Netflix Beat the (Very Low) Bar
Netflix's Q2 losses came in lower than feared, thanks partly to Stranger Things 4 — but the real story is the ad tier and password-sharing crackdown quietly taking shape underneath it.
Making My Own Version of the JWST Carina Nebula Photo
I downloaded the raw JWST data from MAST and tried to make my own version of the Carina Nebula photo. It did not go as smoothly as I expected.
The Webb Images Everyone's Sharing Aren't the Interesting Part
NASA's first full James Webb images went public this morning, and the raw data landed in the public archive right alongside them — which is the part actually worth paying attention to.
Webb's First Deep Field, and a Website That Couldn't Handle It
NASA and the White House released the first full-color James Webb Space Telescope image last night, and I spent twenty minutes fighting NASA's own website just to download the full-res version.
Two Weeks of Letting Copilot Finish My Sentences
A holiday-weekend writeup on two weeks of actually using GitHub Copilot since it left preview and went generally available, warts and all.
Copilot Isn't Free Anymore
GitHub Copilot left preview and got a price tag this week ($10/month, free for students and OSS maintainers) - some notes on nine months of free access, the bugs it quietly hands you, and the licensing argument that isn't going away.
Nobody Pays You 18% For Free
Celsius Network froze withdrawals this week and the Fed hiked rates three quarters of a point. A personal, mildly smug take on why sky-high crypto yields never made sense.
Diablo Immortal and the Hundred Thousand Dollar Character
Diablo Immortal came out a week ago and the internet already did the math on what a maxed-out character actually costs. Spoiler: its not pretty.
Stage Manager Looks Great. My iPad Doesn't Get It.
WWDC brought a genuinely good new multitasking system for iPad called Stage Manager, but Apple locked it to M1 chips only, cutting out iPads that are barely a year old.
Elon's 40-Hour Ultimatum and the Return-to-Office Panic
Musk's leaked email telling Tesla staff to be in the office 40 hours a week or leave is dumb management theater, and it says more about him than about remote work.
Netflix Layoffs and the End of Infinite Growth
Netflix's quiet round of layoffs a couple weeks back says more about the end of the streaming growth era than the bigger headlines this month ever will.
The Phone Number You Gave Twitter "For Security" Was Never Just For Security
Twitter just agreed to pay $150 million after the FTC caught it using phone numbers and emails collected for two-factor login as an ad-targeting database. I have complicated feelings, mostly smug ones.