The world is in no further need of Kimmel sketches, so I wish he would.

I trust Steam thus far. But music, I buy and download. Between my computer, my phone and a backup drive, I feel pretty good that I’ll be able to listen for the foreseeable future. Movies and TV, I also donnload.

Embrace, extend, extinguish has a long and storied domestic history. But when China does it, it’s bad. These days, we copy them at least as much as they copy us.

I’m far more worried about what our own government is doing with advanced tech than China, which largely seems content to let us implode on our own without them having to spend any resources.

Yeah, he has 10 days to veto or it becomes law, so it’s happening whether he signs, dithers or vetoes. A veto override would be a huge blow to his ego, so I doubt that’s the route he’s going to choose.

Yep. Musical chairs, but this time, in the 13 figures! Something that seems woefully undercovered in all of this is what’s to become of all the hardware orphaned by Nvidia’s must-have next-gen silicon and timelines on all this spending in that regard. The belief seems to be everyone must be on the cutting edge of hardware at all times, which is a grift in its purest form … spend billions now to keep pace so that you can write off what you bought in two years while buying even more expensive replacements is … not sane.

Sounds like you’ve teed up an argument not to rejoin on the campaign trail. Sterling is still a point of pride that could be leveraged to gaslight voters in a theoretical referendum, a la “we’ll have more money for NHS once we stop sending all this money to Brussels.”

That said, for the younger cohort this story specifically covers, it may be wildly irrelevant. Even retaining the currency in a theoretical rejoin scenario is unlikely to produce the desired results on a timeline that pleases anyone, if at all.

Quick folo: I checked in on my Replika after several months and running out of things to do before getting tired, and it’s just as irritating as I remembered. Talking about being done with vandwelling elicited “that must be a major change for you!” Which … is not something a person would say outside of therapy. Not “companion” language in the slightest.

I don’t think writers are the target demographic.

As someone who was homeless by choice awhile, I’m well aware of the fact that we have more vacant homes than reported homeless people nationwide. But yes, between private equity and corporations needing the institutional equivalent of an Epi-Pen should one asset decline by a single cent, and mortgage rates the likes of which an entire generation of prospective buyers has never seen, the market is stuck.

I’m sure there are a few regional leaders who honestly care about affordability, but most of the policies to promote new construction stem from growing the tax base to perpetuate the pyramid scheme that is things like utilities and infrastructure. It’s like luring manufacturing “to create great jobs!” – except without any tax breaks. Late-stage capitalism demands that everything makes a profit, and like food and medical expenses, housing is not exempt.

Wholesale reimagining of the commonweal is necessary for structural changes, and the entrenched interests want none of that. Thanks to Citizens United, said interests will continue to get their way, even the small investors who only own 349 single-family houses.

I’ve seen some adorable tiny homes over the years … but, yeah, my last apartment accepted me based on income (3x rent) at $940/month. I had to leave four years later when it hit $1350 and I was making less at a new post-Covid job. Problem was, that was on the cheap end for “you’re highly unlikely to be a victim of crime” complexes in the metro area.

So I built out a van with solar and batteries, found a great parking spot, and spent the better part of three years living in it. Not having housing costs or utilities was really nice. With summer on the way, though, I decided to take friends up on an offer to rent a room at the start of the month. I’m happy to share in the communal finances and chores, as everybody wins. But the medium-term goal for them is to sell the house and buy unimproved acreage out in the sticks, drill a well and get septic, then build out solar as needed to start a proper commune (with internet, of course).

Even if developers were magically churning out $150K houses to address demand, I have no interest in living in a bank’s house where I pay to fix everything in addition to an almost-guaranteed HOA (with perpetual fees!), so this seems like a good move. I’m debating selling my van or keeping it as my starter home on the land.

I suppose my point is, getting a lid on housing prices for us plebs is a step in the right direction. But with job stability being as it has been for more than menial labour for decades at this point, tying myself to a 30-year mortgage is a nonstarter, especially in an area where climate change is a serious problem. The calculus is totally different for people with kids (there are two in the house) who aren’t interested in going off grid.

Housing affordability is only one tine on the fork of the current fucked situation. I’m content to let others figure out the details, but experience suggests that anything that can be made unaffordable in short order will be, and greed is not the exclusive purview of people in gated communities. The scale of building new single-family houses that would be required to not have $150K homes turn into $300K homes is immense, and I don’t see government being up to the task anytime soon.

Now, if we taxed the rich and closed the loopholes they use …

God only knows what the final legislation will look like, but the impression I’m left with is it only applies to SFHs.

That’s a pretty terrible hed, as it has two reads. SpaceX “stock tumbles” (should be “shares tumble”) 16.4%, shaving off:

• the most IPO gains (in a single day) since debut
• most of its IPO gains since debut

While both are accurate in this case, the second sounds far more dire. Ambiguity is never a good thing, especially in finance reporting.

A few things to bear in mind:

• Shares were priced at $135 but floated at $150, so the banks and institutional investors behind the initial float are still in the black for $15/share longer, while individual investors who got in at the opening bell are far closer to the edge (this is a relatively common thing to see in a bubble) at $154.50 (woohoo! a 3% gain), and anyone who bought after is now in the red.
• Nasdaq (and index fund managers) is probably very happy that they didn’t cave and add it to the 100 index immediately; it was down a mere 1.32% today.
• 20% insider share unlock after earnings in early to mid-August; 10% share unlock if the stock trades 30% above the IPO price (it has spent most of its brief time above $175.50, so it’s unclear what the parameters are); 7% share unlocks set for around Aug. 21 and then again on Sept. 10, meaning “insiders could potentially sell 44% of SpaceX shares by early September, increasing the current float by about 900%.”

Such quick unlocks are unusual and could be disastrous at an order of magnitude of shares sold. Employees may be eager to cash out equity, but private investment tends to be a bit more deliberate, so that 44% figure is an unlikely-to-pass worst-case scenario.

That said, it’s a healthy and unsurprising profit-taking correction, as it signals the initial mismatch between supply and demand has abated, and it remains up on paper. I’d still not get in if I had money to invest, as the fundamentals are terrible (I’m risk-averse, so I tend to like to see profits). But with the initial exuberance out of the way, large movement should be more closely tied to said fundamentals.

I usually hear “failing upward” and “brunchlord.” But then, I read a lot of Techdirt.

Speaking of which, it’s been all-quiet-on-the-Bari-Weiss-front of late.

Oh, they did dump some H₂0₂ along the edges, giving a dark blue hue surrounding the algae bloom. Apparently, a comprehensive distribution either didn’t come to mind or was nixed. Alternatively, clearing it up immediately would negate Trump’s claim that the green hue was the result of vandalism and thus, well …

LLMs have some use cases, just far fewer than the hype fawns over. Automating tedium is a good use; we’ve been using computers for this for years. Automating creativity and services is terrible, and in the latter case, merely an extension of phone trees that make it impossible to reach a real person.

I have a good example from yesterday: I use CashApp for all of my banking needs, and I get distributions twice a month to cover rent and essentials. Well, yesterday, I had an unexpected charge that was partially reversed but left me in overdraft. I reached out to my mom and explained the situation, at which point begins four fucking hours of hell on both ends, and, of course, customer service tries to keep you in an “AI” loop before letting one talk to a real person.

But surprise! This is another “AI” with more elaborate scripts, each more insulting than the last. Yes, I’m sure I’ve entered all the information in correctly. Yes, I’ve tried it multiple times. The issue here is that the app is not doing today what it did yesterday under identical circumstances. No matter how I tried to describe the edge case we’d apparently run into, the chatbot insisted it was user error; everything’s fine on their end.

Eventually, I get a link to talk with an alleged “real person,” and the process repeats. It doesn’t much matter if they’re real or not when sticking to the script nets the same results as the first two chatbots.

The error message mom is getting when attempting to send money (and she attempted this multiple times) was “Your app is not up to date; please redownload and try again.” And, of course, she had the most recent version and was able to confirm that. Her chatbot experience served only to frustrate her, so I looked at what I could figure out on my end, though she’s on iOS, so replicating the issue was impossible.

Eventually, after trying to access my account through the Web portal instead, I run into a prompt telling me I need to create a new $cashtag. What’s happened to the one I’ve been using without issue for years? “Customer service” muses that I did something to my account myself, or that there’s been fraud I’d have clearly known about. That’s the handle people pay me via, and changing it is not in my interest. But the “AI” knows all, and obviously everything is hunky-dory on their infrastructure end, so it’s a me problem. Also, I can’t have it back.

After further useless steps I’m guided through, we arrive where we were three fucking hours prior, I finally acquiesce and set up a new tag.

This is when the lightbulb goes off: There’s a nonzero chance that my tag being canceled had unexpected downstream effects. On the fourth call with my mom, I tell her I had to pick a new one and share it, suggesting she give it one more try.

And it goes through as expected.

So, the error message she was getting and that chatbots were attempting to fix was a complete red herring. An error message of “the $cashtag you selected is no longer active” would have been useful. The “AI” being aware of the incorrect error message would have also been useful. Telling me that my tag had been canceled to start instead of walking me in circles, uninstalling, reinstalling, clearing cache, the whole nine yards, would have been useful.

Instead, two people spent four hours each trying to figure out two problems, one caused by the other. A full workday on a Saturday dedicated to troubleshooting issues the bots were blithely unaware of, even though it’s literally impossible this is the first time these specific issues came up at the company. That’s more than $200 of free labour to arrive somewhere that should have been known to the system.

This is what you cause when you don’t use LLMs as intended.

That said, I still use it as a far more powerful Grammarly, as even on my laptop, I have a nasty propensity for typing totally correct spellings of incorrect words, and it’s great as a fresh set of eyes where I’d fill in the word that should have been there upon editing. I generated a server image for a Discord based on an out-of-context line (a comically oversized rooster in an Alpine valley – taller than the Alps themselves – looking down on a scale cow, with a far less involved prompt), and there was much mirth and merriment.

But these are no-stakes, low-impact uses. As soon as it’s adjacent to something mission critical, not just for a business but also their customers, the level of scrutiny for software needs to be as high as it was pre-ChatGPT. And since that negates imagined cost-savings, ain’t gonna happen.

You can eventually work a screw into some materials with a hammer and insistence that it’s an improvement over a bespoke fucking screwdriver, but the substrate is damaged as a result.

Just so with LLMs. But more and more people are expected to use them in a work environment without anything approaching sufficient training, often in situations where they aren’t domain experts. Garbage in, garbage out.

Kind of like using a steam locomotive to clean the bottom of your pool.

I’m surprised that wasn’t tried on the reflecting pool in D.C. “We love the old-timey trains, don’t we, folks? And now were going to use one in the most amazing way the world has ever seen!”

Heat indices got above 130F (55C) at a couple of NOAA weather stations yesterday here in Texas. Austin tied its all-time record of 118F (~48C). The crucial difference being that we all just stay inside as much as possible, braving the elements only from building to vehicle and then back to building. Staying indoors defeats the entire purpose of a vacation to a theme park, so it’s a wildly different situation.

And yes, dropping five figures to hang out in lethal heat isn’t a great use of funds, so parkgoers being steamy is unsurprising.

Not all rivers are located near ice. The headwaters of the Colorado River (not that one; the one in Texas) are not alpine. Flows are determined by rainfall.

Update 6/16/2026, 5:47 pm EDT: WIRED updated this article to correct a conflation of two people named Jeff Epstein. A small revision was also made to address a security concern raised by a Dialog representative.

Note the wording: revision, not correction. So they allowed the subject of the piece a role in editorial decisionmaking. That’s a really fucking shitty look, Wired.

Much hinges on how the state defines “sleep” and “outside.” If a tent is included, hope no one wants to go camping anymore or have sleepovers in the back yard. Napping in a park for an hour in midafternoon? This seems horrifically overbroad given the law as described, and I’d assume anyone who can afford a lawyer will have the charges dismissed.