🪶 This is only my opinion, but it is one I strongly hold: Tom Bombadil is equal parts omnipotence and ADHD.
Godzilla × Kong: The New Empire, 2024
Wednesday, May 15, 2024
Watched on Tuesday May 14, 2024.
My Neighbor Totoro, 1988 - ★★★★★ (contains spoilers)
Monday, May 13, 2024
This review may contain spoilers. We watched this with the kids for Mother’s Day and they loved it. We were worried some of the characters would look scary to their Disney sensibilities, and at first they probably did, but the kids acclimated quickly and fell in love with Totoro. I can’t wait to watch more Miyazaki with them.
🔗 Apple Will Revamp Siri to Catch Up to Its Chatbot Competitors
Tripp Mickle, Brian X. Chen and Cade Metz report at The New York Times that:
The decision came after the executives Craig Federighi and John Giannandrea spent weeks testing OpenAI’s new chatbot, ChatGPT. The product’s use of generative artificial intelligence, which can write poetry, create computer code and answer complex questions, made Siri look antiquated, said two people familiar with the company’s work, who didn’t have permission to speak publicly.
Apple can’t be serious here. My earliest IFTTT recipes made Siri look antiquated. Siri has been, to put it as politely as Siri deserves, trash for years. The user experience of the earliest Echo Auto was head and shoulders above Siri. If you need a reminder set, Siri will work more often than not. But that’s been its only viable use case since release.
Apple has been marketing off of machine learning since 2018 and probably earlier, so it’s just bonkers that they didn’t decide to scrap Siri at least that long ago and turn their machine learning resources toward something better.
🔗 Does the Statute of Limitations Ever Apply in Legal Malpractice?
Hey look, my employer has a blog about the kind of work I do, and I wrote a thing for it.
I wore transitions (™️?) lenses for a year and half in my late thirties and no one close to me loved me enough to punch me in the face and force me to replace them. I’m not saying I don’t take responsibility, or that I’m not loved at all, just maybe not enough.
😠 Google’s connected speakers and hubs are actually useful (unlike Alexa and Siri…), but it’s really hard when you’re super angry about something and have to mumble “Hey Google …” through gritted teeth. Just let us change the wake phrase.
(Yes I know some devices/command combinations don’t require a wake phrase but who has time to learn which)
🔗 Trump VP contender Kristi Noem writes of killing dog – and goat – in new book | Books | The Guardian
I’m not quoting from the review or her memoir because Noem is deplorable, and because, somehow, it’s worse than the headline suggests.
When people tell you who they are, believe them.
💙 About to watch the long Bluey episode with the family… will update afterward…
😠 If your iPhone on iOS 17 becomes unresponsive, be warned:
You may lose that day’s photos if you decide to force a reboot before getting them off the phone.
This happened to me today. I lost three photos of my son being cuter than any other son in the world.
🔗 Some legal malpractice cases are bogus, and many are defensible. But some are, well, not, which is apparently how State Bar Court Judge Yvette D. Roland in California viewed the misconduct proceedings against John Eastman, the now-disbarred architect of the 2020 fake electors nonsense. (PDF)
🔗 Manton Reece - An update on the pricing update
Micro.blog is such a great value. Like omg.lol, Micro.blog is a positive community built by people who didn’t see exactly what they wanted on the web, so they decided to make it.
Bilby, 2018 - ★★★★
Sunday, March 31, 2024
This short is, indeed, extremely cute. But it's also impressively executed in terms of the writing and the animation. Parenting pro-tip: Shorts like this one are good to keep handy for when you need to extinguish a tantrum without starting a longer watching session.
👑 That feeling when you've been reading The Hobbit to your kids and your four-year-old daughter insists, and I mean INSISTS, that the friend she made recently at dance class, whose name she had trouble remembering until just now, is named Thorin
I do something similar (even in name), with quicklinks.lol, but Floh Gro’s solution using an action in Drafts for iOS is faster, and private.
🔗 Manton Reece - Recommendations and blogrolls on Micro.blog
I’ve long meant to get a blogroll up on this site, and it’s another testament to the fact that I’ve chosen the right community that it was recently integrated into Micro.blog, including auto-updating, public OPML and JSON exports.
Bilbo is, ever was, and ever shall be, my people.
“Back now to the Mountain!” cried Thorin. “We have little time to lose.” “And little food to use!” cried Bilbo, always practical on such points. – The Hobbit, Chapter 15, The Gathering of the Clouds, by J.R.R. Tolkien
🔗 U.S. versus Apple: A first reaction – Six Colors
I haven’t read the complaint yet, but this was… not what I expected Attorney General Merrick Garland to have his people focused on…
🔗 Scholarfy | Google Scholar bookmarklet by Johan Ugander
This is a useful bookmarklet to move a standard Google search to Google Scholar. I use it with modified version I made with ChatGPT to search an exact phrase, for use in searching for legal opinions.
Here’s “my” code:
javascript:location = ‘scholar.google.com/scholar"’ escape(document.forms[0].elements[‘q’].value) ‘"';
The best part about the 32-Bit Cafe is that we’re trying to move the internet forward productively in the ways we can make an impact, participating in the creation of web services, websites, and weird, wacky web projects. We want to bring back the idea of personal websites to the many of us who have been stuck in social media cycles since the emergence of Web 2.0. Not to mention, we’re not just helping people build their first websites; we’re also making our own hosted services for anyone to use and participate in to help with decentralizing hosted services.
This is exactly the kind of thing I love to see.