Brandon Muramatsu

Sitting outside in shorts and a T-shirt in balmy 60F weather.

Lil Finder Guy
Who is it? What is it? Is it friend or foe? Has it arrived in peace, or is it plotting to corrupt our SSDs and fray our USB-C cables?

basicappleguy.com/basicappleb...

Minimalistic City Map Posters This Github project from Ankur Gupta allows you to “generate beautiful, minimalist map posters for any city in the world”. There are a variety of different themes you can choose from and the resulting images

City Map Poster Generator can create printable minimalist map posters for any city in the world. [kottke.org]

Teaching a powerful tool for learning.

The feature, which launched in August, claims to help you “sharpen your message through the lens of industry-relevant perspectives.” When users select the “expert review” button in the Grammarly sidebar, it analyzes their writing and surfaces AI-generated suggestions “inspired by” related experts. Those “industry-relevant perspectives” include the likes of Stephen King, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Carl Sagan, among many others. The Verge found numerous other tech journalists named in the feature, as well, including former Verge editors Casey Newton and Joanna Stern, former Verge writer Monica Chin, Wired’s Lauren Goode, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman and Jason Schreier, the New York Times’ Kashmir Hill, The Atlantic’s Kaitlyn Tiffany, PC Gamer’s Wes Fenlon, Gizmodo’s Raymond Wong, Digital Foundry founder Richard Leadbetter, Tom’s Guide editor-in-chief Mark Spoonauer, former Rock Paper Shotgun editor-in-chief Katharine Castle, and former IGN news director Kat Bailey. The descriptions for some experts contain inaccuracies, such as outdated job titles, which could have been accurately updated had Superhuman asked those people for permission to reference their work.

The endpoint of journalism is that an AI startup turns you into a fake "editor" without telling you and against your will www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

Grammarly is using our identities without permission Grammarly’s AI stole my boss’s identity.

lol this absolutely sucks

www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

Screenshot of printing dictionary entries (American Dictionary of Printing and Bookmarking, 1894): Flong.—The prepared paper used for making the molds for casting stereotypes by the paper process. Floor Pi.—Letters picked up from the floor or sweepings of a composing-room. Letters on the floor indicate ill-trained compositors, as type is nearly ruined by being allowed to fall thus. It is the custom in most offices to pick up the types and place them upon a piece of paper in one of the boxes of a case or in the stick, and to insist upon distributing them very soon after.

Mmmm…floor pi. Adjacent to my flong interest.

Had a conversation yesterday with a data security specialist for 50,000 student university who says what keeps him up at night is Antropic Cowork.

“Do not put that on any computer that contains anything you are not prepared to lose.”

(Some) of the migrating geese are flying north.

Now if they’d take their cousins that have decided to make the area their permanent home. That’d be great.

The first rule of learning is to admit you don’t know. The second rule is to never stop asking why.

I wish FedEx were as diligent in January, delivering at 9:50pm after the major snow storm we just had.

I'd have received the computer I needed for work in time to set it up to process while I was traveling for 2 weeks. FedEx put me back 3 weeks, thanks.

Woven in Japan A COMMITMENT TO CRAFTWOVEN & PRINTED IN JAPAN SINCE 1980 For us, a Spooner has never been just an aloha shirt. It's a study in patience and a commitment to craft. A fabric woven into our story nea...

www.reynspooner.com/pages/woven-...

Guy in a mascot costume shaped like a log with a few cherry blossoms coming from its head, wearing a race bib that says “stumpy” standing in a cafeteria.

current state of mind is that this just waved at me and I waved back without it even registering that there’s a mascot of a dead tree in the cafeteria

There are two rules in life:

1) Never give out all the information.

Also, unusually we're closed for 2 days because of the storm. First time in 17 years we've done that.

And the storm was 13" vs. 18" about a month ago...

🤷🏻‍♂️

Today was a 3 shower day at 25 degrees.

/wait for it

25F not 25C. Usually it's >>25C that causes 3 shower days.

Acme Weather Over the years it went through numerous iterations — including more than one major redesign — as we worked our way through the process of learning what makes a great weather app. Eventually, in time, it was acquired by Apple, where the forecast and some core features were incorporated into Apple Wea

The folks behind Dark Sky spun themselves out of Apple and have built a new weather app: Acme Weather. “We missed those days as a small scrappy shop. So let’s try this again…” [acmeweather.com]

The Great Planet | For decades, the golden rule of travel was simple: share the beauty you find. Today, that same generosity is destroying the very places we... | Instagram

“A new ethic is quietly emerging among modern travelers. It is called Digital Silence. It is the conscious decision to share the art and the emotion of a place without giving away its exact coordinates… It is a radical act of conservation.” [instagram.com]

Me chuckling hearing about the “extreme low temps” in the 30s where I used to live…

🤣🤣🤣

Shyam writes: What is an AI PC? What's one thing I can do on an AI PC that I can't on a regular PC? Antonio writes: Dude, I don't even think half the marketing people who give us briefings on new products can answer this without talking pure fluff. It's mostly just drivel, and I think for the average user (whose AI experience is likely just talking to ChatGPT), it just means extra bloatware. One thing I'll give to Microsoft is Windows 11's live translation captions is pretty cool.

I love the future
www.theverge.com/column/88156...

Watching an Olympic broadcast in a language I don't understand is a surprisingly good.

I don't have to listen to the inane commentary that broadcasters think they need to fill the air.

A $100M+ idea would be software to automagically remove the inanity on demand. Sometimes it's good, mostly not.

Those who cannot think for themselves are truly lost.

2/6 fully working. #MonoIsTheNewStereo

if you're an older person who finds words like mogg and maxxing annoying, just starting using them. people over the age of 30 have the superpower to end trends by simply adopting them

KLM has these fancy magnetic connectors for headsets. They don’t work so gud, and are thus far 2/5 headsets not working for me. #FirstWorldProblems

"Computers don't think" is an actual line in a Hollywood movie from the 1980's, kinda stunning!

That said, I've worked with motion picture photography for decades and I'm gonna tell you that you can't MAGICALLY enhance a photo to accurately depict the truth. It's all made up.

Yeah I’m not sure I’ll admit to Howard the Duck…

No one has seriously said LLMs aren’t important or that AI is categorically junk.

Some of us have said that there is something bigger than tech. It’s called power — governance, civic norms, etc — & refusal is absolutely part of how we think soberly about that power. Who has it & how they use it.

Gonna spam some of my own writing here again because AI industry people are bringing out that “black box” canard again www.techpolicy.press/the-black-bo...

Sling’s Day Passes are the answer to my streaming prayers