Sorry I also just want to make fun of John Gruber again for thinking that instead of banning smoking for young people, we should just tax them so that the only people effectively banned from smoking are poor people and rich people can smoke all they want. What a clown this guy is! Someone's got rich guy brain.
John Gruber joins a long lineage in assuming there was deep thinking behind any of George Lucas' Star Wars decisions. In this episode, he thinks there is some undercurrent to Star Wars where the underclasses hate droids and thinks it's a parallel to our modern era where people are hating AI. In truth it's more likely George Lucas was like, "This is supposed to be a seedy underbelly, someone needs to act like a racist, what can they be racist against? Oh, the droids, nice, let's do that," without any thought behind it past the surface level need to have something a little colorful happen.
A little googling confirms this, plus the retconning that people hate droids after The Clone Wars happened. John Gruber is also totally ignoring the fact that Luke's own adoptive parents used droids and they were moisture farmers on a seemingly impoverished-in-general world. Also, obviously, droids don't consume food or drink so they would just take up space that doesn't make money in a cantina.
Anyway, just John Gruber proving again that just because you write a blog about Apple products, that doesn't mean you are some kind of genius who even bothers to google his theories for confirmation before proudly writing about them on the internet.
It took me a long time to become aware of and to try to break my habit of saying whatever (usually negative) thing that comes to mind. After spending a few days on irc, I realize having grown up on the internet is where I got that habit from, because 99% of people respond with something negative on irc to just about anything. Luckily the sentences are so short thanks to irc that it's easy to just ignore and not get roped into. But it's funny. I guess the negativity of the internet is just a universal thing.
For example, I saw some people quoting Nine Inch Nails lyrics, so I said, "nin is so good, I saw them live a month ago, great show," and one person responded, "reznor is old asf, probably doesn't hit as hard."
I replied, "he's still got it, thank goodness. everyone's going crazy over the nin Coachella performance." Another person chimes in, "i looked over someone's shoulder and saw trent reznor with many backup dancers and it did not resemble what i remember as nine inch nails... but that is fine."
So, yeah, just because people are talking about something they like, the second you chime in to say "I like that thing, too!" suddenly no one has anything good to say about it.
Unpopular opinion but the amount of value Claude Code creates for a person makes it pretty absurd that there are people who seemingly expect to get unlimited usage of it for $20 a month.
The $20/mo plan is for the Claude chatbot, the Claude Code usage you get with it is basically a demo to get you to upgrade to the $100/mo or $200/mo plans. But people don't like this, obviously.
"I hate everything related to AI and I always will," they write, over and over again, on a social media site that is paid hundreds of millions of dollars by AI companies for training data to build AI.
Listen, I didn’t have children, so I’m entitled to use all that water and energy on AI if I want to, ya dweebs
A friend of mine is at a crossroads in their software engineering career and I spewed some thoughts at them I thought I would preserve here.
I think we're in the era where an engineer really needs to be full stack to stand out. Like it's not enough to be specialized for a specific niche, so many engineering skills and patterns apply to both frontend and backend, and agentic coding assistants mean we can work effectively in any language, for any platform, any framework, so long as we have a solid foundation of good software engineering practices and an understanding of how to properly direct coding agents. Stuff like test driven development / red-green test writing, understanding different refactoring methods, overall understanding of different universal architecture patterns... and then you likely need taste, an eye for design, because the dedicated designer role is likely going the way of the dodo–the designers have the same coding agents and can learn the same patterns and philosophies about software engineering that we know, so we're competing with them now.
Man, I wish I liked Jon Bernthal as the Punisher. But... he sucks. Disney sucks. The only truly good Punisher has been the War Zone movie, and thankfully that is so good we don't really need any other Punisher adaptation. But it would be nice if all this modern day Punisher content wasn't shitty Netflix/Disney bullshit. Give us a real Punisher!
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it's normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
– Ira Glass
Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP
Man, Donald Trump would have made a great Freemason! No wonder so many Freemasons idolize him. He really embodies the ideals of Masonry.