It's 2026 - the site can look like an old-skool zine being displayed with monospace fonts on a computer monitor and easily still have alternate formats for mobile devices. Not having it is just pure laziness.

I wouldn't mind if Reader Mode could deal with the text, but it can't. Oh well.

Amusingly, I started walking recently at a local track. One day while I was walking, I thought, "I should create a little web app for a counter to keep track of my laps." So I asked Claude Code and it whipped up a nice little mobile app with a big "+1" button, a reset, the whole deal, all within less than a lap and a half. Great! A lap later I think, "I should have it keep track of the time it takes me to walk each lap."

As I'm typing out the description, I realize, "You dumbass, you're describing the built-in chronograph feature of the Clock app!" So I just switched to that.

The problem is our legal system is still based on the waterfall method. Lawmakers try to plan for everything, laws meant to solve one problem face feature creep and create a thousand others, then no one wants to touch anything after launch for fear of making things worse or because that one guy uses the temperature of his CPU as a quick-key and refuses to change his workflow.

Anyways, no law is perfect and never will be, and neither are the fixes.

It wasn't that long ago where the network traffic of every website was transmitted in the clear via http, not https. Literally anyone at a coffee shop could listen to the WiFi network and see everything being sent and received in plain text. GMail didn't move to https until 2010, and I think it was one of the first webmail sites to do it. Browsers only started flagging non-https sites just in the past few years.

It already seems far fetched, honestly.

Wow. So, be nice or I'll replace you with a very large shell script?

I suspect there's some sort of strong association going on with color and tool use in our monkey brains.

Documenting unexpected or intermittent behavior: The easiest bug fixes of all.

I find I spend a lot less time on the site as a result, which really is a blessing in retrospect. I'm pretty convinced it's at least half AI bots now. Given how much AI sites use reddit as a source of "truth", it's not a good sign.

Still, I was among the first couple thousand people to create an account, so it still annoys me that the automated process just happily nuked me. Oh well.

Sure, if everyone knows what they're doing, it's not a problem. But we all know how long that assumption lasts.

I first tried it to remind me of what happened in a previous book in a series that I was reading. When I realized it was either misstating plot points or straight up hallucinating, I tried it on a bunch more books to amuse myself.

Older classics are of course more accurate, but for newer or less popular books Gemini won't shy away from giving you a summary culled from misinterpreted Reddit threads and Goodreads reviews. It's like getting a secondhand account from someone who talked to another person who had read the book a long time ago. You get the general gist of it, but with some added flavor.

Even if you upload an entire epub of a book, the results aren't stellar. Rather than a Cliffs Note's quality summary, they're pretty sparse or leave out important bits of information. One chapter summary I got back made a point of describing what one of the characters was wearing, even though it had absolutely zero to do with anything else. Yes, that's technically a "summary", but not quite my tempo.

If Google wants to present summaries of websites in anything more than a very, very superficial description, they're going to have to improve their model's ability to understand context and importance. In theory, a novel is a self-contained bundle of text, so pulling accurate information out of it should be straight forward. A website is naturally going to be way more of a challenge.

All that said, I find the AI summaries from Google/Gemini to be quite useful and a time saver, but I know to always double check something if it's at all important.

George Washington's English ancestors, specifically Sir Lawrence Washington, were the owners of the West Amesbury Estate in Wiltshire, England, which included the land where the ancient Stonehenge monument sits. (Via Google)

If you hadn't that before, welcome to the "Huh, that's a funny coincidence" club.

But my disappointment with streaming TV is that it's not the same as actual live TV. I want to see local news clips and commercials, weather updates, announcements for local events, etc.

Without all that, it's just a bunch of pre-recorded content that you can't pause or rewind.

I've worked most of my career in developer relations at various Big Tech (advocate, evangelist, pre-sales, etc.) which in large part entails giving presentations explaining how a company's technology works to others. It makes me wonder if the couple official company videos I've made will be viewed in 70 years by that generation's techies.

1. https://m.youtube.com/@IBMTechnology

The Catholic Church is not anywhere close to being a neutral institution who will be writing something like this in good faith (no pun intended). This is an organization based on prejudice, subjugation and outright delusion built on literally millennia of persecution. All of their observations will be made from the standpoint that their worldview is the only correct one, which is unacceptable in every way.

For example, ChatGPT will quickly and efficiently answer all your questions about how and where to get a safe abortion, including pros and cons, history and other specifics. This is something the Church is vehemently opposed to on principle. Anything else they have to say on the topic is therefore irrelevant.

I guarantee that whatever AI doom they're warning about will never be anywhere close to the damage the continued existence of the Catholic Church causes and will continue to cause in the future.

Anyone who thinks otherwise doesn't know history nor read the headlines of the past several decades.

Hey, I love it when Bob from Chicago tells Trump to go to hell, but beyond that I couldn't care less what he or the truly horrific religion he leads thinks about anything, let alone new technology.

Or projectiles like bullets and missiles. A sniper bullet with nanoscale textured surface that's able to go x% farther due to reduced drag seems plausible.

San Francisco has a power line going to it via the underwater "Trans Bay Cable (200kV DC)" from Pittsburg. I'll have to look that up as that's quite an engineering feat in my opinion.

If you select a powerplant, wind farm or solar project, you can see how much power is generated in MW. It lists battery projects as well like the one in Moss Landing (182.5 MW). It's enlightening to compare how much power each type of generator provides, especially if they're located near each other.

Fun find: The Apple Campus's solar power output is 14.4 MW. There needs to be more of these around.

Really educational link, thanks!