Australian surfer Olivia Ottaway under a wave in Teahupo'o, French Polynesia.
I’m returning the Instant Pot I purchase recently (and have not yet used).
https://www.eater.com/news/886762/trump-maga-instant-pot
Gross.
it is to the point now that i am legitimately shocked when someone shares a link to X like "hey check this out" cause i don't hang out at nazi bars and it's weird that they do
I’ve been seeing Fisker Oceans more often recently. Seems odd.
It’s time for me to either get rid of my Leaf or spend $1K on a CCS to CHAdeMO adapter.
Leaning towards the former. I should probably just get a CCS car.
(I sold my final Tesla last week. Good riddance. Great car, reprehensible brand.)
This is the 100 year anniversary of humans having an idea of what the heck the sun and all the stars actually are. If you had asked a leading astronomer in 1925 what the sun was, they would say that it's basically the same as Earth, but very hot.
In Cecilia Payne's doctoral thesis she was the first to say, from spectral data, that the sun was overwhelmingly made of hydrogen and helium.
It was later described as "the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy".
When we throw up our hands and say none of it matters, we're doing the fascists’ work for them. They don't need to hide their corruption if they can convince us it's pointless to look. They don't need to silence truth-tellers if we've already decided truth is meaningless.
The biggest scandal in AI energy usage right now deserves to be the xAI data center running on 35 methane gas turbines that don't need air permits because they are "temporary" and don't have catalytic reduction pollution controls installed because... they just didn't bother?
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/12/xai-data-center/
This is a great way to explain Jevon’s Paradox:
@mathowie thanks for posting about Visor! I have a similar relationship to the car market, and I agree, it’s fantastic!
Community cafe in SF vandalized because it's owned by a Jewish person.
From their GoFundMe:
"Under the cover of nearby ICE protests, agitators smashed windows, defaced the building with hateful slurs, and scrawled threats like “Die Zio,” “The Only Good Settler is a Dead One,” “Death 2 Israel is a Promise” and “Intifada” across its walls. Manny received explicit death threats, and the space was left in disrepair.
This was not just an attack on a cafe —it was an attack on a community space that stands for dialogue, democracy, and belonging."
https://www.gofundme.com/f/stand-with-manny-rebuild-and-resist-hate
https://babka.social/@dukepaaron/114661790644462089
While images make sense in some contexts I feel the worst part of video-podcasts is that it makes costs so high you inevitably have to depend on big tech to host and serve.
It’s like 2000 MB for Full HD MP4 instead of 60 MB for 128 Kbits AAC. One can be hosted, archived & served cheaply . The other not so much if you have tens of thousands of listeners. So Google & pals end up “owning” anything with audience.
#LudditeThoughts
🚨 Great sci-fi alert! 🚨
These Burning Stars by Bethany Jacobs is *excellent*
https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/2153ea5c-318b-40d7-a1f3-757b6f8225e1
My review of Devil in the Stack: A Code Odyssey by Andrew Smith:
> I’m a software engineer and I was impressed by how well this book captures the *feels* to work on software today. Not only that, but there’s plenty of explanations of how computers work, all of which I knew already, but I was never tempted to skip those parts. They are refreshingly clear, straightforward, and accurate. The prose is clear, cogent, brisk, and wry. This all added up to a very enjoyable book.
https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/a8baf746-d4af-425b-ae7c-39fcd294b451
Analysis shows that China’s emissions are dropping due to renewables
It's the country's first one-year emissions decline that's not linked to economic issues.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/05/analysis-shows-that-chinas-emissions-are-dropping-due-to-renewables/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social
Last week we had a lot of fun at local-first conf in Berlin. We’ve written up our experiences here: https://neighbourhood.ie/blog/2025/06/04/local-first-conf-recap
tl;dr: 11 years after inventing offline-first, we finally have hit the zeitgeist. Feels great!
I’m trying Claude Code (CC) after reading [AI Changes Everything][1] by @mitsuhiko and my initial reaction is that I’m a bit baffled.
It keeps suggesting small, individual changes (diffs) to specific lines of specific files, and asking me to approve them or not. Most of them are OK, some of them are not. Whatever. But I have to sit here twiddling my thumbs between each interaction. It’s tedious. I could do this work faster on my own, and I’d have higher confidence that it’d actually work. (Some of the changes will need verification — especially because I’m running CC on a “quick and dirty” “temporary” project that has no automated tests.)
I’m guessing maybe Ronacher has CC configured to not prompt about each individual change, but to just go ahead and work through an entire change — in other words, the review/update/review cycles are larger, coarser-grained. So maybe I’ll try that.
So I have a Take:
Imagine if LLM coding assistants had come out when programming required explicit manual memory management.
Everyone is writing all this C code with malloc() and free(). It's a pain, and repetitive, and why spend time thinking about this?
So all the early adopters of LLMs are saying "this is amazing, I don't have to write all this boilerplate malloc() and free() and multiplication of pointer sizes by array length, it auto-generates that for me, This Is The Future! You will All Be Left Behind if you don't adopt this!"
(I am actually skeptical this is something LLMs would do reliably, but let's just pretend they can.)
And maybe that approach would actually win, and no one would have created garbage-collected (or equivalent) languages, because that's silly, you have a LLM to generate that code for you.
Never mind that garbage collection is vastly superior to LLM-generated-malloc():
* The code is _way_ shorter and therefore easier to reason about the parts you actually care about (the logic)
* You don't have to worry about the LLM generating garbage one time out of N
* Less segfaults and memory corruption, etc..
Back to our actual present: a lot of what I hear people saying about LLMs is "look, I don't have to write as much boilerplate or repetitive code" and I'm sorry but that's not a benefit, that's just doubling down on a liability. All things being equal (if it's just as understandable, just as fast, etc), you want to solve a problem with the fewest lines of code as possible.
If you have to write the same thing over and over again, that is a failure in your tooling, and you should build better tooling. A better library, a better abstraction, even a better programming language.
And to be fair sometimes this better tooling requires significant investment, and those resources that are available for R&D are being piled into LLMs instead of into reducing how much code we write.
But sometimes better tooling and libraries is just a matter of _thinking_ about a problem. And can you even think if your boss wants you to hit the deadline, "and AI should make you twice as productive, right?"
But also: why think, when you can double down on a bad status quo and have an LLM poop out some more code for you?
My ex just offered to “find me a woman” — and I think she was half-serious 😱
I miss my under-desk treadmill. I gotta pull that thing out of storage.
I’m officially done with takes on AI beginning “Ethical concerns aside…”.
No! Stop right there.
Ethical concerns front and center. First thing. Let’s get this out of the way and then see if thre is anything left worth talking about.
Ethics is the formalisation of how we are treating one another as human beings and how we relate to the world around us.
It is *impossible* to put ethics aside.
What you mean is “I don’t want to apologise for my greed and selfishness.”
Say that first.
welcome to the future, now your error-prone software can call the cops
(this is an Anthropic employee talking about Claude Opus 4)
Telo MT-1 prototype review by Out of Spec:
(A 4-door electric city truck with 300+ miles of range, a 5+ foot bed, locking storage, a mid-gate, same length as a 2-door Mini Cooper, 10" ground clearance)