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Here’s a great take from last month re: the Cook/Ternus transition, from Om Malik: When he took over from Steve Jobs in August 2011, Apple’s market capitalization was around $350 billion. As of this morning, it sits near $4 trillion. That is more than a 1,000 percent inc...

While I’m linking to pieces on Apple’s CEO transition, here’s an annoying tidbit from Tripp Mickle and Karl Russell’s piece for The New York Times, under the headline “Tim Cook Was Very, Very Good at Making Money” (gift link): Even though it has largely missed out on the...

I have taught Claude Code to write software the way I do. It has abilities that I don't, for example, I give them 1000 lines of code, highly factored, with lots of thought into making it readable and maintainable, and always falling short (our languages today fight against r...

Simultaneously audacious and humble, a combination that epitomizes Ted Turner’s entire life. (Shades, too, of Walt Disney’s apartment above the fire department at Disneyland.)

A follow-up point on my “AI Is Technology, Not a Product” column over the weekend. Here’s a repeat of Steven Levy’s argument that John Ternus must direct Apple towards building “a killer AI product”: By the end of this decade, it’s unlikely that people will swipe on thei...

Jim Prosser, back in February: Let me be clear about causation, because the AI parallel only works if we’re honest about it. The communications failures didn’t kill nuclear power. The disasters did. But two decades of talking over the public meant the industry had built ...

Wikipedia: The Alaska Permanent Fund (APF) is a constitutionally established permanent fund and sovereign wealth fund managed by a state-owned corporation, the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation (APFC). It was established in Alaska in 1976 by Article 9, Section 15 of the ...

A Surveillance ‘Cat-and-Mouse’ Game With AI:

In 2023, a team led by Ming Gao, now a researcher at Nanjing University, used human voices to defeat speech-recovery algorithms in a different way. Its jammer, called MicFrozen, is worn by a speaker who doesn’t want to be recorded. It listens as they talk and then generates a real-time stream of ultrasonic “anti-speech” tuned to the speaker’s voice, much like the noise-cancellation technology in your headphones. The device then sends out another layer of counterfeit speech-shaped sound to mislead any algorithm that tries to reconstruct what was lost. 

Note that the “answer” to digital technologies we hate is always MOAR DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES. For previous entries on this point, see this and this. 

2024-era ChatGPT pictures, of which I created many are now like Comic Sans type was in 2010 or so, if you remember.

Jeffrey M. Jones, Gallup: Seven in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centers for artificial intelligence in their local area, including nearly half, 48%, who are strongly opposed. Barely a quarter favor these projects, with 7% strongly in favor. [...] The data cente...

I explain why The Gulag Archipelago is not “narrative history.”

Jon Stewart is usually pretty good, but I think he got it wrong when he says the AI companies are stealing journalists' knowledge. Imho they don't create knowledge, they report it. The knowledge isn't theirs to own, and that is for the times there is actually any new stuff. They stick to a few main stories, and still insist that the upcoming election is about the economy. They talk about the $1.7 billion slush fund, but aren't reporting every day in every story how much money we've given ICE. That big funding is going to the concentration camps they're building, the people we hear so little of. This is a government that shot two people in Minnesota, on camera, and shrugged it off. We let that go too.

Galicia, May 2026.

From the video The only way I know how to make great photographs.

Another day at the office, enjoying the process and the landscapes with a camera in my hands.

My thanks to Drata for sponsoring last week at DF. Their message is short and sweet: Leverage autonomous AI agents to automate compliance, manage internal and third-party risk, and continuously prove your security posture.

Today Claude found a problem that would only be uncovered if you knew that assigning to location.href didn't happen immediately. If it decides to redirect and then do a bunch of other stuff including making network references, the whole thing could (and did) come crashing down. I would have found that problem, but the actual error message the browser emitted made me think the problem was on the server not the client.

Timothy Snyder made an important point. Trump sees his cause as a religion and sees himself as god. So when someone who is unfairly punished by Trump says they're still glad they voted for them, because (I guess) if god is on the ballot, you have to vote for him.

I envision a network of twitter-like systems built out of the components of the web and nothing more. Every part replaceable.

Via Peter Atwood, a map made by Paramount Studios in 1927 to show directors and producers that they didn’t need to film in exotic locations: California and Nevada offered all the necessary exoticism! (I’d like to get a closer look, though, at the parts of southeastern California that are supposed to stand in for Sherwood Forest. And at a number of other things, if I’m being honest.) 

Everybody, including me, is shouting VAR MUST GO! (And if it does, then the first time a ref flubs a big call everybody will be shouting BRING BACK VAR! But I solemnly pledge that I will not join that chorus.)