This is delightfully well done, and worth sharing around.

Well, dark mode and the preliminary UIKit ports seem nice, and I wasn’t really expecting any new hardware, but bringing Stacks back a decade later and neutering CoverFlow seems, well… Not very imaginative, really.

Best takeaways from the keynote for me? The committment to iOS 12 support across the entire current range (which is impressive) and with performance increases (which I hope will actually happen), plus the rebirth of Workflow as Shortcuts.

Hopefully there’ll be a migration path that lets me re-build all the workflows I have with third-party apps–otherwise, it’ll be more than a little awkward.

Also, kind of sad to see Podcasts show up on the Watch and semi-Sherlock Overcast. I’ve avoided the built-in app so far because Overcast has very neat audio processing (and will likely keep using it), but…

Around two years ago, a high-ranking exec turned to me at a dinner party and asked me what the heck I was doing at Microsoft with my OpenSource background and (I quote) “actual tech experience”.

I’m prone to wondering that myself sometimes, but stuff like this gives me heart.

On the other hand, it feels totally unreal. It’s as if a million repositories suddenly cried out…

Ah well. Let’s see how things pan out.

Update: Official blog post, presentation. $7.5B–not bad at all…

HackerNews, of course, has gone ballistic at least twice.

This was by far the best news all week. I’m a fan of both the books and the series and rate them quite highly, because even if some of the plot devices could be tuned down a little the hard physics, sheer attention to detail and character dynamics make it a treat for both sides of the brain.

The biggest takeaway, though, is that SyFy is fundamentally incompetent at managing their assets – this is the latest in a series of fumbles and cancellations that shows they are completely missing the point of the genre they’re named after, and I’m very glad Amazon picked this up.

After all, this is the best Sci-Fi show in recent years, and it would be a near criminal waste to deny us this kind of glimpse into what could be the future of the human condition (regardless of the plot devices).

Michael Lopp, in his usual concise and unassuming fashion, knocks it out of the park, at least where I’m concerned.

(This is serendipitous for a number of reasons I can’t get into right now, but, as usual, terrific reading if you’re seriously into any sort of career, your own or other people’s)

We’ve spent the past couple of years drumming up passive/reactive assistants that do little more than pattern matching, so no wonder placing them into roles that mimic initiative makes people uneasy.

But they’re still glorified state machines. I found the Google I/O demo to be a bit whimsical, but the capability is undeniably there, and it’s going to be interesting to see how this pans out, especially since it is the ultimate API—in short, all the talk about digital transformation, exposing APIs for customer service, etc., does not scale out (or down) this far, and Duplex has the potential for doing that.

I spend a lot of time using machine learning tools of all kinds, and this is very, very slick indeed, at least judging by the demo video.

Although I’ve found that I work best with Jupyter notebooks and CLI tools, I’m really curious to try it out with some of my training sets.

Even though I only play a couple of times a year, I’ve maintained a Quake III Arena installation on my personal desktop for many, many years (thanks to ioquake3), and this seems like the perfect way to while away a lazy holiday afternoon.

Update: make sure you download the 64-bit build of ioquake3. Also, if you want to run servers, I keep some notes on it for other architectures.

This is so cool I just had to link to it.

I might even print one myself some day, since I have a Pi on my desk set up as an Arduino development environment and Docker build box.

The writing was on the wall, but this is still sad. What annoys me the most is that a lot of modern Wi-Fi gear relies on crummy management applications (or worse, volatile cloud services that expose your home to all kinds of added risks), and the only real guarantee you have of having a setup that will work smoothly and securely is to be your own radio planning expert.

When my three AirPort base stations die, I’ll likely replace them with OpenWRT-capable gear rather than rely on a manufacturer to “support” them.