Just watched _Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die_, and holy *crap* that's a fascinating movie.
It's just as much a horror movie as a science-fiction one: expect quite a lot of both scary and creepy.
And I confess, I'm not sure the story actually holds together logically, but it's a time-travel story at its heart, and that provides quite a bit of leeway.
Anyway -- not an easy movie, but a far better one than it looks like at first glance. Recommended!
I’m fully a month behind the times, apparently, but this is an absolute delight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayWiE_gL9mU
(A get-out-the-#vote video from the cast of #Hamilton.)
#USPol, but a happy detail for a change
Wow, even by the standards of the #fascist #Trump regime, this is some exceptionally wanna-be-autocrat bullshit: https://apnews.com/article/ilhan-omar-search-f968cfe403d61ad61812422f1252fd2c
Fascinating post from #Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/redesigning-source-control
tl;dr — since they’re seriously #AI-maximalist over there, with nigh-infinite quotas, they’ve gotten to the point where they’re trying to juggle on the order of 30 *thousand* code changes per day.
Turns out that git turned into an enormous bottleneck for that, so they gave up and wrote a new agent-focused source control system, Scion; this gives a brief overview of the architecture.
It’s explicitly only relevant at that kind of scale, but it’s an interesting read.
But I’m horribly amused at the way the article makes it sound like server-centric source control is a radical innovation, having been through several of those before git was invented…
This is a wonderfully evocative page, showing just how much of the world is held up by a tiny number of #OpenSource developers: https://sheets.works/data-viz/holding-up-the-internet
Well worth bookmarking for when you're in a conversation with someone who doesn't understand the scale of the tragedy of the commons here.
Brief personal editorial: society as a whole needs to share the work and money better here. In my spare time I’m Treasurer for @typelevel, and painfully aware of the difficulty of running massive software projects on a shoestring. If you can contribute time or money to any of this (or better, get your companies to contribute), *please* do!
Our own donation info can be found at https://typelevel.org/foundation/ but there are lots of other deserving projects as well. Every little bit helps!
And if you want to come help with some serious and fun Scala code, join us on #Typelevel’s Discord at https://discord.gg/typelevel-632277896739946517 — questions welcome!
Just so everyone is crystal-clear, #ICE is absolutely *not* limiting their attention to immigrants. They’re illegally attacking American citizens as well, and quite a lot of them: https://projects.propublica.org/american-citizens-detained-dhs-civil-rights/
The #Trump #fascists like to pretend that they’re only going after illegal immigrants, but the reality is that there’s a lot of naked racism in play…
A bit weird and amusing to find out something about next-door #Vermont from the BBC, but this article is delightful to see: https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20260928-a-virtual-power-plant-hidden-in-vermont-homes-is-keeping-the-lights-on-during-storms
tl;dr — Vermont has a growing program to support large home #batteries. It’s particularly great for folks who are in areas that are prone to outages, but even more importantly, it allows the grid operators to use those home batteries to smooth power, and avoid “peak” problems.
This is downright wonderful to see, a real boon for #renewableEnergy, and I’d love to see Massachusetts get equally serious about something like this…
A week or two old, but this half-hour video from Patrick Boyle is well worth a watch if you’re interested in the #AI Bubble: https://youtu.be/T-oXyXwD6sE
tl;dr — the video is basically examining the question “How does all the noise about a $2 trillion IPO for #Anthropic make any sense?” The answer can be summed up as, “It doesn’t”.
As always, he gets a little nerdy about the financial ins and outs, talking about how IPO valuations work and where all the money is going. But the punchline is basically that you have to believe in both astonishing growth for the industry *and* that Anthropic will capture a huge amount of that for such numbers to be remotely plausible.
It’s also even more deadpan sarcastic than he usually is, which says something. But I really want to see a website for Boyle Compute now…
Today in “yeah, #AI is changing the rules”, I just came across #ArtCraft: https://getartcraft.com/apps
tl;dr — this whole project is basically a gigantic “fuck you” to #Adobe. They’re building ground-up, open-source, clean-room reimplementations of all the major Adobe tools, using Opus to write Rust desktop apps.
It’s crazy-ambitious (and still very much a work in progress), but appears to be a long ways along already and moving at lightning speed.
This may signal a new trend, as #LLM-based coding threatens applications that go too far down the #enshittification road.
Yes, I know some folks will object to this being AI-generated — there are plenty of valid arguments there. But I very much do not object to Adobe getting poked in the eye, and the prospect of many Bad Companies getting a comeuppance is quite welcome…
RE: https://social.growyourown.services/@homegrown/117354728907764529
Seriously, folks — it’s way past time for the #SCA to get the hell off #Facebook, but this looks to be the nail in the coffin…
Ah, neat -- #YourLocalEpidemiologist's NY branch is now formally expanding to the whole northeast: https://yourlocalepidemiologistny.substack.com/
For anyone who doesn’t know it, YLE has been a sensible, calm source for public-health information since the beginning of the pandemic. It’s pretty much my go-to for coverage that is well-informed and neither panicky nor denialist.
For the #comics fans: I just got introduced to the Sweet Shop app, a new platform for digital comics that seems to get the details right, including:
* Bootstrapped instead of VC-funded (so much less prone to #enshittification)
* Leans towards DRM-free when they can (although they allow creators to ask for DRM)
* Provides PDF downloads
* Already has a considerable stock of good comics
More immediately, for the next week or so, Iron Circus Comics ( @IronSpike ), one of the best queer-friendly indy publishers around, has a deep sale on a good chunk of their back stock — a buck a volume for a bunch of great stuff: https://sweetshop.app/publishers/iron-circus-comics
So I’ve just bought the ~half of their comics I didn’t already own, and wholeheartedly recommend checking it out: it’s a fabulous deal on a lot of fine comics.
And more generally, check out Sweet Shop (and yay for alternatives to the Amazon empire): https://sweetshop.app/
Epic and delightful game of 20 Questions that I just learned about for the first time: https://www.tumblr.com/thestoryofaslut/829053719115071488?source=share
(Vague content warning as kink-related, but the post itself is entirely SFW.)
:scala: 📣📰 New Scala News is out: the August 31, 2026 edition, with dependent types, sbt plugin classpath isolation, an sbt security fix and more.
The site's had a refresh too!
:scala: 👉 https://www.scalanews.net/Archive/2026/scala_news_2026-08-31.html 👈 :scala:
cc @hktpe @scala_lang @armanbilge @eed3si9n @jducoeur @SethTisue
For a long time, I’ve been applauding _The Boys_, the raucous and gory but brilliant political satire that involves a deeply psychotic superhero committing, essentially, a Christo-fascist coup of the US.
One of the most marvelous things about it was how blatantly clear the parallels to the #Trump regime were. (For about a year there I was *sure* he would find some pretext to shut the show down before its finale.) So much of what it portrayed closely mocked the current right wing.
So I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the real world is now aping the last season of the show, with blatantly personal ads being run by the government for the dictator: https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/09/problem-with-trumps-taxpayer-funded-ads/688817/?gift=E_ZnjFDVDXw07BX6pvgvVMlFmaLaMUd8vXcmGIxlZys&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
That didn’t prove persuasive for Homelander — hope it doesn’t do any better for Mr. Orange...
The #enshittification of #Google continues apace.
I’m going to be staying at a hotel soon. I want to put that in my Saved list in Google Maps. Nice and straightforward you’d think, right?
No — when I put the address into Google Maps on my laptop, it shows me *all the hotels in that area*. (Of which there are many, because it’s in the middle of a city.)
Worse, while the desired place is top of the list, it is in no way clearly highlighted on the map, so it’s impossible to find in that sea of hotels.
Worse yet, from that search pane, I can’t find any way to *save the address*. Instead, Google is so busy trying to sell me ways to make a reservation (which I already have), it’s managed to misplace the “save” button.
I finally gave up and did it from my phone (the app still works properly). But in Google’s desperation to Sell Sell Sell, they’re losing sight of why I ever bothered to use them in the first place…
Really excellent take on the bloody “Lesbian Bar Mask Mandate” story that’s taken over the internet the past few days: https://awardsforgoodboys.substack.com/p/lesbian-bar-mask-mandates
This one’s hard to summarize into a tl;dr — the article’s a little long, but worth reading for a bit of properly nuanced perspective.
It echoes nicely with my own feelings about the whole thing, which is that I have a good deal of empathy with all of the people who are actually *involved* in that situation (on both sides of the debate).
But some of them lost perspective (in somewhat stereotypical ways, unfortunately) and it *completely* went off the rails when it went viral and became “news” (in the sense of “News-Shaped Entertainment Content” that really is no business of the wider world).
Anyway — read the article. It takes this specific incident as an opportunity to remind us of some wider and more important lessons.
“Frog and Toad and the Increasingly Capable Machines”: https://www.frogandtoad.ai
tl;dr — this is a cute, quick little children’s story that also serves as a pretty accurate summary of the HuggingFace Incident.
Well worth bookmarking for anybody who is trying to figure out what the hubbub was all about.
*snrk* — quote: “... what might be called #Trump’s iron-clad Law of Military Achievement: The number of times the president claims victory is inversely proportional to the actual extent of American military success”
Oh, this looks neat: https://structural.chat
This is the latest product from the #Unison team (who I knew from the #Scala world back before they founded Unison).
Haven't read my way through the papers yet, but the (very reasonable-sounding) theory seems to be that #LLMs are actually a pretty lousy way to build chatbots -- they're achingly slow, non-deterministic, and dangerous from a security POV.
They've instead come up with a technology that provides a similar look-and-feel, but is lightning-fast and deterministic, so it works Just Plain Better.
Very cool, and very much a product for our times. I look forward to digging into how it works...