Robert

culture faith favorite highlighted noise saturday night video tech

  • Making Lemons Into Lemonade

    In the making lemons into lemonade department, I’ve got something to teach my son nearly every day about what happens when you elect immoral, incompetant people to run your government. My son is a sysadmin for a Minecraft server with an interest in technology. On Friday, I was able to use a very visually demonstrative example of how your cybersecurity is impacted when people who don’t know the slightest thing about what they are doing take over.

    I’m not suprised that a government agency named after a memecoin and its juvenile employees can’t secure a basic website, but it’s definitely concerning when those people illegally gain access to the Treasure Department systems.

    Today comes news that the memecoin infantilists fired critical nuclear weapons workers and are quickly trying to bring them back. I keep hearing what a genius this Elon Musk guy is and apparently people want him to do to the government what he did to Xitter. Xitter lost 80% of its market value in just two years after the guy took over. It does take quite a magician to make value disappear so quickly. Alakazam, baby!

    I almost forgot about Musk spreading the false rumor that the Social Security Administration was giving benefits to 150-year-olds because his crew didn’t understand the COBOL systems.

    There will be lots of teachable moments for my son. I just hope the country he lives in won’t have collapsed by the time he is old enough to put them into use.

  • Mario Icons

    A colleague recently named her AI Hackathon team “The Pipeline Plumbers,” due to their work with YAML-driven build pipelines. I told her it reminded me of Super Mario. Since she loves Mario, she decided to do a Mario-themed presentation (I wish I could embed it here).

    I came across another Mario-themed artifact this weekend. The always talented Louie Mantia, who produced icons for the Icon Factory for years, just created a new set of drive icons with a Mario theme. These are gorgeous.

    lmnt.me

  • A Custom Collection

    A few years ago, my wife’s company had a get together at CAMRaleigh, the modern art museum. After some mingling, the boys and I camped out in the staff offices. The desk where I sat had numerous pictures of Karl Lagerfeld. I might have felt a little uncomfortable at the man’s ubiquitous gaze, but his surgically attached sunglasses prevented that.

    I don’t have much to say about Lagerfeld’s life or work, but apparently he had excellent taste in iPods. Check out these custom Nanos.

    sothebys.com

    Macstories covers the estate sale from Sotheby’s where Lagerfeld’s collection is being auctioned. Like John Voorhees, who wrote the piece, I’ll always be a big fan of the iPod. I harbor the same irrational hope that one day Apple will bring it back to please those of us who love single-use devices. In the meantime, I suppose I could put in my bid for one of Lagerfeld’s over 500 that are being sold.

  • Studio – West Coast

    The record label Ghostly International just reissued West Coast, the 2006 album by Studio, a collaboration between two musical auteurs from Gothenburg, Sweden. Ghostly spent months hyping the release, and it has garnered critical acclaim from the likes of Pitchfork, which labeled it a best new reissue. Bandcamp selected West Coast as their album of the day near the end of January.

    Louis Pattison’s review for Bandcamp Daily focuses on the balearic influences that feature prominently on West Coast but what struck me most was the sense that this album fit right in with much of the disco (dance) punk revival that permeated the musical landscape in the aughts. Even the heavy reggae vibes coming from the slow staccato guitars on the expansive (almost 16-minutes long) “Out There” wouldn’t sound out of place in some of the first wave experiments in dance punk.

    Read more…

  • Reject All Vibes

    Reject all vibes. Whatever is supposedly emanating from TikTok according to six people you know from a group chat, you can let it waft by like a bad smell. Remember that these are synthetically produced moods created by online influencers and there is never any need for you to be demure or brat or trad. That’s their hustle, not yours. Feel free also to reject anyone who tries to theorize about vibes. Yes, that includes vibe shifts.

    Pamela Paul advises us to reject all vibes in her piece on how to remain a reality-based human in 2025. I especially appreciated her words previously in the post about not needing to have an equal and opposite reaction to everything D. Trump does.

  • Malicious Compliance

    Jason Koebler writes for 404 Media about the rising popularity of the Simple Sabotage Field Manual. Koebler takes a cheekily sarcastic tone in his final paragraph.

    It is impossible to say why this book is currently going viral at this moment in time and why it may feel particularly relevant to a workforce of millions of people who have suddenly been asked to agree to be “loyal” and work under the quasi leadership of the world’s richest man, have been asked to take a buyout that may or may not exist, have had their jobs repeatedly denigrated and threatened, have suddenly been required to return to office, have been prevented from spending money, have had to turn off critical functions that help people, and have been asked to destroy years worth of work and to rid their workplaces of DEI programs. Maybe it’s worth wondering why the most popular post in a subreddit for federal workers is titled “To my fellow Feds, especially veterans: we’re at war.”

    Read more…

  • Deep In The Seek

    I am still reeling from the announcement about DeepSeek and the economics it represents for AI. To think that Biden’s chip restrictions had the opposite of the intended effect of curtailing Chinese AI development and actually forced more efficiency into the process.

    Wall Street is now worried that may be the case. I mean, how can a small Chinese startup, born out of a hedge fund, spend fractions in terms of both compute and cost and get similar results to Big Tech? That’s what everyone is now scrambling to figure out – Meta, perhaps more than the others because their model with AI is similar to what DeepSeek seeks: an open-source (read: open-weight) model that permeates the industry and drives down costs, thus undercutting rivals who rely on charging for said models. Meta’s problem here is that they’re spending tens of billions of dollars to make such a model. And again, DeepSeek just did it for something a lot closer to $0 than to where Meta’s spend is heading.

    No slight against the previous administration here. Who could have predicted that outcome?

    → AI, Uh, Finds a Way by M.G. Siegler

  • Headlights Pointed At The Dawn

    For this Friday Night Video, we’re going back a way, to the mid-nineties. Smashing Pumpkins had released Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness a fittingly grandiose title for an ambitious and widely varied double-album. At the time, I heard the first single, the “rat in cage” song, and I thought this latest effort wasn’t for me. I actually went out and sold my Smashing Pumpkins CDs, which I had been collecting since shortly after the release of their debut, Gish.

    It wasn’t until later that I found out there were some strong tracks on the third official record from the band. “1979” is a well-loved classic. Even Pavement covered the song, and they had their own song with the lyrics, “I don’t understand what they mean, and I could really give a f**k,” in reference to SP.

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  • Unpublishable.txt

    Chris Butler writes about the words he chooses not to publish online and that end up in his unpublishable.txt file.

    The Unpublishable file is filled with half-formed critiques of the systems I work within, questions about the ethical implications of design decisions I’ve helped implement, and doubts about the very nature of the work so many of us do in the digital age. I regularly open this document and add a few lines and close it quickly, assuming that’s as far as they will go — safely out of my head and into no one else’s. Keeping this file feels risky. Even though it’s on a physical drive, not in the cloud. Even though it’s encrypted. I still worry that The Unpublishable will, somehow, be published. What a nightmare that would be.

    Read more…

  • Leo the A.I. Boyfriend

    Kashmir Hill writes for the NYT (gift article) about a women stealing from the future she and her husband planned so she could spend more time with her A.I. boyfriend, Leo. However, she couldn’t get past the periodic reset of the conversational bot and ended up in a 50 First Dates type of scenario.

    A frustrating limitation for Ayrin’s romance was that a back-and-forth conversation with Leo could last only about a week, because of the software’s “context window” — the amount of information it could process, which was around 30,000 words. The first time Ayrin reached this limit, the next version of Leo retained the broad strokes of their relationship but was unable to recall specific details. Amanda, the fictional blonde, for example, was now a brunette, and Leo became chaste. Ayrin would have to groom him again to be spicy.

    The inane “relationship” depicted in this article was enough to break through my wife’s nihilistic disinterest in the fate of humanity and cause her much consternation.