i pulled snow crash off the shelf a couple of weeks ago. i’d been meaning to re-read this but … other things. i have to say, this has not aged well. it’s still an amusing and fun read, but it’s definitely grounded in the milieu of the late 80s early 90s. this novel had l...

Shopping is Impossible

this is the running joke in our house. if the phone is out … “you must be shopping”.

there’s never been more retail, but retail is dead. we have more forms of X to consumer than ever before and oh, so. many. options. and yet, it all sucks.

last week was apparently dominated by gossiping about the departures from google. SemiAnalysis and plenty of others spilled a lot of metaphorical ink in the topic. the SA take, Gemini is Cooked but GCP is Cooking reeks of gossip and twitter tea leaf reading with their usua...

Plunder and Danger on Argentina’s Sea Shelf

this is one of the most fascinating things i’ve read in a while.

The great wealth transfer reality check

here’s an interesting writeup from that great bastion of progressive thought, visa. a couple of things to take away from this article.

• there’s not as much trickling down as folks might think there is. it’s going to be siphoned off at various stages in the process
• there’s wealth transfer and propping up taking place right now
• this will keep the economic disparities locked in for the next few generations
• consumer spending bumps are likely to be modest. of particular interest to visa who’s keen to get a couple points of fees on all of those transactions.

All of WPD’s Flock cameras stolen | Crime & Justice | winonapost.com

well played winona.

Trump administration to pay German firm to halt US wind projects

The Future Of Knowledge Workers In An AI-Driven World this is a great writeup. there’s a fair amount that i’ve discussed with friends and coworkers over the years. having worked in tech for my entire career, i don’t even bother trying to explain to people what i do, it’s w...

AI model achieves breakthrough in forecasting cyclones — Google DeepMind

this is some of the best AI related news i’ve seen in a while. too bad it’s lost in the noise of google staff departures and misc. political dreck.

How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds - Open RSS

well, this was a romp through some bad memories.

AI financial advice is surprisingly good — especially if you ask the right questions | MIT Sloan

‘The Odyssey’ Translator Emily Wilson on Nolan’s New Movie

i still haven’t found the time to read this but i’m somehow sucked into everything around it.

this is a great bit of writing and has all sorts of fun pointers around it.

AI firms must answer for rogue bots, says Hugging Face boss

LLMs these days … amiright?

dear apple -

it’s (checks watch and setting » general » about) iPadOS 26.6 …

what is this shit?

GOP Staffers Say the Party Has a Groyper Problem - POLITICO

SlopCodeBench: Benchmarking How Coding Agents Degrade Over Long-Horizon Iterative Tasks

someone finally brings this topic to the fore. even small vibe coded projects can be horrifying under the hood.

nice test coverage, but whoa!

quick personal observations on kimi 3 there are no moats. kimi k3 running at a fraction of the price of claude is impressive. i wired it up to claude-code yesterday and gave it a reasonable task to refactor some code based on some consolidation that i had spelled out in a ...

Iran Has Figured Out How to Overwhelm U.S. Air Defenses

cross reference this with some war on the rocks reading and appreciate what a top down clusterfuck we find ourselves in.

Microsoft logs $3.2B from Anthropic investment, but OpenAI was a mixed bag | TechCrunch

microsoft clearly had a solid quarter. interesting here is the relative valuation proxy for the 2 frontier labs.

For the year, Microsoft’s OpenAI investment generated a $5 billion gain and added $0.67 on EPS, respectively, the company reported. (Microsoft reported $17.95 EPS for its fiscal year.) Still, it is noteworthy that Microsoft reported nearly as much of a gain on Anthropic in one quarter as it did for the year on OpenAI. In fact, it is so noteworthy that Microsoft disclosed it.

Release 0.12.0 · astral-sh/uv · GitHub

note that there are some changes in here that are breaking. notable here is the default directory construction and uv init.

How to Use ChatGPT and Gemini Prompts to Find Out What They Know About You - The New York Times

i ran thru the prompts they offered up, cranked opus to high and wallowed in the sad state of affairs. you should too.

The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models | Claude by Anthropic

well worth the read.

Ruff v0.16.0

lots of good stuff in here. also, i’m going to have to update my baseline config.

exhibit F

dept of energy admits in court that the only criteria that was used to pull grants was state “color”.

here’s the NYT reporting on this: Trump Administration Admits Canceling Grants to States That Did Not Vote for Him - The New York Times the anodyne treatment of this is a clear indication of how numb we’ve become to this shit.

this is what it’s come to; the pornificatin’ of marmot research. i for one applaud this innovative approach to plugging the gaps in funding cuts. but seriously, the RBML deserves better. Marmot researchers battle record die-off with beer, body positivity — and OnlyFans | 9...

Do Smart Glasses Have a Surveillance Problem? | Vogue

– archive.is

a little part of me dies inside everytime i see someone putting these on their face.

tl;dr - yes.

though this is a pretty solid writeup from vogue business, of all outlets. i do recommend reading the article.

⊕classic spin. this, THE 40 BEST ALBUMS FROM THE LAST 40 YEARS THAT YOU PROBABLY DIDN’T HEAR (BUT SHOULD’VE) - SPIN, article from SPIN was kind of a personal breaking point for me. it starts off strong then totally shits the bed on execution. here was an article that was exp...

Puritans Wouldn’t Eat Pussy, So They Invented the Western

gotta say it was the headline that grabbed me. the balance of the article was a rollicking good read. i mean i knew the pilgrims were an uptight bunch, but seriously folks. gotta make the home front somewhat appealing.

i’m not sure what to make of this particular vein of argumentation in the “damsel in distress” trope, but i suspect there’s more going on here than folks would care to admit.

The Brand Ledger | Worse on Purpose

this is the best list i’ve seen of enshittified brands to date. the common theme here … private equity.