I didn’t end up watching the Super Bowl. I used the afternoon to unpack boxes and other tasks leftover from moving. But I did really like this ChatGPT ad. It has a little whimsy reminiscent of some Apple ads, while still uniquely its own thing.
The Daily
• The New York Times
China Seems Unstoppable. Trump Thinks Otherwise.
Elon Musk’s Threats Get Darker as Trump Legal Losses Trigger MAGA Fury
Rage is mounting among President Donald Trump’s allies over the losses that Trump’s agenda has suffered in court, which are clearly becoming a serious obstacle to him. It’s gotten so bad that Elon Musk shared a tweet from someone who suggested that it may be time to defy the courts. Musk also boosted Trump allies who are seething over these rulings. All that amounts to a pretty dark threat from Musk: He and MAGA appear to be steeling themselves to defy judicial rulings. We talked to Norman Eisen of Democracy Defenders Action, who is litigating against Trump, about how successful the legal resistance has been thus far, whether Trump and his allies will defy the courts, and what would happen if they did.
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Matt Mullenweg
• Matt
Ed Catmull on Change
I’ve been really enjoying the book Creativity Inc by Ed Catmull of Pixar, it was recommended to me by my colleague Dave Martin a while back and I finally got around to it. There’s an interesting story in it where George Lucas has asked him to develop a film editing system that was digital. While … Continue reading Ed Catmull on Change →
THE TRUMP-MUSK CIVIL WAR AGAINST AMERICA IS UNDERWAY - 2.10.25
omny.fm/shows/countdown-with-keith-olbermann/the-musk-trump-civil-war-against-america-is-underw
Trunk & Tidbits, January 2025
Blue sky writer
The word "blue" as written by a sky writer.This is heavy
Reasoning models are just LLMs
Hope folks are having a good weekend. I rolled out a few changes this morning, including this “New Post…” menu option on the Uploads page. Surprised we never had this before.
I missed the memo for the outside space at this coffee shop… There are like 20 little kids and families running around here. Not a distraction, just makes me smile remembering how good life was with little kids. The bittersweet irony with parenting is not knowing until years later what you had.
BTW, being in my blogroll means that your posts have a chance of being included in my Little Feed Reader on Bluesky.
I subscribed to Wired because of their famous coverage of the Musk Coup, so I also added its feed to my blogroll so I could see what I bought, and was actually not surprised that they've been hit by the same disease all online publishing has, the need to bait the clicks, and of course not very much of it is hard-hitting.
I'm still fixing bugs in the new Bluesky feature I wrote about yesterday. If the URL of an image has search args, I wasn't getting the type correct and Bluesky rejected it. I used a post about Aaron Swartz's statue unveiled in San Francisco yesterday to test the fix. I knew Aaron of course, he was part of the group developing RSS in the early 00s. He went on to do other things, as did I, and I met up with him again in NYC in the early teens, and then a few months or a year or two (I don't have the exact date of the meetup) he commited suicide. It was a real shock. Now, many years later -- a statue. And the random snarky slogan my test script picked out was really appropriate to the event. It was a tragedy, because an older more confident Aaron would have made a big contribution. I often think about that.
The Daily
• The New York Times
The Sunday Read: ‘Some Raw Truths About Raw Milk’
BULLETIN: DEMOCRACY ENDS. FBI APPLICANTS MUST LIE ABOUT JANUARY 6TH - 2.9.25
omny.fm/shows/countdown-with-keith-olbermann/bulletin-democracy-ends-fbi-applicants-must-lie-ab
John Gruber on the implications for sideloading if TikTok remains unavailable in the App Store:
If I’m wrong and TikTok remains in this half-zombie state in the US — unavailable in the App Store or Play Store, but operational if you have the app installed on your phone — it’ll be interesting if TikTok is the app that makes the mass market actually care about the lack of sideloading on iOS. It’ll be interesting too if sideloading on Android goes mainstream because of this.
TikTok should make an iOS marketplace app in the EU to demonstrate to US customers what they’re missing.
AI forecasting retrospective: you're (probably) over-confident
A one-year review of people's predictions on an AI-forecasting survey I made last year. Most people were over-confident in their predictions.
Esoteric API features
Two small, esoteric API features