I’ve known about some of Google’s special operators for years, but librarian Hana Lee Goldin goes through all of the ones she knows about that supercharge search results beyond the usual five paid results and AI Overview at the top of the page. Bookmarked!
When Peter Thiel said, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wasn’t talking about your freedom. He was talking about his own. You don’t exist. When Musk took a chainsaw to the federal government as part of the inside joke he called DOGE, he did so with the air of a man who believed that nothing matters—poverty, chaos, human suffering. He was having fun. It didn’t even matter that the entire destructive exercise ultimately yielded no practical financial gains. For him, the outcome was a foregone conclusion: He could only win, because losing had lost its meaning.
This article has been making the rounds, but it deserves to be shared: Noah Hawley writes about the ultra-rich and the point at which consequences or morality cease to be a factor to them.
But when I told him what had happened, Bezos looked horrified. He did not say “I’m so sorry.” He did not say “Do you need anything?” Instead, he made a face, and in an instant, an aide came and whisked him away. When presented with the opportunity for empathy, even performative empathy, he chose escape.
A couple of years ago I found myself in a rainy field, attempting to free a rust-frozen series of bolts off the front of a Scout that was sitting only a few feet from a crusher. There wasn’t a lot of salvageable stuff on the truck other than some sheet metal; in hindsight I could have probably picked more parts, but I spent most of my time fighting these dumb bolts. I eventually found an employee of the yard, borrowed a cordless angle grinder, and had the grille free in minutes.
A month later I bought a cordless DeWalt grinder and used it a couple of times when my corded units didn’t quite reach, but I found that it only had about 30 seconds of power before it would basically just die out. I chalked this up to my older, smaller 20v batteries not holding a ton of charge, but this winter, I bought a fat 6A for it and my impact driver, and the resulting surplus of power made no difference. I dropped it off at a local authorized service center and they called me this morning to tell me the magnet and armature are bad, and that it isn’t worth the repair cost.
I bought into the DeWalt ecosystem 15 years ago, and while I don’t have a ton of their stuff, I’m shopping for a Milwaukee replacement now.
Wow, here’s a couple of hours’ worth of reading: a man researched and mapped the 8 major English dialects across the continental US, with examples of the differences in vowel pronounciation in exhaustive detail below. Sadly, the map was produced in something called Paint.net; I’m shocked that a data viz or graduate student has not volunteered to rebuild it on a proper cartographic platform.
From an ongoing series of articles about the enshittification of pretty much everything, here’s one about why power tools have gotten less dependable over time.
SBD bought them in 2004. The cheapening of internal components started immediately.
According to a former tool industry representative who spent 30 years in the business, the plan was clear from day one. Cheapen the internals to build more profit margin into each unit. Discontinue large portions of the product line, including iconic legacy tools the brand was built on. The service centers closed within roughly six months of the acquisition.
TL;DR: 90% of all major tool brands are owned by a handful of large conglomerates, and it increases shareholder revenue when they make the tools suck so that we have to replace them every five years.
- It’s going to take me a while to get used to 90˚ weather this year. I can already feel it sapping the life out of me.
- When do we get to see Jules Winfield walking the earth like Kaine in Kung Fu?
- I’m growing four tomato plants in the greenhouse this year, after taking four years off. I refuse to put any more time or hope into it than that.
- I made a tactical error the last time I was at the liquor store: I bought a 12-pack of Western IPA instead of Pacifico. We are clearly in beer-with-lime season, and I have something like eight more cans to go through before I can feel the island breeze again.
….just got my irons in a lot of fires. I was at the World Bank Monday to interview an old friend for a work project, and back there yesterday to do some filming. Work in general has been very busy, and the personal projects are all moving along at a brisk pace. BRB, will update more soon.
BoC might be teasing new music, according to the internets; apparently a bunch of mysterious VHS tapes have been released from Warp Records, their label, featuring audio samples that sound vaguely Boards-adjacent. It has been over a decade since they released Tomorrow’s Harvest, which is way too damn long.
Twelve years ago, I traded the web design field for a gig as a creative director, and while it’s been challenging to move to management from the trenches, I’m glad I did it. By the time I hung up my spurs I’d been doing it for 15 years, and I was pretty burned out. I also noticed that our shop was beginning to utilize templated designs more and more, and I could see the writing on the wall, especially at that place. I loved web design, and what it did for me, and I miss parts of it very much.
Meanwhile, I’ve kept a Google spreadsheet of my parts inventory for the trucks for several years. After parting out the green Travelall, when the number of rubbermaid bins full of parts overwhelmed my brain’s capacity to remember what was where, I did a sweep through each one and catalogued their contents. This worked well for a while, but the search function in a spreadsheet sucks, and updating the sheet is even worse on a phone. I’ve resisted spending money on yet another app because I’m cheap.
This evening I asked Codex to help write a basic PHP script for me to query the spreadsheet and return search results with the name of the bin and its location. After it helped me navigate the wilderness of Google API authorization, it built a small web app that gave me solid search results in a phone-optimized format. When I had that nailed down I asked it how hard it would be to include a way to add new items, and within a few minutes that was done as well. There’s even a flag that allows me to note when I’ve pulled something from a bin, which colors the field in the Google sheet so I can update it later.
Half of the fun of learning programming languages was the feeling you got when something you wrote actually worked. But my personal success ratio was generally 1 minute of joy vs. 59 minutes of frustration. Codex got me to where I wanted to be much faster than I ever would have been able to do on my own.
I’m glad I’m not doing web development anymore.
So the guy that currently runs FEMA claimed that he was teleported to a Waffle House during a podcast interview. Predictably, normal people were upset about this.
Despite the criticism, Phillips doubled down on his supernatural account this week, claiming that the incident occurred while he was “heavily medicated” and that the incident was a “miracle” performed by God.
FYI, Phillips runs a department with 1,000 employees and a budget of $300M.
Many, many people have found themselves at a Waffle House with no idea how they got there, but there’s no shame in admitting you got dumped there by an Uber or stumbled in after a rager at your buddy Steve’s house. This fucking guy claims teleportation.