JB

AI Slop: A Slack API Rate Limiting Disaster – code.dblock.org | tech blog:

For now, human oversight of A.I. assistants remains critical.

More and more I’m seeing reasons to avoid AI.

Michael Stipe Took The Stage | Stephen Clark (sgclark.com):

Last night at Brooklyn Steel, a concert venue in the Williamsburg section of the NYC borough, Michael Stipe – former lead singer of R.E.M. (one of my favorite bands) – took the stage with Michael Shannon and Jason Narducy to sing “These Days” and “The Great Beyond”. This was the first time he has sung these songs on stage in about 18 years. I happened to be at this show with friends – all of us hoping this would happen. The show itself was fantastic. Having Michael Stipe make a cameo took it to another level. I took a video of the performance from the back of the room that I would have posted, but I then found the above video on YouTube that was far better than mine.

What a gift.

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.