All the people who didn’t like the movie Presence — jeez, put the crack pipe down. That was a great film. Get off your high horse and realize that not every movie has to be a cookie cutter “the whole world is at stake” action extravaganza. There’s nothing wrong with a little introspection and calm.
Year: 2025
In Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Queequeg, a South Sea harpooner visiting Nantucket, was offered a wheelbarrow to move his belongings from an inn to the dock. But he did not understand how it worked, and so, after putting all his gear into the wheelbarrow he lifted it onto his shoulders. Most travelers have done something that looked equally silly to the natives, for we are all unfamiliar with some local technologies. This is another way of saying that we do not know the many routines and small narratives that underlie everyday life in other societies.
David Nye, Technology Matters: Questions to Live With (MIT, 2006)
Flippin’ Mad
Cheyenne, Wyoming yesterday during high wind warnings pic.twitter.com/irB47cPLCi
— Heidi Hatch KUTV (@tvheidihatch) December 18, 2025
I’ve been driving on a highway where stuff like that was happening. Rural Montana. At night.
Do not recommend.
Texas is suing all of the big TV makers for spying on what you watch.
The Scottish Highlands, the Appalachians, and the Atlas are the same mountain range.
Rapid-Onset Political Enlightenment.
Boeing Taps Anduril in Bid For Army’s Cruise Missile Interceptor.
Jobs Could Soon Replace Prices as Focus of Anxiety. Already have.
Welcome to the age of zero-sum politics.
Japan needs to possess nuclear weapons: PM office source. Indeed.
3D-printed helixes show promise as THz optical materials.
The U.S. Is Stealing From Millennials and Gen Z To Make Boomers Even Richer.
LG TVs’ unremovable Copilot shortcut is the least of smart TVs’ AI problems.
The inside story of SpaceX’s historic rocket landing that changed launch forever.
Lean
–Surprised by Ferdinand Fagerlin
Using the Tool
I wrote a right-click (context menu) search extension with the help of AI in 25-ish hours of work and prompting that would’ve taken me 500+ hours to complete on my own, and for a competent programmer probably would’ve been in the 150 hour range.
Huge returns if you know what you’re doing.
My tool has more features, a better UI, is more extensible and is easier to use than any other similar extension out there. It’s not even close. Mine is just better by every measure that matters. And there’s no way I would’ve bothered to create it without AI.
Battery of Ourselves
Batteries are changing the world and America is missing the revolution because we stupidly thought batteries were all about climate https://t.co/H42I0JlSWx
— Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 (@Noahpinion) December 19, 2025
Could we get any stupider? Culture wars give you brain worms.
Only Possible
It really is odd that people get completely halted doing computer stuff if there is one single tiny little step even minutely different than what they were expecting.
Today, for instance, because no matter how senior you are in my field you still end up doing Level 1 helpdesk crap, I was helping a Sales Director add the company holidays calendar. I sent her directions but neglected the fact that she had to choose her own account in a step. It was the only possible choice. There literally were no others.
Nevertheless, this person was halted there claiming that it “wasn’t working.” They’d tried nothing and it all failed. At the very, very simplest of steps in a non-risky situation.
And this is the common case with people and computers. Why?
Learning Experience
How many of you ever got into a fight and lost? Did you learn anything?
I’ve lost many fights. Some so terribly I’d not call them fights, but rather beatdowns where I couldn’t and didn’t really do anything. Ah, the joys of growing up a misfit in rural North Florida.
What I learned is to get better at fighting. I did, so lost a lot fewer and that reputation of being a tough scrapper reduced the bullying by a ton.
Amazon darf Kunden auf Prime Video nicht zu Werbung zwingen.
Gut Bacteria from Amphibians and Reptiles Achieve Complete Tumor Elimination.
Personal computing is moving to a “renter” model. We need to get ahead of this and stop it before it’s too late. They’ve been trying this for years. Now finally succeeding.
This was a wild experience and a new scam tactic I hadn’t seen before.
Make me CEO of Mozilla. I too would do a better job.
Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons. Now it’s asking why.
We may never be able to tell if AI becomes conscious, argues philosopher.
China’s High-Flying Swarm Mothership Drone Has Flown.
Gen Z would rather cut Social Security benefits for current retirees than pay higher taxes to save the program. Nice bit of foot-shooting there.
The World Failed Holocaust Survivors at Bondi Beach.
US prices continued to rise despite Trump claims they are ‘rapidly’ falling.
US announces more than $10bn of arms sales to Taiwan. Good.
These are all the vehicles destined for extinction in 2026. So few sedans left, which I vastly prefer to SUVs.
Spacing In
At work there’s one customer (that has over 10,000 times our yearly revenue) giving us trouble about why we don’t have two disaster recovery locations. Hello, we do not have nearly-unlimited monopoly money like you do. We can’t go spooling up data centers and environments all across the land.
Anyway, as long as I have the data (which I do), I can spin up an environment anywhere nearly. I’m tempted to list “the ISS” as our second DR location and be done with it.
Not Russian There
If Poland didn’t have about a 98% chance of being invaded by Russia in the next decade, I’d consider immigrating there.
About AI
Just because you use a tool poorly doesn’t mean it’s a bad tool. All it means is that you are a deficient user of that tool. If I pick up a sharp knife, cut toward myself and then slice my hand, does that then make it a poor knife?
People’s reasoning skills are utterly absent in the face of their big and worthless feelings about things.
Control Role
I am always amazed and saddened by how complacent and complaisant others are about having someone else in control of their computers, devices, and by extension, their minds.
Kelvinator
I’ve absolutely never found the phrase to be true that Northerners like to spout about, “You can always get warmer. But you can’t always get cooler. There’s only so many clothes you can take off.”
Sure, the part about the clothes is true. But I just do not get warm in winter at all. When it’s below about 50 degrees outside, there is no unchilling my bones. Yes, even indoors.
I just hate winter so much.