Friday Feed 2025

The Collected Friday Feed, 2025 Anthony Starks

Friday Feed January 3, 2025 Casual Viewing Why Netflix looks
like that Intel’s Fall from Grace Tracing the trajectories of several semiconductor manufacturers. Things we learned about LLMs in 2024 A lot has happened in the world of Large Language Models over the course of 2024. Here’s a review of things we figured out about the field in the past twelve months, plus my attempt at identifying key themes and pivotal moments. YouTuber won DMCA fight with fake Nintendo lawyer by detecting spoofed email A brave YouTuber has managed to defeat a fake Nintendo lawyer improperly targeting his channel with copyright takedowns that could have seen his entire channel removed if YouTube issued one more strike. Welcome to the Public Domain in 2025 Singing in the Ran, All Quiet on the Western Front, A Farewell to Arms, Mickey Mouse shorts

Friday Feed January 10, 2025 33 Things We’d Love to
Redesign in 2025 From crossing signals to patient portals and oh-so-much more. Nvidia unveils $3,000 desktop AI computer for home researchers At CES on Monday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang described the new system as "a cloud computing platform that sits on your desk." The company also designed Project DIGITS as a bridge between desktop development and cloud deployment. Developers can create and test AI applications locally on Project DIGITS, then move them to cloud services or data centers that use similar Nvidia hardware. Apple and the AI divide Apple seems to be pressured to play catch-up on AI technology, and I feel like this is being driven by activist shareholders instead of people who are focused on products. Apple has previously been a company to take their time and do things right. Their current AI strategy seems to be announce everything way too early and release some things before they’re ready. The Atlas of Space As a long-time space nerd, I realized recently that I didn't have a good intuition on the scale, speed, and relative orientation of the celestial bodies around us. So over the break I built out a kind of spatial Wikipedia to click around and learn about planets, moons, asteroids, and other bodies orbiting the Sun. Microsoft disguises Bing as Google to fool inattentive searchers If you can't beat Google, trick your users into thinking that they're using Google.

Friday Feed January 17, 2024 AI voice scams are on
the rise. Here's how to protect yourself. Artificial intelligence-enabled voice cloning tools have made it easier for criminals to mimic strangers' voices and dupe victims into handing over large sums of money. or example, a scammer might target a victim posing as their grandchild and claiming they require cash — fast. Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban law “There is no doubt that, for more than 170 million Americans, TikTok offers a distinctive and expansive outlet for expression, means of engagement, and source of community,” “But Congress has determined that divestiture is necessary to address its well-supported national security concerns regarding TikTok’s data collection practices and relationship with a foreign adversary.” The 2025 AI Engineer Reading List We picked 50 paper/models/blogs across 10 fields in AI Eng: LLMs, Benchmarks, Prompting, RAG, Agents, CodeGen, Vision, Voice, Diffusion, Finetuning. If you're starting from scratch, start here. The Best Product Engineering Org in the World “How are you measuring productivity?” Apple is pulling its AI-generated notifications for news after generating fake headlines Apple is temporarily pulling its newly introduced artificial intelligence feature that summarizes news notifications after it repeatedly sent users error-filled headlines, sparking backlash from a news organization and press freedom groups. Apple will soon receive ‘made in America’ chips from TSMC's Arizona fab — company in final stages of quality verification News The entry of locally produced chips in the American market is a big win for the United States’ push for silicon independence, especially as it massively relies on Taiwan for the majority of its most advanced chips.

Friday Feed January 24, 2025 MasterCard DNS Error Went Unnoticed
for Years The payment card giant MasterCard just fixed a glaring error in its domain name server settings that could have allowed anyone to intercept or divert Internet traffic for the company by registering an unused domain name. The misconfiguration persisted for nearly five years until a security researcher spent $300 to register the domain and prevent it from being grabbed by cybercriminals. FLAME: A Small Language Model for Spreadsheet Formulas We present FLAME, a transformer-based model trained exclusively on Excel formulas that leverages domain insights to achieve competitive performance while being substantially smaller (60M parameters) and training on two orders of magnitude less data. We curate a training dataset using sketch deduplication, introduce an Excel-specific formula tokenizer, and use domain-specific versions of masked span prediction and noisy auto-encoding as pre-training objectives One hundred years of Bell Labs What is the best research & development organization of the last 100 years? If you search the Internet or ask an AI the question, Bell Labs will surely appear at the top of the list. The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a total disaster Shortly after the New Year, someone in Redmond pushed a button that raised the price of its popular (84 million paid subscribers worldwide!) Microsoft 365 product. You know, the one that used to be called Microsoft Office? Yeah, well, now the app is called Microsoft 365 Copilot, and you're going to be paying at least 30% more for that subscription starting with your next bill. GENUARY 2025 Over the 744 hours of January, for every 24 hours there will be one prompt for your code art.

Friday Feed January 31, 2025 DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in
LLMs via Reinforcement Learning We introduce our first-generation reasoning models, DeepSeek-R1-Zero and DeepSeek-R1. DeepSeek-R1-Zero, a model trained via large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) without supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as a preliminary step, demonstrates remarkable reasoning capabilities...DeepSeekR1 achieves performance comparable to OpenAI-o1-1217 on reasoning tasks. To support the research community, we open-source DeepSeek-R1-Zero, DeepSeek-R1, and six dense models The Illustrated DeepSeek-R1 A recipe for reasoning LLMs Older Adults Disproportionately Hindered by Touch Screen Interfaces in Driving Tasks The general assumption is that older adults struggle with touch screen devices because they are unfamiliar with the technology and that with practice, they will become proficient. This study provides evidential support of a probable physiological barrier contributing to some older adults’ touch screen difficulties. In our study, participants (7 older adults, 10 younger adults) had to press a touch screen button to get information while driving. Older adults disproportionately failed attempts to hit this button. It’s official: Research has found that libraries make everything better. The researchers’ analysis (which used positive psychology’s PERMA model, if that means anything to you) discovered that libraries are good for people, their well-being, and their communities. How one YouTuber is trying to poison the AI bots stealing her content Specialized garbage-filled captions are invisible to humans, confounding to AI.

Friday Feed February 7, 2025 Out of Ideas they made
a machine that charges you over and over again for a number of input and output tokens that they control (since they have control over how many tokens the model produces) for a duration of time that they also control. Since the models are non-deterministic by nature and hard to explain, they’ve effectively written themselves a blank check to charge you however much they want Learn Shader Programming with Rick and Morty This animation of Rick was made with 240 lines of code. No libraries, no images. I’m going to show you how to use GPU shaders and signed distance fields to make animations like it for videos, video games, or just for fun! I even built a live coding editor into the page so you can see the examples running and tinker with them. It's Pixel Rick! Announcing the Data.gov Archive We’ve built this project on our long-standing commitment to preserving government records and making public information available to everyone. Libraries play an essential role in safeguarding the integrity of digital information. By preserving detailed metadata and establishing digital signatures for authenticity and provenance, we make it easier for researchers and the public to cite and access the information they need over time. Introducing a Hexagonal-tiled Cartogram for U.S. Counties Mapping data isn’t just about geography - it’s about telling stories hidden in numbers. Recently, I created a cartogram that tiles all U.S. counties into a uniform grid of hexagons. This approach transforms our traditional view of the nation, offering fresh insights into population, density, and other socio-economic variables that are often obscured on conventional maps. As Internet enshittification marches on, here are some of the worst offenders Doctorow believes there are four basic forces that might constrain companies from getting worse: competition, regulation, self-help, and tech workers. One by one, he says, these constraints have been eroded as large corporations squeeze the Internet and its denizens for dollars.

Friday Feed February 14, 2025 Modern-Day Oracles Or Bullshit Machines?
How to thrive in a ChatGPT world reCAPTCHA: 819 million hours of wasted human time and billions of dollars in Google profits By 2025, reCAPTCHA is easily defeated by bots. Yet Google continues to offer it because reCAPTCHA has evolved into a tracking tool that collects user data and generates billions in revenue for Google, according to Chuppl. "Re-captcha takes a pixel by pixel fingerprint of your browser, a realtime map of everything you do on the internet." We are destroying software We are destroying software, and what will be left will no longer give us the joy of hacking. The Tiny Book of Great Joys If you are interested in how I over-engineered the process of making a tiny book for my wife, using AI, a pen plotter, a 3D printer, and a lot of time, you are in the right place. The book is titled The Tiny Book of Great Joys Visualizing Data Is An Art - We Should Treat It Like One I've been thinking about how we communicate information and specifically the role data visualization plays. It's a surprisingly young field that uniquely sits at the intersection of art and science. Much of the lexicon is actively being written and, perhaps counterintuitively, I'm going to advocate for a bit less science and a bit more art.

Friday Feed February 21, 2025 DOGE Has ‘God Mode’ Access
to Government Data The president’s special commission now has an unprecedented ability to view and manipulate information at many federal agencies. AI Killed The Tech Interview. Now What? AI also significantly reduces the effectiveness of comp sci fundamentals and the coding interview as they are today. The problems are too simple, and an LLM can quickly answer them in most cases. Humane Humane existed for six years, which is quite a long time, but it collapsed quicker than any other company I have seen before. I hope that in the future, people can see red flags more clearly and that journalists identify them much earlier, without giving companies the benefit of the doubt. Poking the Robot How would you explain this chart to somebody who can't see it? Microsoft’s Majorana 1 chip carves new path for quantum computing Microsoft today introduced Majorana 1, the world’s first quantum chip powered by a new Topological Core architecture that it expects will realize quantum computers capable of solving meaningful, industrial-scale problems in years, not decades. The hardest working font in Manhattan One day, I saw what felt like Gorton on a ferry traversing the waters Bay Area. A few weeks later, I spotted it on a sign in a national park. Then on an intercom. On a street lighting access cover. In an elevator. At my dentist’s office. In an alley.

Friday Feed February 28, 2025 I Recreated Shazam's Algorithm from
Scratch because no one is hiring jnr devs I recreated Shazam's algorithm out of curiosity but mostly out of desperation. In this video, I explain how Shazam works and how I implemented the algorithm in Golang. The Hollow Men of Silicon Valley The cold logic of AI doesn't recognize the value of a human life beyond its productive capacity. It doesn't understand the power of a protest song, the unifying force of shared grief, or the motivating fire of righteous anger. It can't compute the value of human dignity or the importance of self-determination. Nigerians are building affordable alternatives to AWS and Google Cloud Local cloud startups offer data sovereignty at a time when the debate about who has access to a country’s data is heating up. Meet the journalists training AI models for Meta and OpenAI The gig work platform Outlier is one of several companies courting journalists to train large language models (LLMs). Was Harvey Weinstein thanked more often than God at the Oscars? I analysed almost 2,000 Oscar speeches to discover if the claim that Harvey Weinstein was thanked more often than God is true. Plus, we'll find out which Hollywood icon is bigger than both of them.

Friday Feed March 7, 2025 Stone Soup AI “We have
a magic algorithm that will make artificial general intelligence from just gradient descent, next-token prediction, and transformers.” “Really,” said the users, “that does sound magical.” “Of course, it will be even better and more intelligent if we add more data — especially text and images,” said the execs. Hallucinations in code are the least dangerous form of LLM mistakes The way to avoid those problems is the same as how you avoid problems in code by other humans that you are reviewing, or code that you’ve written yourself: you need to actively exercise that code. You need to have great manual QA skills. How He Made a Masterpiece on His Laptop Discussing the Academy Award Winner "Flow" Work at the Mill Or, the Story of Digital Equipment Corporation Scientists crack how aspirin might stop cancers from spreading Aspirin disrupts the platelets and removes their influence over the T-cells so they can hunt out the cancer.

Friday Feed March 14, 2025 Internet shutdowns at record high
in Africa as access ‘weaponised’ More governments seeking to keep millions of people offline amid conflicts, protests and political instability The Einstein AI model What we'll actually get, in my opinion, is “a country of yes-men on servers” (if we just continue on current trends) but let me explain the difference with a small part of my personal story. Microsoft is reportedly plotting a future without OpenAI If Microsoft pulls this off, the benefits are obvious: cheaper, faster AI services and a chance to stake out its own ground in a competitive market. But between contractual obligations, technical dependencies, and OpenAI’s ongoing innovation, Suleyman’s mission is more of a long grind than a quick win. His team is making moves—one model swap at a time. Step Into the Real-Life Lumon Industries, the Breakout Star of ‘Severance’ Bell Works, the setting of the hit serial for Apple TV+, is now a tourist attraction, drawing fans to the architectural wonder. What Would It Take to Recreate Bell Labs? Bell Labs is most famous for being the birthplace of the transistor, but that’s just one of dozens of major inventions and discoveries that originated there. Bell Labs also spawned: the silicon solar PV cell, the first active and passive communications satellites, the first videophone, the first cellular telephone system, the first fiber optic telephone cable, the quartz clock, Information Theory, Statistical Process Control, the UNIX computer operating system, and the discovery of Cosmic Microwave Background radiation

Friday Feed March 21, 2025 iPhones were being stolen off
porches right after delivery, and now we know how Fung writes that an AT&T employee in New Jersey used his credentials to track hundreds of customer shipments, sharing photos of customer names, addresses, and FedEx tracking numbers with the criminal group. Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino The fiasco here is not that Apple is late on AI...The fiasco is that Apple pitched a story that wasn’t true, one that some people within the company surely understood wasn’t true, and they set a course based on that. How the Tesla brand turned so toxic Tesla’s stock price has been sinking, new car registrations are down, and merely owning one has become uncomfortably political for a lot of people. The IndieWeb Doesn't Need to "Take Off" It's like saying that gardening hasn't taken off because most people buy their vegetables at the supermarket. The IndieWeb doesn't need to "take off" to be valuable to those who participate in it. US appeals court rejects copyrights for AI-generated art lacking 'human' creator Tuesday's decision marks the latest attempt by U.S. officials to grapple with the copyright implications of the fast-growing generative AI industry. The Copyright Office has separately rejected artists' bids for copyrights on images generated by the AI system Midjourney.

Friday Feed March 28, 2025 AI models miss disease in
Black and female patients A new study, published today in Science Advances, adds to this work by testing one of the most cited AI models used to scan chest x-rays for diseases—and finding the model doesn’t accurately detect potentially life-threatening diseases in marginalized groups, including women and Black people. Trapping misbehaving bots in an AI Labyrinth When we detect unauthorized crawling, rather than blocking the request, we will link to a series of AI-generated pages that are convincing enough to entice a crawler to traverse them. But while real looking, this content is not actually the content of the site we are protecting, so the crawler wastes time and resources. They lied to you. Building software is really hard. The reality is that if your goal is to become a software developer, relying on these tools early on often ends up slowing you down. You get the illusion of progress early on, but the flat learning curve just means that it will take much longer to learn all the things you need. I was wrong about AI Coding 'm mostly anti-AI person since the AI hype started years ago. However with time I realized that I misjudged AI Coding — Here’s Why. Pi Pico Rx - A crystal radio for the digital age? My first step into the world of electronics was with a crystal radio, just like this one. A USB interface to the "Mother of All Demos" keyset In the early 1960s, Douglas Engelbart started investigating how computers could augment human intelligence: "If, in your office, you as an intellectual worker were supplied with a computer display backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day and was instantly responsive to every action you had, how much value could you derive from that?"

Friday Feed April 4, 2025 Making of the New York
and Erie Railroad organizational diagram Drawn in 1855 and only rediscovered in recent decades, this diagram captured my attention and I finally took the time to recreate it from scratch as a fun technical exercise. What was unexpected was the depths I ended up going to in order to learn about its fascinating history. The Mediocrity of Modern Google The company that once represented the pinnacle of innovation has devolved into a symbol of corporate indifference. Celebrate 50 years of Microsoft with the company's original source code That code remains to coolest code I've ever written to this day AI bots strain Wikimedia as bandwidth surges 50% Automated AI bots seeking training data threaten Wikipedia project stability, foundation says. Porting Tailscale to Plan 9 As the quip goes, “We chose to port Tailscale to Plan 9 not because it was easy, but because we thought it would be easy.”

Friday Feed April 11, 2025 What If We Made Advertising
Illegal? Ad companies are never going to regulate themselves—it's like hoping for heroin dealers to write drug laws. No one is entitled to yell at you “GET 20% OFF THIS UNDERWEAR YOU GLANCED AT YESTERDAY” with a dopamine megaphone in your bedroom. And to track 90% of your life to know when and how to say it. That's not free speech, that's harassment. The 2025 AI Index Report The AI Index offers one of the most comprehensive, data-driven views of artificial intelligence. Recognized as a trusted resource by global media, governments, and leading companies, the AI Index equips policymakers, business leaders, and the public with rigorous, objective insights into AI’s technical progress, economic influence, and societal impact. Copyright-ignoring AI scraper bots laugh at robots.txt so the IETF is trying to improve it Recently formed AI Preferences Working Group has August deadline to develop ideas on how to tell crawlers to go away, or come for a feast So, I Wrote a Book The Story Behind 100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them Visualizing a Million Time Series with the Density Line Chart In this paper, we introduce the DenseLines technique to calculate a discrete density representation of time series. DenseLines normalizes time series by the arc length to compute accurate densities. The derived density visualization allows users both to see the aggregate trends of multiple series and to identify anomalous extrema.

Friday Feed April 18, 2024 10,000 Times Faster, 10,000 Times
Simpler: Why Today’s Solutions Don’t Need Internet-Scale Complexity Instead of taking advantage of hardware advancements to simplify solutions, we’re often overengineering, creating unnecessarily complex distributed systems that mimic the architectures of tech giants like Google. But here's the secret: Most businesses don’t need Google-scale infrastructure to succeed. In fact, overengineering might be the very thing holding them back. The Problem with “Vibe Coding” If you’re writing software that you’re planning to ship; to distribute to other people, perhaps even sell it to paying customers? Well, now that’s a whole different ball game.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. Introducing Kermit: A typeface for kids Kermit is a friendly and approachable font that encourages children of all skill levels to read, even if they are anxious about their abilities. In Two Moves, AlphaGo and Lee Sedol Redefined the Future Although machines are now capable of moments of genius, humans have hardly lost the ability to generate their own. CURE ID App Lets Clinicians Report Novel Uses of Existing Drugs The platform enables the crowdsourcing of medical information from health care providers to facilitate the development of new treatments for neglected diseases. Typographic Portrait of Jean Sibelius Composed Entirely of Brass Rule When our renowned master composer Jean Sibelius turned 70 in 1935, [...] I was struck with a strange dream of trying to replicate his image using impractical typographic methods. I had previously seen pictures "set" with Monotype fonts and decorations in foreign graphic design trade journals, particularly "The Inland Printer", so I decided to try, but not with type and ornament, but with rule.[1]

Friday Feed April 25, 2025 How We Diagnosed and Fixed
the 2023 Voyager 1 Anomaly from 15 Billion Miles Away Fixing the Flight Data Subsystem on a decades-old spacecraft that is 15 billion miles from Earth. Mark Zuckerberg Says Social Media Is Over During testimony at Meta’s antitrust trial, the Facebook founder’s argument was, in so many words, that platforms like his are not what they used to be. DOGE Worker’s Code Supports NLRB Whistleblower Berulis said the new DOGE accounts had unrestricted permission to read, copy, and alter information contained in NLRB databases. The new accounts also could restrict log visibility, delay retention, route logs elsewhere, or even remove them entirely — top-tier user privileges that neither Berulis nor his boss possessed. The Effect Of Deactivating Facebook And Instagram On Users’ Emotional State We estimate the effect of social media deactivation on users’ emotional state in two large randomized experiments before the 2020 U.S. election. People who deactivated Facebook for the six weeks before the election reported a 0.060 standard deviation improvement in an index of happiness, depression, and anxiety, relative to controls who deactivated for just the first of those six weeks. People who deactivated Instagram for those six weeks reported a 0.041 standard deviation improvement relative to controls. Exploratory analysis suggests the Facebook effect is driven by people over 35, while the Instagram effect is driven by women under 25. Doubling Up: How ‘Sinners’ and Other Movies Multiply One Actor From camera tricks to digital facial replacement, a history of duplicating effects.

Friday Feed May 2, 2025 AI Snake Oil: What Artificial
Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference On April 17, 2025, the MIT Shaping the Future of Work Initiative and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing welcomed Arvind Narayanan, Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University, to discuss his latest book, "AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference," co-authored with Sayash Kapoor. Why Even Try if You Have A.I.? In a world saturated with technology, we already have to remind ourselves to put down our phones; to go outside; to see friends in person; to go places instead of staring at them on our screens; to have non-technological experiences, such as boredom. If we’re not careful, then our minds will do less as computers do more, and we will be diminished as a result. Off-screen in the Wilds of Manhattan What a New York exhibition taught me about the costs of creative triumph. How to Build a Great Emerging Tech Product We’re excited to adopt it to create a really great product. But how do we make it stick? Altair at 50: Remembering the first Personal Computer No longer did you need an electronics degree to assemble an inexpensive computer or be a business that had to spend tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars (and have a staff) in order to use a computer.

Friday Feed May 9, 2025 The enshittification of tech jobs
Amazon is famous for spying on its warehouse workers and drivers – and now its tech staff report getting popups warning them that their keystrokes are being monitored and analyzed, and their screens are being recorded. How much information is in DNA? We still have no idea what (if anything) lots of DNA is doing, and we’re a long way from fully understanding how much it can be reduced. P Castle Kellmore rendering Since Castle Kellmore released on Playdate, I have had a lot of interest in the technical aspects of its rendering system. So I thought I would give a brief insight into how I made it look as good as possible, while (mostly) keeping to 50 frames per second. I Put Sheet Music Into Smart Glasses! The story of how I fulfilled my dream of putting sheet music into glasses, and why it's just the beginning. Stop treating ‘AGI’ as the north-star goal of AI research In this position paper, we argue that focusing on the highly contested topic of ‘artificial general intelligence’ (‘AGI’) undermines our ability to choose effective goals.

Friday Feed May 16, 2025 Tixy A simple 16x16 dot
animation from simple math rules Ink & Algorithms A weekly deep dive into the craft of pen plotting—covering techniques, tools, and the artists pushing the boundaries. NASA keeps ancient Voyager 1 spacecraft alive with Hail Mary thruster fix "These thrusters were considered dead. And that was a legitimate conclusion," Voyager mission propulsion leader Todd Barber said in JPL's report. "It's just that one of our engineers had this insight that maybe there was this other possible cause and it was fixable. It was yet another miracle save for Voyager." A conversation about AI for science with Jason Pruet, Director of the Laboratory’s National Security AI Office. He no longer views the technology as just a tool, but as a fundamental shift in how scientists approach problems and make discoveries. The global race humanity is now in is about how to harness the technology’s potential while mitigating its harms. Baby Is Healed With World’s First Personalized Gene-Editing Treatment The technique used on a 9½-month-old boy with a rare condition has the potential to help people with thousands of other uncommon genetic diseases. After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain LLMs are okay at coding, but at scale they build jumbled messes. I’ve scaled back my use of AI when coding and gone back to using my brain and pen and paper.

Friday Feed May 23, 2025 YouTube’s new ads will ruin
the best part of a video on purpose “Peak Points,” a new ad product powered by Google Gemini. It uses AI to identify the most engaging or emotionally charged moments in popular YouTube videos and then serves ads right there. Yes, right when you get to that good part, an ad will be waiting to disrupt your experience.

Friday Feed May 30, 2025 We Tested Google Veo and
Runway to Create This AI Film. It Was Wild. AI video tools like Google’s Veo 3 and Runway can now generate scenes that look almost indistinguishable from reality. WSJ’s Joanna Stern and Jarrard Cole put them to the test in a short film made almost entirely with AI. Watch the full film and then see exactly how they pulled it off. Dispatch from the Trenches of the Butlerian Jihad Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine. My review of Power Failure: the downfall of America's greatest company From a $600 billion giant to near-bankruptcy, GE's downfall reveals how financialization and imperial CEOs destroyed a 130-year industrial icon. The 3 Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen With the rise of Flash and CSS in 1997, three web design philosophies emerged. David Siegel advocated for 'hacks', Jakob Nielsen kept it simple, while Jeffrey Zeldman combined flair with usability. Sam and Jony and skepticism But right now, all we have are words and an awkward video of Sam and Jony drinking espresso. The words are all vague. I’ll believe whatever they’re going to release when I see it. Until then, like so much in the AI world in particular and the tech world in general, it’s meaningless hype, signifying nothing.

Friday Feed June 6, 2025 Physicality: the new age of
UI There’s a lot of rumors of a big impending UI redesign from Apple. Let’s imagine what’s (or what could be) next for the design of iPhones, Macs and iPads. Revenge of the Chickenized Reverse-Centaurs The next generation of labor exploitation merges chickenization with reverse-centaurs. DoorDash and other gig companies use apps to script the movements and conduct of “independent contractors” to the finest degree, while hiding their true wages from them until they’ve finished their jobs. Trends – Artificial Intelligence (AI) May 30, 2025 Mary Meeker / Jay Simons / Daegwon Chae / Alexander Krey Rapid advances in artificial intelligence, compute infrastructure, and global connectivity are fundamentally reshaping how work gets done, how capital is deployed, and how leadership is defined – across both companies and countries. Probe lenses and focus stacking: the secrets to incredible photos taken inside instruments The photo above may look like a city or some sort of industrial plant, but it's not: it's actually the inside of a pipe organ, photographed by Charles Brooks. It's one of the many pictures he's taken from the inside of musical instruments, a process that's substantially more complicated than it may seem, especially since he's often working with rare, historically significant objects. VC money is fueling a global boom in worker surveillance tech A funding surge has given rise to technologies to track, analyze and manage workers — often in countries with little regulation. I Think I’m Done Thinking About genAI For Now I come not to praise “AI skepticism”, but to bury it.

My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts But AI is
also incredibly — a word I use advisedly — important. It’s getting the same kind of attention that smart phones got in 2008, and not as much as the Internet got. That seems about right.

Friday Feed June 13, 2025 AI Angst So there’s lots
of AI angst out there, but this is mine. I think the following is a bit unique because it focuses on cost, working backward from there.

Friday Feed June 20, 2025 Now might be the best
time to learn software development Devs are gonna develop- and now with far greater reach and speed than ever before. So my advice to any exec thinking about layoffs: you can be sure that other institutions are reorganizing their AI-powered devs to conquer new territory, why aren't you doing the same with yours? Cray versus Raspberry Pi The RPi5 is much smaller and lighter than the Cray 1, by many orders of magnitude. In fact we're talking just 50g versus 10 tonnes. The RPi5 uses far less power at around 12W versus the 115KW of the Cray. But what about performance? Can this tiny single-board computer match the awesome power of what was once the fastest computer on the planet? Well, as I mentioned earlier, the Cray had about 160MFLOPS of raw processing power; the Pi has... up to 30GFLOPS. Yes... that's *giga*FLOPS. This makes it almost 200 times faster than the Cray. Inside the Apollo "8-Ball" FDAI (Flight Director / Attitude Indicator) During the Apollo flights to the Moon, the astronauts observed the spacecraft's orientation on a special instrument called the FDAI (Flight Director / Attitude Indicator). This instrument showed the spacecraft's attitude—its orientation—by rotating a ball. Real Risk to Youth Mental Health Is ‘Addictive Use,’ Not Screen Time Alone, Study Finds Researchers found children with highly addictive use of phones, video games or social media were two to three times as likely to have thoughts of suicide or to harm themselves. Menstrual tracking app data is a ‘gold mine’ for advertisers that risks women’s safety – report The report’s authors caution that cycle tracking app (CTA) data in the wrong hands could result in risks to job prospects, workplace monitoring, health insurance discrimination and cyberstalking – and limit access to abortion.

Friday Feed June 27, 2025 The Man Who Beat IBM
When IBM tried to reclaim control of the PC market with proprietary technology, Compaq CEO Rod Canion decided to create an open standard and share it with competitors—effectively giving away "the company jewels" to preserve innovation. xAI faces legal threat over alleged Colossus data center pollution in Memphis NAACP demands a meeting to discuss xAI's alleged pollution in Memphis. AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome Our AlphaGenome model takes a long DNA sequence as input — up to 1 million letters, also known as base-pairs — and predicts thousands of molecular properties characterising its regulatory activity. It can also score the effects of genetic variants or mutations by comparing predictions of mutated sequences with unmutated ones. Modeling the World in 280 Characters An exploration of the mindset, methods, and motivations behind crafting tiny, expressive shaders that combine code, art, and constraint. Bill Atkinson: Polaroids showing the Evolution of the Lisa GUI Bill Atkinson shows and explains his binder of Polaroid photos which he took during the development of the Lisa, documenting the evolution of its graphical user interface.

Friday Feed July 4, 2025 Local-first software You own your
data, in spite of the cloud...In this article we propose “local-first software”: a set of principles for software that enables both collaboration and ownership for users. Local-first ideals include the ability to work offline and collaborate across multiple devices, while also improving the security, privacy, long-term preservation, and user control of data. We’re Not Innovating, We’re Just Forgetting Slower Today’s innovation cycle has become a kind of collective amnesia, where every few years we rediscover fundamental concepts, slap a new acronym on them, and pretend we’ve revolutionized computing. Writing Code Was Never The Bottleneck The marginal cost of adding new software is approaching zero, especially with LLMs. But what is the price of understanding, testing, and trusting that code? Higher than ever. ICEBlock, an app for anonymously reporting ICE sightings, goes viral overnight after Bondi criticism ICEBlock, an iPhone app that allows users to anonymously report sightings of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, has rocketed to one of the coveted top spots in Apple’s U.S. App Store rankings. How Apple Created a Custom iPhone Camera for F1 You can't mount a cinema camera on a Formula One race car. These nimble vehicles are built to precise specs, and capturing racing footage from the driver’s point of view isn’t as simple as slapping a GoPro on and calling it a day.

Friday Feed July 11, 2025 The Real GenAI Issue The
business leaders pumping all this money of course don’t understand the technology. They’re doing this for exactly one reason: They think they can discard armies of employees and replace them with LLM services, at the cost of shipping shittier products. macOS Icon History Documenting the evolution of macOS system icons over the past several decades. How Uber Eats Scaled Search to Handle Billions of Daily Queries Uber Eats scaled search by revamping indexing, geo-sharding & ranking, supporting billions of queries daily without compromising latency. When Figma Starts Designing Us The subtle ways in which design tools shape how we think and what we make What Every Programmer Should Know about How CPUs Work • Matt Godbolt In this talk, Matt will describe some of the performance features of modern CPUs and explain how your code is already benefiting from them. We’ll look at real-world server performance, the tooling available to measure their impact, and how compilers are often already doing the right thing for us.

Friday Feed July 18, 2025 Gaming Cancer: How Citizen Science
Games Could Help Cure Disease By inviting players to tackle real scientific problems, games can offer a hand in solving medicine’s toughest challenges. How GLP-1s Are Breaking Life Insurance If we assume about 65% of people who start GLP-1 medications quit by the end of year one, that creates a big problem. When someone stops the medication, they'll usually regain the weight they lost, and in two years, most of those key health indicators (like BMI, blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol) bounce back to their starting point. This means the underwriter has just locked in a 30-year policy at preferred rates for someone who'll be high-risk again by year three. Can A.I. Find Cures for Untreatable Diseases—Using Drugs We Already Have? He focussed on a central irony: the medication that saved his life already existed, and nobody had thought to give it to him. “There is a systemic problem,” he told me. “There are all these drugs available, sitting in your local pharmacy, but they aren’t being used to treat all the conditions they could.” Two guys hated using Comcast, so they built their own fiber ISP Comcast was charging me for every little thing on my account and the bill always found a way to get higher than expected, especially going over my data cap. Prime-One has no data caps and the bill has been the same since I first joined, not to mention they offer the first month free How does a screen work? most people have no idea how a screen works. Any time you see a pixel light up, you are witnessing actual witchcraft before your eyes - light bending through electric crystals just so you can read a tweet in bed.

Inside the Collapse of the F.D.A. How the new health
secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is dismantling the agency.

Friday Feed July 25, 2025 Nearly 4,000 NASA employees opt
to leave agency through deferred resignation program On Monday, more than 300 current and former NASA employees signed and sent a letter known as the "Voyager Declaration" to interim NASA administrator Sean Duffy, criticizing "rapid and wasteful changes" at the agency that they say include cuts to programs and research. Google Spoofed Via DKIM Replay Attack: A Technical Breakdown What followed was a deep dive into the message to determine whether it was a genuine communication or a cleverly crafted phishing attempt. The email was convincing enough to create real concern, and that’s what makes this story worth sharing. Mammalian Cell Evolution Machine May Bring New Vaccines “The general method of directed evolution is cyclic, where we generate diversity in a gene of interest, select for fitness against a challenge, and amplify successful genetic variants to repeat the process. This is all done with the goal of directing a gene towards a desired outcome,” What to know about ToolShell, the SharePoint threat under mass exploitation The vulnerability, which is formally tracked as CVE-2025-53770, enables unauthenticated remote code execution on servers running SharePoint. The ease of exploitation, the damage it causes, and the ongoing targeting of it in the wild have earned it a severity rating of 9.8 out of a possible 10. Revisiting Moneyball Whether the 2002 A’s succeeded primarily through analytics or traditional talent is less important than the broader principle they demonstrated: analytics can reveal value that conventional wisdom misses. They also showed the power of intelligence, creativity, and sheer persistence in overcoming financial disadvantage.

Friday Feed August 8, 2025 Unpopular Opinion: Teacher AI use
is already out of control and it's not ok Here's a list of the worst AI offences I've seen in my district since the start of the spring semester last school year: When Disney Went Digital In ‘86, it hired Pixar to overhaul the whole Disney process. The company wanted to work higher-tech and cheaper.3 Many of its analog methods — some of them older than Steamboat Willie — would be replaced. It would enter the digital age.

Friday Feed August 22, 2025 How to draw a Space
Invader I recently made the Space Invader Generator for Creative Coding Amsterdam code challenge. I made it for fun of course... and galactic domination too! You can see how it looks below and in this post I'll show you how it works using an interactive animation. What the hell is going on right now? Instead of their comments being taken to heart, reflected on, and used as learning opportunities, hapless young coders are instead using feedback as simply the next prompt in their “AI” masterpiece. An Interactive Guide to SVG Paths In this blog post, we’ll cover all of the basic commands, including the infamous arc command. I’ll help you build an intuition for how they work, and show you some cool stuff you can do with them! AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard' They're cheap and grew up with AI … so you're firing them why?ß Moving Objects in 3D space Visualizing Moving Objects in 3D space

Friday Feed August 29, 2025 Python: The Documentary | An
origin story This is the story of the world's most beloved programming language: Python. What began as a side project in Amsterdam during the 1990s became the software powering artificial intelligence, data science and some of the world’s biggest companies. But Python's future wasn't certain; at one point it almost disappeared. A Teen Was Suicidal. ChatGPT Was the Friend He Confided In. More people are turning to general-purpose chatbots for emotional support. At first, Adam Raine, 16, used ChatGPT for schoolwork, but then he started discussing plans to end his life. AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers, Stanford study reveals The study revealed that workers between the ages of 22 and 25 have experienced a 13% relative decline in employment since 2022, in occupations most exposed to AI. Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people We’ve all sat in those presentations. A speaker with a stream of slides full of text, monotonously reading them off as we read along. We’re so used to it we expect it. We accept it. We even consider it ‘learning’. As an educator I push against ‘death by PowerPoint’ and I'm fascinated with how we can improve the way we present and teach. The fact is we know that PowerPoint kills. Most often the only victims are our audience’s inspiration and interest. This, however, is the story of a PowerPoint slide that actually helped kill seven people. You no longer need JavaScript It’s actually pretty incredible what HTML and CSS alone can achieve.

Friday Feed September 5, 2025 50 keyboards from my collection
To celebrate the Kickstarter for Shift Happens going well, I thought I would show you 50 keyboards from my collection of really strange/esoteric/meaningful keyboards that I gathered over the years. (It might be the world’s strangest keyboard collection!) AI web crawlers are destroying websites in their never-ending hunger for any and all content Fastly warns that they're causing "performance degradation, service disruption, and increased operational costs." Why? Because they're hammering websites with traffic spikes that can reach up to ten or even twenty times normal levels within minutes. Physically based rendering from first principles In this interactive article, we will explore the physical phenomena that create light and the fundamental laws governing its interaction with matter. We will learn how our human eyes capture light and how our brains interpret it as visual information. The Hand-Drawn Hits That Hollywood Isn't Making Folks who follow the animation news have already heard. Right now, hand-drawn features are taking over. The Bitter Lesson is Misunderstood Double your GPUs? You need 40% more data or you're just lighting cash on fire.

Friday Feed September 19, 2025 tinycolor Supply Chain Attack Post-mortem
A malicious GitHub Actions workflow was pushed to a shared repo and exfiltrated a npm token with broad publish rights. The attacker then used that token to publish malicious versions of 20 packages, including @ctrl/tinycolor Apple used AI to uncover new blood pressure notification feature in Watch Apple Watch Series 11 models that go on sale on Friday can notify users that they may have high blood pressure, in a feature the company has powered using artificial intelligence rather than a blood pressure monitor. 60 years after Gemini, newly processed images reveal incredible details "It's that level of risk that they were taking. I think that's what really hit home." No CSS, No Javascript. Longevity on the web. I've switched operating systems, hardware architectures, desktops, laptops, and phones. Somehow, through all of that, a website written 20 years ago still works today. Other than retro-nostalgic emulation, is that true for anything else? TIC-80 tiny computer TIC-80 is a free and open source fantasy computer for making, playing and sharing tiny games.

Friday Feed September 26, 2025 Huntington's disease successfully treated for
first time The data showed that three years after surgery there was an average 75% slowing of the disease based on a measure which combines cognition, motor function and the ability to manage in daily life. The great sameness: a comic on how AI makes us more alike o improve our working relationship with AI, we must first understand how sameness happens. The comic below, created by Jordan Bolton, explores this topic through a single character who, under the weight of everyday pressures, comes face to face with the threat of a great homogenisation How Amgen Lost The PCSK9 Patent War In 2014, Amgen sued Sanofi and Regeneron to claim ownership of an entire class of cholesterol drugs. Nine years later, the Supreme Court ruled against them - but they won where it mattered most. Microsoft blocks the Israeli military from some cloud and AI services The Guardian revealed last month that Microsoft’s services were being used for mass surveillance of Palestinians. Why Apple Has a Big AI Problem More recently, rivals like Google, Microsoft and OpenAI have been pouring billions of dollars into scaling up artificial intelligence services while Apple has remained more cautious. The gap was clear at the iPhone 17 event, where Apple made only modest AI announcements. Now the company is betting on the reinvention of its Siri voice assistant to carry it into the generative AI age, and maybe gain ground on the competition.

Friday Feed October 3, 2025 Why I gave the world
wide web away for free But for the web to have everything on it, everyone had to be able to use it, and want to do so. This was already asking a lot. I couldn’t also ask that they pay for each search or upload they made. In order to succeed, therefore, it would have to be free. That’s why, in 1993, I convinced my Cern managers to donate the intellectual property of the world wide web, putting it into the public domain. We gave the web away to everyone. Tim Berners-Lee Invented the World Wide Web. Now He Wants to Save It In 1989, Sir Tim revolutionized the online world. Today, in the era of misinformation, addictive algorithms, and extractive monopolies, he thinks he can do it again Selling Lemons: The hidden costs of the meta game The idea is called “a market for lemons.” The phrase comes from a 1970 paper by George Akerlof that explains how information asymmetry between buyers and sellers can undermine a marketplace. The Age of Enshittification In a new book, the technology critic Cory Doctorow expands on a coinage that has become bleakly relevant, in Silicon Valley and beyond. Color Engineering Color can be engineered in a repeatable way that clarifies messy choices.

Friday Feed October 10, 2025 NASA Shares How to Save
Camera 370-Million-Miles Away Near Jupiter With few options for recovery, the team turned to a process called annealing, where a material is heated for a specified period before slowly cooling. “You have 18 months” We are so fixated on how technology will outskill us that we miss the many ways that we can deskill ourselves.

Friday Feed October 17, 2025 The State of the AI
Industry is Freaking Me Out How NVidia and OpenAI Fuel the AI Money Machine Does the news reflect what we die from? What do Americans die from, and what do the New York Times, Washington Post, and Fox News report on? Silver Snoopy Award The Silver Snoopy best symbolizes the intent and spirit of Space Flight Awareness. An astronaut always presents the Silver Snoopy because it is the astronauts’ own award for outstanding performance, contributing to flight safety and mission success. Silicon Valley's capture of our political institutions is all but complete The tech lobby kills off two key California AI bills, and why it matters. Plus: How Sam Altman played Hollywood with Sora 2, organized mass social media deletions, and more. Things I’ve learned in my 7 Years implementing AI I wasn’t the “PhD scientist,” working on models. I was the guy who worked on productionizing their proof-of-concept code and turning it into something people could actually use.

Friday Feed October 24, 2025 Today is when the Amazon
brain drain finally sent AWS down the spout When your best engineers log off for good, don’t be surprised when the cloud forgets how DNS works Beyond the Machine Creative agency in the AI landscape I am so tired of hearing about AI. Unfortunately, this is a talk about AI. Where’s the AI design renaissance? This post attempts to answer two questions: Will AI take design jobs? If so, which ones? In light of that, what should designers focus on? Armed police swarm student after AI mistakes bag of Doritos for a weapon Allen was handcuffed at gunpoint. Police later showed him the AI-captured image that triggered the alert. The crumpled Doritos bag in his pocket had been mistaken for a gun. Foreign hackers breached a US nuclear weapons plant via SharePoint flaws A foreign threat actor infiltrated the Kansas City National Security Campus (KCNSC), a key manufacturing site within the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), exploiting unpatched Microsoft SharePoint vulnerabilities, according to a source involved in an August incident response at the facility.

Friday Feed October 31, 2025 ChatGPT's Atlas: The Browser That's
Anti-Web he problems fall into three main categories: Atlas substitutes its own AI-generated content for the web, but it looks like it's showing you the web. The user experience makes you guess what commands to type instead of clicking on links. You're the agent for the browser, it's not being an agent for you Who needs Graphviz when you can build it yourself? We recently overhauled our internal tools for visualizing the compilation of JavaScript and WebAssembly. When SpiderMonkey’s optimizing compiler, Ion, is active, we can now produce interactive graphs showing exactly how functions are processed and optimized. Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound Recent research has linked mental imagery to traits as different as vulnerability to trauma and a propensity to hold grudges. How We Saved $500,000 Per Year by Rolling Our Own “S3” We built N3, a Rust-based in-memory landing zone that eliminates both issues, using S3 only as an overflow buffer. Result: meaningful cost reduction (~$0.5M/year)

Friday Feed November 7, 2025 Policy Incentives for Pharmaceutical Innovation
Our reduced form and structural findings suggest that market exclusivity—especially if targeted to high-social-value, low-market-return areas—can be an effective tool for realigning incentives and stimulating innovation FDA described as a “clown show” amid latest scandal; top drug regulator is out An alleged extortion attempt, a petty yearslong grudge, shocking social media posts, and ominous text messages make up the latest scandal at the Food and Drug Administration, an agency that industry outsiders are calling a “clown show” and “soap opera” amid the Trump administration’s leadership New York school phone ban has made lunch loud again These days, lunchtime at Benjamin N. Cardozo High School in Queens is a boisterous affair, a far cry from before the smartphone ban went into effect, when most students spent their spare time scrolling and teachers said you could hear a pin drop. I'm a Linux I bought my first Mac in 2004 because it seemed different and provided a better way to work. In 2023 it’s why I choose Linux. Yes, these days that makes me a crazy-one, a misfit, a rebel, a troublemaker. I’m a Linux. Tape containing UNIX v4 found While cleaning a storage room, our staff found this tape containing #UNIX v4 from Bell Labs, circa 1973

Friday Feed November 21, 2025 Command Lines The compilers that
followed abstracted away machine code, letting programmers focus on higher-level logic instead of lower-level hardware details. Today, AI coding assistants2 are enabling a similar change, letting software engineers focus on higher-order work by generating code from natural language prompts Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025 The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind. Instead, it was triggered by a change to one of our database systems' permissions which caused the database to output multiple entries into a “feature file” used by our Bot Management system. Breakthrough Diabetes Treatment May Deliver Insulin Through a Skin Cream Nevertheless, the results could mean that frequent insulin injections may one day be a thing of the past. And the system may even work with other drugs. BitBlt's 50th anniversary I declare that today, Nov. 19, 2025 is the 50th anniversary of BitBLT, a routine so fundamental to computer graphics that we don't even think about it having an origin. A working (later optimized) implementation was devised on the Xerox Alto by members of the Smalltalk team. I converted a rotary phone into a meeting handset One of my coworkers laughed and said “I bet if this were a phone call, you’d slam the phone down right now”, and a dread spread over me. Why didn’t I have a phone handset I could slam down? Had I really become a corporate husk of my former, carefree self, puppeteered by the vicissitudes of capitalism?

Friday Feed November 28, 2025 Large language mistake The problem
is that according to current neuroscience, human thinking is largely independent of human language — and we have little reason to believe ever more sophisticated modeling of language will create a form of intelligence that meets or surpasses our own. What OpenAI Did When ChatGPT Users Lost Touch With Reality The chatbot wanted to chat. It started acting like a friend and a confidant. It told users that it understood them, that their ideas were brilliant and that it could assist them in whatever they wanted to achieve. It offered to help them talk to spirits, or build a force field vest or plan a suicide. Tiger Style Tiger Style is a coding philosophy focused on safety, performance, and developer experience. Inspired by the practices of TigerBeetle, it focuses on building robust, efficient, and maintainable software through disciplined engineering. A trillion dollars is a terrible thing to waste The machine learning community is finally waking up to the madness, but the detour of the last few years has been cost Ilya Sutskever – We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research “These models somehow just generalize dramatically worse than people. It's a very fundamental thing.” Fran Sans Fran Sans is a display font in every sense of the term. It’s an interpretation of the destination displays found on some of the light rail vehicles that service the city of San Francisco.

Elon Musk’s Worthless, Poisoned Hall of Mirrors “About This Account”
stated that many prominent and prolific pro-MAGA accounts, which signaled that they were run by “patriotic” Americans, were based in countries such as Nigeria, Russia, India, and Thailand. @MAGANationX, an account with almost 400,000 followers and whose bio says it is a “Patriot Voice for We The People,” is based in “Eastern Europe (Non-EU),”

Friday Feed December 5, 2025 Why We Can't Quit Excel
Microsoft’s spreadsheet software is expensive, derivative and depressing. It might also be the most killer app of all time. A vector workstation from the 70s All in all, a pretty capable machine, especially in 1975. BASIC computers where getting common, but graphics was pretty new. According to Tektronix the 4051 was ideal for researches, analysts and physicians, and this could be yours for the low low price of 6 grand, or around $36.000 in 2025. In 1995, a Netscape employee wrote a hack in 10 days that now runs the Internet Thirty years later, JavaScript is the glue that holds the interactive web together, warts and all. Stacking Dependencies What happens when you take an XKCD joke too literally An Abominable Creature Follow the money and you might get lost. That’s why I made a diagram for the entire US healthcare system’s financial flows - covering an incomprehensible $5 Trillion in healthcare spending.

Friday Feed December 12, 2025 Size of Life From DNA
to Pando Clone Your intellectual fly is open So please, if not for the sanity of all of us than just to give your own message the credit it deserves: have some confidence in your own voice—and write your own content. Microsoft Scales Back AI Goals Because Almost Nobody Is Using Copilot Microsoft has cut its sales targets for its agentic AI software after struggling to find buyers interested in using it. In some cases, targets have been slashed by up to 50%, suggesting Microsoft overestimated the potential of its new AI tools. Mermaid to Motion Live Mermaid render with cinematic flow SVG is all you need SVGs are pretty cool - vector graphics in a simple XML format. They are supported on just about every device and platform, are crisp on every display, and can have embedded scripts in to make them interactive. They're way more capable than many people realise, and I think we can capitalise on some of that unrealised potential. The kids who ran away to 1960s San Francisco I followed my curiosity and ended up at the library reading hundreds of letters of runaway teenagers who came to hippie San Francisco

Friday Feed December 19, 2025 1.5 TB of VRAM on
Mac Studio - RDMA over Thunderbolt 5 I'm not sure if its by accident or Apple's playing the long game, but the M3 Ultra Mac Studio hit a sweet spot for running local AI models. And with RDMA support lowering memory access latency from 300μs down to less than 50μs, clustering now adds to the performance, especially running huge models. AI's Unpaid Debt: How LLM Scrapers Destroy the Social Contract of Open Source The big tech AI company LLMs have gobbled up all of our data, but the damage they have done to open source and free culture communities are particularly insidious. By taking advantage of those who share freely, they destroy the bargain that made free software spread like wildfire. TikTok Deal Done And It’s Somehow The Shittiest Possible Outcome, Making Everything Worse This was never about addressing privacy, propaganda, or national security. It was always about the U.S. stealing ownership of one of the most popular and successful short form video apps in history because companies like Facebook were too innovatively incompetent to dethrone them in the open market. Fuzzy Canary AI companies are scraping everyone's sites for training data. If you're self-hosting your blog, there's not much you can do about it, except maybe make them think your site contains content they won't want. Fuzzy Canary plants invisible links (to porn websites...) in your HTML that trigger scrapers' content safeguards. On the Immortality of Microsoft Word Microsoft Word can never be replaced. OpenAI could build superintelligence surpassing human cognition in every conceivable dimension, rendering all human labor obsolete, and Microsoft Word will survive. Future contracts defining the land rights to distant galaxies will undoubtedly be drafted in Microsoft Word.

Friday Feed December 26, 2025 Rob Pike's comment on unsolicited
AI-generated email Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software. The Entire New Yorker Archive Is Now Fully Digitized For the first time, every cover, article, and issue in the magazine’s hundred-year history can be enjoyed on newyorker.com. Celebrate the Public Domain with the Internet Archive: 2026 the Class of 2026 is packed with icons: Dizzy Dishes, marking the first appearance of Betty Boop; Disney’s famous bloodhound debuts as Rover (later known as Pluto); the Academy Award–winning Best Picture All Quiet on the Western Front becomes free to share; beloved classics like The Little Engine That Could join the celebration; timeless musical compositions including “Georgia on My Mind,” “I Got Rhythm,” and “Dream a Little Dream of Me” are opened up for reimagination; and the dazzling Technicolor revue King of Jazz takes its place in the commons. Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves Flock left at least 60 of its people-tracking Condor PTZ cameras live streaming and exposed to the open internet. How Did DOGE Disrupt So Much While Saving So Little? Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency said it made more than 29,000 cuts to the federal government — slashing billion-dollar contracts, canceling thousands of grants and pushing out civil servants. But the group did not do what Mr. Musk said it would: reduce federal spending by $1 trillion before October. On DOGE’s watch, federal spending did not go down at all. It went up.

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