I actually ran a few numbers based on current costs. If you're making $120K/yr in Florida and paying the average cost for a 1-bedroom rental in Tampa ($1,642/mo, as of April 2026 according to Apartments.com), your after-tax take home is $98 (24% federal tax bracket, no state tax) and you have $78.4K after rent. If you're making $180K/yr in California and paying the average cost for a 1-bedroom rental in San Jose ($2,705/mo), your after-tax take home is $130.5K (24% federal tax bracket, 9.3% CA state tax bracket) and you have $98K left after housing.

You can keep fiddling with the numbers, but in most cases, the premium for getting a tech job in Silicon Valley is sufficiently high that you really are making more in absolute dollars despite the higher cost of living.

It is infuriating how successful the "facts don't care about your feelings" crowd has been at pushing discriminatory legislation through in the last few years based largely on feelings rather than facts.

(Disclosure: I write 99% of my stuff in Emacs now, so I'm not going to go that far out on a limb for iWork. It's just that it's the best "Works"-style suite that I've used.)

Also, (1) the image is dithered, ha ha, and (2) The image on the page https://daringfireball.net/2020/05/dithering is an 863K PNG. (Which I bet we could still get down to a smaller size, granted.) It took me a bit to figure out what you're looking at -- the Dithering site on passport.online, where the cover art is inexplicably 3000x3000 pixels. I'm too tired to come up with a good crack about how that explains what I don't like about Ben Thompson, but I bet it's there.

So why did Bluesky end up proportionately more leftist (which is absolutely true)? Because while the moderation team at X may still remove/suppress posts that are illegal, X has, at a corporate level, very explicitly chosen a political side in a way that no other major social media company has. Bluesky's CEO has not, to the best of my knowledge, been promoting liberal conspiracy theories, hyping posts attacking conservatives, or joining the government to radically reshape it in ways that anyone even moderately right-of-center would find horrifying. When I read HN, it seems like those who still love Twitter/X seriously downplay how much of an effect Elon Musk's transformation into a loud, forceful reactionary -- and his insistence on making sure that Twitter/X reflects that transformation in the posts that it actively promotes to its users -- has had on its audience composition. Yes, I know there are still lots of people on Twitter who aren't Musk fans, aren't particularly political, might even be left-of-center, but his behavior has actively driven a lot of people off it.

tl;dr: Bluesky didn't actively choose to become left-of-center; Twitter actively chose to become far right, and those who were bothered by that but still wanted to be on social media largely ended up on Bluesky.

Hi. I have edited AI-generated first drafts of documentation -- in the last few months, so we are not talking about old and moldy models -- and describing the performance as "extremely well" is exceedingly generous. Large language models write documentation the same way they do all tasks, i.e., through statistical computation of the most likely output. So, in no particular order:

- AI-authored documentation is not aware of your house style guide. (No, giving it your style guide will not help.)

- AI-authored documentation will not match your house voice. (No, saying "please write this in the voice of the other documentation in this repo" will not help.)

- The generated documentation will tend to be extremely generic and repetitive, often effectively duplicating other work in your documentation repo.

- Internal links to other pages will often be incorrect.

- Summaries will often be superfluous.

- It will love "here is a common problem and here is how to fix it" sections, whether or not that's appropriate for the kind of document it's writing. (It won't distinguish reliably between tutorial documentation, reference documentation, and cookbook articles.)

- The common problems it tells you how to fix are sometimes imagined and frequently not actually problems worth documenting.

- It's subject to unnecessary digression, e.g., while writing a high-level overview of how to accomplish a task, it will mention that using version control is a good idea, then detour for a hundred lines giving you a quick introduction to Git.

As for using AI "to generate deep research reports by scouring the internet", that sounds like an incredibly fraught idea. LLMs are not doing searches, they are doing statistical computation of likely results. In practice the results of that computation and a web search frequently line up, but "frequently" is not good enough for "deep research": the fewer points of reference for a complex query there are in an LLM's training corpus, the more likely it is to generate a bullshit answer delivered with a veneer of absolute confidence. Perhaps you can make the case that that's still a good place to start, but it is absolutely not something to rely on.

Then came Apple Silicon. And at least in my eyes, Apple hardware is the best it's been in a really long time.

There are some definite trainwrecks in the current state of Liquid Glass (especially on the Mac), and there have been other dubious choices and mounting bugs made over the last few years. But I've used both Windows 11 and a recent Linux distribution (Fedora, via Asahi Linux, running KDE Plasma), and while I like the latter it's just not enough to make me give up what I like on the Mac in terms of Mac-only applications and little life-bettering affordances I've internalized over the years I've been here. Yes, if the trajectory they're on now in software continues, I'll have to re-evaluate that -- but their hardware took a real turn for the better after Jony Ive and some of his deputies left. Alan Dye and some of his deputies left earlier this year, and I'm not going to count the new team out before giving them a chance to prove themselves.

(Having said that, I'm not ruling out replacing it, but I don't think I'll be inclined to do that until they stop updating its version of iPadOS.)

...

Seriously, joining Mastodon is not particularly difficult; people just freaked out a few years ago at being asked to pick a server to join. The joinmastodon.org website has gotten a lot better at explaining what that means and just directing people to mastodon.social if they don't want to pick something more specific, but the "oooh, this extra step makes Mastodon super super scary, if you pick wrong YOU ARE DAMNED FOREVERRRRRRRR" vibe persists.

(Also, "non-negative" is carrying a lot of weight, since both Trump in his first term and George W. Bush in his first lost the popular vote. The idea that a wide majority of the country is conservative, let alone MAGA, is risible.)

I think it's more realistic to expect that they're going to stick with a UI officially called "Liquid Glass" for the next decade, but it's going to go through some serious iterative changes in the next couple of years -- probably much more than it would have were Alan Dye still around.

> Apple formally allows booting third-party operating systems on Apple Silicon Macs. Shortly after the Asahi project started, Apple even added a raw image mode to prevent macOS updates from breaking the boot process for third-party operating systems. This provided no benefit to macOS whatsoever; it merely served to help third-party operating system development.

There are a lot of reasons to be annoyed with Apple, but we don't need to invent new ones, and there's an awful lot of misinformation out there about Macs that conflates how locked down iOS is with the Mac (combined with the insistence that Macs are going to be locked down just as much as iPhones within the next few years, which I have literally been hearing since the iPhone came out in 2007). There are some things that are more difficult to do on macOS Tahoe than they were on MacOS Leopard twenty years ago (like, apparently, resize windows), but there is nothing that is "locked down" in a way that makes something I remember doing then literally impossible to do now.

Semi-ironically given the Org mode discussion, the markdown-mode package for Emacs makes it one of the best Markdown editors I've used!