I keep notebooks in a bottom drawer that cover years of work and thoughts. While I may need to check last year’s notebook for work-related stuff a couple of times, I never look at the plans or thoughts. The plans serve as a direction, the thoughts are no longer deep.
I’d ride an electric bike were I not convinced I’d die in road traffic. But I’ve waited so long that subscriptions have come to bicycle hardware.
The Basic tier provides a rider dashboard, basic security, a stolen mode, and updates over Bluetooth for free. You can then pay £6.99 / €7.99 (around $9) per month, or £84 / €96 ($110) per year, to become a Core member
8BitDo 2.4G controller kept disconnecting from my docked Steam Deck during Dead Rising 2. An incompatibility between the 2.4G dongle and the dock’s USB 3.1 ports. But there’s a USB 2.0 port inside the controller charging stand! 🎮
As of December 2024, AI wrote 30.1% of Python contributions from US users vs 24.3% Germany, 23.2% France, 21.6% India, 15.4% Russia, 11.7% China. Chinese devs favor Gitee over GitHub. First-mover advantage? Doubtful. These gains may plateau as easy tasks get automated first.
I have the sneaking suspicion that PlayStation and Xbox are raising prices above the hardware loss line to be ready for Grand Theft Auto 6. Some people will buy a system just to play GTA 6 and will never buy another game for the system.
Shockingly, LLM users were far less able to recall or quote from essays they had just written. In fact, 83.3% of LLM users failed to provide even a single correct quote from their own writing, compared to just 11.1% in both the Search Engine and Brain-only groups.
That would be because they didn’t write them. They possibly didn’t edit them.
The Louvre staff went on strike.
We didn’t plan to go on strike, but the people are so exhausted, they can’t support the conditions getting worse and worse
The issue with Europe becoming the world’s largest museum as its native population declines is that tourist overcrowding is making locals angry.
In tech, the days of spending a lot of cash upfront and spending little on each user are over. AI means you’re not making it back on volume anymore. Every customer using AI increases your costs. This is why AI companies are chasing enterprises instead of trying to build the next Gmail or WhatsApp.
OpenCore Legacy Patcher always adds a bit of excitement to older Mac hardware. Is it a bug in the latest OS release? Or is it all the work that has had to be done to get that release running on an absolute potato of a Macintosh?
As datacenter production gets automated, the cost of intelligence should eventually converge to near the cost of electricity. (People are often curious about how much energy a ChatGPT query uses; the average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours, about what an oven would use in a little over one second, or a high-efficiency lightbulb would use in a couple of minutes. It also uses about 0.000085 gallons of water; roughly one fifteenth of a teaspoon.)
Source: Sam Altman
Apple’s new container support in macOS 26 is nowhere near as feature-rich as Docker. It doesn’t support memory ballooning or loopback networking to the host. But it’s much lighter on Apple Silicon resources and launches containers like greased lightning.
The 6G wireless spectrum auctions are coming soon.
Telcos: We’ve learned our lesson after overhyping 5G, something that was an expensive, incremental upgrade.
Me: Oh good!
Telcos: 6G will provide holographic communication and facilitate the Internet of Senses.
Me: Get out.
The phase-out of Rosetta 2 in macOS was just a matter of time. But as someone who runs an ancient MMO client on top of WINE, this is a new challenge. Windows x86 code → WINE translation layer → macOS Intel APIs → Rosetta 2 translation to ARM64. That chain could break.
Apple are doing okay with AI. AI will be like databases. Big models in the cloud and tiny ones in everything else. Whenever I see people give Apple advice, I remember that if they had followed mine from 20 years ago, the company would be 1/20000th its current size but make the best desktops ever.
YouTube introduces an ad-free tier, changes its mind. YouTube’s offer is to rival TV ad revenue for content providers. They’re also going hard on AI content creation tools to allow creators to pump out more videos to keep eyeballs. Of course, to pay for all of this, they’ll continue to flood the platform with ads.
YouTube competes with Netflix for viewers' time. Unlike Netflix's walled garden approach, YouTube offers a mix of subscriptions, memberships, and creator payouts. However, YouTube has been steadily adding more viewing interruptions than Netflix. At some point, this may become so annoying that viewers will go elsewhere.
Fantasy game books for kids in the 80s and 90s. You’d flick through them in the bookshop, and there was something dangerous-looking every few pages. It was great. You’d wonder, ‘I’ll have to fight that?!’
This time of year I enjoy looking at all the new games I won’t have time to play. But then I see most of them are built on the jittery, traversal-stuttering mess that is Unreal Engine 5. Then I’m relieved I won’t have time to play them.
The next time you go to pay at a supermarket, look up. I remember doing this years ago at the Amazon Go in Seattle and being disturbed by the arrays of cameras looking down. Supermarkets are catching up. You’ll take something off a shelf soon, and a camera lens will stare back at you from the shelf.
Mac development hero, Bill Atkinson, has died. He leaves a lot of fingerprints on modern computing. He also created the Venice font. The only original Mac font not created by Susan Kare.