Hot take on the Apple Music — iTunes — icon in iOS 27.2. It doesn’t bother me. Do I like other designs? Yep. Sure do. Do I hate this one? Nope. I don’t. This is going to sound really weird coming from me but it doesn’t look weird, or bad, to me because musical notes are usually displayed on paper. White paper. I know, I know, it’s digital. Also, look at that beautiful Daft Music and MusicBox icon. 😍 Yeah, they‘re amazing!

Last year for Halloween I dressed up as the brainrot character Tung Tung Tung Sahur. It was an interesting way to gauge how much time everybody spent online. Half of my friends didn’t understand the reference, although the costume was a massive hit with trick-or-treating middle schoolers.I’m convinced I was ahead of my time. This year, Spirit Halloween also started selling brainrot-themed costumes, and people are racking up tens of millions of views for dressing up as AI slop characters. None…

Sound familiar?An incumbent attempting to establish a false reality through accusations and loud repetition. These people don't get embarrassed.

In India, a group of uncles plans to subvert the A.I. that is replacing them, in a mockumentary that celebrates the weirdness of regular intelligence. The description belies an incredible short movie. Here’s a blurb from the movie creator: Pranav Bhasin In India, reality is often stranger than anything you could write. This film started as a small, slightly absurd idea about three uncles trying to stop the spread of AI, and somewhere along the way I fell in love with them, with their…

Every year I see two false things get repeated about Halloween. They are:1. Check your candy for razors/drugs/something dangerous because people could do bad things to candy!2. Black cats shouldn't be adopted out because people use them as decor and return them or do awful things to them.You're theoretically more likely to find candy in your razor blades than the other way around,if you think about it from a humorus angle.First off, the whole razors-in-candy nonsense is mainly an urban legend…

Meta spent $1.18 billion on severance and about $140 billion on data centers in 2026. The layoffs did not pay for the data centers. Cash flow and debt did, and the cost shows up later as depreciation.

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Foundational Texts is a semi-regular essay series that looks at some of the culture that shaped me and how it still resonates today. Read all the installments: Jenny Holzer | The Goonies | The Channel 5 News Team | The Cave of Time | The Westing Game | Star Trek: The Next Generation I was only 17 when I moved out of my folks' house. I was ready to leave—desperate to leave—and landed in Chicago's Wicker Park neighborhood in the early '90s. This was back when apartments there were still big and…

View from Cariboo Dam, pre-run: Blue sky to start, gray sky to end. Conditions today were a bit warmer and less humid than Wednesday. The net effect was not much difference–the real change was post-run when it started to shower and got a bit chilly. The run started out sunny and got increasingly cloudy, but remained nice ‘n dry. I started out at the dam today, in order to reduce the overall length of the walk back home. The only downside: fewer photos of Still Creek after the run. Worth the…

SafeRoute SA shows crime hotspots across all of South Africa as a heat map and plans driving routes that steer around them, from a trip across Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, Pretoria or Gqeberha to a long road trip. The route opens in Google Maps or Apple Maps with detour points on it, so the maps app stays out of the red zones. It’s free, needs no sign-up and works on your phone. Built from SAPS police-station crime statistics, weighted by harm (a murder or carjacking counts far more than a…

I hadn’t worked out since Monday due to some serious leg soreness after that last session. That and some late nights this week made this session difficult. I had to cut my pull-ups short due to pain in my lower lats on my left side. That’s not good. I wonder if it’s another deep lactic acid buildup like I had in my right shoulder last fall. That required deep needling to release. Unknown location (probably inside)

Happy Halloween

I’m enjoying all the fall colors today. Selfie a day for a year, day 59: Oct 30, 2026 edition.

wrap yourself in a blanket make a human burrito unwrap just enough to allow another human in squished together a tightly rolled bundle happily still

Hanlon’s razor says, “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by [incompetence].” (Consistent with a standard substitution, I’ve replaced “stupidity” with “incompetence”). This adage is constantly on my mind when I read SAD Scheme opinions. On the one hand, the plaintiffs routinely exhibit, at most, a gross disregard for due process and the rule of law. On the other hand, I often see a lot of flat-out bad lawyering. But must it be either one or the other? ¿Por qué no los…

9:05 – Mon 26 October 2026 12:05 – Mon 26 October 2026 9:02 – Tue 27 October 2026 12:06 – Tue 27 October 2026 9:01 – Wed 28 October 2026 12:01 – Wed 28 October 2026 9:04 – Thu 29 October 2026 12:04 – Thu 29 October 2026 9:06 – Fri 30 October 2026 12:02 – Fri 30 October 2026 Bonus Follow Me As discussed previously, on Fridays, I present my weekly social media roundups. Note that toots of articles generally include header images from the articles, which I don’t include here unless their creators…

Back in June my friend John invited me to his bachelor party to be held in Las Vegas, if I was flying that far then I thought I might as well make a trip out of it and planned with Mariah and Nick a trip through some of the national parks in Utah. I’m not a frequent or experienced hiker and I think the only other national park I’ve been to is Yosemite (twice), but we’ve mostly only done city trips so why not??? Utah (Movies watched on the plane: Swing Girls, F9, Ghost Killer) Since Moab isn’t…

Sheryl and I attended the Three Rivers mayoral debate last night at the Playhouse in Georgetown. A small crowd came out to listen. This was my first real interaction with our municipal government, and the candidates are all strangers to me. I suppose it’s on me to understand who these people are and what they do, but judging from last night, most of them don’t understand their roles either.Like so much public debate these days, it was full of confusion about what local government actually does.…

I was reading an interview with Nicole Kidman a few weeks ago. In it, she revealed she still likes to go to raves, even at 59: "Dinner at 10.30 p.m., club at 1 a.m. I’ll put on glasses. Sometimes I’ll wear a wig to hide, a little dark wig, and then I can just dance. [...] I’m not an extrovert and I wouldn’t say I’m the person that walks in and goes, I own this room, [but] I love dancing and I’ll go to a rave because I just want to lose it with a group of people and dance." On Reddit, I was…

The excellent Public Domain Review, a rich source of curious stories and images, has branched out into publishing books – small books, my favourite kind. I now have the first three of these PDR Press Minis, and lovely little volumes they are, each with a usefully informative Note on the Text (more like an Introduction really). Number one in the series is a safe bet: Overture, from Swann's Way – the opening section of the first novel of the sequence, in Scott Moncrieff's translation (justly…

A panel at Android Dev Summit 2026, moderated by Ben Trengrove, about how developers use AI-assisted coding, agents, and developer tools. We discuss shipping speed and productivity, bottlenecks in the software lifecycle, code review, deployment safety, legacy modernization, CI infrastructure, and the cost of AI.

My puzzle game Block Wizard is back! Originally released in 2010 as a Flash game, it now has a web remaster that you can play directly in a modern browser, with mouse or touch controls. Block Wizard combines match-3 puzzles with RPG-inspired progression: match blocks by color or symbol, earn experience, upgrade your skills, and spend mana to cast spells. Special blocks and cascading matches add new challenges as you work your way through 50 levels. Watch the gameplay video. Give it a try — it…

The MisconceptionThe comfortable belief goes like this. Renting intelligence is nothing like renting servers. Servers are physical, scarce and sticky. Knowledge is abstract, abundant and portable. You can swap one model for another the way you swap a search engine, and the worst that happens is your prompts need a trim. Infrastructure lock-in was a hardware problem. Competence has no cables. It is a pleasant story, and it has the structure of every pleasant story the industry tells itself at…

When choosing software becomes a statement of personal virtue instead of a practical decision. Apparently, we're doing this again. A technology company gets caught up in controversy, and people start announcing they're leaving, canceling their subscriptions, and looking for alternatives. This time it's Proton, and judging by some of the reactions on Reddit, canceling an account is a considerably more significant event than I realized. The complaints involve Andy Yen, Proton's push toward AI,…

In a recent working paper, researchers report on how to enable practitioners in organizations to use AI more effectively. Companies often struggle to identify where AI can produce meaningful business gains. Research involving 515 companies found that those exposed to examples of how other organizations redesigned work around AI identified 44% more use cases, completed 12% more tasks, were 18% more likely to acquire paying customers, and generated nearly twice as much revenue. Leaders should map…

Read the full post at - 5 Notes on Visiting Redwood National & State Parks In June 2025, my family and I spent two full days (and three nights) in Redwood National and State Parks as part of a road trip through Oregon and Northern California. I’d been looking forward to this one for a long time. I’ve been to several national parks, and every single one has managed to exceed my expectations. So for the Redwoods, I deliberately set my expectations sky-high. Here are 5 notes from the trip – plus…

Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote a brave self-critical piece in The New York Times, centrally about how she intentionally sent her daughter to a well-funded but failing school, PS 307, in the hopes of using voice to improve it, and how that utterly failed her daughter and failed to impact the school. Ultimately her daughter recovers, but we see a completely broken system that is unresponsive to internal voice, and until now she made no attempt to blow the whistle and utilize her professional position…

It might be my personality type or something. Perhaps even something in my birth chart. But I tend to not care when pushed to the max of my emotional give-a-damness. Not caring has been a powerful self-rescuing force for me in the past. I'm noticing that many people enact cruelty and emotional violence when they see someone cares. Or at least are interested in their welfare. They ride on that energy, using it for emotional blackmail. When I stop caring so much for situations or people, my world…

TOP STORY: In preparation for what it hopes will be a ginormous IPO, AI company Anthropic filed a ginormous SEC registration statement this week. A major function of such things is to disclose “risk factors” to potential investors. I haven’t read Anthropic’s disclosures in detail, but I did notice a couple interesting facts. For example, Anthropic’s net losses have quintupled every year so far, and it projects a net loss of $160 billion for 2026. It also warns that it may never become…