Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard is really awesome. Love the idea and the execution is wonderful. More of this in the world, please.
Nine albums I've been listening to on repeat
Here are some albums I’ve been listening to a lot lately. Hope you find something you like. They are all exceptional.
I’ve been consolidating a bunch of digital files into a comprehensive personal archive. Today I came upon a sheet of print-your-own stickers from the early days of the dot-com bust. San Francisco was absolutely covered in advertisements from dot-com boom. Shit was already starting to go sideways.
Got a new iPhone 18 Pro today. Went for a 512 GB in Glacier, which looks nice. I don’t have a case for it yet. I wish I trusted myself enough to go caseless, but I don’t. They really do feel so much better without a case.
I traded in my iPhone 16 Pro to Apple and got $510 for it, which seemed like a decent price. I can’t be bothered with anything more complicated. I was almost certain I was going to pre-order the Duo, but I can’t imagine compromising on the cameras, which are way more important than having a foldable phone. And it’s fucking expensive, even with the wife’s employee discount.
Love this animated ascii art.
I would absolutely not recommend using ChatGPT, Claude or any other cloud-based AI as a diary. They are not private and depending what you put in them, it could very well be reviewed by a human and reported to law enforcement. Case in point.
Reading about Ben Thompson’s Mac getting hacked, which he uses exclusively for agentic AI stuff, is pretty scary. I’ll definitely be making some improvements to my own setup based on this. He also expressed some of the same concerns as I have about Apple locking things down even further. And he’s absolutely right about it being pretty much impossible to run a Mac headless. Good luck if the power goes out and you aren’t physically able to access it.
Go put on Susumu Yokota’s Sakura (2025 Remaster) when you have a chance.
Hotness
In case you haven’t heard, it’s quite hot in Los Angeles, but that’s October in LA for you. I went to the farmers market, as I do nearly every Sunday and even at 9am it was insanely hot. I’m sitting in my car in Santa Monica at the moment and it says it’s 101 degrees. My watch say 95, so it’s probably somewhere in the middle.
I distinctly remember going to pumpkin patches in October when the kids were younger and it was always dreadfully hot.
And if the heat weren’t enough, the mosquitoes are completely out of control. I picked up buckets at home depot so I can build some mosquito traps for around our house. A neighbor I was talking to yesterday did the same.
Good lord. This Low performance of “When I Go Deaf” from 2013 absolutely wrecked me. I miss them as a band and still can’t believe Mimi is gone. Low is just one of those bands for me… (h/t Sippy)