Vibe-Coding, emuOS, and Roundball Rock

Oh hello there 👋

Here are some things to read, watch, play, and think about.

1. Fridge Poem is the kind of weird-web nostalgia I love to see: an infinite canvas of random words to cobble together whatever poetry/nonsense your heart desires. As far as I can tell, it's a global canvas and you can share the "coordinates" of your masterpiece (or stumble upon some else's). Yes, my family had the original set. We were a Gen-X/Millennial household after all.
2. Speaking of tech-nostalgia: emuOS is one of the coolest things I've seen in a while: full Windows 95/98/ME in-browser emulators with games (Skifree anyone?) and all sorts of other fun goodies.
3. Old Fruit Pictures. That's it. That's the account, "a bot tweeting random images from the pomological watercolor collection in the USDA's national agricultural library." Did you know there are over 7,500 (!) types of apples grown worldwide?
4. I've been going deep on so-called "vibe-coding" – no, wait! Don't go. I, like a lot of others, am not fan of a lot of what surrounds this stuff. But let's back it up: during the pandemic ('member that?), instead of learning how to make sourdough, I spent a ton of time brushing up on HTML/CSS. I learned a lot, so much so that I was able to re-design my personal and agency websites, first from scratch, later with Webflow. But as a non-programmer, I always hit a wall with more advanced non-static languages (e.g., Javascript), and so I sort of stopped there. But the beginner-intermediate skills I developed gave me more than enough knowledge to take the next step with this new form of generative coding. But also: it's not as easy as the term "vibe-coding" makes it seem! This isn't just vomiting out a half-formed idea that becomes fully-realized once you dump it into an LLM. Nope. This is rounds, and rounds, and rounds of iterations, bug-zapping, and battle-testing. If you give a damn about design and UI/UX, it's even more pain-staking. And more than a few times I've just gone into the CSS and fixed some things myself. At this point, I have a queue of personal projects and ideas coming together, for no other reason than to scratch itches and solve little problems. And that's the coolest part of this little adventure: making bespoke software that fulfills a specific need. None of it designed to be monetized. All of it just a side quest.
5. On that note: one of my first live DIY-software projects is altaready.info. To be frank, post-Eaton Fire, like many, I got a little frustrated with the lack of a meaningful, local alert system¹ but also, people yelling into the internet-ether that government officials wouldn't do anything about it. Welp, as I've learned: the best way to complain is to create. As it says on my Github, this is built around a custom risk score that collates data from a bunch of sources (NWS, NIFC, CalOES, local air quality readings), including a weather station I installed on our commercial property in the heart of Altadena. It references the Fosberg Fire Weather Index, with an additive layer that takes the Santa Ana winds into account (AKA "The Devil Winds", which were a significant factor in the fire's rapid spread last year). Obviously, I'm not a programmer or a meteorologist! And I can't say for sure that it checks all the boxes. But all I wanted was a simple, numeric risk score and a minimal, pleasantly designed tool that I could share and make useful for others in the community. Ta-da! ✨
6. On the other hand: Philosopher Carmody Grey on AI, the Pope, and why she turned down Anthropic: "Magnifica Humanitas is as much a cultural critique as its seminal predecessor Laudato Si’, Pope Francis’s teaching on the ecological crisis, which was instrumental in bringing about the Paris Climate Agreement. The two popes shared the same underlying concern: if we do not decide otherwise, our technologies will amplify a political economy of violence, injustice and exploitation. AI is run on a huge, highly damaging physical infrastructure. It is a new and lethally effective extractivism, mining human minds, languages and the earth itself. At the same time, its apparent ethereality renders its exploitation of people and nature invisible. This is the hidden convergence between the two great challenges of our time: AI and the ecological crisis. Behind both is what Leo calls 'a culture of power', which regards nature and people simply as raw material. Instead of thinking about AI itself, we should be thinking about its effects. It concentrates power; it obfuscates accountability; it further despoils nature and climate; it is a means of the wholesale expropriation of cultures, languages and lands for massive profit; and it will probably make us lonelier and stupider." Detecting no lies here.
7. Also: Jasmine Sun talks to PJ Vogt about her "road trip through the data center debate" and to meet the people dealing with this clusterf–ck firsthand.
8. Canva is in hot water for degrading their QR code generator. Long story short: now, unless you cough up the dough for a Business plan ($250/year per user), your QR code will have a Canva logo embedded in it. Buried in the deets: they can also deactivate your QR Code at their discretion. Given that I brought up enshittification last week, literally the day before Cory Doctorow appeared on Jon Stewart's podcast, it seems entirely appropriate to bring up this story. This is a prime example: a platform undercuts competitors and lassos in users with novel features, then gradually degrades those features as they seek infinite growth in serving enterprise customers and shareholders. Sucks of course, but there's no better way to explain it than to misappropriate the famous James Carville quote: It's the economy, stupid.
9. BTW: QR codes are an open, global standard defined by ISO/IEC 18004 (meaning anyone can create and read basic QR codes without paying royalties), and you generate them for free with a variety of tools, including one I shared last week.
10. Revisiting: John Tesh's 1994 live performance (and the backstory) of "Roundball Rock", you know, that NBC Basketball theme. Write-up courtesy of Past Prime: "Between 1987 and 1995, Tesh released twelve studio albums, including two inspired by the Tour De France, one by an Ironman Triathlon, one by The Olympics, two by Christmas and two by the saxiest, horniest of instruments. To those who’d heard about but not actually heard it, the music of John Tesh was a punchline — ridiculous and uncool. But for his growing fanbase, Tesh was producing spine tingling, earth moving art. And never did the earth move for Tesh like it did on Thursday, August 19, 1994."
11. For my brothers and sisters in entertainment marketing: Fandango's latest trends and insights report is a probably-good-idea-to-read kind of thing. Top line, from Variety:

"During the pandemic, Hollywood worried that Gen Zers would never get into the habit of going to theaters, preferring streaming on their smartphones instead. But Gen Z is now the most active cinemagoing demographic, attending more films per year than their elders, according to a new Fandango study. They’re also spending more per visit on concessions and on premium format screens like IMAX."

sooo when is someone going to write a think-piece about how Boomers are killing movie theaters?²

Also:

Max Read on "Sinister Synergies" and corporate thrillers of the 80s, 90s, and 2000s: "In the years between Black Monday and the GFC, Hollywood—itself corporatizing, consolidating, and financializing in a surge of mergers and acquisitions—produced a wave of corporate thrillers driven by anxieties about the economic transformations grinding away in the background of steadily growing GDP." He caps it off with Michael Clayton (2007) 🤌🤌🤌 which reminds me of the only yard sign I'll ever consider putting on my property:

Listen to this:

Anything Kieran Miles David Hebden, AKA Four Tet, puts out is an automatic must-listen for me. As always, headphones recommended.

One more thing:

That's all folks. I hope everyone has a magnificent rest of their week ✌️

¹ As someone who grew up in the Chicago-area and became well accustomed to tornado drills, all I can say is: could we just get some air raid sirens, plz?

² yes, I know, my embittered-millennialness is showing