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Katie Paul, Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman, reporting for Reuters: Meta is planning sweeping layoffs ​that could affect 20% or more of the company, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, as Meta seeks to offset costly artificial intelligence infrastruct...

Sam Henri Gold:

Nobody starts in the right place. You don’t begin with the correct tool and work sensibly within its constraints until you organically graduate to a more capable one. That is not how obsession works. Obsession works by taking whatever is available and pressing on it until it either breaks or reveals something. The machine’s limits become a map of the territory. You learn what computing actually costs by paying too much of it on hardware that can barely afford it.

I know this because I was running Final Cut Pro X on a 2006 Core 2 Duo iMac with 3GB RAM and 120GB of spinning rust. I was nine. I had no business doing this. I did it every day after school until my parents made me go to bed.

What a lovely essay. The best piece anyone has written about the MacBook Neo — because it’s not really about the MacBook Neo.

I’m in The Dispatch this morning on Christopher Beha’s new book on unbelief, belief, and skepticism. And, I am told, if you use the promo code JACOBS at checkout you can get 15% off an annual Dispatch subscription. 

The past days ancestors have been part of our conversation at home, as it is part of Y’s current work at school. We started with the concept of being named after someone. Some time ago from her grandmother, the namesake of her second name, she received a set of multiple ‘birth spoons‘, marked with the […]

An example. This isn't all the data that WordPress keeps for each post, it's just the stuff that WordLand uses. We add some of our own metadata, that's how it is extensible. It's open source, and it's evolved for 20+ years, with a strong ethos of not breaking devs. It could have been twitter, or masto or even bluesky, but they don't show through enough features to be useful as "web text." We want to use all the features of text on the web. I may be the only one who sees this but I predict in a couple of years if we aren't subsumed by AI everyone will say they always knew this is what WordPress is for. 😄

I added Paul Graham to my blogroll at scripting.com. Another massive oversight.

Matt Mullenweg: One evening last month, my Apple Watch, iPhone, and Mac all lit up with a message prompting me to reset my password. This came out of nowhere; I hadn’t done anything to elicit it. I even had Lockdown Mode running on all my devices. It didn’t matter. Someo...

iFixit: Is Apple’s most affordable laptop ever also one of its most repairable? For years, opening a MacBook has usually meant fighting your way through glue and buried parts. But the Neo stands out, with increasingly good day-one manuals, less-painful keyboard repairs,...

Antonio G. Di Benedetto, The Verge: Somehow, the PC makers still don’t see it coming. Here’s how [Asus CFO Nick] Wu described the MacBook Neo, specifically its 8GB of RAM limitation: “I think when Apple positioned the product, it’s probably focused more on content consu...

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A great saint, John M. Perkins, has passed. May he rest in peace and rise in glory.

Travis is back. It was only a matter of time. Given his old compadres Emil Michael and Shervin Pishevar are back in the news, how could he, the king pooh-ba, stay in the shadows? To a lot of us who have been in the know, Travis Kalanick has never really gone away. He has always …

Maggie Harrison Dupré, writing for Futurism: Earlier this month, Ars retracted the story after it was found to include fake quotes attributed to a real person. The article — a write-up of a viral incident in which an AI agent seemingly published a hit piece about a human...

Basic Apple Guy:

Where I and the rest of the internet take this from here remains to be seen. All I know is that Apple should definitely keep this Lil Finder around.

But no, I do not think this is the last we’ve seen of Lil Finder Guy…

Apple’s MacBook Neo ad campaign on TikTok — and seemingly exclusive to TikTok — is the most fun they’ve had with a campaign in ages. I love it.

The thing that we all missed is that WordPress is the best candidate for a standard for what an individual social network message is.

If I knew how AI would work with software, I would've done things differently to prepare for this. I find myself wanting to ask questions about my code that I don't have proper tools to answer. I have to get all my code managed with the new system, but not sure that's even the right way to go. Once I started using it to build full bits of deployed code, not to just answer questions about the work I'm doing one day at a time, I've become confused about planning my own work.

Robin Sloan:

A coarse world does not require us to become coarse; we can insist on our values even if they appear not to be widely shared. What’s so funny about peace, love, and under­standing? (What’s so funny about truth, justice, and the Amer­ican way?) I am not (and I will wager: you are not) a head of state or a polit­ical operative; we are not required to be cyn­ical or “realistic”. We can remain, with discipline, realists of a larger reality —the knowl­edge that the people who do this kind of stuff are already in hell. 

The next few days are gonna be … interesting