Hello world!

Woke up from a dream where humans started metabolizing microplastics to become Lego people. Several people thought this sounded like one of the better outcomes of the whole microplastics mess.

This short story about AI and creative writing is great and angry and captures something important:

It chose 'stone' because statistically, in the petabytes of training data scraped without consent from the internet, the word 'stone' appears in proximity to 'lump in throat' with a probability of 0.04 percent. It isn't a choice. It's a math problem. It is predicting the next token based on mediocrity.

Millie's take on software completion:

We need to normalize declaring software as finished. Not everything needs continuous updates to function. In fact, a minority of software needs this. Most software works as it is written. The code does not run out of date.

Joan Westenberg on Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life:

You'll spend an afternoon doing something that cannot be made faster, producing something that you could have bought for four dollars, and in the process you'll recover some capacity for patience that the attention economy has been methodically stripping away. This resonates with the whole "declare software finished" sentiment above.

Polyglot AI Agents: WebAssembly Meets the JVM - Mozilla.ai exploring how to combine WASM's performance benefits with Java's ecosystem maturity for agentic frameworks.

Been seeing this 1987 gaming setup making the rounds - NES on a CRT with Rambo and Nintendo posters. I've totally been in this room.

The Mr. Bean ADVENT calendar art from Mistigris continues to delight. Also doesn't hurt that I got it running on my own neglected bbs.decafbad.com. :)

Mark Damon Hughes posted the OMNI Complete Catalog of Computer Software from 1984 and I'm hit with nostalgia. There's a whole archive.org copy to browse through.

Goddamn I loved OMNI. And the techno-optimism that software was the way into The Science Fiction Future and not, you know, the Torment Nexus that it actually became.