JB

How to start a record collection • Buttondown:

I tried to talk everyone out of buying vinyl not too long ago. It’s expensive. It’s a pain in the ass if you move. It takes up way too much space in your home. It warps in the heat. You’ll forget you already have something and buy it multiple times. People write about it when they’re trying to avoid writing about all the terrible things happening in the world. Worst of all, it introduces terrible people into your life: audiophiles. We covered all of these things. And yet, you did it anyway.

Congrats. I’m sorry.

Well, as long as you already bought all the equipment, it’d be a sin to see it going unused, so let’s go buy some records.

Pretty much the only thing I personally like on this list is Madonna’s Like a Prayer, and even that’s a stretch. I should probably post my own top ten albums, I always enjoy reading other folks' list and reasoning. Like he says, musical taste is very subjective.

Daring Fireball: Thoughts and Observations on the MacBook Neo:

And the PC world should take note. One of my briefings today included a side-by-side comparison between a MacBook Neo and an HP 14-inch laptop “in the same price category”. It was something like this one, with an Intel Core 5 chip, which costs $550. The HP’s screen sucks (very dim, way lower resolution), the speakers suck, the keyboard sucks, and the trackpad sucks. It’s a thick, heavy, plasticky piece of junk. I didn’t put my nose to it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it smells bad.

Damn, John… tell me how you really feel!

I think he's right about this new MacBook Neo, Apple is going to sell boatloads of these, and my bet is that they'll get great reviews.

Have We Forgotten How to Design?:

It is ironic, isn’t it? The premise of Waymo is to automate moving a human being on a road, but in reality, it cannot function without a human being’s intervention. I don’t even want this technology to begin with. I think it’s dangerous and reckless and unethical. But I can’t help but laugh at this “solution” because it reminds me of how scooter companies need to redistribute the scooters around a city when they all end up consolidated in a single spot.

If only they thought of ways to move people collectively instead of the vehicles.

Like a train.

Chart: US to overwhelmingly build clean power in 2026 | Canary Media:

This year, solar will provide 51% of the new utility-scale electricity capacity slated to come online, batteries will deliver 28%, and wind will add 14%, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Fossil gas, one of the polluting fuels most supported by the Trump administration, makes up only 7% of that new capacity. Coal, the other polluting fuel favored by the White House, does not appear in the ranks of power plants under construction.

The current madness of American politics is just a season, an unfortunate one that will soon pass.

Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software in push for digital independence | The Record from Recorded Future News:

In an interview with the local newspaper Politiken, Danish Minister for Digitalisation Caroline Stage Olsen confirmed that over half of the ministry’s staff will switch from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice next month, with a full transition to open-source software by the end of the year.

“If everything goes as expected, all employees will be on an open-source solution during the autumn,” Politiken reported, quoting Stage. The move would also help the ministry avoid the expense of managing outdated Windows 10 systems, which will lose official support in October.

The Danes are really leading the way here. It'll be interesting to watch how this turns out.

Microsoft's new 10,000-year data storage medium: glass - Ars Technica:

There’s been a lot of preliminary work demonstrating different aspects of a glass-based storage system. But in Wednesday’s issue of Nature, Microsoft Research announced Project Silica, a working demonstration of a system that can read and write data into small slabs of glass with a density of over a Gigabit per cubic millimeter.

I’m not a big fan of Microsoft, but this is just flat out cool.

Owning a $5M data center - comma.ai blog:

These days it seems you need a trillion fake dollars, or lunch with politicians to get your own data center. They may help, but they’re not required. At comma we’ve been running our own data center for years. All of our model training, metrics, and data live in our own data center in our own office. Having your own data center is cool, and in this blog post I will describe how ours works, so you can be inspired to have your own data center too.

Things have changed since 2014 when I was last administering a data center.

February 15, 2026 - by Heather Cox Richardson:

Extremist Republicans attacked their opponents as socialists even as their tax cuts and deregulation were moving money dramatically upward: at least $50 trillion moved upward from the bottom 90% to the top 1% between 1975 and 2020. Republican leaders and media figures fed their audiences the story that the middle class was imploding not because of Republican policies but because undeserving Black people, people of color, and feminist women demanded government handouts. This narrative fueled Trump’s political rise. He promised to fix the economic dispossession of those the modern economy left behind, by “draining the swamp,” restoring white men to control, and rebuilding the American middle class.

I have a vision of the future that I just can’t shake. It’s shaped my politics and many of the choices that I’ve made. It’s a vision of human experience over corporate profits, a vision of abundance and community. It’s a vision that, sadly, feels farther and farther away, but not yet entirely out of reach. When the future is continuously portrayed as something negative, like The Matrix, Blade Runner, or Fury Road, it can be hard to imagine something better. Something positive. But to build the future, we first must imagine the future. Iowa is a mid-sized Midwestern state, but still similar in size to several European nations. There’s a lot we could do as a state. So, allow me a small indulgence and join me in this daydream of how things could be.

Imagine living in a small Iowa farming town, but it’s not run down and falling apart… it’s vibrant, alive. Imagine walking down to a local railway station, a beautiful, clean, and modern building next to the city square. Inside you’d stop at a coffee shop run by a friend’s daughter for coffee and a pastry, before riding the train to Des Moines, or Ames, or Iowa City in minutes. Imagine looking out the window at the farmland as it passes by, not growing corn for ethanol, but diverse crops of actual, real food. There’s still plenty of sweet corn, of course, we just aren’t growing corn to burn anymore. The smaller farms employ more people, and switching to food production has revitalized the traditional family farm.

You wouldn’t only see the food-growing farms as you pass by; you’d see wind farms as well, generating the clean energy that the state now runs off of. As you pass through the suburbs on the way to the city center, you’d see green lawns and solar panels on every roof, each home generating the electricity it needs and trading the excess to the grid. The transition to clean energy and sustainable farming has cleaned the air and the water; Iowa now has some of the cleanest water in the country, no more worrying about nitrates or other cancer-causing chemicals when you want to fish or swim.

When you arrive in the city you either walk, ride a bike, or rent a scooter to your studio. Your work in engineering is in great demand, balancing the economic boom from investments in renewable energy and railways with making the best environmental decisions for everyone. You spend the day engrossed in your work, breaking for lunch at noon, and heading home around four. You pass by thousands of workers who are also working in the clean energy industry, building, maintaining, or managing solar panels, wind turbines, and train components. Iowa’s history of manufacturing and culture of building and making dovetailed nicely with the demands of clean energy that’s not reliant on international suppliers.

You hop on the train and, in 20 minutes or so, get off in your town and walk to the local grocery coop to pick up some fresh produce and dairy for dinner. Passing by the local brewery you think about stopping by later tonight to meet up with friends, but for now dip into the bakery for a loaf of fresh sourdough. Instead of carrying all that home, you borrow one of the city bikes and put your groceries in the basket; they know you’ll ride it back tomorrow. When you get home, your house senses that you’ve arrived and turns on the appropriate lights, opens the windows, and greets you as you walk in the door.

When I envision the future I think about jobs in clean energy, farmland that grows actual food, and a sustainable way of life that doesn’t actively destroy the world we live in. How can anyone argue against a life where everyone benefits? I can understand being skeptical, but I invite you to imagine with me. If you think the best we will ever be as a society is in the past, what hope is there for the future? I think we all want to live well, to feel safe, to be hopeful. There’s a way forward, but we have to choose to go there together, none of us can make the world on our own.

Plans unveiled for Australia's first new city in over 100 years:

American studio SOM and Australian studio Hassell have revealed plans for Bradfield City, a new, 114-hectare city in western Sydney, which is set to include 10,000 homes, a university campus and a two-hectare park.

What would it take to start building like this in the States?