nikhil.io

Her agent brought his granddaughter up to her NYC place one day, the girl was like 8 or 9. She asked her what she painted. Agnes had a rose in a small vase on her kitchen table & asked the girl “do you think this rose is beautiful?” & the girl said yes. Then Agnes put the rose in a cupboard & asked the girl “is the rose still beautiful?” & the girl said yes, & Agnes said “that’s what I paint”.

Maybe that’s a load of hooey. But I love it.

Via my buddy Mark, the one who drew that picture of me. Here’s the internet version of the story. First time I saw her work was at the Des Moines Art Center and I remember falling in Love and immediately, just squinting and staring and standing there. My head and heart went calm. I am so happy I got to see this sage’s work up close again.

Mark followed up with this:

Saw that it was revenge-themed and had to watch it.

Now assume that all the fears about immigrants and their seemingly concerted project to pollute and raze Western Civilization are true. Assume that a small, imported minority are indeed responsible for over half of unspeakable crimes. Assume that Europe does need a long and hard look at the quality and quantity of the people it permits across its borders.

Assume all these things are true. Assume that a vast majority of Europeans are just tired of this but are muzzled by The Left, that there is this abject need for a bold artist to bring these issues to light.

This ain’t it. It is an irredeemably shit statement about all these concerns and is no Death Wish. The script, background score, acting, cinematography, action sequences, pacing, editing, everything: it is laughably bad. If UATX offered a BFA in Film, this would be a hastily cobbled-together senior project¹.

Spoiler: The protagonist guns down an entire immigrant family for a ghastly crime committed by one of its members as ‘justice’. The director thinks this is just shock value, artistic flourish. All bad people are immigrants. There isn’t a single decent one. And lest you think this is a racist rampage, he murders a white ‘woke’ judge too.

Now the very fact that this strange and hateful pile of shit was panned and banned means two things:

1. It must contain Truth and Beauty. At least to the “Help! I’m being repressed!” types.
2. It will be promoted by the world’s biggest edgelord and saddest human being.

Speaking of protagonist. He may be an illegal immigrant himself. But he’s wealthy, white, handsome, and pursues extralegal justice in a black turtleneck so he’s cool. Adapting a popular quote with online parlour firebrands: “He who saves his Country Civilization does not violate any Law.” Other reactions to the movie include lovely sentiments like “This is a checklist” and bumper stickers like “Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent” which I imagine one places right under that totally badass America/Punisher logo. You will hear him offer every single ultra-right xenophobic talking point in a monotone because he is dispassionate and ‘stoic’ and this manly, ubermensch Howard Roark-type.

He is portrayed by Armie Hammer who plays a dude who murders people immigrants for the transgressions he was accused of in real life:

In the 2021 scandal, Hammer, 39, was accused of psychological and sexual abuse by multiple women, some of whom shared messages attributed to Hammer detailing cannibalistic fantasies. One woman, with whom he had an alleged four-year affair while married to his now ex-wife, Elizabeth Chambers, accused him of rape. Hammer denied all the allegations and was never charged.

We live in a simulation. I wondered how they roped him in for the main role. As that article explains, he appears to have done this out of desperation:

Hammer himself touched upon this in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, saying that he only received a 50-page script after being approached to star in Citizen Vigilante.

“I was like, ‘Where’s the rest?’” he said, before impersonating Boll’s response: “‘No, no, no! Ve just go and shoot and have fun. Ve vant you to be great!’”

He also said in the same interview that he was so desperate to get back into acting, he “would have done a fucking cat food commercial.”

and expresses regret in that same article:

[…] A source within Hammer’s team claimed that the actor cried when he first saw the film in full.

“The first time he saw it, he was in tears,” they told Belloni. “He called me and said, ‘Fuck. This is hateful, disgusting.’”

but, the good American that he is:

[…] Hammer was paid approximately $250,000 for the role. Despite being unhappy about the final results, the source indicated that Hammer would reprise his role for the sequel – if the price is right.

‘- you know, I’ve either had a family, a job, something
has always been in the
way
but now
I’ve sold my house, I’ve found this
place, a large studio, you should see the space and
the light.
for the first time in my life I’m going to have a place and
the time to
create.’
no baby, if you’re going to create
you’re going to create whether you work
16 hours a day in a coal mine
or
you’re going to create in a small room with 3 children
while you’re on
welfare,
you’re going to create with part of your mind and your
body blown
away,
you’re going to create blind
crippled
demented,
you’re going to create with a cat crawling up your
back while
the whole city trembles in earthquakes, bombardment,
flood and fire.
baby, air and light and time and space
have nothing to do with it
and don’t create anything
except maybe a longer life to find
new excuses
for.

I’d also need a cool studio space with 18ft ceilings and giant windows with great views of the city to ‘spark’ things you know?

The answer choices gave me quite a lot to think about regarding this whole business and where it’s going. I’m somewhere between:

The Worrier: It’s real, it’s powerful, and that’s exactly why it worries you — not in a doom way, in a ‘we should really be more careful than we’re being’ way. You take the capabilities seriously and the risks seriously, and you’d like the conversation to be a few degrees more sober.

The Disillusioned: You watched this movie already with crypto and you know how it ends. It’s oversold, the value is thinner than advertised, and the concrete harms are piling up while everyone argues about the rapture. You document the gap between the promise and the receipts, meticulously.

Sounds about right but I’d say it’s demonstrably far more useful than blockchain and crypto (which have their uses but are not the panaceas they were hyped to be.)

(Cached)

Back in 2019 or so, my friend Mark asked me what I thought this image depicted. I was totally stumped and guessed fungal mycelia or birds. Drones? Terrible.

Nope, they’re wolf packs! 🐺 And the map shows how territorial wolves are. They created it “from 68,000+ GPS locations from 7 wolves in different packs during summer 2018.” The area here is the Greater Voyageurs Ecosystem which is a giant forest way up north in Minnesota.

Here’s an updated version from 2023-2024.

Badass.

A wonderfully fresh take. I especially love this one.

Via Catherine:

This is true happiness: to have no ambition and to work like a horse as if you had every ambition. To live far from (your people), not to need them and yet to love them. To have the stars above, the land to your left and the sea to your right and to realize of a sudden that in your heart, life has accomplished its final miracle.

Related (and also via Catherine 🥰): a most lovely poem by Mary Oliver called “The Summer Day”

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

For nearly six years and counting, I’ve had the misfortune of using Microsoft Teams, an infernal piece of software that I am not entirely unconvinced isn’t sadistic psychological research into discovering novel UI/UX anti-patterns.

As I tried my best to use it today for a meeting, I realized that I’d rather tell people I sold crack cocaine or ran a puppy mill than divulge that I’m an engineer at Microsoft who works on Teams.

(Addressed to myself. I look forward to eating crow over most of this.)

To use LLMs effectively as a programmer,

1. You still need to know what to tell them¹.
   Be explicit. Especially with success/failure conditions. Especially when laying out a brand new project or module.

2. You need to check all the work.
   “Trust But Verify.” Did you solve the right problem? Are your tests testing the right thing? Are the docstrings and comments actually helpful and correct? Is the generated code maintainable, modular, readable? Are you confident you’ll be able to integrate features and bugfixes after you stepped away for six months?

3. You need to maintain that Vibe Coding is bullshit for anything other than proofs of concept.
   And atrophies your skills and your passion (that last part makes you a human being and not the thing they want to replace you with.) If you’re not a programmer, go wild. Citizen Coding ftw. And if your app blows up, thank you for ensuring our job security.

Wisdom and Experience will still matter. Generalists and specialists will still matter. Replacement fears are mostly unfounded and driven by greedy and/or uninformed people. Don’t listen to them. Hone your craft daily, be as good as possible at it, keep your chin up, learn how to use this tool, and you will be fine.

The Future #

The future will be complicated and nuanced and unpredictable. But here I go anyway.

The free-use, ad-free gravy train will end soon, especially with OpenAI and Anthropic. You will pay by the token or at least be inundated by stultifying and privacy-abusing ads. You will understand the true cost of inference and learn the larger and depressing reason behind how non-Google companies continued to attract investment (“Radix malorum est cupiditas.”)

Any personal AI that is both unobtrusive and effective 99% of the time (as endorsed by users) is what will endure. Think of OCR when you hit spacebar on an image of a receipt on Mac, but at a very advanced level. Good design is very hard and people don’t like it when you shove your shiny new toy into their faces, especially when they use your product remembering your cartoon villain glee at replacing them.

On-device LLMs, most likely fine-tuned open models, that are ‘good enough’ and take you 80%+ of the way there are the future (cached.)

Wife suggested this as another must-read on the heels of the last must-read by this up and coming author named Flannery O’Connor. I noted then that O’Connor showed “good, intriguing promise as a writer.”

This Oates gal is no different. I’d say she demonstrates exceedingly high competence and promise with words and images and flow.

Spoilers to follow.

This is as powerfully horrifying a fucking story as the last one. I might ask my wife to suggest some some buoyant material the next time. Same feeling where I sat up straight, read incredulously, got swept up into this delirium where my head screamed “Noooooo!”, and read it at least twice to figure out the horror of what had happened first and what it was all about next.

There is a lot of interpretation and commentary and even a movie (starring Laura Dern, fittingly called Smooth Talk). I was very surprised to see a dedication to Bob Dylan. And Oates herself thought that “Death and the Maiden” was “rather too explicit”:

Oates said that she dedicated the story to Bob Dylan because she was inspired to write it after listening to his song “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”. The story was originally named “Death and the Maiden”.

In subsequent drafts the story changed its tone, its focus, its language, its title. It became “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Written at a time when the author was intrigued by the music of Bob Dylan, particularly the hauntingly elegiac song “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” it was dedicated to Bob Dylan.

The Antagonist #

This is at least based on Charles Schmid, AKA the Pied Piper of Tucson, a notorious serial killer from the 60’s.

Schmid was called the “Pied Piper” because he was charismatic and had many friends in Tucson’s teenaged community. For a time, the members of his teenage coterie would keep the secrets of his murders […] He spent part of his time on Tucson’s Speedway Boulevard, picking up girls and drinking with friends, although he tended to be a loner. […] Schmid was a short man who wore cowboy boots stuffed with newspapers and flattened cans to make him appear taller; he explained to impressionable teenagers his resultant rolling gait was a result of a “crippling fight” with Mafia members. He used lip balm, pancake makeup and created an artificial mole on his cheek. Schmid also stretched his lower lip with a clothespin to make it resemble Elvis Presley’s.

So there’s that.

But then the interpretation and symbolism and mythology go to bizarre and truly fascinating places and she is really chill with all of it.

He’s Satan: cloven-hooved, weird gait, needs to support himself. He knows things he cannot possibly know. Connie knows there’s something seriously amiss but cannot help being curious and cannot help being powerless. The allure! The license plate on his jalopy is 33 19 17. Judges 19:17 is where the title of the story comes from. The sum 33 + 19 + 17 is 69 which would be of deep interest to Oates’ sparring partner on Twitter. Oates should’ve squeezed a 420 in there to get him to actually read her work (“guys… guys…”). I’ve read about how “An Old Friend” is to be read as “An Old Fiend.”

Or maybe he’s Pan (he says the place she came from doesn’t exist any longer, and where she had intended to go is also no longer an option) or the Big Bad Wolf (says he can easily destroy her house/haven.) Most likely Satan though.

WTF Happened? #

No idea and I don’t think I can think about this more, really. It’s graphic without being graphic. The wailing, sweat, resignation, surrender, Connie’s sacrifice and (possible?) violation, and sheer sinisterness in the last few paragraphs are experiences I won’t ever forget. Consider:

“My sweet little blue-eyed girl,” he said in a half-sung sigh that had nothing to do with her brown eyes but was taken up just the same by the vast sunlit reaches of the land behind him and on all sides of him—so much land that Connie had never seen before and did not recognize except to know that she was going to it.

Jesus. I think I’ll just settle with what Oates said about her work:

It was cast in a mode of fiction to which I am still partial—indeed, every third or fourth story of mine is probably in this mode – “realistic allegory,” it might be called. It is Hawthornean, romantic, shading into parable.

Okay. This is not what it is but “It’s a parable about the monsters you’ll encounter as you’re growing up” is fine by me. I’ll work with my wife to read some ‘light Hawthornean’ things next.

Here’s a short film adaptation on Vimeo.

Paul Stiff wrote this inspirational list of dos and don’ts for typographers in 1999. It was written in response to an email circulated by Robin Kinross requesting typographic equivalents for the Dogme 95 injunctions of Danish film-makers.

1. Readers come first, second, and third. Designing is not done for peer approval or prizes.
2. Readers are neither ‘target audiences’ nor clichés: they bring their own purposes and questions to every encounter with text.
3. ‘Reading’ is not one-dimensional: there are many reading acts.
4. Content matters: design nothing that is not worth reading.
5. Stand by meaning.
6. Embrace the big picture.
7. Attend to details.
8. Looking good is better than looking different.
9. Looking good is worthless without making sense.
10. Designing and making is collective work: many brains and hands are involved. The designer must not be credited unless all other workers are also credited.

I am very little concerned with confronting, disrupting, or disturbing. I am too tired, too old now to be about that sort of activity. No longer do I wish to be an irritant, but rather a spreader of balm.

From a lovely zine I read in Asheville NC in June 2023.

A graduate student used the word “voluntold” in conversation. I’d never heard of it and love it.

Voluntold is widely associated with the military and may indeed have its origins in military slang. Embrace the Suck, a 2017 book of military slang, suggests that soldiers may have been saying it since the 1970s, but it seems voluntold really caught on in the 2000s. In a 2004 interview with KoreAm Journal, a soldier noted that some volunteered for their assignments while others were voluntold. A 2014 Business Insider article listed voluntold as a word that “only military people will know.”

Here’s a cheatsheet for common things. Amazing stuff you can do these days with just CSS.

Spoilers!

Binged with the wife over Christmas Break. Extremely well-written, with deliberate and meditative sequences¹, truly breathtaking camerawork, fantastic background scores, and large doses of dark humor. All the stuff we’ve come to expect from Gilligan & Co. who appear to have used every single penny of the $15 million Apple and Sony lavished on each episode.

I’ve spoken to quite a few people whose interest waned after the first three or so episodes. Mine certainly did but I stuck it through and realized that remonstrations about length and how boring many episodes are (a) missing the entire point about inviting you to explore isolation and its effects and (b) borne of Social Media Attention Spans. Consider²:

“For instance, Netflix — the standard way to make an action movie, that we learned, was you usually have three set pieces. One in the first act, one in the second, one in the third — and the big one with all the explosions and you spend most of your money on that one in the third act. That’s your kind of finale.”

The Departed actor added, “Now, [Netflix is] like, ‘Can we get a big one in the first five minutes?’ We want people to stay tuned in. And it wouldn’t be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue because people are on their phones while they’re watching.”

My wife, a writer and editor, told me about Gilligan’s stance on AI in creative fields (it’s not very complimentary) and it really shows.

I don’t know that a reasonable person would think they’re benevolent and harmless after the second half: The scene where The Hive abruptly stops chanting after Kusimayu’s transformation (and abandons the little goat) was very chilling.

Apple ordered two seasons and I cannot wait to see how the writers (hopefully) wrap things up. Lots of theories abound given the hints dropped throughout the first season (e.g. Finnegan’s Wake, mentioned in the very first episode, ‘loops’ to the beginning). Even if the second season sucks, I’d very much love to see what they do with Chekov’s Nuke:

We had an ending that was perfectly good. It would have been satisfying but not as satisfying. And we got a note. You know the old thing about how executives always have stupid notes. Actually, Apple and Sony said, “Is there an even better ending to be had?” And we listened, and I’m really glad they gave us that note. It made for a better ending.

A devops engineer told me to read this “phenomenal” story at the Caesar’s Palace Lobby Bar in Vegas seven years ago over drinks after a tiring day at a conference¹.

My wife’s an O’Connor stan and called it “one of the greats” when I told her I was going to read it. I also told her I lost my shit when I opened a Google Document someone had posted with the story and found an “AI Summary” panel next to the text. A killer feature for VC champions who cannot scrape together enough time and attention for fifteen letter-sized pages (12pt, single-spaced, 1.5 inch margins) of a short story, what with being laden with the solemn and excruciating burden of buoying the economy on a cushion of mostly hot farts.

My resting state is composed almost entirely of pathos and general discomfiture.

This is my first FOC story. I enjoyed it so much I read it twice. Here’s the full text. Sans summary for you’ve always been able to do that in your fucking head.

Spoilers. #

She’s really funny. Some examples: Just everything leading up to the line “The grandmother decided that she would not mention that the house was in Tennessee.” Mr. Teagarden’s Coca-Cola fortune. “We’ve had an ACCIDENT!” And my absolute favorite: a shellshocked, orange-nosed cat hanging off its owners neck “like a caterpillar”. Love it.

And then it all goes dark. I wouldn’t even call this sudden; you barely notice where you are when it changes. ‘Slowly, then suddenly.’ Complete, masterful control over cadence. The Wikipedia page has a lot of quotes by O’Connor herself about what it all means at the end. She calls herself “a Catholic writer” and there’s all this stuff about her “anagogical vision”² and extending Christian Grace, even when your life is imperiled and even in your dying moments, and allowing God to flow through it all.

Two things that kept coming to mind were (1) this is about Satan and (2) this is about the simplicity, not banality, of Evil. And like the Misfit, some people know they’re being evil but are too far along and too embarrassed to concede their errors and mend their ways. The Grandma appeals to the Misfit’s good provenance and original nature. It doesn’t matter. It’s just how it is for him now. This is who he is, with “no real pleasure” in continuing to be so.

My daddy said I was a different breed of dog from my brothers and sisters. ‘You know,’ Daddy said, ‘it’s some that can live their whole life out without asking about it and it’s others has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters. He’s going to be into everything!’"

Overall, and speaking as someone who’s written JavaScript for a living, I’d say Ms. O’Connor shows good, intriguing promise as a writer. Tip-top stuff. I look forward to reading more of her work and soon.

Here’s a reading by Hannah Joyner.

Tons of features but, to me, the coolest things are: easy UI controls, git-friendliness, and reactivity.

Messed with Claude Code over Christmas break and, while quite impressed, was unsure of how people used it to create and manage non-trivial projects.

My initial thoughts: (a) Be explicit and (b) Check the work.

And the answer to my prayers. Activate a ‘multi-clipboard’ with a very simple and memorable ⌘Shiftc

brew install maccy but please get it via Gumroad or the App Store.

Saw with the wife. Three hours long, utterly engrossing, takes its own sweet time, not a moment wasted. Features some big names and incredible performances throughout (Spencer Tracy, Judy Garland, Marlene Dietrich… and a young Shatner!). But, and in order, Montgomery Clift and Maximilian Schell steal the show. The former’s only on screen for about 15 minutes or so and is so utterly innocent and vulnerable he makes you feel like you want to reach into the TV and hug him. The latter won an Academy Award for his intense role as a defender of monsters. One of the best court dramas I’ve seen.

This is also a very necessarily sad subject. There is so much in the movie that gave us a Rusty Cohle “Time is a Flat Circle” vibes. There isn’t much we felt and discussed that’s new under the sun. We need to remember history and speak the Truth (and to power) no matter how difficult it is. My attorney buddy told me that Burt Lancaster’s¹ character, Dr. Ernst Janning - Reich Minister of Justice - was one of his favorite characters. His climactic monologue will make you wonder why we keep making the same mistakes over and over again.

You can and should watch the movie for free.

Windows 11 is an ad platform and AI shit-showcase masquerading as a serious operating system that serious people are supposed to use to get serious things done. Bookmarking this in case I have to use this infernal piece of software.

It’s all too sad really. I’ve used it since Windows 3.1 and still think Windows 7 was a fantastic OS (used it exclusively for gaming). Looks like I might be good with the Windows 10 Enterprise IOT LTSC version, at least until 2032.

I photographed these at a 2015 exhibit in Chicago and saved them to perhaps use as funky webpage backgrounds. I still remember them being so beautiful and absolutely hypnotic in person. They were designed in Austria, Paris, Munich, and Russia.

As told by Dr. Mihaly Mezei, Professor at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, at a seminar at my department.

It reminded me of an old joke […] Khruschev and Bulganin, at that time when there was a Soviet Union, were visiting the Queen of England. And so Khruschev notices that Bulganin puts a silver spoon in his pocket during the dinner.

So Khruschev said, "Well, ladies and gentlemen, I want to show you a magic trick. Here is a silver spoon. I put it in my pocket. Bulganin, take it out!

I really need to read this book and soon.

Cached.

TL;DR: Get this.

---

A reasonable and normal human being would prepare to clean their laptop’s keyboard by getting together a cleaning cloth (e.g. microfiber) and solution (e.g. isopropyl alcohol). They would then power down their laptop and clean their keyboard (and maybe trackpad and screen) before pushing the power button on again.

That last part would not get you promoted at Apple. When your MacBook is shut down, any key is the power key. Because fuck you and your reasonable expectations.

The official guidance is to employ a can of compressed air. Make sure it’s really compressed so it gets rid of both debris and grease.

You can also issue terminal incantations, and hold down several keys and the power button in the shut down state (which is not guaranteed to work on newer laptops)¹.

In your (unreasonable) frustration, you can make a lovely, free, & helpful little utility that addresses this problem and attempt to publish it to the App Store. It will be rejected as being “not useful” because Apple, run by visionaries who care deeply about design, knows better and would really love it if you shut the fuck up.

A play on Mr. Lovenstein’s original by Dorsa Amir.

Given that his early songs, his voice and his persona were drenched in drink, how hard was it for him to give up?

“Oh, you know, it was tough. I went to AA. I’m in the programme. I’m clean and sober. Hooray. But it was a struggle.”

Does he miss the odd night-cap?

“Miss drinking?” he says, sounding genuinely surprised. “Nah. Not the way I was drinking. No, I’m happy to be sober. Happy to be alive. I found myself in some places I can’t believe I made it out of alive.”

That bad, huh?

“Oh yeah. People with guns. People with gunshot wounds. People with heavy drug problems. People who carried guns everywhere they went, always had a gun. You live like that,” he says, without a trace of irony, “you attract lower company.”

Did he write a different kind of song when he was drinking?

He thinks about this for an instant, then says, “No. I don’t think so. I mean, one is never completely certain when you drink and do drugs whether the spirits that are moving through you are the spirits from the bottle or your own. And, at a certain point, you become afraid of the answer. That’s one of the biggest things that keeps people from getting sober: they’re afraid to find out that it was the liquor talking all along.”

Also:

Like Charles Bukowski said: “People think I’m down on 5th and Main at the Blarneystone throwin’ back shooters and smokin’ a cigar, but I’m on the top floor of the health club with a towel in my lap, watchin’ Johnny Carson.”

The Ashes, one of Cricket’s most hallowed tournaments held every two years between archrivals Australia and England since 1882, proved to be yet another theater of the ongoing embarrassment of English Cricket and its obdurate affection for a strange and ineffective philosophy, many notable individual heroics aside. I sincerely take no joy at all in this: everyone enjoys a nice and tense set of games between evenly matched opponents in any sport.

No pundit so of course here’s a trenchant analysis. Evident home advantage aside, Australia just played meat-n-potatoes Test Cricket: Bowlers suffocated with near-perfect line and length. Batsmen didn’t indulge in outlandish heroics (“Vibe Cricket”). And critically, every person responsible for catching a ball (you know, to get the other team out) made sure to wash their hands of any butter from breakfast. And there was, at the minimum, a ‘concept of a plan’. That’s all. Small things, great attention, done to perfection.

England managed to talk a big talk and do little else. All the dropped catches aside, I will not forget how their spearhead fast bowler, a very talented fella, got mouthy with and punished by the greatest Test batsman in a generation, all while dressed like a recently promoted minor henchman in a Guy Ritchie movie: “Bowl fast when there’s nothing going on Champion.” I cannot think of a more symbolic summary of both the series and the state of English Cricket than the minute and thirty seconds of that video.

Since 2013 England has won 10 and drew 6 of 38 Test matches against Australia.

My part of the internet is abuzz with the departure of an Apple Exec named Alan Dye who just may be responsible for all the dogshit UI/UX decisions at the company over the last decade or so that heavily favored looks over functionality to a lot of unheeded frustration and dismay. John Gruber offers a fascinating account of his seemingly ill-deserved accession and shittiness as an design leader. Here’s a zinger from the footnotes:

I have good reason to believe that Ive, in private, would be the first person to admit that [he made a mistake promoting Dye]. A fan of Liquid Glass Jony Ive is not. I believe he sees Dye as a graphic designer, not a user interface designer — and not a good graphic designer at that. I don’t think Alan Dye could get a job as a barista at LoveFrom [Ive’s design shop].

Oof. Here are two other posts on the drama.

The absolute nuke is an encore by designer Juan Buis of “Liquid Ass” fame.

Now I’m told it gets better:

This is not the real news.

The real news is that he is being replaced with Steve Lemay, one of the most OG interaction designers at Apple.

Not someone with a marketing or packaging design background; someone who sweats over pixels and knows what “discoverability” and “affordance” and “feedback” and all those dirty human factors words mean.

https://patents.google.com/?inventor=stephen+lemay

Really hoping I smile at my nerdrage over “bullshit visions borne of arrogance, fart-sniffing, and desperation” a year or two from now.

So curious that such a wealthy man never posts anything that indicates that he enjoys or is even aware of what virtually everyone appreciates — scenes from nature, pet dog or cat, praise for a movie, music, a book (but doubt that he reads); pride in a friend’s or relative’s accomplishment; condolences for someone who has died; pleasure in sports, acclaim for a favorite team; references to history. In fact he seems totally uneducated, uncultured. The poorest persons on Twitter may have access to more beauty & meaning in life than the “most wealthy person in the world.”

“wherever he goes, he wants to leave” - that’s because when he gets there, he has brought his own self along; & whatever club he’s invited to join has been devalued by the invitation.

It’s always The Hitchhiker’s Guide. I don’t think this man has read the book or the series in its entirety. If he has, I suppose it must be “being on the spectrum” that would explain his abject inability to see that Adams is ridiculing (and would mercilessly ridicule) people exactly like him.

Oates appears to have stirred him into critiquing film (source). Can’t wait for him to be the most trenchant presence here as well.

I go to a pizzeria at around 2:00AM.

“Hey man can I get a slice?”
“No man only burger.”

Turns around, gets back to putting trays away.

Think before you speak, don’t waste peoples’ time, this most certainly ain’t Kansas.

I ♥️ NY 🍕

(Two large slices, cheese and pepperoni.)

And why it was very silly of me to think of them as mere adornments:

The larger fur liner creates a larger boundary layer [a thin layer of air created by molecules bumping into each other].

(Cached: fur, no fur)

And LLMLingua (Microsoft) will compress things for context windows.

Thank you, Almighty Algorithm, for this absolutely hypnotic piece of music, choreography, and camerawork.

More videos by the conservatory. Song by Il Est Vilaine, choreography by Martha Nichols, and camerawork by Devin Jamieson.

And here’s the Dancer in the Blue Shorts.

I was tickled to try out the Windows 3.11, Windows 95, and Windows 7 ones. Simpler, purer times.

Covers testing/mocking, databases, Redis, performance. For engineers at Stream. Cached.

Was looking for an alternative to my trusty “10 Hours of IceBreaker Idling in the Arctic” and found this.

over the last couple of years i’ve been making really really really quiet music to listen to when i do yoga or sleep or meditate or panic. i ended up with 4 hours of music and have decided to give it away.

it’s really quiet: no drums, no vocals, just very slow calm pretty chords and sounds and things for sleeping and yoga and etc. and feel free to share it or give it away or whatever, it’s not protected or anything, or at least it shouldn’t be.

thanks,
moby

via OpenCulture

Advice from an eminent scientist I worked for and looked up to (and still do) at my very first job after college.

Just showing up – on time, rested, clean, appropriately dressed, and well fed – is half the battle (50%).

Having enthusiasm and maintaining a patient and positive attitude despite adversity is half of the remaining half (75%).

Knowing your likes and dislikes (and your strengths and weaknesses) accurately enough that you can formulate some clear life goals that are well aligned with who you really are is half of the remaining half (87.5%).

Using the clear image of these goals to guide your decisions in such a way that you spend most of your time doing things that you enjoy and are good at is half of the remaining half (93.75%).

Surrounding yourself with people who are honest, optimistic, and who like you for who you are, is half of the remaining half (96.875%). Being honest with yourself and others – and obeying the ethic of reciprocity in everything you do – is half of the remaining half (98.4375%).

If you do all of these things most of the time, it has been my experience that good fortune can be counted on to fill in any gaps that occur and to carry you well beyond your original dreams and goals.

I read “iPhone Pocket” and got very excited about the prospect of an updated iPhone Mini (the best phone I’ve used). But lo, a $230 mankini for your fucking phone from a very unserious group of people at Apple:

“Courage” indeed.

Saw with the wife. Phenomenal cinematography, set and costume design, and suspense-building. Hugh Grant and Chloe East are just excellent. Very promising plot that was underserved by ill-informed, incomplete, and sophomoric arguments against Abrahamic traditions and religion writ large.

Made me think of how insufferable I must have been in my early 20s, when New Atheism was in vogue, and I had killer arguments against faith and religion that were as necessary and delicate and nuanced as a loud fart in a cathedral. Not religious in the least but that me would’ve really loved Grant’s ramblings in this movie.

Thing is, I don’t think the writers would have landed the plane even if they’d consulted an actual academic or theologian and didn’t just rely on a 3-hour YouTube speedrun of the Best of Hitchens and Dawkins.

You can think whatever you’d like about Mormon missionaries and their obligations but it can be dangerous work. I remember two fellas visiting me in 2011. I gave them some water and we chatted. They were much younger than me but had a lot of stories to tell.

I get around 8-10 calls from 1-8xx numbers every single day, most of them pertaining to financial scams (I get as many text messages as well). A few leave voicemail and the GIF at the end of this note shows about two weeks’ worth. I’ve taken to silencing unknown numbers on my iPhone. The Do Not Call Registry is on a quick little break right now.

Americans have received 4.1 billion robocalls so far this year, or around 135 million each day. A recent survey by Talker Research of 10,500 general population adults indicates that Americans get twice as many scam calls and texts as any other country (and even more than countries that have passed useful consumer protection laws and have functional regulators).

Actually doing something about a problem everyone agrees is awful would be antithetical to Free Market principles, a blot on the idea of Freedom itself, and would precipitate the demise of our thriving republic. Because all regulation is evil, I’ll just sack up and wait for The Market to sort it all out 🥰

A Sample of Laissez-Faire Blessings, Delivered Daily #

Spoilers!

A most odd thing. Can’t find who recommended it to me. It’s only around 70 pages and is a magical realist retelling of Stalin’s ascent to power and his horrible and bloody legacy due to his involvement with a very licentious¹ and decently interesting vampire coven². There’s this Dorian Gray angle to the story that was rather confusing and I think unnnecessary. I really didn’t understand the ending (or maybe just don’t want to accept it).

Régis Penet captures the hopelessness, danger, and decrepitude very well.

Pretty average cop infiltrates crime boss’ family story. Like enjoying a Burger King double (with large fries and a coke) instead of a gourmet The Wire. Nice cinematography, great performance by Maria Cordsen as Ashley. There might be a second season.

Whoever did the soundtrack deserves a giant raise. Here’s the opening track.

Obsessive organizer of things and see myself using this daily.

Short film by a young Villeneuve. One of the nicer gifts of The Almighty Algorithm. You can watch it here:

Spoilers!

I’m glad I saw it on a projector. Not sure if it’s a political statement (e.g. the chandeleir being their elite privilege (a ridiculous idea, untethered to anything ‘real’ or ‘permanent’) following them or one about the human condition and our fraught, parasitic relationationship with nature or just both. We never know how tall the building is: greed is a bottomless pit. This was years before Sicario and Dune and you can just see Villeneuve’s ease with and penchant for creating huge atmospheres and settings¹.