Ian Bogost
@ibogost.com
Read my new book, The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life: https://gratifying.life Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor at WashU; Staff writer at The Atlantic; author of 11 books. https://bogost.com
When I was a kid, my parents generally didn’t let me get fast food. McDonald’s in particular was held in strong contempt. But Burger King was endorsed, if only on occasion. It was considered righteous by comparison. But…why? The ”flame broiled” thing? Because a Whopper Jr. had lettuce and tomato?
Every time endowment-return news comes out, everyone seems to jump into a pool of ignorance about how endowments work. The third graf of this story explains it, but in a kind of boring way. Imagine asking, “Bank of America has $2 trillion in deposits. Why is my checking account still $3,000?”
Harvard Endowment Soars to $68 Billion Even as Federal Cuts Force Layoffs (Gift Article)
The stock market has boosted Harvard’s wealth. But as federal funding slumps, the school is seeking corporate sponsors to underwrite research.
nytimes.com
Around the same time Apple announced a set of (confusing!) home devices, it also broke certain types of home-automation actions in Apple Home. To people who are deep into smart-home stuff, this feels like attaching a shiny, new toilet to an old, decaying sewer pipe.
Significant bug in home automations using shortcuts that require network connection
I posted this in the beta 5 discussion, but putting it here for visibility. I’m hopeful this will be fixed in the betas. 🤞🏼 I’ve put a summary of the bug below. FB23893604 tvOS 27 beta 4 & 5: Home ap...
forums.macrumors.com
I wrote about the internet-of-things AI-malware risk. This type of exposure is far more likely to be a problem than ~extinction~, but it is also more likely to produce an extremely dumb, broken-computer-world instead of cinematic calamity. A rule: The dumbest future is probably the most likely.
Invasion of the Self-Replicating AI-Malware Botnet
An AI risk much dumber—and therefore more likely—than extinction is arriving.
theatlantic.com
Kind of amazing how "Just put 'wagyu' on it to make it seem good" has become so common.
Feel like the only one: The next era of Delta One is here
Drawing on its double-decade lead in customer experience and hospitality, the airline reveals its largest investment and most holistic redesign in nearly 30 years.|
news.delta.com
Reaching a point where I’m better at making ice cream than doing almost anything else.
What a nightmare. Impossible to find anything worth watching on your 5, $15/mo streaming services, but now you can talk to it instead of joysticking around before settling on some godforsaken Lost-alike to lull you into a stupor sufficient to prequel sleep.
I had to dig fairly deep to discover that Apple wants another $130 to mount this silly home hub on a wall with PoE, and you can’t even get it besides.
I hope you’ll read my story about AI programming in the context of amateur, personal computing (and to that end, here’s a gift link: tinyurl.com/2hf9hv4v). But this paragraph is the one I’d pull out if I had to choose one.
Ian Bogost@ibogost.com · 4d agoI wrote about what I learned from a year or more of “vibecoding” small, personal projects: Fifty years after personal computers supposedly made computing yours, the activity keeps receding back into the computing priesthood.
I wrote about what I learned from a year or more of “vibecoding” small, personal projects: Fifty years after personal computers supposedly made computing yours, the activity keeps receding back into the computing priesthood.
The Tragedy of AI Coding
AI-assisted software development could have liberated programmers. Instead, it has become the latest way for Big Tech to confine us.
theatlantic.com
A weird thing that has happened because of smartphones, inflation, tariffs, and other factors is that a pretty-good non-smartphone camera kit now costs a minimum of around $2,000.
The titular poem in this collection is not great (apart from “my goldfish swam like crazy”), but the title sure is good, and I think of it often.
Setting aside whatever objection you might have to Amazon, Prime Day is simply confusing at a basic, ontological level. What is a product? What would it mean to 'want' or 'need' one? What is a price, or a sale, or a deal? Is any given product truly one, or merely a medium for the supposed deal?
Among the pathologies of a life lived through software, the idea that everything is a flow of data meant to be analyzed, occupied, inhabited: My home weather station sends me an emailed your weather month in review, which invites me to "explore your weather trends."
As a former Angeleno, I have willingly hated San Francisco for decades absent good or even any reason. The tech industry has probably been ruining it for at least 30 years, with ups and downs. But setting that aside, I just never believed San Francisco to be a great world city subject to ruination.
Just about everything I encounter every day feels like a Cool Memories aphorism.
Sure computer memory is expensive, but I just paid 33% more for locust bean gum than I did in April.
We will have to wait and see what this really is, but Apple is very, very late to "smart home" stuff, and widgets on screens that show your reminders is not really the issue: Rather, the janky interoperation of actual devices, such as locks, alarms, garage doors, and so forth.
Apple’s new ‘homeOS’ will launch this month, here’s what’s coming - 9to5Mac
Apple reportedly plans to launch new Home products on October 13 alongside an all-new operating system rumored to be called ‘homeOS.’
9to5mac.com
The only thing worse than owning a dog is backing into parking spaces.
We are living in an age when every database-record transaction comes with a series of notifications.
