Don’t fall in

AI shit gets so weird. For example, the fake golfer Grace (aka Gracie) Brooks appeared in the midst of my Facebook doomscrolling (above) to say something to me (scrolled across her boobage) about “an older guy” watching her. Never saw her before, or cared to see her. But I a…

Cruiseday

Real hard forks Hmm… NiemanLab: NPR, the quintessential audio news brand, adapts to a video-first future. Specifically, “NPR … landed Machine Gods, the new video-first podcast from veteran tech journalists Casey Newton and Kevin Roose.” I subscribed to Casey and Kevin��…

Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket....

Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket. “There’s no point beating yourself up for failing to clear a backlog (of unread books, undone tasks, unrealized dreams) that was always inherently unfeasible to clear in the first place.”

What ISO Is Too High? A Real Noise Comparison From ISO 3200 to 12800

Not very long ago, increasing ISO beyond even 2500 on your DSLR felt like giving up something precious, like a part of your reputation, in return for getting a shot. Yup, I've felt this way many times when having to embrace horrible grain at the cost of capturing a moment felt l…

Kim Tschang-Yeul, Water Drops

From the early 1970s until his death in 2021, Korean artist Kim Tschang-Yeul painted water droplets. From one of the galleries representing his work: The waterdrop was the starting point for a singular and iconic body of work, which stands at the confluence of lyri…

The death of web development education. “The income from...

The death of web development education. “The income from my book sales went from being enough for me to live off (2024) to zero (2026).”

Brett Simmons on how using the stock Mac UI isn’t the...

Brett Simmons on how using the stock Mac UI isn’t the easy choice it used to be. “Many of the apps people think look good are not using stock UI.” Simmons’ own quickie redesign of NetNewsWire looks much better to me than the Liquid Glassified version.

What’s On Your To-Do List?

I keep a list of things I want to do for KDO in Apple Notes, organized into four sections: small, medium, large, and longshots/obsolete. This note contains tweaks, bug fixes, code refactoring, new site features, roadmap items,1 infrastructure migrations, potential project ideas,…

The Bizarre, Murky History of Soviet-Born Tetris....

The Bizarre, Murky History of Soviet-Born Tetris. “Ironically, Tetris’s success began because the totalitarian Soviet regime did not recognize what we take for granted in the West: the freedom to publish.”

On commodified, automated intelligence. “If any of these...

On commodified, automated intelligence. “If any of these things shake out and we make it out of the near-future, the best you can hope for is a universal basic income, pegged to a meaningful percentage of existing compute.” (God that’s bleak.)

The MN Stolen Neighbors Quilt

Over the past six months, dozens of people pitched in to create the MN Stolen Neighbors Quilt, which is made of 12,500 squares, each one representing an immigrant abducted in Minnesota by the Trump regime’s secret police (ICE + CBP). The quilt was recently unveiled at the MN S…

Polaroid Mod Review: The Camera That Brings Everyone Joy

The Polaroid Mod is a camera that I think is really fun in addition to being pretty advanced. I'm not sure how sustainable it is though. For sure, it brought everyone I took photos of quite a bit of visible joy. But in today's world, it's impossible for photographers to spell th…

Is the Sony A7s IV Finally Launching Soon?

Sony has had a wonderful year so far. The company launched some great cameras, including the high-resolution king, the a7R VI, recently. While the company has not spoken about what the next launch will be about, a few reports are pointing out that it will be the successor to the…

In the wake of her divorce, Curtis Sittenfeld revisits...

In the wake of her divorce, Curtis Sittenfeld revisits her 2015 piece on marriage. “Toward the end, I felt as if the best versions of ourselves had married and the worst versions of ourselves were getting divorced.”

Does Shooting in Auto ISO Actually Hurt Your Exposure Control?

Modern cameras are so good that auto ISO control is something that isn't even worth fussing over as long as you set the right parameters. This is especially the case with cameras that don't have the highest megapixel counts and have been around since the year 2020. If anything t…

Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer

OpenAI isn’t going to release its newest model because...

OpenAI isn’t going to release its newest model because “it showed high levels of what the company saw as deception, or a willingness to mislead users about its actions [and] was also willing to go beyond the original scope of what it was asked to do”.

This American Life has a whole episode with Nikole...

This American Life has a whole episode with Nikole Hannah-Jones and her daughter Najya, following up on her NYT article about Nikole’s school choice for Najya.

Whoa, for the 50th anniversary of Songs in the Key of...

Whoa, for the 50th anniversary of Songs in the Key of Life, Stevie Wonder has released four additional songs from that recording session. “We didn’t add these songs to the album, but they were part of what I was feeling and discovering as we made it.”

Traveling Light? Our Presets Do the Heavy Lifting in Post

When you're traveling, the last thing you want is to spend hours in front of a laptop editing photos instead of being out exploring. That's exactly the problem our Lightroom presets and Capture One styles solve. Apply one, adjust a couple of sliders if needed, and you're done. W…

Could Sharper Lenses Really Make Images Look Like AI?

The lead image of this article is one that will always stick out to me. It's an image of my good friend, Alex. And I remember when I was showing it off to a bartender identifying as Gen Z, she told me it looked like AI. However, I was showing her the literal back of the camera s…