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Through decades of consolidation, reorganization, and divestiture, AT&T left a famously complicated corporate history. One of the greatest enterprises in American history, arguably the greatest enterprise, AT&T has often rivaled the federal government in the size of its budget and workforce.

Friends, I believe we’re approaching the end of this era. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have filed the paperwork to go public, starting a race for exit liquidity for two companies that burn billions of dollars a year and have no path to profitability.

Both of these companies are

Andrew Singleton in AI Economics for Dummies at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency:

Benjamin owns a farm. He employs 100 workers plowing his fields. His total payroll is $10 million/year. One day, he buys a mule, which provides the worker who uses it with a modest 10 percent productivity gain. Benjamin fires 99 of his workers and purchases 99 mules, expecting a 1,000 percent productivity gain. The driverless mules cause plow damage to his property in excess of $50 million. Benjamin loses another $5 million due to the loss of productivity from his one reMayning employee, who no longer guides a plow but instead spends 100 percent of his time shoveling mule shit. Goldman Sachs builds an altar to Benjamin in their lobby and cuts out the heart of a junior analyst on it every Friday. They call it “Blood Sacrifice Friday.” The name isn’t catchy, but the event becomes a management favorite nonetheless.

I try to keep it light on the AI stuff these days, because oh my god it is everywhere and it bores me to death, but this it too good.

Via.

Once more I can't believe another year has passed.

I feel like the speed of time has increased tenfold. It was only just yesterday that I sat down with little time to spare to collect my thoughts about what should've been your eight birthday? Yet, here we are, on the day that you should have turned nine.

Your little brother and little sister and growing up so fast. Too fast. Every day they are out and about, attending one thing or another. He plays football, handball and gymnastics. She takes dance and ballet classes, and gymnastics too, of course. I do the best I can to help them navigate everything. As does your mother. Sometimes I feel like it's my responsibility to help them find their calling in life, and master it. But I know that the best I can do is be their number one fan in whatever they are doing. So I try to limit my role to that. And the driving to and driving from. And packing bags, filling bottles, buying shoes, making sure nobody forgets their hairbands (I really need to learn how to braid hair, I'm sure if you were here I'd know it already) and a hundred other little things.

That's life right now. It passes at a hundred kilometres per hour. Not so much because I am so busy, I think, but because I am enjoying every moment of it. Even if it is hard sometimes, watching them grow, physically, mentally and socially, into something resembling complete human beings is more rewarding than anything else I have ever experienced. By an infinite margin.

Thinking about how you should have been even further down the line makes me sad. Angry, too. What would you have liked, I wonder? Would you have been a sports girl, like your brother, or musical dance girl, like your sister? Who of the kids I that would have been your classmates would have been your friends? I wondered that as we all went to an end of the school year party at the school tonight, and I saw your class perform a dance.

The weather was great. I overdressed, and felt a little scorched. Your sister did, too. We didn't have time for our usual celebration of your birthday on account of the school party. It made me feel a little guilty. But your sister and I visited your grave and lit a candle. We'll do the other rituals this weekend instead.

I know you won't mind.

Miss you.

⏱️ 04:06 total (1:45 actual) ⇄28.5km ⌀16.1km/h ↗89m ↘?m

Good ride yesterday, to deliver some seedlings I have been growing to a friend who lives under the Fiumicino take-off flight path, just across from the excellent cycle path.

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I had a lot of trouble on my Mac with Time Machine telling me the disk was full and yet I could not find huge wins just by inspection and deleting things that looked too big.

Last year I wrote one of my favourite pieces ever — The Hater’s Guide To The AI Bubble — and followed it up with The Hater’s Guide To The AI Bubble Volume 2 several months later.

The masterwork of Terry A. Davis is his eclectic operating system, TempleOS, which he worked on until his tragic death in 2018. In terms of technical excellence, TempleOS rates well in some respects and poorly in others.

May was a big month! The highlight was a cycling trip around Lake Konstanz, passing through Konstanz, Bregenz Austria, Stein am Rhein in Switzerland, and Meersburg.

We passed a lot of operating agriculture, growing apples, strawberries, and other fruits.

The route is very continuous, mostly flat, and popular with retirees.

There’s this idea in IndieWeb circles of the admin tax. That’s the work you have to do in order to be somewhat independent of the big silo platforms, the price you pay instead of paying with your attention.

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There is not a lot of external evidence for what has been a very busy month one way and another, but I know.

Highlights of the month:

• Garden on the terrace growing fit to bust
• Visit to a fabulous paeony nursery; mine still blind after all these years
• Tried an audio clip again; still no impact
• Good visits with several friends passing through
• Exciting, inspiring, recreational visit to Hearsay audio arts festival in Ireland
• One good and long recording that will Take Work™
• Some good bicycle rides
• Succeeded in making a server at Hetzner for my big project
• Taxes half done
• BBQs, watermelon, cherries.

Activities

May: (low because Ireland)

• Walking with sticks: 0
• Reading: 18
• Steps (avge): 8458
• Podcasts: 7 (all of them logged)
• In bed/asleep 7:48/7:40
• Cycled: 4
• Weight (avge): 90.7
• Naps: 16

April:

• Walking with sticks: 1
• Reading: 12
• Steps (avge): 8356
• Podcasts: 14 (all of them logged)
• In bed/asleep 7:52/7:43
• Cycled: 3
• Weight (avge): 90.8
• Naps: 14

Stuff Done

The server business was very taxing and I had to make several restarts.

Following up on my earlier announcement that I was forking Vim, I’m happy to announce the first release of my fork today: Vim Classic 8.3.0.

I have written a release announcement for vim-classic.org, which you can read here.

It has been an unfortunate turn in the software industry, one of many as of late, that gambling is once again one of its primary engines. With the rise of almost nationwide online sports betting, not to mention prediction markets, making odds on real-world events and extracting the money of suckers is no longer limited to island nations.

A little while ago, I decided that I would really like a better webmentions experience on this site. I’m currently indebted to Pelle Wasserman’s app to collect them for me and deliver them here, which I appreciate very much, but my effort to understand how I might improve the presentation, for example by separating and grouping the various kinds of reaction, taught me only that I have far too much to learn about doing that in a browser.

Last week I ran the second part of my three-part “What If…We’re In An AI Bubble?” series where I have been covering the scenarios that I believe could lead to the bubble popping.

Here’s what I’ve discussed so far:

• What

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Sometimes you come across a tune and you instantly know. It will be a combination of the melody, the instrumentation, the vocals and the lyrics. And everything else that makes music unique.

Came across Rattlesnake Milk today and it was love at first listen. Both their albums (from Bandcamp and Qobuz).

While listening I looked up their upcoming tour dates. Was mightily disappointed discovering that they're coming to Norway in the fall, but won't be playing in Oslo! Can we get someone on this asap?!

Signed up for updates about Open Printer. Hopefully this project sees the light of day, and soon! Right ready for a printer in the house, and this looks perfect.

Via.

Last week I ran the first part of my What If…We’re In An AI Bubble? Series, where I asked questions and posed scenarios as to the consequences of the many, many questions I’ve asked over the last few years.

Executive Summary:

• The Information reports that OpenAI generated $5.7bn in revenue for the first quarter of 2026 based on discussions with sources familiar with its financials.
• With adjusted negative margins of -122%, this means that for every dollar of revenue OpenAI made, it lost an additional $1.22, or

In August 2019 I discovered Tailwind, the CSS framework that makes responsive design relatively easy, thanks to an enthusiastic post by Julia Evans.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran a story about how Anthropic is “about to have its first profitable quarter,” specifically an operating profit, or EBITDA profitability:

Anthropic’s revenue is set to more than double to $10.9 billion in the second quarter, an explosive rate of

Caffeine's negative effects on me are never clearer than when I'm under the influence of caffeine.

(I rewrote that sentence 13 times to get it ‘right’. It still doesn't feel right, but perfect is the enemy of good.)

I redesigned my blog! I decided to put some more personality into it this time, after over a decade of the minimalist style. This short post is just an excuse to show up in your feed reader so you can go look at it.

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A week ago, I moaned that my Fastgate router kept re-assigning IPs after a power failure, which made my Pi-hole less than wonderful.

Every day I read some sort of wrongheaded extrapolation about the future of AI — that today’s models are somehow indicative of AGI creating a “permanent underclass” of people that stops people from building software companies, or really doing any kind of job on the computer:

No comment on this PR may mention the following topics:

• Long-term social or economic impact of LLMs
• The environmental impact of LLMs
• Anything to do with the copyright status of LLM output
• Moral judgements about people who use LLMs

We have asked the moderation team to help us enforce these rules.

– Add an LLM policy for rust-lang/rust, GitHub

A couple years before I got my first GPS watch, this was how I tracked my workouts:

This was a ‘10k’ (ish) run. Based on my understanding of what someone had told me was the course of a local 10k race.

To be honest, it worked just fine. I'm not sure adding GPS and other sensors for a multitude of advanced metrics has made me any fitter than I would've been if I'd just continued running with my old iPod Nano in hand. But it does make my workout log look a little better, so there's that.

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There you'll be

The submarine is a surprisingly ancient technology—at least in its early, primitive forms. The idea is quite simple, that a well-enough-sealed boat ought to be able to submerge and resurface. It's the practicalities that make the whole thing difficult.

In this week’s free newsletter, I explained how bad the circular AI economy is in the simplest-possible terms: 

Anthropic not have money to pay big cloud bills, because Anthropic company cost lots of money, more money than Anthropic make! So Anthropic only PAY cloud bills if OTHERS

On the road, as it were, right now, so this report will be updated with the necessaries when possible.

Highlights of the month:

• Published a link to Photographs on the main site
• Seedlings still having a hard time of it, but other stuff on the terrace flourishing
• Sporadic meals outdoors
• Good bike rides
• Visit to the firefighters’ museum
• Sinners in the cinema at midday
• 300 issues of Eat This Newsletter
• Started on a Melt the ICE hat with yarn selected by The Squeeze
• A few days away as designated driver for The Squeeze
• Watering system working again
• Trains to and from Düsseldorf for IWC
• Visit with an old chum not seen in years
• Poor lecture on a fascinating topic; floods on the Tiber.

Activities

April:

• Walking with sticks: 1
• Reading: 12
• Steps (avge): 8356
• Podcasts: 14 (all of them logged)
• In bed/asleep 7:52/7:43
• Cycled: 3
• Weight (avge): 90.8
• Naps: 14

March:

• Walking with sticks: 2
• Reading: 24
• Steps (avge): 8383
• Podcasts: 14 (all of them logged)
• In bed/asleep 8:11/8:02
• Cycled: 2
• Weight (avge): 90.3
• Naps: 16

Daylight savings → less time in bed

Stuff Done

IWC DUS was a lot of fun, seeing old friends and meeting new ones.

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I've been reading the new Sally Rooney novel, Intermezzo. It's really beautiful. The perfect kind of novel to read slowly. She manages to write prose that's engaging at the micro and macro levels - beautiful sentences, as well as lovely long narrative arcs.

Everyone, it’s time to talk about AI demand and the capacity constraint issues across the industry.

These constraints are not a result of “incredible demand” for AI, but the desperation of hyperscalers and the avariciousness of two near-trillion-dollar failsons living off their parents’ welfare.

Joe Abercrombie in 20 Years:

One observation that blows my mind – The Blade Itself is now twice as old as A Game of Thrones was when The Blade Itself came out. GRRM felt like a long established pillar of the genre to me at that point. Truly I must be part of the fantasy furniture at this one…

That you are, Joe. That you are.

Just this weekend I was visiting a fantasy and science fiction book store with my seven year old son, with whom I'm currently reading Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets. As we stumbled upon the First Law books, I told him ‘just wait until you're old enough to read these ones, you'll have a blast’.

I guess The Blade Itself was about 10 years old when I read it. In another decade, he'll be the one reading it.

I spent a lot of time outside in April. The first two weekends I did long bike rides: from Brooklyn to Tarrytown along the Old Croton Aqueduct trail, and out to Rockaway Beach via the Marine Parkway Bridge & Cross Bay Memorial Bridge.

Then, I ran the Brooklyn Experience Half Marathon.

I mentioned in a recent note that I've been tinkering with the front page setup for a while. The previous iteration of the front page had been mostly identical since I relaunched the blog in late 2023. It showed recent posts and recent notes.

Since then, I've added a couple of content sections to the website. I add books to my reading log several times per month. The workout log is updated daily. The result is that the front page wasn't really reflecting the entirety of the activities that happen on this website. As new visitors tend to drop by the home page, I think it's a good idea to use that page to give them an idea of what's happening on this website.

To that end, I've tried several times the last year to find a way to incorporate updates from the reading and workout logs into the front page. Unsuccessfully! I've created and discarded at least five different mock-ups. Common for all of them is that I've begun with the approach of trying to lift the design elements from the two logs into the front page. As I'm happy with how both sections look, that felt like the natural approach.

The drawback is that every single time I tried this approach, the overall feel of the front page was disjointed. It came off as something haphazardly thrown together. When I tried once more to tackle this challenge the other day, the outcome was the same. But at that point, a lightbulb went off.

‘I don't have to bring the design elements from the logs to the front page. I can just bring the data from the logs and present them in the same way I do the other front page elements!’

The template was essentially already in place. Posts and notes are distinct types of content, and were already presented as such. Doing the same with two more types of content shouldn't be an issue. So I gave it a go. And, to my surprise, it worked just fine. It's not revolutionary or anything out of the ordinary. But that wasn't what I was aiming for. I just wanted to preserve the look and feel of the home page, while also showing the breadth of content I share on the site. And I think I achieved just that.

To spruce it up a little, I decided to reuse the icons from the workout log on the workout log entries. With that little visual in place, it was a short order to just reuse miniature versions of the book covers from the books I'm reading to add a little bit of colour there as well.

One unexpected result is that the posts and notes entries feel a bit flat by comparison without any visuals. But, as I want to err on avoiding anything akin to Apple's icons in menus everywhere, I think I'll leave it as it is for now.

While make some changes to the front page (I finally found a way to include the content I wanted!) I accidentally copied the settings file from my ‘dev’ directory to my actual website directory. The dev version only has a placeholder URL and site name in the settings.

Now I've gotten a reminder where I use those settings.

In addition to the header, the feeds rely on these. When I regenerated the site with the placeholder values in the settings file, every old post in the feeds were given a new URL and unique ID. This would result in your feed reader thinking these old posts were new posts. And a dead link to these posts.

Will try not to do that again! ^_^

Watched Train Dreams tonight.

Wow!

Another great film. Loved the quiet contemplation of it. The perseverance in the face on unbearable grief. Speaking of, I was, presumably like the protagonist, hoping that it didn't happen. That they simply moved on from the scorched earth, to start anew somewhere.

I still am.

Back when Copilot first came out, I immediately disliked it. But I decided to give it a fair shake and tried to evaulate it in good faith. I wasn’t interested in paying for it, but they had a form for FOSS community members to apply for a free subscription, so I filled it out and gave it a shot.

Been thinking about redoing the front page for a while now. Want to incorporate recent workouts as well as books I'm reading. Perhaps even recent listens from my ListenBrainz profile.

Fiddled around with the inspector trying to land something. But nothing feels right. Yet. Could probably take to Figma or something to get a decent sketch, but ‘designing’ with HTML and CSS feels more like shaping clay or working wood, and that's the way I want to do it.