Quite a bit later than usual, here's this week's new ten lyrics to identify!
Playing the game is simple. Visit the blog, and if you recognize any of these lyrics leave a comment with the name of the song *and* the artist.
This game begins our second year.
I suppose it's not too surprising, because Cory Doctorow shaped much of my opinions about technology and copyright in the 00s. But I find very little to argue with in this interview.
Even his opinions on AI scraping, which are entirely consistent with his past writing but very much at odds with much of the anti-AI crowd.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/how-to-burst-the-ai-bubble-strike-at-its-roots/
It was a little too dark for the lens I was using, but otherwise I'm pretty pleased with this shot of two mockingbirds having an argument.
Day four of deliberate wildlife photography practice. This time I got really close to a green heron.
There's so much more to Eric Schmidt’s failed University of Arizona address than "he said a nice thing about AI and got booed."
It starts with him passing blame, then giving students bad advice he’s already demonstrated won’t work.
And, of course, he asks booing students to shut up so he can tell them to use their voice.
I watched a video recently saying Eric Schmidt’s address to graduates at the University of Arizona deserved a much closer look than it had gotten, so … I gave it one.
Day 3 of deliberately practicing my bird photography. (Day two didn't go so well.)
Another pretty good look at Cheery the hyper cat. This is pretty much her expression if she's awake; we often say her head is full of bees.
She's two, just over nine pounds, and very interested in anything you are doing. Especially if it involves cheese.
A very rare, peaceful moment with our hyperactive kitty, Cheery.
Day one of deliberate wildlife photography practice. I sat outside in my front yard for a while and never got a picture as good as this one, which I took in the first three minutes.
I think our attempts to automate tasks with AI reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of LLMs and automation. It's a waste of time and tokens asking an LLM to do something it is not designed to do.
I go into more detail on my newest blog post.
When people talk about AI, they keep using the word "automate." I don't think that means what they think it means.
The lyrics game I posted yesterday has had 8 / 10 lyrics identified. One of the two remaining is:
"Whenever I get this way, I just don’t know what to say. Why can’t we be ourselves like we were yesterday?"
If you know the song and artist, pop the answer in the comments.
Contemplating replacing myself with a small program that watches for new slack messages and responds with "what," "I don't understand," and "where's the tea?"
I wouldn't even need an LLM for that.
We got freezing temperatures just as the flower buds on my sakura were starting to open. Now we have very few flowers, but the leaves are beginning to show.
Amazon cuts their workforce by thousands, throws their remaining software engineers in the AI deep-end, then has the gall to act **not angry, disappointed** that crud makes it into production.
End your workweek on a high note, I guess:
I've been spending some time this week digging into Figma, and it's a really impressive piece of software. It does a lot more than I really expected it to.
What strikes me as weird though is they've implemented a lot of HTML / CSS layout as "Auto Layout" with their own terminology ("hug", "fill", "auto gap") when they could have been more direct about what they were taking from CSS. It sure would make talking to (and understanding) devs easier, but instead it's like a language barrier has been created between us.
This is a bit confusing, but the parent company of Shout Factory now basically owns MST3K. I hope this means better things; Joel was clearly struggling with it.
I’d love it if they had new seasons and they kept the writer’s room small. I liked the newer episodes but there were so many hands in it, it kind of lost the small-town feel it had.
I’m on board with “don’t let algorithms control your music” but prior to streaming I’d rely on things like cable radio, broadcast radio, and MTV — which all strike me as similar to the streaming algorithms. And by at least the 80s what was played was more a business choice than actual curation.
I have a web project that will need to send the occasional notification email, so I need some sort of SMTP service. Is there anything I should consider besides Sendgrid or Mailgun? Let's assume that "maintain the security of email infrastructure" is not something I want to make central to my hobby site.