Fujifilm’s Forgotten Camera

A while back, I moved away from Fujifilm cameras and gear after being a pretty die-hard Fuji lover for over a decade. Their treatment of the X Pro 3 and their newfound fascination with content creators made me feel like they've been leaving photographers in the dust. It's part o…

This is a fun and really well-done triple mashup of...

This is a fun and really well-done triple mashup of Outkast’s B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad), Hitchcock’s The Birds, and Sesame Street.

A sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. NES cartridge...

A sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. NES cartridge recently sold at auction for $3 million. “It bears the coveted gloss sticker seal affixed to the top lid, identifying it as a second-production example.”

This is neat: Robin Sloan is rewriting his 2009 short...

This is neat: Robin Sloan is rewriting his 2009 short story, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. “The interplay between books and technology has changed since I wrote them…but also that I have become a different writer, and a better one.”

Airport Meeting

Stop chasing life goals and start trying tiny...

Stop chasing life goals and start trying tiny experiments to learn from instead. “Chasing goals doesn’t work for life’s most important questions — career, relationships, health. It’s like locking in your answer before you have understood the question.”

What’s the Point of Sex, Anyway? “There is yet...

What’s the Point of Sex, Anyway? “There is yet another kind of male, known among ichthyologists as a ‘sneaky mater.’ This type dispenses altogether with nest-building and partnering and simply darts around squirting.”

How a Differential Gear Works

I’ve posted this before, but it’s so good, here it is again: a super-simple explanation of why differential gears are necessary in cars and how they work. (via @stevenstrogatz) [This is a vintage post originally from Apr 2013.] Tags: cars · science · vide…

The Open Source AI Gap Map shows the current...

The Open Source AI Gap Map shows the current capabilities of open source AI tools with an eye toward answering an important question: “What building blocks are missing for creating completely open source AI products?”

The End of Reading Is Here . “The decline of...

The End of Reading Is Here. “The decline of reading will bring about changes of the same magnitude. It will affect our innermost thoughts, our society’s politics and culture, and how we tell the history of our civilization.”

This Free Film Scanning Tool is What Analog Photographers Have Been Waiting For

Film scanning tools are a rare bunch for most analog photographers. There are a few options, but those that are free and open source, along with good color science, are hard to come by. To help with this conundrum, a young creator has innovated a tool that can help one to conver…

Why The Best Player Alive Barely Runs

David Epstein, author of the recent Inside the Box (a book about the value of constraints), did a fascinating video on “anticipatory skill” and “chunking” and how players like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo (who can accurately head the ball even in the dark) use t…

Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future...

Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI. “This book presents the rediscovered original source code of ELIZA alongside previously unseen scripts…, revealing a far more sophisticated system than previously documented.”

The Pearl

I was asked recently what I thought about Graham Platner and realized that I hadn't really formed an opinion about him. I've not written anything about him, either on socials or on here, and it seems like the iron is rapidly cooling so I might as well have a strike. I live in…

Big Tech Breaking Bad

The most hated people in America are leaders of big tech companies. This definitely wasn't true when I got into the industry, so how did we get here? Our current tech environment can trace its roots to the personal computer revolution of the 70s and 80s. There was a real DIY sw…

Tehrant

In 1989, The Offspring released their self titled album. On it is a song called Tehran: In your plane in the blue sky You roam again Words that echo in your mind Make your heart beat faster This is no Vietnam…

Wirth's Revenge

In 1995, Turing laureate Niklaus Wirth wrote an essay called A Plea for Lean Software in which he mostly gripes about the state of software at the time. Among these gripes is this claim which Wirth attributes to his colleague Martin Reiser1, though it's become to be known as Wir…

Abolish ICE

Several days ago, ICE agents murdered Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. As is now customary, Stephen Miller interrupted his usual torrent of racist anti-immigrant abuse on Twitter to call Pretti an "assassin" and a "domestic terrorist" in an attempt to frame his killing as a justifie…

On AI: Environmental Impact

Earlier in 2025, I started to poke around and experiment with using LLM-based AI. My purposes have largely been educational. While I absorbed the basics of machine learning during my general computer science education, I have never engaged directly with the topic and have not s…

Sublurb

On Mar 30, 2025, Hank Green posted on BlueSky: Some of the critiques I’ve seen [of abundance liberalism] do seem to boil down to the old mainstay of “people should stop wanting the things they want” and I don’t really know how to handle that. “We don’t need more h…

Politics is Real Life

Charlie Kirk was assassinated in Utah today, just a few short hours ago. As of this writing, the suspect is still at large. We don't know anything about their politics or their motivations. Kirk's body is not yet cold, but virtually everyone has already made up their mind about…

Notes on "Abundance"

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's book Abundance made a big splash when it landed in March of this year. I wanted to get around to reading this while on a train or a plane, but as luck would have it, I sleep incredibly well on both, so it's languished in my "to read" pile until no…

Zohran Takes

A lot of us in NYC are basking in the glow of an unexpectedly decisive Zohran Mamdani victory last night. In addition to the happiness that an election night could be something to celebrate, there is some schadenfreude, or in the poetic words of Ashley Feinberg, an "incredible s…

Long Hours in the Smithery

I recently came across "Odin: A Programming Language Made For Me." The author of the post has also written a book about the Odin language, and it's a really nice technical overview of aspects of Odin that he recognizes from programming practices he used at the game company "Our…

Onshoring 996

Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba and formerly one of the richest people in China, has reappeared this week. It's not the first time he's managed this feat; he also reappeared in 2023. This time seems more impactful, because it was among a group of businessmen in the front row of…

LLM Agent AAR: Recipe Management

I thought it would be useful to record my journey through various technologies on this blog, akin to Simon Wilison's TILs. Since my experience with LLMs has felt more like fighting a battle against their less desirable proclivities, I decided that calling it an AAR is probably m…

Contact Light

I'm finally comfortable admitting that LLM no longer stands for Lunar Landing Module. After an 8 month break where my technical output was limited to updating this blog to use SQLite instead of MongoDB and creating a Minecraft modpack and a few mods, the itch to tinker and expl…

Strawberries

If you travel in east Asia in the winter, especially to Korea or Japan, you'll find yourself somehow in strawberry season. This is because they grow short-day cultivars that flower and ripen in the winter. A few years ago, I bought some of the best strawberries that I've ever h…

Twenty Twenty Five

My blog has been on hiatus for some time. I've not published a post since April 2022, which is nearly 3 years ago. I have been writing steadily in the interim, but I didn't manage to write anything that I felt met the bar that I had established for myself on this site. One of t…

How a Photographer Lost a $259K Photoshoot to AI

I recently worked with a photographer to estimate and negotiate a project for a smaller sports apparel client. In our initial creative call, the client described the need for “dynamic and compelling” product images of their new retail line consisting of 100 items of athleisu…

British political news: Nigel Farage is facing...

British political news: Nigel Farage is facing competition for his parliamentary seat from “a man with a ‌trash can on his head, better known as Count Binface”. From the country that brought you Boaty McBoatface…

City’s Beautification Initiative Hamstrung By Commitment...

City’s Beautification Initiative Hamstrung By Commitment To Local Artists. “I’m pretty sure when the mayor promised residents a revitalized arts district, he didn’t mean a couple of wonky fish sculptures haphazardly nailed to a tree…” Bwhahaha.

First Image of the Sony RX10 V Shows a Major Design Overhaul

Sony has introduced some fantastic cameras for professional photographers over the past few months. It now appears that the company is keen on launching something that benefits enthusiasts who are on a budget. While there have been reports of the launch of Sony RX10 V, it has no…

Is the Original Sony a7 Still Good in 2026?

Back in 2013, the Phoblographer reviewed the original Sony a7; our review can be found here at this link. In 2021, we questioned whether or not it's still good and I came up with a few suggestions on how to make it better if you've still got it. It's now 2026; and I still use my…

Birding Photographers: This Will Protect Your Gear

Trust me when I say this, you're working your camera gear way too hard. That's why we created the Photography Care Program, in collaboration with Full Frame Insurance. Dust affects your camera and lens performance more than you think, and unless you're constantly cleaning the l…

The Flashback 35 V2 Just Became one of the Best Compact Cameras

The Flashback 35 V2 is a camera that we said isn't just insanely fun, but we also rated it amongst one of our best travel cameras of the year. We say this even despite the cost of the camera rising and some issues with the DNG Raw file capabilities. Thankfully for the company, t…

Medieval Wound Man

From The Public Domain Review, The Many Lives of the Medieval Wound Man, a diagram found in many medical texts beginning in the early 1400s. Living on today in libraries from Copenhagen to Munich, the strange figure of the Wound Man gives modern viewers a glimpse of the wor…

If Only There Had Been a Sign That the Face-Melting Nazi...

If Only There Had Been a Sign That the Face-Melting Nazi from Indiana Jones Wouldn’t Make a Good Senator. “Marion Ravenwood said he trapped her in a room and physically assaulted her. But I decided to keep supporting Toht anyway.”

Interviews with some of the dwindling number of...

Interviews with some of the dwindling number of survivors of World War II Japanese American incarceration camps, including George Takei.

Why the Olympus XZ-1 Is the Comeback OM System Desperately Nees

Olympus has some wonderful cameras in their lineup. From the iconic GH series, to the newly launched S1 series, there is so much for users to choose from. However, the company has some fantastic cameras that were launched a decade ago, and some of them deserve a comeback. This i…

Will Apple Give Us Truly Personal AI?

A couple of weeks ago, in The George Carlin Model of AI, I said personal AI needed to work first on what George called a place for my stuff. Should Apple occupy that whole personal space, kinda like René Magritte visualized in a surrealist painting seventy-five years ago? I thi…

World Cup Wallpapers for Your Phone

Marcos Paulo has been making all sorts of phone-sized wallpapers for the World Cup and posting them to Threads. You have to poke around to find them in his account, but here are a few direct links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Tags: design · fashion ·…

How to talk about “AI” without adding to the...

How to talk about “AI” without adding to the anthropomorphization. Suggestions: “artificial intelligence → probabilistic automation” & “AI agent → probabilistic, unverified software manipulator”. Seems like the horse is out of the barn on this though…

Mister Rogers visits Eric Carle’s studio and paints with...

Mister Rogers visits Eric Carle’s studio and paints with him (full episode). Carle wrote and illustrated The Very Hungry Caterpillar and other children’s books.

Over the past few centuries, humans have decimated bird...

Over the past few centuries, humans have decimated bird populations — you can hear it in the thinning of the dawn chorus — but it’s difficult to notice sometimes because of shifting baseline syndrome.