BMW Owners Angry 'Spider-Man: Brand New Day' Ads Are in Their Cars : via: Daring Fireball A banner touting the film first appears when the car is started, though owners have to click on the ad to see the full video. Still, one owner claimed BMW has been pushing increasingly intrusive videos onto its dashboard space. We need an open source movement for cars. I think about this for my Subaru all the…
In 2018 I wrote “ A New macOS ”, since then every new macOS version that comes out, I reference the post to see how close they’ve come to meeting my imaginary ideal. It’s been over eight years now, so I thought it’d be good to see where I stand on my original requests, and how well the Mac is doing at it’s core job of managing information. My original post made…
AI Economics for Dummies - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency : 1. Acquiring one grape costs Alex $2 billion. Alex offers to sell Mike one grape a month for the next 12 months for $1 billion per grape. Alex asks for the full $12 billion up front and provides Mike with one grape for the first month. Alex makes a $10 billion profit this month; his ARR is $120 billion, and his profits are trending up at…
I’ve written before about getting my start in the tech industry, and my experience with security since. What I haven’t written about is my experience with the “Certified Information Systems Security Professional”, or CISSP , certification, and what it means to me. This is a story 25 years in the telling. It’s only fair to acknowledge that 25 years ago I was a stupid…
The last lines of the poem “ The Summer Day ” by Mary Oliver go: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”. I’m honestly not one for poetry most times, but that one hit me like a brick the first time I read it. The phrase has lived in the back of my mind since. I’ve been thinking about the poem the past few days as I’ve…
Ad Infinitum · Matthias Ott : One approach, proposed by Google Research, is what you might call a “ token auction .” In this model, advertisers don’t buy ad slots on a page. Instead, they bid, token by token, on the actual text the model generates. Each advertiser brings their own LLM, and an auction mechanism decides whose model gets to influence the next word. The output is a weighted blend of…
It’s Time to Dismantle the Technopoly | The New Yorker : In a world where a tool like TikTok can, seemingly out of nowhere, suddenly convince untold thousands of users that maybe Osama bin Laden wasn’t so bad, or in which new A.I. models can, in the span of only a year, introduce a distressingly human-like intelligence into the daily lives of millions, we have no other reasonable choice but to…
How to reverse AI brain rot — A note to myself : Keep skills alive that a machine could easily replace, even if it's inefficient. Cooking, writing, repairing, designing etc. Automate everything else if you don't see value in it. But don't just over-automate for the sake of it. Examples include: — Try to fix things when they break, sewing, wrenching, have fun with it — Write long form articles just…
How to usher in an era of abundant donuts • Buttondown : What would you say to someone who proclaims, “I want to be a donut maker,” but has never actually made a single donut in their life? You say “That’s awesome. What can I do to help?” This is a beautiful essay.
Team Mirai and Democracy - Schneier on Security : Japan’s election last month and the rise of the country’s newest and most innovative political party, Team Mirai, illustrates the viability of a different way to do politics. In this model, technology is used to make democratic processes stronger, instead of undermining them. It is harnessed to root out corruption, instead of serving as a cash cow…
I’m OK being left behind, thanks! – Terence Eden’s Blog : There are a 16,000 new lives being born every hour. They're all starting with a fairly blank slate. Are you genuinely saying that they'll all be left behind because they didn't learn your technology in utero? No. That's obviously nonsense. It is 100% OK to wait and see if something is actually useful. Seconded.
How to do the work • Buttondown : The cruelest thing the tech industry ever did was to tell you that they cared about you. They built you nice campuses, they called you family, they gave you clothes with their name on it. They fed you, they washed your clothes, they got you to ride in their Pride floats. They made you feel like you had not just a job, but a community. And yes, they paid you well.…
Why I Love FreeBSD - IT Notes : Which is one of the reasons why every time I attend a BSD conference, I come home even more in love with the project: the vibe of the community, the dedication of the developers, the presence of a Foundation that is strong and effective without being domineering or self-important - which, compared to the foundations of other major Open Source projects, makes it…
New ways to learn math and science in ChatGPT | OpenAI : Shot: In early testing, college and high school age students said the interactive experience helped them better understand how variables relate to one another. Parents said it gave them a more dynamic way to walk through problems alongside their children. Educators said tools like this could help students understand how concepts work,…
Daring Fireball: 'Grief and the AI Split' : Orchard’s fine essay examines a philosophical divide within the ranks of talented, considerate craftsperson developers. The divide that I’m talking about has been present ever since the demand for programmers exploded, but AI code generation tooling is turning it into an expansive gulf. The best programmers are more clearly the best than ever before. The…
‘50 Years of Thinking Different’ — Curb Cuts : As a lifelong disabled person and longtime Apple fan, never mind an objective technology journalist, improved lives obviously resonates deeply with me. Apple’s accessibility efforts is an exemplar of its “make the world better” ethos. Credit where due.
AI Slop: A Slack API Rate Limiting Disaster – code.dblock.org | tech blog : For now, human oversight of A.I. assistants remains critical. More and more I’m seeing reasons to avoid AI.
Michael Stipe Took The Stage | Stephen Clark (sgclark.com) : Last night at Brooklyn Steel, a concert venue in the Williamsburg section of the NYC borough, Michael Stipe – former lead singer of R.E.M. (one of my favorite bands) – took the stage with Michael Shannon and Jason Narducy to sing “These Days” and “The Great Beyond”. This was the first time he has sung these songs on stage in about 18…
How to start a record collection • Buttondown : I tried to talk everyone out of buying vinyl not too long ago. It’s expensive. It’s a pain in the ass if you move. It takes up way too much space in your home. It warps in the heat. You’ll forget you already have something and buy it multiple times. People write about it when they’re trying to avoid writing about all the terrible things happening in…
Daring Fireball: Thoughts and Observations on the MacBook Neo : And the PC world should take note. One of my briefings today included a side-by-side comparison between a MacBook Neo and an HP 14-inch laptop “in the same price category”. It was something like this one, with an Intel Core 5 chip, which costs $550. The HP’s screen sucks (very dim, way lower resolution), the speakers suck, the…
Have We Forgotten How to Design? : It is ironic, isn’t it? The premise of Waymo is to automate moving a human being on a road, but in reality, it cannot function without a human being’s intervention. I don’t even want this technology to begin with. I think it’s dangerous and reckless and unethical. But I can’t help but laugh at this “solution” because it reminds me of how scooter companies need to…
Chart: US to overwhelmingly build clean power in 2026 | Canary Media : This year, solar will provide 51% of the new utility-scale electricity capacity slated to come online, batteries will deliver 28%, and wind will add 14%, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Fossil gas, one of the polluting fuels most supported by the Trump administration, makes up only 7% of that new…
Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software in push for digital independence | The Record from Recorded Future News : In an interview with the local newspaper Politiken, Danish Minister for Digitalisation Caroline Stage Olsen confirmed that over half of the ministry’s staff will switch from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice next month, with a full transition to open-source software by the…
Microsoft's new 10,000-year data storage medium: glass - Ars Technica : There’s been a lot of preliminary work demonstrating different aspects of a glass-based storage system. But in Wednesday’s issue of Nature, Microsoft Research announced Project Silica, a working demonstration of a system that can read and write data into small slabs of glass with a density of over a Gigabit per cubic…
Owning a $5M data center - comma.ai blog : These days it seems you need a trillion fake dollars, or lunch with politicians to get your own data center. They may help, but they’re not required. At comma we’ve been running our own data center for years. All of our model training, metrics, and data live in our own data center in our own office. Having your own data center is cool, and in this blog…