The Valve Steam Machine is overpriced, and the price will go up. Valve are buying components on the spot market, even Xbox is getting screwed on costs there. There’s ~$660B of planned spending on AI data centres over the next 12 months. How do consumer companies compete for chips against that?
There’s nothing quite as..fragrant..as that new Uninterruptible Power Supply smell. I have a week of plastics and wiring lacquers outgassing ahead of me. But still better than unexpected data loss the next time we have a thunderstorm. (Because that happened during the last thunderstorm.)
With the re-release of the Bond movies you’d think they’ve have converged on 4K HDR with Dolby Atmos for purchase. Nope. The Connery movies have that. For Craig only No Time To Die has that. Brosnan/Dalton/Moore/Lazenby have 4K scans. But Netflix? They have unreleased source files for all of them.
Mistral users memed a new avatar into existence. Le Chaton Fat, which started as a fictional AI model. It wears a tie in work mode and has a keyboard in code mode.
The European Commission has moved its Bluesky accounts to W Social. It has no documentation, no public timeline on their site, and they’ve just gone closed source. Is this the ‘Davos cocktail party vibes’ social network?
I bought an Nvidia Shield Pro back in 2019. Seven years later and nothing on the market has superseded it. Android TV on the device is decaying but it still does Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos and HEVC playback. A lack of Dolby Vision 2 support is what’ll kill it off. But that’s a while away.
Looks like I’m done for the weekend. 
Close Encounters of the Third Kind would have been a better movie if it was just François Truffaut and Bob Balaban travelling the world investigating UFOs. They both can wear the hell out of a pair of sun glasses. The Richard Dreyfuss character arc is him ditching his family because they’re boring.
Watched: The Girlfriend Experience 🎬 Sasha Grey’s flat performance works fine in this non-linear narrative. There isn’t a plot, there are situations in the life of an escort who is also in an unfulfilling relationship. It felt longer than it is: empty and unfulfilling.
Airlines would crack down harder on combustible lithium-ion batteries if there were a commercial alternative. There isn’t. Aqueous lithium-ion can’t deliver the power, and calcium-ion isn’t available to consumers. So every power bank remains a hazard.
Watched: Fearless 🎬 The opening is more powerful than the overwrought ending, but as a film about psychological damage it’s good. Jeff Bridges survives a gruesome plane crash. His new beatific presence is a thin shell around the agony. How long until he crumbles?
JB-M in the FT (paywall) pointing out that it’s the youngest workers who are most opposed to remote work. Because if you’re not in the office, there’s nobody to learn from. Having managed new graduates, I get it. But you get promoted for the work nobody had to ask for.
While discussing solutions to the dehumanising aspects of AI the Pope quotes Tolkien. (Quoting Gandalf)
Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Leo XIV Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026)
- The twentieth-century Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien, in the words of a protagonist in one of his novels, described our responsibility in this way: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.”
DLC for story-based games is lost on me. I played through Cyberpunk when it was a crappy mess and enjoyed it. Phantom Liberty came out, I played it for half an hour and never went back. The game was over, I saw the ending. Make a sequel.
Had Soylent Green on in the background. The film sets New York’s 2022 population at 40 million; the source novel, set in 1999, gave it 35 million. The actual figure, in either year: about 8.5 million. We’re not running out of space, we’re running out of people.
Quibi was an expected failure but vertical video is a real business now. What will the first mega hit show be? I think it’s on the way.
Spider-Noir with Nicolas Cage looks delightful. Shot for both black and white and Technicolor, pick the mood you’re in when you watch. If you have a 4K OLED, you win either way.
Watched: Tag: The Assassination Game 🎬 A mongrel genre movie mixing satire, noir, thriller and campus comedy that never commits to any of them. Not worth seeking out but fine if it’s on. Linda Hamilton has a great time.
Apple announced on-device natural language search across your data at WWDC 2024. Nearly two years later, it still hasn’t shipped. Missed Spring 2025. Missed Spring 2026. Third time lucky?
For all the negativity about season 3 of Euphoria, leave it unwatched for a day and you’ll pick up your phone to find the closing scene spoiled. It’s television people talk about.