Bubbles Weekly

My day job pivoted to being "AI-First" so uhhh I quit

Today, Instagram updated its logo wordmark. CNET had a nice image of the before and after, presented below as after and before: Although I don’t think AI was…

When I was in high school, I had the bright idea that I could save a screenshot of a Winamp MilkDrop visualizer in progress, and post it to my DeviantArt…

There's a certain strain of commentator who is just sure that nothing can ever get better. In amongst all the hullaballoo about the UK potentially banning…

The problems we face in the #openweb are often presented as technology problems. Which protocol, platform, licence, federation path, software? Which standard?…

Introduction Gordon, Gordon, Gordon… I think you should look back at what you have written in Tech sucks? Really? and reassess your thoughts. Your conclusion…

My college at Cambridge e-mails its members notices regularly and I woke up to one today telling us they would be changing the signage on the toilets. The new…

I’m just starting out with bird photography, and I’ve compiled a short-list of birds I want to take photos of, to have some sort of goal when I’m out there and…

Years ago, I had an experience that showed me what a bad retirement could look like. It was like Scrooge being visited by the Ghost of Retirement Future.

Enjoying Idaho while ignoring IllinoisToday is the first day of my life that I am unemployed. And not by choice.As I mentioned on LinkedIn last week, me and…

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks watering someone else’s garden. (This isn’t some ~deep~ metaphor, I’ve literally been watering someone else’s garden.) My…

Over the last few weeks, I’ve kept wondering how I would describe summer in our region with just one picture. Maybe a day at the lake? The old town flooded...

10 August 2026 In August in southwestern PA you may notice a tiny white ball floating above the trail, maybe at eye level. If you walk into it you discover the…

1 : something devised or contrived: such as a(1) : a piece of equipment or a mechanism designed to serve a special purpose or perform a special function…

I opened my first bank account when I was ten days old. I still have the receipt. Obviously it wasn't me who marched into the Post Office in Croxley Green and…

Sony took away digital movies that people paid for. Streaming services keep raising rates. Amazon bricked old Kindles. Sounds like the LA Clippers broke salary…

Andreas over on 82MHz has written about how you can’t expect giant tech companies to change if you keep buying their products: Tech sucks: You have to vote…

I mostly use my web stats service because I get a lizard-brain kick from watching numbers go up, but it also provides some fun insights. For example, it’s how…

I spotted Bubbles in my basic referrers this morning, and my heart lit up. A little directory, surfacing blog posts from actual bloggers, what in the old web…

Retraction: The App Store Rejection of the Week That Was, in Fact, a Correct Rejection by John Gruber To the best of my recollection, this is the first post…

I wish I didn’t have to use NoScript. For those unacquainted, NoScript is a browser plugin which I use with Firefox that allows me to control the running…

Inspired by skuka's post

To illustrate how well AI is going, here’s a prime example of the confidently wrong phenomenon, a.k.a. mansplaining as a service… I asked free Microsoft…

Just after I talked a little bit about my adventures with YouTube this year, and my quiet hopes to maybe one day earn a little bit from my work, YouTube drops…

Sarah Perez, in a TechCrunch story about monthly active user numbers for Bluesky, Threads, and X, using data provided by Similarweb: Instead, the data shows…

It’s been a few months since my post on leaving Gmail which sparked a lot of discussion on Hacker News. Email isn’t the most exciting topic in the world, but I…

Leaving sucks. But there’s no other way. As long as you keep throwing money at the corporations who treat you badly, why would they change? Andreas on 82MHz…

I’m currently pulling together a bunch of sources – that are mostly recent – on the topic of LLMs and their use in software development. Some are peer-reviewed…

Despite my history of uncovering App Store frauds, I rarely go looking for these things intentionally! They’re just so pervasive and obvious, they jump out at…

Why generating code makes it meaningless, why writing code by hand has value, and why toil is a critical part of the human experience.

Broken Cellphones Introduction So, I had planned to spend a lovely evening watching the returns in the Clacton by-election, but it seems that there are a…

(Previously: No Screens Cafe) At the Cowork Cafe, you can look at your little screen when you’re supposed to be looking at your medium-size screen. Welcome to…

Been using Kagi for search now for a couple weeks and there’s no going back to Google. Clean results, no bullshit ads everywhere, no pushing their properties…

A few weeks ago I finished reading Leviathan Falls, the ninth and final book in The Expanse series by James S.A. Corey. I started the series all the way back…

Writing students once learned that putting the most important information first in an article was the preferred, humane way of reporting on a situation. This…

Almost everyone alive in 1993 remembers some version of what happened in that Manassas, Virginia apartment: Lorena Bobbitt severed her husband John's penis…

A short poem about the recent heatwave and subsequent fires in the UK

I’m deciding what should outlive me, and what I’m perfectly happy to let disappear.

RNZ reports on yet another distressing development due to the “AI” craze: When a Wellington second-hand bookstore started to get bulk book orders, owner…

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