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Timeline
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Yet more views from the train, earlier today going across a bay on the Hudson River. 🚂
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Congressman Ritchie Torres Authors Bill For Digital Games Ownership Rights
The Stop Killing Games movement appears to still be alive and well. The grassroots campaign to legislate out the practice of gaming companies selling games that they neuter or render unplayable in whole or part later when shutting down backend server support has had its ups and downs, to be sure. An effort to pass […]Reply source -
The Metric Is Not The Mission: When The Reckoning Reaches The Courts
The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. Across the series, the argument follows the evolution of the platform economy—from the optimism of the early internet to the growing tensions around […]Reply source -
'It Ain't Right:' Texas Said It Would Halt Data Center Permits. The State is Pushing Ahead Anyway
“The Caldwell Technology Park [...] the Stargate facility, and a bunch of other very large hyperscale facilities have gotten regulatory approvals [...] so it's not like a real pause."Reply source -
NPR’s Planet Money recently did a show on tariff refunds...
Reply sourceNPR’s Planet Money recently did a show on tariff refunds and interviewed Panic’s Cabel Sasser about how they decided to refund their Playdate-buying customers for the tariffs surcharge they paid.
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Do you believe in life after death? This is a great...
Reply sourceDo you believe in life after death? This is a great interactive piece by Alvin Chang about people’s beliefs about the existence of an afterlife and how those beliefs change over the course of our lifetimes.
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Sling TV Drops Innovative Streaming ‘Day Passes’ After Disney, Warner Bros Sued
Last year, Sling TV unveiled a rare bit of innovation in an increasingly enshittified streaming video market. They began offering what they called “mini-subscriptions,” allowing users to subscribe to live streaming TV for the day, weekend, or a full week for prices starting at around $5. It was a nice option for folks who don’t […]Reply source -
A Tiny 24 FPS E-Ink Game Boy Emulator
Reply sourceThis is really impressive: a software engineer got a Game Boy emulator running at 30 fps on a tiny e-ink screen.
If you’re familiar with e-paper, you know that they normally refresh much slower (2-3 times a second), not nearly quick enough to play even a simple video game. This guy wrote his own display driver that got the refresh rate up to 30 times per second. From the transcript of the video explaining how e-paper works and how he hacked the display to make it play games:
Unlike conventional displays like LCD or OLED, ePaper stores its image physically using charged black and white pigment particles. By changing the electric field, the display moves the pigments towards or away from the surface, which in the end gives us black- or white-looking pixel. And usually a sequence of several electrical pulses called a waveform is needed to move the pigment back and forth, before finally driving it towards the new image. This helps produce a clean result without leaving too much of the previous image behind. But this takes a lot of time.
The project is open source — you can get the plans and code on GitHub. This engineer was inspired by Wenting Zhang’s e-paper Game Boy emulator:
Zhang has also made a color e-ink display that runs at 60 fps. Very cool. (via yanko design)
Tags: Game Boy · video · video games · Wenting Zhang
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Stopped for a while in Albany. 🚂
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A 24-minute video tour of the Krasner and Pollock: Past...
Reply sourceA 24-minute video tour of the Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous exhibition at the Met. I hope I make it to NYC to see this before it closes in January.
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Mohawk River in Schenectady. 🚂
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‘We Didn’t Do This Perfectly’: American Fork Police Chief’s Understatement Now Anchors A Civil Rights Lawsuit By Reckless Ben’s Helpers
We’ve been covering a bunch of stories related to the saga of “Reckless” Ben Schneider and Bricks & Minifigs (“BAM”), which began with a series of videos Schneider produced about his increasingly more extreme attempts to get back the Lego sets that someone had given to a BAM franchise on a consignment deal, and which […]Reply source -
Daily Deal: Soundfreaq Sound Spot II Bluetooth Speaker
The Soundfreaq Sound Spot II combines wireless audio performance, ambient lighting, and relaxing sound features in a compact design built for modern lifestyles. Featuring a Bamboo and White finish with eco-friendly materials, this Bluetooth speaker complements bedrooms, offices, living rooms, and personal spaces while delivering both style and functionality. Engineered with a custom-designed audio driver, […]Reply source -
Towers of Babble is a game that mashes up word games and...
Reply sourceTowers of Babble is a game that mashes up word games and tower defense games. “Nouns make buildings and other parts of speech make modifiers that you can add to a building to improve its stats.”
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Hyperland, a Prescient 1990 TV Show by Douglas Adams
Reply sourceI’d never heard of this before: in 1990, the BBC aired a program created by and starring Douglas Adams called Hyperland. It begins with a frustrated Adams throwing his TV out (too linear, too non-interactive) and Tom Baker (from Doctor Who) popping up as an intelligent interactive agent that promises to “do your every slightest bidding, to fetch and carry for you, to work tirelessly and selflessly on your behalf, always ready, always willing, no job too small or too menial”.
Circumventing the limitations of ‘linear’ broadcast TV, the 50-minute programme imagines a new world in which an AI software ‘agent’ - brought to life here by Doctor Who favourite Tom Baker - helps the user (played by Adams) to find and access material of interest in a global world of hyperlinked information - text, images, audio and video.
Pop-up ‘micons’ (moving icons) conveniently link to interviews with leading technologists of the era (among them Ted Nelson, Robert Winter, Robert Abel, Kristina Hooper, Fabrice Forin and Steve Gano).
Some of this stuff has dated badly - few visions of the future get everything right! - but the programme is nevertheless of considerable historical importance.
Incredibly, at about the time Hyperland was being broadcast, a young CERN computer scientist by the name of Tim Berners-Lee was beavering away on URLs and HTTP, the foundations of what would become the World Wide Web.
Even Adams, who foresaw so much, didn’t anticipate the impact the Web - and the Internet that conveys its data globally - would have on civilisation. Needless to say, the enticing infoworld envisaged in Hyperland was a public-service one of education, art, literature (including nods to Adams’ own works!) and entertainment. There’s no advertising, hacking, cybercrime, information theft, social-media addicts, unaccountable corporate domination or drug-like dependence on the smartphones that Adams himself predicted.
And Tom Baker’s enthusiastic agent isn’t forever popping up to try and sell you something…
The YouTube version above is missing a segment, but you can watch (and download) the whole program on the Internet Archive, a project that fits the vision of the future imagined by techno-utopians like Adams.
I’m imagining what 16-year-old Jason would have made of this (or HyperCard or hypertext had he had any clue that they existed until 4-5 years later) — his brain probably would have exploded.
Tags: artificial intelligence · Douglas Adams · Tom Baker · TV · video
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Canadian YouTuber Visited By Cops After Building Mock Flock To Track Cop Cars
If most cops had a sense of irony, they wouldn’t be cops. By that I mean that there’s little in the job that attracts people with tons of self-awareness or a finely developed sense of humor. Both of those traits generally contain a sense of irony. And since most cops don’t have that, this is […]Reply source -
Police Say Scammers Used AI to Clone a Sheriff’s Voice
The scammers used the voice of a specific sheriff to impersonate him.Reply source - Reply source
A few more details in this Fortune story about the short-lived coup against Matt Mullenweg, but still no real explanation for why it happened:
A remarkable level of secrecy surrounded the drama. None of the board members have publicly explained why they suddenly wanted him out of the company. Mullenweg has declined to describe why he was all but fired, or how he quickly got back control of the company.
You come at the mad king, you best not miss.
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Lane 8 has released his Fall 2026 Mixtape, 4 hours,...
Reply sourceLane 8 has released his Fall 2026 Mixtape, 4 hours, recorded live at SF’s Castro Theatre. This one’s going straight into the earholes. Soundcloud, YouTube, and elsewhere.
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Matthias Pfefferle blogs about a clever way to render OPML in browsers using JavaScript, via @jlelse. I'm going to look into doing this for Micro.blog's OPML too.
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The Staples Gift Card Heist
A gang of hackers targets Staples, but not to buy things from Staples.Reply source -
Won’t Someone Please Stop Me, Dr. Frankenstein, from...
Reply sourceWon’t Someone Please Stop Me, Dr. Frankenstein, from Building the Creature? “These are serious concerns. And I think we should all stop. Me, especially. Can anyone make me stop doing the thing I want to do? Apparently not.”
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Working on more layout fixes for the iPhone Duo. I'm not sure Apple made the right trade-offs with the design of this thing. Vertical nav controls still feel weird. And with the device backordered for months, hard to justify the time to rethink everything.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Consequence of Donald Trump
Reply sourceWriting for Vanity Fair (archive link), Ta-Nehisi Coates says that Donald Trump is the most visionary politician of his era.
Through a mix of moxie, cynicism, and misanthropy, Trump has made himself into the dominant American of our age. Sometimes a man meets his moment, and Trump met his in the wake of a black presidency and a conservative movement doggedly and patiently pursuing a decades-long counterrevolution. The marriage of Trump’s charisma to a fundamentalist right wing has been bountiful: three Supreme Court justices in four years, the subsequent destruction of national abortion rights, the banishment of affirmative action, the hollowing of the Voting Rights Act.
And the genie may not go back in the bottle:
But some things can’t be unseen. The example that Trump has set, the scope of what is possible should one embrace the dark powers of the White House, will not dissipate. It turns out that you can deploy secret police onto American streets. You can deport immigrants in defiance of the courts. You can have the Justice Department badger your enemies. And you can become very rich while doing it. And some of the most powerful sectors in America, those who most loudly extol their own love of country, will stand around and watch you do it. Asked why he was making deals during his second term, Trump gave a succinct and chillingly accurate summation: “I found out that nobody cared.” And to the extent that there is a genius to Trump, it is in his apprehension of this reality—so very few people who matter care. When you’re president, they let you do it.
Coates recently discussed this piece on Vanity Fair’s podcast.
Tags: Donald Trump · politics · Ta-Nehisi Coates
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About XSLT -- I remembered that I thought it was a bad idea. Let XML look like XML. Trying to make it look like an HTML page, how does that make any sense. Like opening the hood of a car and seeing a big picture of the outside of the car. People aren't really that dumb, but some people like to complain a lot. The rule of the web is if you don't like what you see, that's what the freaking back button is there for. Probably just a troll anyway. Show them your JSON and RSS. If it's done nicely it can be quite illumifying.
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How a Massive Chinese Crime Ring Hacked Staples to Steal Millions
A sophisticated organized crime gang hacked into Staples, issued millions of dollars worth of gift cards, and went on a spending spree across the U.S.Reply source - Reply source
Last morning on the train, along Lake Erie. 🚂
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Whoops: Grok Bot Spills Tech CEO’s Bank Data In Public Slack
Shane Mac, a tech entrepreneur and CEO of the software developer XMTP Labs, decided to connect Grok Bot to his personal bank account. Like many people who attach undercooked big tech agentic AI agents to their personal accounts without reading the instructions (see: Muse’s rough last few weeks), it didn’t go well. Mac soon found […]Reply source -
Countries Where Nguyen Is The Most Common Surname
Nguyen (Nguyễn) is the most common surname in Vietnam, shared by an estimated 38–40% of the population. The name has also spread around the world through Vietnamese migration, becoming particularly common in countries such as Australia, France, Norway, the Czech Republic and the United States. However, one of the most surprising places where Nguyen tops […]Reply source - Reply source
Chicago Union Station. 🚂
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In other Anthropic news today, I’ve been thinking about this bill that Anthropic proposed where it’s not a show-stopper if only 50 people might be killed or seriously injured:
The bill would let the government block a model's release or use only if it poses a foreseeable, imminent risk of more than $1 billion in damages, or of killing or seriously injuring more than 50 people, according to the report.
It's weird to even put a number on this. But also, if gun manufacturers had to meet a similar standard before putting semi-automatic rifles on the market, the world would be a better place.
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Health care is phone tag in US
Reply sourceThe healthcare system in the US is grossly inefficient, incredibly bad and getting info to and from patients.
Teach everyone in healthcare to try to use their portals as their first resort of communicating with patients.
They waste so much of their time and our time playing phone tag.
I don't know if it's this way in other countries, but it is universally a phone-voice-based comm system in the US.
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Anthropic announces a new public benefit fund, beyond what the existing b-corp can do:
The Anthropic Public Benefit Fund will have increased flexibility and scale, enabling us to pursue our mission in new ways: for example, we might explore large donations to traditional nonprofits or direct distributions to specific populations.
A little mysterious. I wonder what they have in mind (or if they know).
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Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is n00bdragon with a comment about Florida’s age-gating law and its esoteric definition of addiction: Is anyone else bothered by this incredibly strange definition of “addiction”? Is YMCA soccer addicting if 10% of a youth soccer team (one player) plays soccer for more than two […]Reply source - Reply source
There's a fun site that keeps track of Codex resets. OpenAI is in the middle of a nutty 28-day challenge to ship new features every day or give resets. Feels like a "bank error in your favor" every few days.
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Crossing into Wisconsin. 🚂
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I wrote a piece entitled The Web of Markdown on Oct 6. I have to keep looking it up, but I do remember writing it very quickly and deciding it needed a memorable title, like the ones about textcasting, and podcasting and all the other bits that went on to be something. It's one of those times when it seems to have potential with other developers, they seem to see the same logic in it that I do. A way to disconnect from VC control of the web and try again with the open basis, the un-owned basis. There was a fork here at some point in the last 10 or so years, we just refused to see it as such. And btw it was not a very polite piece, but I wasn't feeling polite when I wrote and decided not to edit the anger out of it. I don't like having been so wrong. But it's a fact and denying it doesn't change it. - Reply source
Mark Gurman is pretty down on the iPhone Duo launch:
Apple has dealt with launch shortages before, but a three-month wait for a new iPhone is practically unprecedented.
Doesn't bother me, but I know some developers are annoyed that they can't test their apps for months.
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Along the Mississippi River as we head out of Minneapolis. 🚂
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I'm feeling so lucky that I get to build software for people like @patrickrhone. We were able to catch up this morning as my train stopped just long enough at the Minneapolis - St. Paul station.
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Looking over stats for the Mac app. 90% of users on macOS 26 or 27. 98% on Apple Silicon. Only thing I'd like to change going forward is to check for new versions a little more aggressively, so people don't miss out on improvements. I'm not sure the 2006-era Sparkle UI is the best in 2026.
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I took this shot of the stars from Puget Sound a few days ago, then didn't even look at the result on my phone because I just assumed it would be blurry. Actually it turned out pretty neat. If I had known, I'd have tried again and fiddled with the exposure.
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This Week In Techdirt History: October 11th – 17th
This Week in 2016 This Week in 2011 This Week in 2006Reply source - Reply source
In John Gruber's initial thoughts on the HomeView, he wonders about the odd $300 pricing for both the regular HomeView and the wall-mounted version:
So the wall-mounted version, when you include a mount, costs more but sounds worse? This doesn’t make sense.
I was thinking about this too. All I can come up with is that Apple doesn't want you to buy the wall-mounted version unless you're really sure that's what you need. If the wall-mounted version was cheaper, some people might buy it based on price, then be unhappy because it's too much trouble to install.
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No wi-fi and intermittent cell coverage for this trip, as expected. Somehow I managed to upload a video when we got back near a town. I used the offline time to write some code by hand (gasp!) and do yet more editing on the book.
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Morning in Montana. 🚂
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I didn't notice it at the time, but in the all the work we did about blogging, we had open channels of communiation, meant to make everyone feel like they had a stake. Big mistake, because they took this too literally and the way many people communicated was through orders, demands or ultimata. All of it came from the power we gave them by making everyone's voice supposedly equal. Of course they weren't all equal. Power has to be a function of your contribution. And as it says in Rules, power comes from users of your product. If being compatible with you means I have access to more users, then I will listen. I will also listen if you remain respectful -- and don't presume to give me an order. Someone just did that today, and it froze me, then I re-read the message and it was an order, and not nicely phrased, condescending, presumptive, and very wrong. I started writing a reply, even posted one, then realized what was going on, and deleted my reply and blocked the person.
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This Might Be the Earliest Known Spear Murder In Earth’s History
Archaeologists have discovered a puncture wound from a spear in the shoulder blade of a Neanderthal that lived 75,000 years ago, offering a possible glimpse of early interpersonal violence.Reply source -
MLB Plans To Play Stupid Games With Its Website Again In Upcoming Lockout
Back in the much simpler times of 2021, we wrote about some of the games Major League Baseball decided to play as part of a brief owner’s lockout of players while both sides negotiated a collective bargaining agreement. This included essentially scrubbing the MLB website of all pictures of current players, stories about current players, […]Reply source - Reply source
On the Empire Builder. Starting to turn east, with the moon in the sky. 🚂