James Gunn’s Superman on Thursday out of CinemaCon, and it’s mostly just the same trailer we saw back in December, with the same quick-cut looks at Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced), Mister Terrific (Edi Gathegi), Guy “worst haircut in the ’verse” Gardner (Nathan Fillion), Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan), a giant kaiju that might be Jimmy Olsen, and more. The difference is, there’s an extra two minutes of footage that might just be the full theatrical cut of the sequence that follows after Superman crashlands in the snow near the Fortress of Solitude — and it’s a long, agonizing two minutes.

Based on the trailers I’ve seen I don’t think I’m gonna like this Superman.

Henry Cavil is still the best Superman. 🦸🏻‍♂️

Sarah Perez • Tech Crunch

Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Tumblr, WooCommerce, and a range of other online services, is reducing its workforce. The layoffs will impact 16% of staff across divisions, an Automattic blog post published Wednesday reveals.

I feel really bad for Automatticians. They’ve been through a real rough patch over the last year. First all the hubbub with WPEngine, the mass resignations, and now a layoff.

I hope they all land on their feet and Automattic survives and continues to lead the progression of WordPress far into the future.

I’d also like to see Matt Mullenweg loosen his grip on the open source organization so it can lead future efforts. ❤️

Matt Birchler

Back in 2019 I moved my blog off of WordPress and over to Ghost. In short, I wasn’t happy with WordPress and wanted a blogging engine that felt more like it was made for blogging than a full CMS where I didn’t use 99% of the features on offer. Ghost seemed to align with my values as a writer and a general user of technology, and over the past 6 years, that’s only become more clear that was the right choice for me.

Paying an organization to take care of the servers and infrastructure for your blog is very freeing.

I switched to Micro.blog a few years back and don’t regret it. The team makes sure we’re always up and running and the service and user experience are dirt simple for blogging. Just as they should be. ❤️

Matthew Haugey

I’ve used most Google’s products since the day they were introduced, so it was a great opportunity to see what these products are like for first time users, since the first time I used them long ago, they usually looked much different.

An interesting read on Google’s widely used products and services. Understanding how the Enterprise versions work is challenging. I’ve had a number of odd experiences with sharing documents over the years. Go read it. You may find yourself nodding your head in agreement.

Emma Roth • The Verge

France’s competition watchdog (Autorité de la concurrence) ordered Apple to pay €150 million (~$162.4 million) after finding that its App Tracking Transparency system allows the company to abuse its dominance in the mobile app market. In its decision, the authority says the initiative — which Apple pitches as a way to give users more control of their privacy — harms small publishers and “is neither necessary for nor proportionate with” Apple’s goal of protecting personal data.

Heh, App Tracking Transparency is something I really appreciate as a user but I can see how some App Developers would not like the idea.

At WillowTree we create a lot of what I refer to as “Marketing Apps.” Most large corporations who have something to sell you really need to have these beautifully designed and implemented applications that not only advertise their products but often need an ordering workflow. We do that and we do that really well.

Every one of the apps I’ve worked on is chock full of analytics measuring all sorts of things. The great companies take the user experience data they collect very seriously and make improvements accordingly.

The app I’m working on now has improved dramatically over the last year because the company we’ve done work for studies their analytics. It really can work.

Politics

Johnathan V. Last • The Bulwark

Fittingly, it was the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, who declared the official time of death.

The United States of America is now a world wide embarrassment that cannot be trusted and has become a laughing stock.

Postpone any trip to the US you’ve had booked. It’s a real mess here.

Joan Westenberg • The Index

If you had told me a decade ago that a former president would waltz back into the White House, torch the global economy, slap double-digit tariffs on damn near everything, spook the markets into evaporating over three trillion dollars in a single day, and call it a “booming economy” with a straight face—I would’ve thought it a particularly cruel and poorly conceived joke.

Again. See my first comment above.

Trump and his administration are burning everything down. Morons all.

Of note, Joan Westenberg has become one of my favorite writers. She delivers facts and opinions with a dry wit I really appreciate.

Sharon Waxman • TheWrap

Now as the owner of The Atlantic, she is the quiet superhero behind the current Signalgate scandal. Editor Jeffrey Goldberg, who in full disclosure I know well enough to have his email, has rightfully been taking a hero’s tour on media everywhere since he broke the story of having been “accidentally” included in a Signal chat group of the top national security officials talking about an imminent attack on the Houthis, in violation of every imaginable security protocol not to mention common sense.

It took one brave woman to put all the billionaire bros to shame.

Now if we could convince Bezos to sell the Washington Post to Kara Swisher that would be incredible.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Tom Warren • The Verge

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. 👨🏻‍💻

JanerationX

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. 😞

Alana Loftus • Irish Star

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.🔥

Chris Medland • Racer

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! 🏎️

Fiona Jackson • TechRepublic

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.

InfoQ

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. ⚒️

Noor Al-Sibai • Futurism

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?

The Eclectic Light Company

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.

Steve Yegge • Sourcegraph

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. 🦕

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Mike Coppinger • ESPN

“Big” George Foreman, one of the most influential and recognizable boxers of all time, died Friday, his family announced on his social media account.

RIP, Big George. 🪦

Sean Burch • TheWrap

Apple is reportedly losing more than $1 billion annually on its streaming service, Apple TV+, according to The Information on Thursday — providing a rare glimpse into the tech giant’s content operation.

That’s a huge number. Apple has some really good original programming. The production value is always top notch. I’d imagine that’s why it costs so much to keep going. Take a look at Netflix. They pump out content that, overall, has a much lower production value. Those in turn fund the production of high quality content. 💸

Gus Mueller

There’s been a lot flying around the social web the past couple of days about Apple completely botching their AI push, and I haven’t seen a whole lot of solutions (I fully admit I could completely be missing it). But off the top of my head, here’s one idea that I think could really help and reap benefits for both Apple and developers.

I’d imagine a lot of developers are going to want access to an AI API.

Put AI in all the things! I’m not sure how I’d use it in my apps, yet, but I could see doing some local machine learning to help pick feeds for the user to check out. 😁

Dogesec

RSS and ATOM feeds are problematic (for our use-cases) for two reasons; 1) lack of history, 2) contain limited post content. We built some open-source software to fix that.

I like this, a lot! This would be a great way to make a complete backup of your blog. Just generate a gigantic RSS feed of everything and push it to GitHub and other places.

One of the things I want to do for Stream is get full content for a particular feed. For now Stream only gets what the feed includes. I’ll have to change that so it grabs the HTML and pulls the body out.

Brian Whitwam • Ars Technica

The European Commission is not backing down from efforts to rein in Big Tech. In a series of press releases today, the European Union’s executive arm has announced actions against both Apple and Google. Regulators have announced that Apple will be required to open up support for non-Apple accessories on the iPhone, but it may be too late for Google to make changes. The commission says the search giant has violated the Digital Markets Act, which could lead to a hefty fine.

It’s time to get the popcorn out to see how much these two juggernauts push the rules. 🍿

Apple has already done the very least it could do to comply with opening up the ability to have third party app stores.

Kirk McElhearn

What I have trouble understanding is how she continued working with sociopaths after the first few years, when it was obvious that they wouldn’t change. As she rose in the company, and spent time with “Mark” and “Sheryl,” it was clear that these two people, as well as others, don’t care about the consequences of their platform.

Facebook is a nasty, evil, company. I jettisoned my account in 2011 but thought recently about making a new one. What an idiot! I’m glad I didn’t do it.

Umar Shakir • The Verge

A month of anti-Tesla dissent escalated this week with two reports of Teslas catching fire in Las Vegas and Kansas City.

I still say these Tesla cars and trucks are spontaneously combusting.

It would a real shame if the stock price sunk so low Space Karen got a margin call.

It’s too bad Tesla’s board is in Space Karen’s pocket. Tesla could use new leadership at CEO and the board.

They’re clearly not innovating or even doing the least bit to update the models they have. When was the last time the body shape changed?

Also, Musk isn’t running the company. Why should he continue to drag them down?

Fire the man already, before one of those giant lots of Tesla’s spontaneously combusts and cause a lot more damage.

Sharon Harding • Ars Techna

After a year, the top 5 percent of apps in most categories, including gaming, photo and video, health and fitness, and social and lifestyle, make more than $5,000/month. The 25th percentile makes $5 to $20 per month, depending on the category, save for photo and video apps, whereas the bottom quartile makes $32 per month.

I’d take $32 per month! I could use it to support my coffee habit. 😁

On the flip side I’m really happy for the companies who make enough to survive on and even thrive. Good for them! ❤️

Nina Tran • Greenville News

Word is spreading that Sauer Brands Inc. ― owner of Greenville’s beloved mayonnaise brand ― has been sold to none other than a northern company.

I’d never had Dukes Mayo until we moved to Virginia. In California all I remembered was Craft Mayo as a choice. Dukes became an instant hit for me the first time I had it. I hope these new owners don’t mess it up. 🫙

Robert Rodriguez • The Fresno Bee

On Tuesday, the two defendants in one of Fresno’s biggest business scandals are expected to report to federal prison to serve their sentences for wire fraud and conspiring to commit wire fraud.

I know Jake and Irma personally and I hope nothing but the best for them. I have to believe this was a huge mistake on their part. An ignorant mistake. I don’t know enough about it to know if it was or not. They did so much good for the Central Valley and other places. ❤️

Paige Bruton • Semafor

Chinese automaker BYD unveiled a new range of electric vehicles that it said can charge in five minutes, ramping up its competition with Tesla in the burgeoning Chinese market.

It would be nice to see these cars here in the States. Especially if they’re in the 10-20k range. That’s the range I’d consider purchasing a new car.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Its been a week. My back is really messing with me. I’ve had this problem for years and years and I absolutely hate when I’ve injured it. The meds I’m on leave me really sleepy so I wouldn’t be surprised if this set of links is short.

Anywho, there’s my week in a nutshell.

I hope you enjoy the links.

Daring Fireball

Brazilian Court Gives Apple 90 Days to Allow Sideloading on iOS

I hope Apple is starting to build out their infrastructure to allow for more stores but what I think most developers would rather see is Apple dropping their 27% fee for using the platform. Something more like 5% or even 10%.

Never gonna happen.

Dan Goodin Ars Technica

Apple on Tuesday patched a critical zero-day vulnerability in virtually all iPhones and iPad models it supports and said it may have been exploited in “an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals” using older versions of iOS.

Even the best software engineers in the world make mistakes.

YouTube

A 10x faster TypeScript

This video is worth a watch. It was interesting to hear their reason for using Go for the port.

Tom Warren • The Verge

Microsoft is replacing Remote Desktop with its new Windows app

So now they have a Windows app for running Windows apps?

Talk about confusing. This is weird. 🤣

Aditi Bharade • Business Insider

Kentucky’s bourbon makers are up in arms about Canada yanking their bottles off shelves

Consequences. This is a consequence of tariffs. You definitely cannot blame Canada for pulling American products off of their shelves.

Pedro Piñera

A week ago, ByteDance announced the release of Lynx, a technology for building mobile apps using Web technologies. ByteDance had been using it to power many of their apps, and they decided to package it up and open-source it. Having Lynx enter the space with a new approach is great news for the community.

Yet another framework for building mobile applications.

A lot of companies are looking for ways to have a single set of code to run across mobile platforms.

It’s hard to argue against the idea of it.

Joan Westenberg • The Index

The future of America isn’t being written in Washington—it’s being coded, traded, and hoarded by tech billionaires who see democracy as a bug, not a feature.

Billionaire Tech Bros need to be placed on a rocket and launched to Mars. Let them have it. 🚀

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Its a bit late morning thanks to Daylight Saving. We’ve sprung ahead an hour.

Yesterday, Saturday, Kim and I had some errands to run and we were out of the house pretty much all day. So, you get a Special Sunday Edition of Saturday Morning Coffee. 😃

I hope you enjoy the links and have juiced up your brain with your favorite coffee or tea.

Sarah Perez • TechCrunch

Automattic-owned blogging site and social platform Tumblr has financially backed Tapestry, the newly launched app designed to organize feeds from across the open web, including RSS, Mastodon, Bluesky, and others.

It’s really nice to see my favorite software company succeed with a new product. Tapestry is like a feed reader bulked up to do other things and allows folks to extend it using a bit of JavaScript and their own imagination. In a slight way it’s a dashboard construction kit. I enjoy using it and it’s gonna be fun to see what others build with it.

Joan Westenberg

We live in an age where everything has to have a trajectory. Every hobby needs a corresponding side hustle. Every interest must be optimized, packaged, and presented for maximum reach. Paint beautiful landscapes? Better start an Etsy shop. Love baking sourdough? Time to launch a baking YouTube channel. Write poetry? Get on Medium and build your brand.

There was a time in the late 90’s, early 2000’s, where most blogs were just personal sites. Not monetized at all.

I started this blog in 2001 in the hopes I’d become a better writer. I’m still trying to do that and I really enjoy having a blog where I can write whatever I want, when I want to.

Dave Winer

I have most of the features I asked for in textcasting (!) and I am typing in a respectable editing window, where I retain copies of my writing, and there’s no freaking tiny little text box. And because I’m hooking in through a protocol (here’s the punchline) this writing can go anywhere. Anywhere. Let me say that again. Any. Where.

Dave has continued on his adventure to have a single writing location that publishes everywhere. He’s been using WordPress as a single source for publishing to a blog and to Mastodon. Really, the WordPress blog is the Mastodon Server. I’m really interested to see where this goes.

I’ve been using Micro.blog in much the same way. I publish to my blog and the Micro.blog timeline and Micro.blog handles publishing to Mastodon, Bluesky, and Tumblr. It’s proven to be the exact solution I’ve always wanted. 👍🏼

Samantha Cole • 404 Media

Anthropic, the company that made one of the most popular AI writing assistants in the world, requires job applicants to agree that they won’t use an AI assistant to help write their application.

Is AI that good or that bad? 🤣

Geek and Dad

The top of the line new Mac Studio M3 Ultra (32-core CPU, 80-core GPU) with 512G RAM (!) and a 4TB SSD is an impressive and tempting machine, but ~$11K (!!). Is that “ridiculously expensive”? 🤔

That is a crazy amount of money for a computer, even for a Mac.

It is a rocket ship of a configuration.

Mike Florio • Yahoo Sports

“I cheated the program,” Jones said, via Brent Schrotenboer of USA Today. “Like, I was really good. People don’t know how smart I am, but like, I can say it now. I don’t play no more. But like, I’ve never used my [urine] for a [urine] test. Not one time. Not one time.” (Folks, it’s OK to use the word “piss,” if that’s the word he used. You won’t go to hell for it.)

Folks will always find a way to beat the system. I am surprised he’s admitting it.

It would be nice for the players to be able to smoke weed. I’ve heard it helps a lot with post game pain.

JanerationX

In the span of 17 years, the USA has shifted from the hopeful progression of electing a Black president to sad self-loathing with the ascent of a dictator. There are several factors that played into this country’s demise. In my opinion, social media has had the largest impact.

Social media certainly hasn’t helped things. It’s definitely made piling on a lot easier.

jwz

The world is full of people who, in this, the Year of Our Basilisk, 2025, are willing to loudly admit, “Yeah, I knew Musk was – [pick one or all] – 1) a homophobe, 2) a racist, 3) a con man, 4) a eugenicist, 5) a natalist, 6) a nepo baby, 7) full of shit about Mars, 8) full of shit about self-driving, 9) wants to destroy public transit, 10) was never actually an engineer at all but just someone who buys companies and puts his name on them, 11) has an entire team at every company he bought whose job was just to stop him from breaking things, 12) is just absolutely fucking cringe – but I was willing to give all that a pass, for years, because He Does Good Work.”

Space Karen is just a terrible human being.

He should be deported back to South Africa.

Live Fast Motorsports

Live Fast Motorsports is thrilled to announce that pioneering motorsport driver Katherine Legge has entered the Shriners Children’s 500 NASCAR Cup Series race at Phoenix Raceway on March 9, 2025, racing the No. 78 DROPLiGHT Chevy Camaro. This marks Legge’s debut in the NASCAR Cup Series, underscoring her determination and versatility in professional racing.

I’ve always liked Katherine Legge. When she’s run the Indianapolis 500 I’m always hopeful she’s gonna win it all.

I hope her Cup run goes really well today.

Joseph Howlett • Quanta Magazine

A new proof extends the work of the late Maryam Mirzakhani, cementing her legacy as a pioneer of alien mathematical realms.

It’s incredible to me how our scientists and mathematics continue to move us forward.

It’s also a real shame to loose someone so passionate about her work. ❤️

Formula 1

With the season-opening Australian Grand Prix (March 14-16) rapidly approaching, last week we asked you to pick your favourite helmet design from all our 2025 F1 drivers.

I dig articles like. It’s just about showing pictures of helmets. Simple, but fun and interesting.

Matt Mills • Louder

Metallica’s …And Justice For All pushed bassists into the background during the 1990s, a famed thrash metal player says.

I hear folks talking about And Justice for All and the way they treated Jason Newstead from time to time.

It is a real shame to hide the bass like that.

Logan Carter • Jalopnik

Mexican sculptor Chavis Mármol dropped a nine-ton replica of an ancient Indigenous Olmec head onto the roof of a Tesla Model 3 in Mexico City as a brilliant commentary on modern society’s obsession with materialism, excess, and capitalism

Now that’s exactly how you treat Tesla. Destroy them, trade them in, and stop buying them.

Hopefully the market continues to hammer Teslas stock price and drive it down, down, down so the board will grow a pair and fire Musk once and for all.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

We’ve had a pretty great week here in our part of Virginia. It’s been sunny with temperatures in the 60’s! 😎

Other than that it’s been one of those regular weeks. Nothing overly exciting going on except for the disaster that is our country leadership at the moment. But let’s not get into that here.

Please enjoy the links! ❤️

Carmel Dagan, J. Kim Murphy • Variety

Gene Hackman and Wife Betsy Arakawa Found Dead in Santa Fe Home; Oscar-Winning Star of ‘French Connection’ and ‘Unforgiven’ Was 95

This one hit me. Gene Hackman is my favorite actor of all time. There was just something about him. It didn’t hurt that he reminded me of my grandfather who was an extremely kind man but tough as nails. That’s how Hackman always came across to me.

There are my favorite Gene Hackman films.

• The French Connection
• Target
• Mississippi Burning
• The Replacements
• Unforgiven

There are many more excellent Gene Hackman films to choose from.

In the end he lived a long life and managed to live out his final years peacefully with his wife in New Mexico. 🪦

Joan Westenberg

Why Personal Websites Matter More Than Ever

I love reading Joan’s work. Whether it be on her personal blog or on The Index. She’s just a darned good writer.

Anywho, I agree with her 100%. A weblog is the best social media site you can have because it’s yours. If your host shuts down you can freely move it and your content to a new home.

Start free with a WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger, or Micro.Blog account and see where it takes you. There are, of course, others to choose from.

The next step in your journey, perhaps it should be the first, is to acquire a custom domain name to host your blog. They’re also quite easy to get and all of the blog hosting providers I mention above will let you set your own domain name. Easy least!

Nico Grant • The New York Times

“I recommend being in the office at least every weekday,” he wrote in a memo posted internally on Wednesday evening that was viewed by The New York Times. He added that “60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity” in the message to employees who work on Gemini, Google’s lineup of A.I. models and apps.

I emphasized the 60 hours comment. That’s a bunch of BS. Trust me, I should know. I put in those kind of hours in the 90’s and early 2000’s. In the end they get a bunch of free work out of you and, if you have a family, your family suffers. It’s just not worth it. Ok, ok, so do a few years of it, say five, and get out.

If you’re single and don’t have any friends this may be the only way you socialize. I could see doing 60 hours a week, but at some point your mind and body pay the price for it.

I’m approaching 60 and I’d rather spend my time with my wife, children, and grand children.

Be wise. Don’t be me.

Scott Neuman • NPR

Skype, the pioneering and once ubiquitous free video calling service, will be history come May. It was so popular that people used it as a verb: “I’ll Skype you in the morning.”

I guess all good things must come to an end, right? Skype was equally loved and hated. I know folks who used it to do international calls and it’s been a huge part of the podcasting world for over a decade, probably two? Folks tried other services but Skype just worked better. It wouldn’t drop connections which is its primary job. The UI sucked but it did the job.

What are folks using today for recording podcasts? I’d love to know.

Jonathan M. Gitlan • Ars Technica

Yes, it turns out you can make a Tesla Cybertruck even uglier

I don’t know if this is uglier or just as ugly in a different way. Lipstick on a pig indeed! 🐷

It’s a garbage “truck” made by a garbage company “run” by a garbage human.

I put quotes around “run” because there is zero chance *Space Karen is performing his duties as CEO for Tesla, SpaceX, or X at the moment.

(* Yes, I pointed to Nazistack. I wish these damned good writers would get off that platform.)

Tim Hardwick • MacRumors

Apple has offered a reason why the iPhone 16e doesn’t include MagSafe, one of the more notable omissions from its latest entry-level smartphone.

I’ve said it a few times now. This may be the perfect phone for me. Lower priced and is good enough. I’d still get iOS and an incredible piece of hardware with good battery life. Oh, and a small camera on the back. 😃

Jack Dunn • Variety

‘Daredevil: Born Again’ Draws Glowing First Reactions, With Some Praising the Opener as the ‘Best Pilot of Any MCU Series Thus Far’

I’m happy to see this back! I haven’t started watching yet, but I most certainly will at some point. Apparently we’re gonna see The Punisher show up at some point. I was a fan of that series as well. ❤️

Kelly Crandall • Racer

Carson Hocevar earned a NASCAR Cup Series career-best finish Sunday at Atlanta Motor Speedway but was left having to explain himself afterward.

Last seasons Rookie of the Year really pisses people off. He’s been doing it since he was part of the Truck Series. Wrecking Corey Heim in the wall during the Championship Race in 2023 was a disgusting display of selfishness.

These Cup drivers won’t put up with his overly aggressive style. He’s stepped over the line from aggressive to reckless. The veteran drivers will straighten him out. It may take a few punches in the face, but they’ll fix it. 🤬

Valerie Ettenhofer • /Film

Tom Cruise who? Hulking action star Alan Ritchson has now played beloved antihero and skull-knocking machine Jack Reacher in more adaptations of Lee Child’s bestselling book series than the Reacher before him (who’s currently busy risking life and limb as a different beloved action hero), and judging by the reviews for “Reacher” season 3, it’s a role Ritchson was meant to play.

Here’s another series I need to get back to. We really enjoyed season one but haven’t watched since.

Alan Ritchson is a really great actor and he fits the physical description of Reacher much better than Tom Cruise.

Michael Larabel • Phoronix

The SystemV file-system that implements Xenix FS, SystemV/386 FS, and Coherent FS is set to be removed from the Linux kernel. The SystemV file-system was orphaned back in 2023 while now is set to be removed entirely after developers realized the code was fundamentally broken.

Ahhh, SystemV. Seeing the word Xenix in there takes me back. Do y’all remember Microsoft Xenix? Probably not many. How about SCO? Yeah, probably not. 🤣

I installed a lot of SCO Xenix at one point in my career. I want to say by then it was SCO UNIX? My memory isn’t that clear on the matter. 😃

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Jim Rea • ProVUE

Forty years ago today the doors opened for the very first MacWorld Expoin the Brooks Hall basement in San Francisco. For most of you this event probably seems like ancient history, somewhere back in the mists of time. But for me this was a very real and exciting event that I participated in as an exhibitor, the start of my amazing journey with the Mac community, a journey that continues on today.

Holy cow! Congratulations, Jim!

What a huge milestone in your career. I’m sure you have plenty of amazing stories to share from your journey.

Check out Jim’s software at ProVUE!

Zoe Kleinman • BBC

Apple is taking the unprecedented step of removing its highest level data security tool from customers in the UK, after the government demanded access to user data.

If I were living in the UK I’d be contacting my representatives and ask them to reconsider their request for a backdoor into iCloud. Apple indirectly did what they were asked for. They made it easy for the UK government to extract data from Apple’s infrastructure with a simple court order and they didn’t compromise the rest of iCloud users around the world.

Reid Spencer • NASCAR

Like Houdini making an unlikely escape from a straitjacket, William Byron trusted his instincts and emerged from a smoky, last-lap wreck on the backstretch at Daytona International Speedway to win the Daytona 500 for the second straight time.

Here’s the Daytona 500 script. Start the race, jockey for position, get in line, at 190+ MPH, and drive around not doing too much for 199 laps. Oh, and watching a little racing between a crapload of commercials.

Then, on the last couple laps, start racing, and have a big crash taking out half the field. It’s call The Big One.

But, I still love super speedway racing. There is definitely a lot of skill to running close to 200MPH a foot or two away from each other. I’m surprised they don’t wreck more often.

There were some good story lines out of Daytona this year, like Corey LaJoie running an open car because he couldn’t land a seat or Jr. Motorsports running a Cup car! I’m very excited for both and hope to see them in a few more races this year.

Smokey Goretooth • Metal Sucks

Tool stay up to mysterious shit. Sometimes they let us know what’s going on, but they do love to be elusive about some shit. They spend years in between albums just diddling around or doing whatever they do, but their bassist Justin Chancellor gave us a lil update on what they’ve been up to musically. It’s definitely good news for the Tool aficionado.

Tool waited 13-years to release Fear Inoculum, in August 2019. It’s been five-and-a-half years since the release and I’m excited by the thought of getting something earlier. But don’t hurry, fellas. Take the time to make another amazing album.

Parakeet

When we set out to found Parakeet, we were certain that we wanted nothing more than to hone our craft together in perpetuity. The early days were full of experimentation and inquiry as we sought to balance our strengths and develop a unified perspective. A decade later, our creative partnership has solidified into something inextricable from either of us, totally complementary, and greater than the sum.

Congratulations to Luka and Louie! Here’s to many more years of success! 🥳

Ethan Marcotte

I want to state up front: I’m not leaving under a “deferred resignation”. I also wasn’t laid off. (Though it’s possible I almost was; more on that later.) Instead, I resigned from my position as a product designer, submitting two weeks’ notice…well, two weeks ago.

A sad day for Ethan, 18F , and the country. He’s a well known champion of the web and by all accounts a really great person.

As a country we need more people like Ethan working in Government, not fewer.

It’s a real loss for all of us and especially Ethan.

Andy Brice

I released version 1 of my table seating planning software, PerfectTablePlan, in February 2005. 20 years ago this month. It was a different world. A world of Windows, shareware and CDs. A lot has changed since then, but PerfectTablePlan is now at version 7 and still going strong.

Congratulations, Andy! This is a huge milestone and I’m extremely happy for you.

I’d love to do this! And I’d better get started because I think I only have a good 20 years remaining in my life, if I don’t do something stupid. To spend those 20 working on something I love would be amazing! ❤️

Peter Dockrill • ScienceAlert

The Cause of Alzheimer’s Might Be Coming From Inside Your Mouth

This is fascinating! My father-in-law died of complications due to Alzheimer’s. He had dental problems the entire time I knew him. Maybe they’re on to something here!

Michael Larabel • Phoronix

The Linux kernel mailing list drama around the Rust programming language use within the kernel continues… Linus Torvalds has largely refrained from the ongoing LKML discussions around a Rust policy for the Linux kernel and in-fighting between kernel developers and maintainers with differing views over Rust. This evening though Linus Torvalds did decide to chime in on the conversation.

I’m pleasantly surprised Torvalds is this open to the inclusion of Rust in the Linux Kernel. It’s a big deal and could lead to a much more stable operating system — not that it’s unstable today. But having a memory safe language is great for the future of operating systems as a whole.

I keep hoping we’ll find out Apple has included some Swift in Darwin.

Rachyl Jones • Semafor

Large corporations are shopping for underground bunkers that can survive a nuclear blast to protect their data centers and C-suite employees as geopolitical tensions rise. The first adopters are primarily cryptocurrency firms, companies that build the facilities told Semafor.

This made me lol. 🤣

I can see a room full of executives in a large underground datacenter. The nuke hits. Power fails. Brownout. UPS’es kick in. Backup generators start. Everything is beeping and blooping like mad. Some machines have gone down and slowly start coming back online. Network connections have been broken. The place is basically on fire. 🔥

The camera pans to the executives who have stepped out of their beautifully furnished offices in their cave. They all look around. The CEO steps out into the middle of the group and says “Now what?” 🤣

Fade to black.

Charles Pulliam-Moore • The Verge

Today, Amazon MGM, Broccoli, and fellow Bond producer Michael G. Wilson announced the formation of a new joint venture that will give the studio full creative control over the Bond movie franchise.

A lot of Bond fans are up in arms over this move. I’m not a huge Bond fan but I really enjoyed the Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig eras, Craig’s has been particularly great in my opinion.

Here’s hoping they do the franchise justice and keep making extremely great, entertaining, films! 🎥

Giles Richards • The Guardian

The world champion, Max Verstappen was booed, as was his Red Bull team principal, Christian Horner, while Lewis Hamilton was cheered, as was the tyre manufacturer Pirelli, so pumped up was this audience. It was the first time, surely, that mechanical grip enjoyed its fist-in-the-air moment.

F1 season is quickly approaching and I’m hoping the grid really shakes up due to all the driver movement over the off season. I’m hoping to see the legend Lewis Hamilton on the podium more often, hopefully in first place, and I expect Williams picking up Carlos Sainz will result in them becoming a fairly solid mid-pack team. I’d really love to see him podium this year but I don’t expect it.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

We got another 10in of snow this week promptly followed by warmer temperatures and rain that almost eliminated it over night. There’s still patches of snow on the ground.

This week we’re expected to get a foot of snow from Wednesday to Thursday. It’s been a stranger that usual weather year this year.

Enjoy the links and the ravings of a mad man. 😆

Jason Koebler • 404 Media

The doge.gov website that was spun up to track Elon Musk’s cuts to the federal government is insecure and pulls from a database that can be edited by anyone, according to two separate people who found the vulnerability and shared it with 404 Media. One coder added at least two database entries that are visible on the live site and say “this is a joke of a .gov site” and “THESE ‘EXPERTS’ LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN -roro.”

Why isn’t this in a section called Politics? Because it’s about a serious security flaw in a government computing center (maybe it’s just a server setup in someone’s closet?)

The scary thing is the kids working for DOGE — henceforth known as DODGY — have access to all kinds of personal information about you. OpSec folks must be going bonkers right now? 🤡

Kelly Crandall • Racer

Spire Motorsports has to win in the NASCAR Cup Series this year.

Spire started as a very small team. Just one driver, Corey LaJoie. They eventually added a second driver and a couple years back got a huge investment of cash. They now have three drivers and are all in to becoming a top tier team. They signed longtime Cup driver Michael McDowell, Justin Haley was brought in to replace Corey LaJoie and they have last year’s rookie of the year Carson Hocevar. In other words, they’re stacked. I would expect each of them to have at least one win this year.

Nick Hodges • InfoWorld

Just say no to JavaScript

This headline is, of course, there to get you to rage click it and go read the article. 😃

So, please, click the link and go read it. Nick is an excellent software engineer and has years and years of “in the trenches” experience to share.

This article is mainly about the benefits of writing maintainable, easy to read and understand, code. It’s something I encourage everyone I work with to do. It’s smart.

The TL;DR is use a TypeScript instead of JavaScript so you get better type checking. Take advantage of it and make your code easier to maintain all at the same time. Smart. 😃

Jyoti Mann, Pranav Dixit, and Hugh Langley • Business Insider

Several Meta employees who said they received positive performance ratings in their mid-year reviews last year had their jobs cut Monday, as the company let go of nearly 4,000 workers in its latest round of job reductions.

Companies don’t need an excuse to let you go. California is an at will state (I’m not sure if folks in other states were let go) but that doesn’t help the poor folks who lost their jobs.

Look, Zuck is the CEO of a company created to make money and please shareholders. I hate to be so blunt but that’s Capitalism.

I know the CEO of TELUS would do the exact same thing to cut our bottom line if needed.

Do I want to lose my job? HELL NO! Do I realize it’s possible? Yes, yes I do.

I hope each and every one of these folks scores much better jobs. After all, I still believe Zuck is a sociopath and Facebook is a terrible company.

Jay Peters and Alex Heath • The Verge

TikTok is back in the Google Play Store for Android users in the US, and soon it will be available on the iPhone, too.

This seems risky to me, but I guess if the folks tasked with enforcing the law say it’s ok to break it, you should just break it? 😳

I hope this doesn’t come back to bite them. I’d also like to see a better solution to this whole TikTok mess.

Jerry Fahrni

Recently I’ve found myself thinking about the state of pharmacy technology. Why? Simple, really. I’m bored and have been doing a little extracurricular reading. Not to mention that a few things have popped up here and there to pique my interest. It’s not one single piece of technology but rather a collection of technologies and interactions I’ve had over the past 18 months.

I love reading my brothers stuff but he hasn’t been very active since he went back to Pharmacy work full time, now as a Pharmacy Director. He’s one of the smartest folks I know and he has amazing ideas on how to improve pharmacy in the hospital.

It’s nice to see him writing again and I hope he keeps it up.

Phil

It’s frequently stated[by who?] that some core components of the AT-Protocol architecture are expensive to host and don’t scale down. So expensive that they are out of reach reach except for VC-funded commercial companies like Bluesky PBC, and expensive due to the structure of the protocol itself. Very non-decentralized.

I must confess, AT Protocol is a mystery to me. I cannot wrap my pea brain around exactly what it is and how to implement it.

This piece is about how Phil used a Raspberry Pi to do some AT Protocol stuff. Even though I don’t get it I find this encouraging. 😀

Jess Weatherbed • The Verge

Some Apple TV 4K users in the US are being prompted to connect their Netflix accounts to the Apple TV app. This would appear to signal an end to the streaming service’s longtime refusal to have its content aggregated into third-party platforms.

This prompted me to ask the CEO of our household if I could purchase a new Apple TV. My CEO was not impressed with my justification so we’ll continue to use the Roku built into our TV. 🤣

I need to some reading on the current state of Roku technology. I’d like a box that aggregates all streaming service (like Apple TV) so I can search in one spot. If Roku does that we can stay with them. I just wish they didn’t collect so much data about us. 😞

Issy Ronald • CNN

Buried deep in a Welsh landfill, beneath layers of years-old garbage, there is a hard drive that holds the key to almost $800 million in bitcoin – or so James Howells believes, after accidentally throwing the drive away in 2013.

That drive is dead my friend. It’s been underground for 12-years, buried under heaps of trash that were exposed to the elements until it was finally covered over. I can’t see how it would survive the damp even if placed in a hardened container much less a plastic bag.

Would I love to see a miracle of some sort? Yes, I would! The odds are long against him.

Kevin Purdy • Ars Technica

One of the things enterprise storage and destruction company Iron Mountain does is handle the archiving of the media industry’s vaults. What it has been seeing lately should be a wake-up call: roughly one-fifth of the hard disk drives dating to the 1990s it was sent are entirely unreadable.

Speaking of hard drives. This is pretty sobering. Atoms and bits rot. Keep moving that data around if you’d like to keep it. I have CD backups of stuff I’ve moved around. I wonder if those darned things are still readable? 🤔

Jay Peters • The Verge

Square Enix has shut down the iOS version of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles and removed it from the App Store following an unfixable bug that blocked people from accessing content they had paid for.

I don’t believe this. I can’t accept this is unfixable. The more likely story it’s not worth fixing because the fix would require upgrading the software to current versions of frameworks or something like that and they don’t want to spend the money on the effort. That I would accept. 😁

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

This week has been a bit of a struggle. I’m still sick and feel exhausted and our country is being dismantled.

My thoughts are not so good. I’m so pissed off.

I hope you all had positive weeks and enjoy the links. ❤️

Iván Carrillo • Knowable Magazine

North America’s largest bird disappeared from the wild in the late 1980s. Reintroduction work in the United States and Mexico has brought this huge vulture back to the skies. This is the story of its comeback.

I remember these beautiful monsters as a kid and remember being really bummed out when they became extinct.

This gives me a bit of hope.

John Timmer

While the work was done with trapped ions, almost every type of qubit in development can be controlled with photons, so the general approach is hardware agnostic. And, given the sophistication of our optical hardware, it should be possible to link multiple chips at a variety of distances, all using hardware that doesn’t require the best vacuum or the lowest temperatures we can generate.

I find quantum computing to be way more fascinating than LLMs. When — if? — these machines become reality the world changes dramatically, again.

I’ll probably be dead before it reaches a state of usefulness, but I hope it does, and I hope the “AIs” of the world or climate change don’t kill us off as a species before then.

Sara Hashemi • Smithsonian Magazine

In Summerville, South Carolina, a mysterious light has been seen hovering over old railroad tracks. Legend has it, it’s the glow of a lantern lighting the path of a ghost searching for her decapitated husband.

I love a good ghost story and a mystery. I also learned something new! I had no idea earthquakes could produce Earthquake lights!

Now, it’s not nearly as exciting as a good ghost story but it’s still fun nonetheless. 😀

Jon Hicks

A long dive into the features that make my ideal music app, and why nothing currently fulfils the brief.

If you have the time to read a longer post and understand how some folks prefer their music apps to work, this article is for you.

As a developer I want my music player to work a certain way and be beautiful to boot but designers can go to an entirely different level when it comes to the beauty of a thing.

Both perspectives are very necessary to make beloved software.

Ben Lovejoy • 9to5Mac

It’s being reported that the British government secretly ordered Apple to create a security backdoor into all content uploaded by iCloud users anywhere in the world.

This is really shameful of the British government if they’ve really asked for a back door.

Remember, once you make an exception for the “good guys” the bad guys will exploit it for their own needs.

What we need now is for Apple to implement end-to-end encryption for messages and other systems. Tighten it up, don’t dumb it down.

Larry Fried • /Film

Every awards season, movie fans and aspiring pundits across the country become obsessed with the ever-coveted Academy Awards. The longstanding awards show has long been considered the holy grail of the film industry and can often feel like an all-encompassing part of the discourse, particularly around the four acting categories. In the lead-up to Oscar Sunday, many of us debate who will win, and once the ceremony comes and goes, there are still debates over who should have won.

Some of these actors shocked me, like Samuel L. Jackson. He’s extremely good in everything he does. Two roles that come to mind are Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction and Major Marquis Warren in The Hateful Eight. Oh, I also loved him in The Red Violin. I’m 100% certain I’m missing a critically acclaimed film in this mix. The man has done so much over his lifetime.

Numeric Citizen

Generation X is the last cohort to have one foot firmly planted in the pre-digital world while seamlessly adapting to the rapid technological changes that followed. We were raised on mixtapes, handwritten letters, and Saturday morning cartoons, yet we were also the first to embrace personal computers, email, and the internet. This unique position grants us a rare perspective—one that values both the patience and craftsmanship of an analog world and the speed and efficiency of the digital revolution. We understand progress because we lived through it, adapting with each new wave of innovation while maintaining the ability to unplug and appreciate the world beyond the screen.

I know not everyone enjoyed their childhood but I did. We were kids of two worlds. One side middle class the other poor. But, rarely did we ever want for the basics and we always had a tremendous amount of love surrounding us thanks to an amazing mother and grandparents.

As a kid my brothers and I lived outside. During the summer we’d get up, get on our bike, and disappear for long periods of time. If not that we’d be at the trailer park swimming pool or out in the street playing football or baseball. There was always the brick yard to occupy us — the brick yard was a deep and wide hole in the ground we’d play in, swimming in the pond or jumping our bikes into it. We had lots of fun tied together with the occasional mischief.

Jerry, the middle brother, got a Commodore 64 when he was around 10 and it was great for games and the die rolling program he wrote, we played a lot of D & D as teens. I never really used his computer, he is the brains of the family, but I was fascinated by it. I also knew I wanted to be a computer programmer at some point in my life. In high school I had the chance to write some BASIC programs and I sucked at it. I was always a horrible student but at some point I figured it out.

All that to say I agree with the article. Generation X is the perfect mix of analog and digital life. We touched grass a lot and as a generation helped build some of the greatest technology on the planet.

Mark Savage • BBC

Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath are reuniting for one last time, to play a fund-raising concert in Birmingham on 5 July.

This show is going to be amazing. Not just because of Ozzy and Sabbath. This is one for the ages and whoever gets to attend will probably have some great stories to tell. 🎙️

Jamie Zawinski

I didn’t think that my former (extremely former) friend and coworker could be more of an unmitigated piece of shit, but “We hired this completely inexperienced guy solely because he murdered a black man” really takes it up a level.

Mark Andressen has turned out to be a real piece of crap human being. Why anyone would work with him is beyond me. Especially now. Garbage.

Politics

Here’s the section many of you may want to avoid. Cursing may ensue, hostile opinions for sure, and general disgust lie ahead.

You’ve been warned.

We are in the early days of the destruction of our democracy. No, that’s not hyperbole. If we manage to go back to being a democracy after the next four years it will be a miracle. There’s a better than average chance the Marmalade Messiah and his boss, Space Karen, don’t leave the White House and install themselves as dictator of this new nation.

In the last three weeks Space Karen has been dismantling our Federal Government through our computer systems. He is in control, illegally.

USAID and other agencies are being ripped out, root and all, by Space Karen and his merry band of pimple faced teenagers.

When is someone with any authority going to walk into whatever building they’re occupying and arrest the entire team, Musk included?

Better yet. When will the violence begin? Musk and Trump have proven they do not respect the law and will continue to go about dismantling things until they are stopped.

Of the two Musk is certainly the bigger threat. I don’t believe he’s the genius everyone thought he was but he is smart and a narcissistic sociopath. He’s not gonna stop. The law can’t or won’t stop him. It going to take a citizen or group of citizens to end what he’s doing.

Assholes. They’re all assholes and violence may be the only way to stop them.

Parker Molloy

In the past two weeks, Elon Musk — a man no one elected to any office — has gained unprecedented access to Social Security payment systems, fired thousands of federal workers, shuttered entire agencies, and installed his loyalists throughout the government. If this were happening in any other country, we’d call it what it is: a coup.

Jeet Heer • The Nation

In truth, Musk is emerging as a government within the government, using the time-honored revolutionary tactic of developing dual power in order to seize control.

Vittoria Elliott and Leah Feiger • WIRED

A US Treasury Threat Intelligence Analysis Designates DOGE Staff as ‘Insider Threat’

Steven Beschloss

Let’s start here: In a sane world, Elon Musk and his merry band of marauding miscreants would have already been arrested. For crying out loud: They have taken control of government computer systems at the United States Treasury and invaded the databases containing the private records of nearly every American, including personal medical records and financial information from Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, all under the pretext of rooting out waste and fraud.

Katherine Stewart • The New York Times

To be clear, “they” are not just Donald Trump and his billionaire co-pilot. Over the past half-century, an anti-democratic movement has coalesced in the United States. It draws on super-wealthy funders, ideologues of the new right, purveyors of disinformation and Christian nationalist activists. Though it pretends to revere the founders and the Constitution, it fundamentally rejects the idea of America as a modern pluralistic democracy.

The violence is coming. At some point people will break. It’s just a matter of time.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Well, well, well, sick again, I see. Yes indeed I am. This time it’s not a stomach virus, this time it’s a common everyday cold. Stuffy head, runny nose, tired. It’s annoying. 🤧

Let’s get to the links. Enjoy!

Evan Symon • California Globe

A new ballot effort aimed at asking Californians if the state should remain in the union was approved for signature gathering to appear on the 2028 ballot on Friday.

This is nothing more than performative as it’s illegal to secede from the Union.

I mean, seeing California, Oregon, and Washington becoming their own country or joining Canada would be amazing. I’d certainly want to move back ASAP. 🤣

Isaac Halvorson

Lately I’ve been on the hunt for a personal database application that I could use to store, manipulate, and explore data important to me. I think I’m at least now able to articulate what it is I want, but I haven’t yet been able to find anything that perfectly matches the daydream.

This is really interesting. There are a number of database products available for the Mac, I personally use Base and love it, but something a bit more user friendly could make for an amazing product for someone. I’d personally love to see a forms creation product with a database behind it so I could make custom forms and put them on an iPad, iPhone, or Mac. It would be great for folks who do sidewalk questionnaires.

Something like this probably already exists. I just haven’t looked for it.

Ernie Smith • PC Gamer

For the first time in nearly 20 years, WordPress no longer feels like a sure bet if you need to get a website online.

Ah, yes, the WordPress saga continues. I wonder what Matt is up to? It feels like he’s partially giving up. I hate to see that as WordPress is critical infrastructure on the internet. It powers so many sites and I can see it doing so much more.

Roger Monty’s • Search Engine Journal

Three unrelated things happened in the world of WordPress and Content Management Systems which may point the direction of how content is published on the web. Two of the developments are directly related to WordPress and has the feel of pieces falling into place.

This is a very interesting piece. If a community rises up out of WordPress and forks it I could see Matt losing out and losing control of the future of WordPress. It would be really nice to see him do something similar to what Eugen Rochko did for Mastodon.

Joan Westenberg • The Index

Tesla is dying. The company’s fourth-quarter earnings read like a eulogy for the electric dream. Revenue crawled up just 2% to $25.71 billion, missing analyst estimates by over $1.5 billion. Automotive revenue - the heart of Tesla’s business - collapsed 8% to $19.8 billion. Operating income cratered 23% year-over-year to $1.6 billion. The operating margin withered to 6.2% from 8.2% a year earlier. These are the vital signs of a company in free fall.

I can only imagine it’s gonna get worse. Who wants to buy a car from a company with a Nazi as CEO?

The Tesla Board needs to grow a collective pair and fire the man. Get someone who will turn Tesla around.

I wonder when we’re going to see a round of layoffs from Tesla?

Charlie Stross

Microsoft Word is a tyrant of the imagination, a petty, unimaginative, inconsistent dictator that is ill-suited to any creative writer’s use. Worse: it is a near-monopolist, dominating the word processing field. Its pervasive near-monopoly status has brainwashed software developers to such an extent that few can imagine a word processing tool that exists as anything other than as a shallow imitation of the Redmond Behemoth. But what exactly is wrong with it?

Charlie is a professional writer and he has a monster hatred for Microsoft Word. That made me ask myself what do writers actually use for writing their novels and books?

I know John Scalzi uses Word, but does he strip it down or just use it out of the box?

George R. R. Martin uses 1980s era WordStar for DOS.

From the article.

But then he did one better. He told Conan that he has two computers, one that’s up-to-date and has Internet access, and one that’s ancient and runs DOS. He uses the newer machine for browsing the Web and checking emails, but he turns to the older one when it’s time to write. And his late-’80s software of choice is the classic word processor WordStar 4.0.

I’d love to see someone collect data on what famous authors use as their word processor or typewriter of choice.

Andrew Cunningham • Ars Technica

But regardless of geography, it feels an awful lot like OpenAI wants to benefit from unlimited access to others' work while also restricting similar access to its own work.

I LOL’d when I read OpenAI isn’t happy about DeepSeek possibly using ChatGPT to train their model, given OpenAI crawled the web and trained their LLM with our work. Oh the irony.

Chris Smith • BGR

“When I think about where I’ll raise a future family or how much to save for retirement, I can’t help but wonder: Will humanity even make it to that point?” he asked.

I think it’s healthy to have a bit of skepticism about LLM’s and where the future of actual AI leads us. Doom is not such a bad answer. Let’s be cautious and slow down the pace. I’d definitely hate to see someone create SkyNet. 🤔

Dustin Albino • NASCAR News

Corey LaJoie to run partial Cup schedule for RWR, joins Prime Video as analyst

I’m happy for Corey! I’m a fan. He’s been an underdog forever and may not have the skill of top drivers but the man doesn’t give up. I’m excited to see how his own team — Stacking Pennies Performance — does this year! Getting the 01 number was quite clever. Since he’s not a chartered NASCAR member it means he’s not guaranteed a spot on the grid. What does that mean? It means there are only so many spots available to racers and he will have to qualify his way in! He starts his new adventure at the Great American Race in Daytona this month. If he qualifies it’s a victory given the number of racers qualifying Open cars.

If I were some super rich dude I’d definitely get behind this guy.

Jim Acosta

I struggled for a bit trying to decide what to write about in my next Substack. But as this - how should I put this - batsh*t crazy week came to a close, I came to the conclusion that this post needs to be about you.

Man! I wish I were enough of a somebody to get Mr. Acosta to listen to me. All of this attention focused on Substack is not good. They support Nazi and white supremacist content on their platform but so many writers and reporter, like Mr. Acosta, just ignore it.

It’s mind boggling how they can ignore the sins of Substack while covering the likes of Donald Trump and the hate and cruelty he foists on so many groups of people here in the United States.

Get off the platform.

Politics

Ethan Jones • Bylines Cymru

Donald Trump has entered the White House again, an astonishing number of American voters seemingly unbothered by his authoritarian rhetoric, let alone the fact he’s an adjudicated rapist and 34-time convicted felon. No wonder the ‘f’ word is in use more than ever, especially due to the actions of Trump’s apparent right-hand man, the unelected Elon Musk.

Keep saying it. Donald J. Trump is an adjudicated rapist and 34 time felon. Oh, and he’s a fascist to boot.

Piece of garbage human.

PZ Myers

I’ve been getting reassuring emails from my university to let me know that they have assembled a team to respond to the federal government shut down of NIH and NSF funded research. In case you hadn’t heard, they canceled review panels at NSF and suspended research at NIH. They made the uncertainty that has always haunted research funding far more shaky. This is a warning shot — they’re going to make everyone conscious of the fact that the Trump team, a collection of idiots with no qualifications in science to throttle any and all science they don’t like.

It’s depressing to see the greatest nation on the planet shut down scientific research. The Marmalade Messiah is trying his best to turn the United States of America into an Idiocracy.

Levi Rickert • Native News Online

The Trump administration’s intensified deportation efforts have created unexpected challenges for Navajo citizens living in urban areas like Phoenix. As the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) began widespread raids in major cities across the country following the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, concerns have surfaced about Native Americans being mistaken for undocumented immigrants.

I knew something like this would happen. It was bound to given how gung-ho ICE has been about “rounding up” brown skinned people.

What an absolute shit show. One that will affect so many lives. It’s terribly cruel and pathetic.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

What a week. We started the week celebrating a man of compassion, peace, and love, a great American!

At the same time swore in a new President. A convicted felon and rapist. A man who doesn’t have a compassionate bone in his body. A man who only loves himself. In other words, a garbage human.

Like I said, what a week.

I hope you enjoy the links.

Jean Boussier

Instrumenting Thread Stalling in Ruby Applications

Another nice post that peaks under the hood of Ruby. I won’t spoil the mystery here. Go read the post. 😃

Zac Bowden • Windows Central

Microsoft is gearing up to ship two new versions of the Surface Laptop and Surface Pro that have smaller displays, designed to be lighter and more portable for people looking for a more travel-friendly PC. Both devices will be premium products, and feature display sizes roughly around 11- or 12-inches, my sources say.

I’ve wanted a Surface Pro since the original version shipped. I love the form factor and it runs a full blown operating system.

Tasha Robinson • Polygon

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s news that Nosferatu director Robert Eggers will follow his vampire movie with a 13-century werewolf thriller called Werwulf, and today’s news that Nosferatu is in the running for four Academy Awards, the Eggers news drops keeps landing: Deadline reports that Eggers has signed a deal to direct a sequel to Jim Henson’s 1986 fantasy Labyrinth.

How do you replace David Bowie? You don’t. Our youngest daughter loves this film and absolutely hates the idea of a sequel. Can’t say that I blame her.

Andrew Webster • The Verge

Doom: The Dark Ages looks metal as hell and launches in May

We haven’t played a game on our XBox in ages. We’ve played some Mario Kart on the Switch but the XBox is basically a dust collector. But this game looks like it could be really interesting and anything called “metal as hell” is good in my book.

Matt Mastracci and Michael J. Sullivan • EdgeDB Blog

We’ve been working on a new HTTP fetch feature for EdgeDB, using reqwest as our HTTP client library. Everything was going smoothly: the feature worked locally, passed tests on x86_64 CI runners, and seemed stable. But then we noticed something strange: the tests started failing intermittently on our ARM64 CI runners.

This particular bug wouldn’t have happened on Windows because you can build the CRT to be thread safe. Of course they may have other issues on a Windows box. 😄

Harry Roberts

The web platform moves slowly, and I understand that can be frustrating for developers who want to innovate, but over a decade of consultancy experience has taught me time and time again that the alternative is much more restrictive in the long term. What’s brand new today starts to show its age much more quickly.

I figure a web developer type would understand this better than I. Doing work on native desktop or mobile computers could present the same issues but typically doesn’t. Our frameworks are provided by the platform vendor. Now, using them without an abstraction absolutely locks you into the platform and major changes are typically few and far between, but they absolutely do happen.😃

Mary Ann Azevedo • TechCrunch

Stripe is laying off 300 people, but says it still plans to hire in 2025

Sigh. This is one of those companies I’d have applied to as an iOS developer if I were in the market for a job. Working on an SDK or component level would be a great deal of fun. To see them have layoffs is a real bummer and points to how fragile the tech sector remains.

Andrew Benson • BBC

Haas have restructured their race operations team with a series of changes that include appointing Laura Muller as the first female race engineer in Formula 1.

I’m still a bit miffed at Haas for firing Gunther Steiner but this move sounds like a good one.

Bert Hubert

So how hard could it be. As input we have something like in UTC, and we’d like to turn this into 1737094027, the notional (but not actual) number of seconds that have passed since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC.

Don’t get me started on dates. We had to deal with all these issues when I was at Pelco. Just never, ever, convert the date from UTC in your system until you need to display it. It’s easy to convert it to local time then use it somewhere else like that.

Luckily we had a really great developer who understood these issues and built us a really great date class for handling all those sticky issues for us.

Niall Doherty • Louder

“It’s the most spontaneous thing I’ve ever been involved in” : the story of Mad Season, the grunge supergroup that Mike McCready hoped would save Layne Staley

For some reason the story of Layne Staley’s death really bothers me. His friends knew he was an addict and it caused a lot of problems in the band. But try as they might they could never get him to get help. He spent his final days locked away in his apartment, frightfully skinny, alone. Mike Starr, Alice In Chains bassist, visited Staley and begged him to go to the hospital. Staley wouldn’t hear it so Starr left. It’s believed it was the last time anyone saw Staley alive. He was discovered approximately two weeks later, partially decomposed, full syringe next to him. Sad, sad, ending to a talented soul.

Charith Amarasinghe • Railway

Since the beginning, Railway’s compute has been built on top of Google Cloud Platform. The platform supported Railway’s initial journey, but it has caused a multitude of problems that have posed an existential risk to our business. More importantly, building on a hyperscaler prevents us from delivering the best possible platform to our customers.

Folks that run “bare metal” servers feel like race car mechanics to me and I love reading stories like this. There was a time when I wanted to be a Render Wrangler at Pixar. All that raw horsepower committed to making the greatest animated film on earth was attractive to me.

Ghost

At the start of last summer, we announced that we would start working on ActivityPub support for Ghost to bring long-form publishing to the largest decentralised networking protocol on the web.

It’s been really nice to see more blogging platforms embrace ActivityPub and the Fediverse.

I’m a very happy user of Micro.blog and their integration with ActivityPub and the Fediverse is second to none. They also support cross posting to Tumblr and Bluesky, and of course Mastodon. You can even follow Micro.blog users from Mastodon. It’s really well done.

Sarah Perez • TechCrunch

Entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban is ready to fund a TikTok alternative built on Bluesky’s AT Protocol, he shared in a TikTok video posted on Wednesday.

This is really interesting but I wonder why he’s thinking about using At Proto instead of ActivityPub and the Fediverse? Pixelfed and Loops have been picking up steam and it’s extremely nice to be able to follow someone on Pixelfed right from my Mastodon client. You can do the same with Loops. It’s just an amazing way to integrate all social media.

Politics

Jason DeRose and Sarah Ventre • NPR

“Let me make one final plea, Mr. President,” Bishop Mariann Budde said in her 15-minute sermon. “Millions have put their trust in you. And as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” said Budde, as she appeared to look towards the president.

Bishop Budde has more guts than all those fat cat billionaires sitting behind his orangeness during his swearing in.

She is a real Christian. God is a god of love. Jesus’ message was all about love and compassion. Can’t these MAGA supporters see that? A lot of American Christians need to wake up. You’ve missed the message. Trump and his administration are all about cruelty. If that’s what you’re after, fine. Just don’t say you’re a Christian who follows the teachings of Jesus.

Evan Hurst • Wonkette

There was a prayer service at the National Cathedral on Tuesday, and Trump and Melania attended (this time not dressed as the Babadook), along with JD and Usha Vance and members of the Trump crime family and all kinds of others. And one of America’s greatest heroes, Mariann Edgar Budde, the Episcopalian bishop for Washington DC, decided to speak truth to power, softly and carrying a big stick, and that stick was J-E-S-U-S.

Zack Beauchamp • Vox

Elon Musk doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt

The man is a Nazi. It’s just that plain. When he put his hand over his chest and flung it out he could’ve left his palm facing inward, but he didn’t. He chose to turn it down.

He’s a Nazi. He’s a racist. He is trying to remake America into a white nation while he rapes, pillages, and plunders our resources for his own selfish goals. I have no idea what those are but he’s definitely up to something.

Joan Westenberg • The Index

The evidence is now undeniable. In front of thousands at Donald Trump’s inauguration rally, Elon Musk - the world’s richest man and owner of X - performed not one but two Nazi salutes.

David Gutman • The Seattle Times

Judge in Seattle blocks Trump order on birthright citizenship nationwide

Birthright citizenship is right there in black and white in the Constitution. Trump is a nasty human being who deserves to be smacked around as often as possible. Of course that wouldn’t snap him out of it. He’s a narcissist and a sociopath. He only cares about himself.