At a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by by people who do not love us but want our money.
I remind you, again, that Wallace said this back in 1996. He had no experience with the internet or social media. But his sense of their future impact is uncanny.
Rakhim hits on something here I’ve been thinking about for a while. LLMs are primarily successful today because Google abused their power as an advertising company and did almost nothing to improve search for almost two decades. LLMs are what search should have been before we allowed SEO to pollute the internet.
Just putting some common apps from e.g. Mavericks and the first macOS (Tahoe) side by side shows the tremendous progress the company had made. From toys to tools. From superficial style to functional beauty.
I’m not saying Tahoe is likely to drive me off MacOS entirely, but the radius of the RoundedRect is actually bonkers.
Usually the prices of consoles starts going down as manufacturing and supply chains settle. This is the first console generation I’ve seen where every single console has had a mid-generation price increase. Grim.
TIL “email apnea”, a condition where you stop breathing or start taking shallow breaths when working at a computer, which puts us into a natural fight-or-flight state. Explains a lot!
Many people have the quisling impulse to insist that Apple had to kiss Trump’s ass. “They’ll be stuck with really high tariffs!" “They might lose government contracts!" This is foolishness, of cause, because all of this will still happen. The only thing that’s different is that Apple will have to navigate those headwinds while everyone in the world already knows that they’re led by a CEO who has already bent the knee, and by a board that collectively has no spine. There’s no point in having fuck-you money in the bank if you never say “fuck you”!
Watching the obsequiousness of tech leaders in the 2025 has been disheartening and Anil Dash nails it here.
This is such a lovely way of displaying old magazines. Seeing the ebb and flow of the page sizes as their subject reaches and then recedes from its zenith. Byte was 90% advertising but with enough time, even those are fascinating artifacts.
I’m a big believer in nostalgia as a form of self-soothing and this site is an incredible example of it. Currently working with 80s cartoons on the other screen and it’s bringing me a tremendous amount of peace.
johnke.me