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Maggie Harrison Dupré, in a Guardian article about Meta Glasses: […] Smartglasses bring the functionality of smartphones, cameras included, into every moment. Several people I spoke to said that even when the LED is functioning as intended it can be subtle and difficult to spot from far away, especially if you aren’t aware of how […]⌥ Permalink

Modular (tweet, beta, Hacker News): Today, the Mojo language officially reaches 1.0: a milestone the language has been building toward since its first release in 2023. Mojo has grown into a general-purpose language with a vibrant developer community writing their own libraries, tools, and applications on top of it. With Mojo 1.0, developers can now […]

Nicolas Seriot (Hacker News, Reddit): The core Unicode algorithms (normalization, casing, bidi, collation) are deliberately bounded, but UTS #35 transliteration rules, under their natural unbounded semantics, are not. This is a result I haven’t found published before. These rules ship as locale data in ICU, the Unicode library shipped in operating systems, browsers, runtimes, and […]

Nicolas Seriot (Hacker News): Engineering folklore holds that Jira (Atlassian’s project-tracking tool) is Turing-complete. Existing claims point vaguely at automation features without exhibiting a reduction. This article supplies a proof, with setup instructions and execution trace. […] Minsky proved this model Turing-complete (1967). Exhibiting it in Jira’s automation language therefore establishes the reduction. Here is […]

A near-Herculean feat of transcription, if I do say so! Read it here.

“Fogust Groove” is a mixtape I made of a bunch of yacht rock and blue-eyed soul I played for my kids while we were driving around the coast of California last week: I first heard these songs as a kid listening to my mom’s car radio tuned to “Sunny 95” (94.7 FM) out of Columbus, […]

An author is never more vulnerable than when they have a book coming out, so I’ll often reach out to their publicists and snag them for an interview. In this case, the publicist reached out to me, and I’m very glad she did, because I’ve been a fan of Julia’s for a long time, and […]

See my letter, “Inside the man is a teenager.”

Artist and filmmaker Erik Winkowski’s “Zinemail No. 1” and “Zinemail No. 2” (and now “Zinemail No. 3”) are some of the most interesting uses of the Substack platform I’ve ever seen, so I asked him if he’d do a typewriter interview. It’s wonderful.

A blackout I put at the top of my letter, “Summer Catch-up.” I haven’t done these in a while. Takes a bit to get back into them.

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I wonder how many scenarios they're playing out in DC wrt Iran. Just guessing, probably none. We learned on Monday that the real war has yet to begin, according to Iran. What could they to hurt the US. Or wake us up to the reality of war. We are not safe in the US, any more than Russians are safe in Moscow. The parallels are pretty amazing. Both Russia and the US started wars of choice, and clearly didn't consider that they might get bogged down. Russia has a source of drones so they can fight back. But I'd be surprised if Trump is stock up, but we he were, where would we use them? We've already attacked Iran with our probably obsolete trillion-dollar military. I'm old enough to remember Vietnam and what asymmetric war is like. The US always falls for this. Our military is very impressive, until we use it. Bluffing was a much better approach for Trump.

On reading eccentrics, cranks, and weirdos. 

A sample of the work of the great watchmaker George Daniels (1926-2011). I never travel to London without visiting the Clockmaker’s Museum, though I sort of miss its old rather obscure location at Guildhall. 

How writing a blog about Terrence Malick makes me pretty much exactly like Terrence Malick. 

Karl Bode: So prepare for a year of breathless and evidence-optional claims that Chinese AI is a dire threat to U.S. consumer privacy and national security, followed by an elaborate bipartisan train of bad policy and shitty new laws crafted by a clumsy coalition of technofascists, extremists, and competition-averse chickenshits. A bit rant-ish for my […]⌥ Permalink

Joe Flint, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link): Walt Disney’s ABC has sued the Federal Communications Commission alleging the agency’s efforts to challenge its broadcast licenses and regulate its talk show “The View” are illegal and an effort to quash speec...

Marcus Mendes at 9to5Mac has a fun update on U.S. v. Apple, the ill-considered antitrust case started by the Biden administration. A bunch of what the DOJ argues are anticompetitive features in Apple’s platforms, Apple argues are in fact privacy and security related. Back i...

Now that I live in central Texas, when I return to my native Alabama I am always thinking: Dang, the trees here are tall.

Apple (developer, details, Hacker News, TechCrunch, The Verge, 9To5Mac): These changes resolve Apple’s disagreements with the Commission over business terms and alternative distribution. They also reduce complexity by moving every developer that distributes apps in the EU to a single set of business terms. […] The Core Technology Fee, a per-install fee for developers that […]