David Pritchard

Introducing ‘The Laser Age,’ a New Podcast from The Reveal New Feature: The Reveal's first podcast takes a close look at science fiction films from the second half of the 20th century. Where did they come from? And what did they say about what was coming next...

Today at The Reveal: The Laser Age, a new podcast about science fiction films from the second half of the 20th century. I was thrilled to have the great @hodgman.bsky.social join me to discuss SILENT RUNNING, a 1972 film about ecology, robots, cantaloupes, and... murder.

Don't doom scroll.
Put down your phone and sleep as best you can.
Get up when you're supposed to and don't skimp on breakfast.
What you have control of right now is you.
Start there.
Maintain that.
Be good to yourselves.
Be good to each other.

I expect that consumer-facing AI programs will continue to improve and they may become much more useful tools for everyday life in the future.

But I think it was a disastrous mistake that today’s models were taught to be convincing before they were taught to be right.

Customers: We want a faster horse

Henry Ford: Ah. In fact—

Kubernetes: Let me stop you right there. What you really need is 1000 horses that die randomly

In the Disney lawsuit, 10 pages are dedicated to citing the work we did. In pursuit of this evidence, Midjourney banned me 3 times and updated their ToS. The first ban encouraged me to dig a lot deeper, so I'd like to congratulate CEO David Holz on his massive unforced error.

It's true. Parasocial relationships with our favourite podcasters... is on the nose.

Cycling Directions Have Expanded Across Canada in Apple Maps Apple has made no announcement that can find about a significant expansion in the availability of cycling directions across Canada, but I thought it was worth noting here because it impacts me persona...

I think this may actually be news. I haven’t seen any other coverage yet. pxlnv.com/blog/apple-m...

Out of masochism - and a desire to stay in touch with “the regular folks” - I still often surf the web without an ad blocker. I’m talking about the Taboola type junk ads.

The first week on my job, browsing the web through a US VPN, I was shocked at the mix of ads I got. I don’t know if it defaults me to the “average English speaker” or to “Silicon Valley male” but either way… wow. The gun ads, the bodybuilding, the drug ads. That said - it has clearly toned down.

Ditto Ottawa! Very helpful for my cellular-watch-maps-only child.

What, you don’t get 20 weapons ads in your feed per day to ensure you know the industry approved naming?

Oh hey, the renderer I've been working on for Persona got shown off at WWDC this morning www.apple.com/newsroom/202...

“Yank tank”. I am definitely borrowing that.

Hm, and I guess latitude would be another candidate theory - provided that you accept “north is up” then “distance north of equator” would give y = up for a Eurocentric point of view. Ptolemy, 150AD.

Dammit, now I want to know.

For sure. Maybe someone can chime in with an actual historian. All I have on my shelf is this Playfair one from 1783, taken from Tufte’s discussions on the origins of graphs:

My guess: from bar graphs, where “higher stack” = more, and that probably comes from stacking coins on a table. So y=up might come from gravity, not language?

A Company Reminder for Everyone to Talk Nicely About the Giant Plagiarism Machine Hey team. It’s your CEO. I know your time is valuable, so I’ll cut right to the chase: It’s come to my attention that some of you have been bad-mou...

"It really does disappoint me that so many brilliant colleagues—whose genuine breakthroughs I’ve profited from for years—would be so quick to condemn this newer, stupider way that I and others like me can make money off your life’s work, through stealing."

I have not paid a ton of attention to the uproar over RTO policies, bc we are all in on distributed teams and not going back.

My impression (via social media) has been that these were shadow layoffs.

Last month I asked an investor why they are doing RTO. He said: "Retention, mostly. And morale."

Watching o3 guess a photo’s location is surreal, dystopian and wildly entertaining Watching OpenAI’s new o3 model guess where a photo was taken is one of those moments where decades of science fiction suddenly come to life. It’s a cross between the …

Watching o3 guess a photo’s location is surreal, dystopian and wildly entertaining
simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/26/...

A good rant. Interestingly my first impression of mastodon was “Ah, I’ve read this book before, it was called XMPP, I didn’t enjoy it”. I got the opposite vibe from early bsky. Not sure what the giveaway was in the first few seconds of each.

Old Bolt, new tricks: Making an EV into a backup power station with an inverter Using a custom kit to make a budget EV offer some emergency power.

We got an electric cooler for this purpose, after food poisoning during our last 8 day power outage.

In a city where only 20% blacks out at a time, my car IS my powerwall, and I can drive it a few kms to refill.

Curious about this, though it voids the warranty:
arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025...

How Saudi Arabia and the National Enquirer are linked to the alleged hacking and blackmail attempt against Jeff Bezos The National Enquirer threatened to publish intimate photos of Bezos' extramarital affair in early 2019. The tabloid has close Saudi links.

After the Bezos phone hacking / blackmail incident leading to his $38B divorce - you’d think they’d learn a bit of op sec. And yet.

www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-s...

real interesting slide set from Tim S at HPG 2009: web.archive.org/web/20090823... . You can see some of the seeds that led to his Verse language in here. Interesting to see some of the predictions that panned out and/or didn't ... (1/n)

Amazing!

I reposted this raw, but the interesting thing here is the subtext that living in America now makes you suspect to anyone outside America. In two months this has become a global fact that maybe a lot of Americans aren’t yet aware of. Or don’t care probs. But they should.

Bird club! Very awesome.

People discovering that Three.js + LLMs is more fun than Unity/Unreal.

Game devs are mad.

Ambitious! I’m not nearly as AI optimistic as this, but I like the thought experiment.

So sorry this a thing, Rook. A living nightmare.

Hold my beer, says cineplex.com