https://www.playtoysandbooks.com

I live in the Andersonville neighborhood in Chicago, and it’s a small bit of joy to have a thriving boutique toy store to walk by as I go to the gym.

I do a lot of event photography as a creative outlet. I want my friends to be able to download individual photos and photo albums easily. As an example, I just photographed a fundraiser for my rugby team last week, and I made all my shots available in a Google Photos album: https://photos.app.goo.gl/PfwHpEJejywBRiZp7

And while that works, I don’t necessarily love feeding all my creative content into the Google machine. I would rather support a diverse photography ecosystem.

Have you explored making downloading individual photos and albums a prominent feature? Mind you, I realize I am weird photographer who does this stuff for free, and I don’t care about attribution or watermarks. I just want my friends to be able to get their photos easily.

I wish more tech execs were in Cook’s mold. Reserved. Controlled. Calm. No Twitter beefs, no overt politics, no blow-ups behind closed doors.

And I am typing that as I look at the Edgewater poster hanging right there over my desk.

Ah, you mean, like the NYTimes RSS feed. The NYTimes (and other paywall sites) only render the headline and one-sentence article summary. Like this:

> Not All Malls Are Struggling

> A certain type of shopping mall has become a surprising bright spot for real estate investors.

You do not…please correct me if I’m wrong…and cannot get a full-text RSS feed from the Times. Or Slate. Or [insert legacy media company here].

Which is deeply frustrating. It’s obviously a way to cut off the most blatant way for a bot to scrape the site, but c’mon, please, media tech teams, we can make private subscription RSS feeds work for podcasts, we can make it work for news. Your most engaged and nerdy and tech literate customers will go for it.

In lieu of that, I use Safari, and I have it set to automatically pop into Reader mode (https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/hide-distractions-whe...) when I hit certain websites. While I would prefer to read my news in NetNewsWire, hitting a de-shittified reader view in Safari is a decent fallback.

It’s just pig slow, even on my M3 Max MacBook Pro with 64GB of RAM.

I have an ASUS ProArt Display 27” 5K. And I somewhat regret it.

I love the pixel density. But I don’t love the matte finish. Which is apparently a controversial take. But I really don’t. I like the crisp pop of typography you get with a glossy display. And, for UI design, the matte finish just doesn’t “feel” like the average end-user experience. I am constantly pushing Figma between my laptop display and my monitor to better simulate what a design will look like on an average glossy LCD or OLED display.

I am an elder Millennial with no kids…I knew it was still a popular game, but seeing a great big Pokéball machine next to the shopping carts really drove it home.

https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/1amree7/theres_a_wi...

It obviously owes a lot to Stephen King’s IT. But it stands on its own merits…and I give it extra credit because it was set in my home town. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_Night)

I have a snarky response, then a real response.

Snark: Oh like a bunch of gays are capable of that level of coordination without it breaking into vicious drama and infighting. We can barely hold together a volleyball team sometimes.

Real: Well, yes, a lot of gay guys do know each other, especially in dense urban cities like SF, NYC, and Chicago, because we are all in the same sports leagues, we go to the same bars, we go to the same circuit parties, and it’s natural to give someone you know an internal referral as a leg up, because it’s a lot easier to hire someone you know versus sifting through 1600 job applications from strangers.

I have transitioned off ChatGPT for home use (Google provides me slightly better value in my personal life, as I can pay for a plan that also accommodates my weird photo storage needs) and it’s all Anthropic at work, but I miss the ChatGPT Mac app. I can’t say for certain if it was Electron or not—I never dug into the internals, and it felt very, very fast and “native”.

It would be utterly negligent to still be running IE in a corporate environment. It’s a huge security risk.

But I think a lot more people are using LLMs for relationship surrogates than that (pretty bonkers) subreddit would suggest. Character AI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character.ai) seems quite popular, as do the weird fake friend things in Meta products, and Grok’s various personality mode and very creepy AI girlfriends.

I find this utterly bizarre. LLMs are peer coders in a box for me. I care about Claude Code, and that’s about it. But I realize I am probably in the vast minority.

(I have no idea. LLMs are infinite code monkeys on infinite typewriters for me, with occasional “how do I evolve this Pokémon’ utility. But worth a shot.)

…oh wait. I can’t. Because for all his successes, Musk has also sowed quite a lot of bullshit that has gone precisely nowhere.