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’Tis But Some Quick News for June 25, 2026 It is not an understatement to say that Mark Zuckerberg’s particular Facebookian flavor of AI psychosis has been wreaking havoc on Meta’s engineering culture. Morale has been in the gutter, dissent has been mounting, and the heat has become so intense on the ways skilled workers have been forced to become data-mined office drones that Meta is now walking…
ATmospheric Conditions Still Unfavorable for May 10, 2026 A year ago, I wrote Where Does Bluesky Go from Here? What is the Bluesky of 2036? about Mastodon turning 10 in 2026 (we passed its official 10th birthday back in February!), ATProto turning 4, and the wide gap in overall vibes between the Mastodon-dominated Fediverse and the Bluesky-dominated ATmosphere. Bluesky as a service is now 3 years…
Watch out for digital zombies on May 4, 2026 It’s fair to say the World-Wide Web has been under heavy fire nearly since it began. “The Web is Dead!” has become a meme headline, much like “The Year of Linux on the Desktop” or “Trump Posts Something Controversial”. So yes, I do tend to roll my eyes when I hear an alarmist take that the Open Web as we have known it is over. This is true even of the…
’Tis But Some Quick News for April 27, 2026 I’ll happily go on record that this product is DOA. Nobody wants an “AI” smartphone from Clammy Sammy Alt-Man, and while any new hardware product designed by the legendary Jony Ive will have some initial appeal (assuming Ive is even still at the helm of this new project), it obviously wouldn’t be enough to get people to give up their beloved iPhones (or…
Sold a Bill of Goods on February 17, 2026 It’s hard not to wonder, in a type of technological midlife crisis, if the cultural phenomenon called Computers isn’t well past its sell-by date by now. In the 1980s, personal computers represented a path out of the angst and malaise of the 1970s. It was the shiny new thing , and oddly it proved very attractive to many former hippies looking for a way to…
’Tis But Some Quick News for January 28, 2026 After ten days of a simple poll where popular alternative search engine DuckDuckGo asked users if they want Yes AI or No AI , the results are in …and they sure don’t look good for the AI boosters out there. 😂 Out of 175,354 votes, only 10% voted Yes AI . An overwhelming majority of 90% (!!) voted No AI . Early on in the polling period the No AI…
’Tis But Some Quick News for January 16, 2026 Bandcamp read the room. It is the hero we need in our hour of darkness. Amidst an onslaught of horrendous AI-generated slop pretending to be music ( Spotify is rife with this garbage , though they keep claiming they’re doing crackdowns and removing millions of tracks), Bandcamp has come out with a new policy statement which is succinct, unequivocal,…
Capitalists Gonna Capitalize on November 28, 2025 In a recent leaked all-hands meeting , Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang responded to a question regarding managers within the company leaning towards less frequent use of Generative AI with the following: My understanding is Nvidia has some managers who are telling their people to use less AI. Are you insane? (No, but I know someone who is.) Here is the…
Time for a sudo shutdown -h now on October 14, 2025 People are up in arms that they’re cozying up to fascists. I’m mad they’ve abandoned non-ghastly social networks. You’ve probably heard of the Framework Computer & fascism(?) debacle by now. (Which weirdly is in many ways related to the Ruby Central & fascism(?) debacle which I reported on elsewhere .) In the case of Framework, it seems that the…
’Tis But Some Quick News for September 21, 2025 In a town hall meeting last week, an employee spoke up and said the company had recently “felt markedly different, colder, more rigid, and lacking in the empathy we have come to value.” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella replied that he was “haunted” by case studies of “companies that were great once, that just disappeared” such as DEC. OK. Look, who am I…
At the Intersection of Technology and the Humanities for September 7, 2025 On February 21, 2001, shortly after Macworld in San Francisco where the Titanium PowerBook G4 and numerous media applications were announced, Steve Jobs sat down for a TV interview which aired on NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation). A quote from this interview was recently shared by the Steve Jobs Archive in a preamble…
The Nightmare of the 2020s is Alive in Portland for August 15, 2025 Can’t say I didn’t warn you! 😕 Yes, I predicted very emphatically that this was going to happen, and some people got quite upset that I would even dare to suggest such a thing. I said that we needed a drastic reset of how we were approaching the conversation around the promotion of generative AI, because the “extremes” of the…
’Tis But Some Quick News for August 13, 2025 AI companionship is a topic we’ve been hearing a lot of lately. Whether it’s in the context of incel bros seeking out an AI girlfriend because they don’t know how to relate to real women, high-flying hustlers who are naturally disposed to the constant presence of sycophants, or increasingly the prevalence of teenagers hooked on chatbots because a fatal…
’Tis But Some Quick News for July 27, 2025 I cannot, cannot believe people have become so numb to Big Tech tomfoolery that (a) they are willing to allow a company to do this, and (b) a company is totally willing to deal with the zillions of negative headlines and bad publicity to follow because overall they expect it will still be a win. I very nearly didn’t believe this post on Bluesky was even…
’Tis But Some Quick News for July 20, 2025 The fact I have a hard time envisioning a new CEO of Apple who actually knows how to design and craft products is itself very concerning. We’re so far into the Tim Cook era, it almost seems a given that the CEO must be someone who knows more about the manufacturing side than the design side. We forget that instead of the “knows how to build it” guy…
’Tis But Some Quick News for July 14, 2025 Look, I know it’s a time-honored tradition for corporate CEOs to say things which mean absolutely nothing due to a desperate attempt to avoid conveying any real truths about anything. But this might just take the cake. Behold the following bizbabble by Recruit Holdings & Indeed CEO Hisayuki “Deko” Idekoba in relation to laying off 1,300 employees in its…
Something Stinking Like Yesterday’s Diapers at July 1, 2025 We already know that there’s no real-world money to be made in Generative AI. I know that sounds rather batty to say out loud, but a number of very smart people have done the math and the math isn’t mathing : That’s $327 billion [in expenditures] this year, with a total revenue of…what, $18 billion of revenue? And that’s not profit! And…
’Tis But Some Quick News for June 25, 2025 It’s the same story, repeated over and over and over and over again. The models get a little bit more advanced, a little less ridiculous looking. Superficial “at-a-glance” quality goes from terrible to decent over time. Yet the details never come together. It’s slop. It’s banal, uninspired, and—this is key— only possible due to industrial-scale theft and…
’Tis But Some Quick News for June 18, 2025 In what may be a mansplaining case study for the ages , the president of Signal Foundation, Meredith Whittaker —also chief advisor to ethics research institute AI Now —also a speaker who has testified multiple times before Congress—also a past senior advisor on AI to the chair of the FTC —was recently on Bluesky reiterating Signal’s promise not to clutter…
’Tis But Some Quick News for June 16, 2025 Call me crazy, but I believe online platforms that people rely on to communicate with each other should be responsive to its users. If it can’t address the needs of its users in a reasonable and timely fashion, it’s not doing its damn job. I don’t think there’s any a valid excuse for a platform like Instagram to leave thousands upon thousands of users out…
’Tis But Some Quick News for June 15, 2025 I’m so pumped, y’all. I haven’t been this excited about computer UI design in years. What am I talking about? Liquid Glass , the first of what I hope are several major dams to break with regard to the shift away from Flat Design . In the midst of all this excitement about 3D in design coming back baby (and I’ll have a lot more to say about this in the…
’Tis But Some Quick News for June 11, 2025 So most YouTubers are going to be running the new macOS on their fancy new Apple Silicon hardware, but if you really want to know what it’s like using this OS, try running it on a 2013 Intel iMac! I kid, I kid. 😅 It’s not exactly in a usable state at present. But it’s fun to see that it’s theoretically possible; likely means the community of retro…
’Tis But Some Quick News for June 10, 2025 I have long been a critic of Google’s design aesthetic and, yes, I’ve been one of those snobby iPhone users who looks down their nose at Android devices. But I will give credit where credit is due. Material Three Expressive , the latest version of Google’s design system for Android and their portfolio of apps, looks really good . And if Apple were…
’Tis But Some Quick News for June 9, 2025 This is a really big deal . The macOS Safari way of doing it (and the Vivaldi way, which I use constantly) is undoubtedly the correct way. I’m testing out iPadOS 26 right now, and yes it’s crashing regularly and glitchy in all sorts of ways. But that’s Developer Beta 1 life, baby . The functionality is definitely awesome, and I’m sure it’ll tighten up even…
Getting Bad Vibes from May 13, 2025 Simon Willison , who is often viewed as a “moderate” in the field of AI-assisted programming (he’s not, more on that in a moment) and thus is regularly cited by people who really want to convince you how concerned they are with the “age of AI” while also appearing “reasonable” (apologies for this run on sentence!) is now big mad that some book authors are…