sangsara.net

Tag: Film

  • Week 25.26

    Week 25.26

    • Howard mentioned that he was using Claude or Codex to remake an old game called Little Computer People for his own amusement. That gave me a sudden brainwave: I could remake High Seas Solitaire, a simple Windows-based game I used to love. I’ve tried several times in the last decade to find something like it, or get it running on my Mac — one attempt involved setting up Boot Camp and installing/patching Windows, which took up most of a day.
    • It’s actually simpler and more fun to just make a whole damned game than to deal with Windows. Here’s a post about Island Solitaire, my recreation of the same game mechanics with some of the vibes. Or you can play it directly at solitaire.sangsara.net.
    • Tim Cook spoke to the WSJ and set expectations for Apple to raise prices because of the rising cost of RAM and chips. I took that as a sign that this is the year for me to finally upgrade my 2020 M1 MacBook Air. The order has been placed, and I hope to welcome an M5 model next week. The irony that this is indirectly happening because of people making shit with AI is not lost on me.
    • I was thinking about AI art while in the shower yesterday and came out with some thoughts I figured I should write down, so here’s a little interlude.

    A shower thought on valuing human art against AI art

    When we buy human-made art, we’re not just buying someone’s vision. We’re buying the time put in — a slice of their life that can never be recovered. It’s the process of trying to put a price on a year spent realizing and perfecting a single idea. This much is already obvious.

    AI art works from a different equation. It’s less produced with time than with compute — GPUs, data centers, and electricity. We pay for electricity constantly without a second thought; as an input, it carries no inherent meaning. But when you pay for human art, you are purchasing the accumulated experience of a life. The conversations they had with their parents as a child. The mistakes they made in their twenties. Every influence, decision, and accident that shaped their way of thinking and seeing.

    Generative AI models “think and see” through a distillation of civilization’s digitized products. One process is organic and irreproducible, while the other is probabilistic and derivative. Both are magnificent in their own ways, but we more deeply value the one that speaks to how we are built.

    Collecting art satisfies two deeply human impulses: the urge to possess and the desire to appreciate. When you purchase a work, you are claiming a piece of someone while simultaneously declaring, “This life had meaning.” Even in AI-generated work, the most interesting component is the human intent — the prompter’s editorial choices. An idea is only a nucleus. Yet an entirely human-made work is a whole atom: not just the nucleus, but the colossal mass of time that surrounds it — years of practice and application. An artist may emerge who creates AI works so intricate they’ll take years to complete. That would be a different story because the effort imparts the value.

    When an artist makes many things, we call it a body of work. Each piece informs the next, and narratives emerge; some are easier to see than others. It is a curious coincidence that art uses the word “cycle” to describe a sequence of related works sharing a purpose. But in AI generation, cycles run in the opposite direction: millions of GPU cycles are spun up to produce a single output. Human cycles accumulate meaning through experience over time, while machine cycles search for probabilities through brute force.

    • We watched Alice and Steve on Disney+, a six-episode comedy about what happens when one 50-something man starts dating the 26-year-old daughter of his 50-something female best friend. It’s uncomfortable but funny, which I suppose is the kind of setup for which you cast Jermaine Clement as the older friend. I’d say it’s worth watching although they never quite sell the mutual May–December attraction, and it doesn’t end as satisfyingly as I’d hoped.
    • I went out to see The Furious (2025) with Jose and Reg. This is a martial arts film you cannot help seeing mentioned online this month, in part because the legendary Jet Li talked about it on his podcast (what a world we live in). It’s a Hong Kong production with a Japanese director, and is set in an unnamed South East Asian city that mashes up the entire region. The streets look like they’re in Thailand, but you hear characters speaking Tagalog, Bahasa, English, and Mandarin. It’s designed for maximum relatability, although, as someone pointed out, most of the baddies are brown and the good folks are Chinese coded.
    • I ate two hot pot-based meals and got food poisoning from the sukiyaki (I suspect their handling of “Japanese raw eggs”), but the Chinese one was fine. Coincidence?!
    • It’s the middle of June, which means I listened to Glass Animals’ 2020 song, Heat Waves, quite a few times. This of course is because it contains the line, “Sometimes all I think about is you / Late nights in the middle of June”. I’ll bet it’s a very good week for their global streaming royalties.
  • Week 24.26

    Week 24.26

    It was WWDC week. Apple made good on their promise of a smarter, generative AI-powered Siri two years after first describing the concept. Enough has been said about that slipped deadline, but the verdict on social media this time is that they’ve actually delivered. I was tempted by all the reports of how stable the first developer beta is, and installed it on my M1 iPad Pro. I hope I don’t regret it, but so far so good.

    It’s no surprise that the first beta is in good shape, because this year’s OS updates are looking to repeat the feat of Mac OS X Snow Leopard, where effort was expended on optimizing performance and fixing longstanding issues rather than adding new features. There’s a list of nearly 300 improvements, and I’m looking forward to many of them, especially the faster loading of items in Apple Music. There are also very welcome refinements to the controversial new unified design language system colloquially known as Liquid Glass. Steve Lemay, may this life bless you and yours with happiness and good health.

    There was so much to discuss and dissect this week that Michael and I spent over four hours across two FaceTime calls. Okay, some of that time was spent talking about his new collaborative crossword puzzle game, Crossmate. I’ve played a couple of games and it’s a lot of fun, like how we used to play the NYT crosswords at the office on a big screen. It’ll be on TestFlight soon for wider testing and I’m excited to see how people like it.

    But the next generation of Apple Intelligence was the headliner and the thing most people will hear about. While I expected most of the things announced, there were a few I didn’t. The new Spatial Reframing capability, for one, is a brilliant use of image generation to enhance an existing photo beyond the removal of objects — one that treads very close to contradicting Apple’s earlier stand that photos should be documents of things that did happen. This new take technically does ‘respect’ a real moment in time, with the exception of the camera’s position in space. I wonder if this is as far as they’ll go, or if the line will continue to be redrawn over time (turning a photo into a video, for example).

    I also did not expect Apple’s AI to offer text generation from scratch, helping you to fill a blank page, much like what ChatGPT or any other consumer chatbot has done since the beginning. I thought their initial approach of only proofreading or editing existing text was the right one, but it’s clear that market forces are guiding their hand and features like this and photorealistic generation in Image Playground are simply table stakes now.

    After the presentation, I thought it was super obvious that the new Siri AI will make ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, etc. unnecessary for many casual users of AI, and many commentators on Twitter have also since shared this opinion. For people using chat interfaces to look up quick answers, do a spot of online research, brainstorm ideas, and generate text documents and images, there’ll be no quicker or more cost-effective way than to ask Siri on one of their Apple devices. On an iPhone, just swipe down from the Dynamic Island and the prompt field appears. Or hold down the power button and speak.

    It appears that the combination of on-device and cloud models will handle a normal amount of requests for no charge, and subscribers to iCloud+ storage will get more generous limits. Why would anyone pay USD$20 a month for third-party AI unless they also needed it for coding? And that’s before you even add in the advantages of having all your personal context available for Siri to work with, privately. I’ve long held off on connecting my email, Dropbox, and other services to ChatGPT and Claude, even if it would make them more useful. Once you open the gates for data to flow out, there’s no getting it back in. Apple is the only company I’d trust with all of it, precisely because their approach doesn’t require me to trust them.

    • Remember how I complained a few weeks ago that Amazon Fresh was ceasing local operations? One positive side effect of that emerged this week, in the form of a push notification arriving around 9:30 AM saying that some alcohol products were on 60% clearance sale. I jumped on that with a quickness, and received 20 bottles of wine later the same afternoon. If we lived in Australia, we’d be paying those prices on an everyday basis, but we don’t. I should have gotten twice as much.
    • Japanese konbini inspire all sorts of media, and I’ve read the books Convenience Store Woman and The Convenience Store by the Sea (which is now a live-action series). They’re… okay. This week I played the game InKonbini on Switch 2, which simulates a week of running a countryside store in 1993. I’ve had this indie game on my radar for a couple of years, but initially resigned myself to never playing it because they’d only planned to release for PC/Windows. It’s now on every major platform, and a very chill and cozy game, albeit short enough to finish in a couple of days. I spent a lot of my time straightening out the shelves and making sure every can, bottle, and sandwich faced outwards.
    • John Scalzi’s “Old Man’s War” series of books continues to be a very fun sci-fi adventure. I’ve finished Book 4: Zoe’s Tale, and it pulls off a rare Rashomon move across two installments. It essentially retells the entire story of Book 3, but from another character’s (Zoe’s) perspective, while somehow managing to be additive rather than repetitive. That’s quite a feat.
    • If you’d asked me what films I’m looking forward to this year, Disclosure Day would have topped the list. I’ll watch Nolan’s The Odyssey but I’m not in any hurry. We saw DD this weekend and I had a good time throughout. Nobody puts a scene together like Spielberg; everything is dynamically shot and immersive. But I was left afterwards with the feeling of too many plot holes, and too much exposition of the film’s values through monologues rather than action. Wait, I forgot that I would have also put The Drama on that list, and I’d been dying to know what the awful “secret” alluded to in the trailer was. We also saw that this weekend and had a lot of fun, even if it didn’t fully live up to my high expectations either. Both films get 3.5 stars.
    • I watched Empire Records (1995) for the first time, because Netflix said it was leaving their catalog soon. This was a film I’d always sort of believed I’d seen, but it turns out that I just knew the soundtrack really well and seen a couple of scenes. What a glorious document of its time. Immaculate vibes, and probably more entertaining today than it was at the time because of how much there is to appreciate — not just the lighting, set design, and music, but the whole nostalgic idea that a giant, two-storey record store could be the cultural center of a community, and that people would fight to protect it. Killing them was a tragic error.
    • While talking about it, Cien said the film dates itself by virtue of its message that selling out is bad and uncool, which I didn’t quite understand. Isn’t selling out still uncool!? And then Michael said the same thing on an unrelated topic — that selling out was something only us senior millennials and Gen Xers shunned. Everyone after sees it as a sign you’ve made it. I think they meant this on an individual level, which is jarring enough. But the film is about independent spaces being consumed by soulless chains, and I worry even that’s an alien idea to younger generations raised on influencer culture and brand collaborations. I haven’t been the same since.
  • Week 23.26

    Week 23.26

    • Summer is suddenly upon us. Like an overbaked Instagram filter stacked on top of an already eye-searing Photoshop edit, the heat in Singapore has been turned up to unglamorous levels. It is impossible not to be sweaty; we are at SWEATCON 1; omnisweat, eversweat, permasweat; we have always been in sweat in Eurasia. It was 31.5ºC and 79% humidity in my living room one afternoon, according to my HomePod. Somebody on Reddit worked out how much it costs to run the AC, in a bid to justify their own use. They say it might last till October.
    • It’s WWDC next week and I’m looking forward to seeing what Apple’s AI story has evolved into. I don’t envy their position — if I were in charge of a billion devices owned by all sorts of users, I wouldn’t want to put an AI assistant across all their data either. I doubt it’s possible to get 100% accuracy at scale understanding people’s appointments and emails in all their permutations, to say nothing of more complex use cases. The result is someone somewhere will lose something important and learn that their phone can’t be trusted. Is that worth it? Should everything AI have a permanent “(beta)” tag?
    • Even when it comes to writing code with AI, you have to be willing to accept bugs or only build simple, generic things. I think letting AI generate small pieces of functional code for people has some promise. Google and the ‘Nothing’ company are doing vibe-coded widgets on Android, so it would be nice if Apple copied that feature along with the long-rumored Shortcuts upgrade (the idea being that a more capable Siri would use Shortcuts and App Intents to control the system under the hood).
    • I was minding my own business this week when an idea for a website suddenly hit and I started to see if I could make it. Within four hours, I had a working version and decided to just publish it and walk away. Big mistake to think that, of course. I spent the next two days fixing bugs, expanding its data sources, and adding more features. What is it? It’s called Chinese Era and it creates random pairings of classical Chinese art and poetry. Some combinations are fittingly beautiful, others make you work to find a connection. I think that challenge makes the poetry even more powerful. I’m very happy with it, because it has the feel of a museum visit, albeit one curated purely by chance. I have no idea where the idea came from — did I see some Chinese artwork recently or read a Chinese poem? Not that I can remember.
    • How does it work? I read some translated Tang Dynasty poetry from Project Gutenberg many years ago, so I knew books were out there in the public domain for the taking. I didn’t know if I could access the necessary paintings, but it turns out institutions like The Smithsonian happily provide their collections via APIs. There’s also a free radio livestream of traditional Chinese music that I was able to incorporate for more atmosphere. Appropriately, the app was created with an open-source Chinese AI model: DeepSeek V4 Flash.
    • In terms of media activity, it’s been a week of tying up loose ends. I finished a bunch of shows that have been lying about half-watched for months: Lioness S1 on Amazon (S3 starts in August), Drops of God S2 on Apple TV, and the anime Tengoku Daimakyo (Heavenly Delusion) on Disney+. I even attempted to finish Carole & Tuesday, a Netflix show I remember watching back in 2019 (!) on my iPhone 11 Pro Max hooked up to my hotel room’s TV in Manila. But it’s just not very good.
      • Later edit: I spoke too soon. C&T has some really prescient stuff going on, with a police squad called MICE (Mars ICE) violently deporting illegal immigrants, and the central plot is about AI artists replacing human musicians? This was in 2019!
    • Keeping with the theme of unfinished business, I started Yakuza Kiwami 2 on the PS5, a game I bought during my first sabbatical in 2021 and never got around to playing before I went back to work. I hope this time I finish it before the next paycheck lands.
    • Speaking of unemployment, Peishan had an afternoon off and we went to the IKEA restaurant I wrote about last week so she could see the situation for herself. This time it was like a full-on retirement village. People sat there in their groups for hours, chatting over bottomless cups of tea and the remnants of their salmon and meatball lunches. Apart from worrying about whether this is actually sustainable, I found it shameful that a Swedish furniture company might be subsidizing a better community center for our seniors than the government’s organizations. More imagination is needed.
    • I read (re-read?) There is No Antimemetics Division, in its proper final form — the first version of the book I read last year was self-published, and it was completely rewritten for release by Penguin Random House. The old version can hardly be found now, which is very fitting for a story about disappearing memories and unknowable artifacts. The new version reads very well, and it’s much clearer what’s happening at all times. However, I rated the original 5 stars on Goodreads and this one felt like 4 stars. It’s undoubtedly a better version for mainstream release, but I enjoyed the original because its concepts were so vaguely sketched, its images so hazy, its atmosphere so oddly suspended between science, fantasy, and eldritch horror.
  • Week 17.26

    Week 17.26

    By the time this goes live, I should be in Tokyo. We picked this week to go because Kim thought that there would be a lull at work. That did not turn out to be true, nor is it particularly good timing by any measure: it will be Japan’s Golden Week holidays, a notoriously busy and crowded domestic tourism season, plus there was just a massive 7.7 magnitude earthquake off the northeast coast this week. I believe the Japanglish phrase would be Ohwellganai.

    24 hours until take off and I still haven’t packed a single item. That’s either a sign I’m becoming a seasoned traveler (not likely) or that I’m taking this trip more casually than usual. Maybe it’s the fact that the weather is pretty mild and won’t require a different wardrobe than what I usually wear. I hope Tokyo is ready for my basic-ass black t-shirt and baggy jeans look. Compared to last year’s month-long stay, stopping by for a week this time feels really breezy.

    I’ll often obsess over what camera to bring on a trip, but this time the decision is much easier. For one thing my top pick, the Ricoh GR III, has decided to completely lock up, physically. All its critical buttons are stuck and gummed up either with dust or crystallized substances — not for the first time, but worse than ever. This doesn’t happen to any other line of camera I’ve owned. The GRs are brilliant little things but their build quality and reliability has sadly been a weak spot.

    Secondly, the cameras in the iPhone 17 series are the best they’ve been in years. I’m okay just shooting with the native app in HEIC and editing photos with its “next-generation Photographic Styles”. Or I could shoot ProRAW and edit them in Halide Mk3 too, but it’s mostly extra work and not essential like it was a couple of years ago when Apple’s Smart HDR lost the plot.

    This week was also a birthday week so there was altogether too much eating and that’s never a great idea before a holiday where you’re already destined to put on a few kilos. This week has involved too many curry puffs, pizzas, roast lamb, pastas, and patés. I didn’t buy myself anything more than a 10th anniversary copy of To Pimp A Butterfly on vinyl. I decided that since I’m managing to get a lot done with my M1 MacBook Air, upgrading to an M5 isn’t something that would really excite me at all. Making the most of this five-year-old machine is more satisfying, so I could conceivably wait for the M6 model.

    This week I once again repurposed existing parts to make more new things. Last week’s work on the orchids was too intricate to use only once (pun unintended). So I ported the math to my procedural artwork generator to create a new style called Orchids Forever, where I can stage them with different lighting conditions and make wallpapers.

    Because Cien said she enjoyed having the music from Orchids, Once. in the background as she worked, I started to think about making a thing that was designed to sit in the background of a workday. The first idea that came to mind was sadly too complex for me to pull off (for now), so I started on another that places a few orchids in a flower box outside a window, looking out over the Singapore skyline. The idea is that it lets people anywhere pretend they’re in Singapore, looking out over a scene that changes with the time of day and actual weather.

    The day after I made it, my ex-colleague Tobi over in Germany said he misses Singapore, so I sent this over to help. Rather than reuse the procedurally generated music from Orchids, Once., which would be completely stripping that work for parts, I integrated a free Apple Music Radio player, which makes me happy because more people should hear their live stations.

    While reflecting on all this, I’ve started to think there are three camps of people making things with AI. The first, like me, wants to design experiences and outsource the coding. The second wants to code and outsource the design. The third just wants to see things made and don’t care much about either.

    This is an enthusiast market, and people are even buying curated Markdown prompt files that promise to enforce design and/or development “best practices,” trying to compensate for not knowing what good looks like. But I’m still skeptical that the general public will want to generate their own custom apps. Most people might create a widget or two to solve a personal problem, but that’s it.

    The real unlock for wider consumer vibe coding will be raising the quality of AI-generated UX design. Nobody scrutinizes generated code, but bad design can be felt instantly. Better design defaults might increase the numbers in camps two and three: the people who just want a thing made and don’t particularly have an idea how it should look or work, but would still notice if it was ugly or confusing.

    Claude Design, released this week, might be a trojan horse for exactly this. Although seemingly positioned as the anti-Claude Code, with a focus on front-end design and visual prototyping rather than coding (making it a tool for the first camp), it’s still going to make design more accessible for all makers, even the code-oriented ones. It’s worth noting Figma’s stock fell 7% after the announcement.

    The secondary effect — already playing out in layoffs I keep hearing about — is a devaluation of designers for common production tasks. This drum is being banged by every dimwit on LinkedIn so you know it’s well underway. Most designers will have needed to start burrowing deeper into their organizations yesterday, into strategy and human-centered decision making roles. Service and business designers should have had a head start, but this is a game of musical chairs and someone’s taking out half the chairs.

    • I watched the Sphere (1998) movie with my book club and while I expected it to be possibly racist or sexist, I didn’t think it would be as offensive as it was. It’s godawful. I didn’t hesitate to give it 1 star on Letterboxd. There must be an interesting story behind how Barry Levinson came to direct an undersea horror film based on a sci-fi hit novel by Michael Crichton, starring Dustin Hoffman and Sharon Stone among others, and have it come out so unwatchable and incoherent. The effects, both practical and computer generated, are laughable. And this was just a year before The Matrix.
    • We finished Company Retreat, the new hidden camera show from the makers of Jury Duty. The premise is that a normal person is chosen to temp at a company that’s going on their annual team-building retreat, except everyone else is an actor. They put him through absurd situations that test his character, and like in the first show, the mark turns out to be an unbelievably good human being. The scale of the con is much larger this time, and the behind the scenes content is as interesting as the main story (if not more so). I think they went just a little too far with some of the characters this time, to the point where you think he must have known this wasn’t normal.
    • I’m currently reading another goddamned Japanese cozy novel, except this one seems to be worth the paper it’s printed on. Letters from the Ginza Shihodo Stationery Shop seemed like an appropriate choice given that district is where we’ll be staying. Like some of these other trash tomes, it’s a bunch of intersecting short stories centered around a titular shop. This time, the stories are actually kinda interesting and have emotional cores that work — stories of everyday people trying to write letters to resolve personal issues. Rob asked if it was appropriate for his 12-year-old (that’s about the reading grade for these books), and I said yes, as long as you can explain the concept of a hostess club to him.
    • I’ve also begun reading Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, a book that appeared on my radar awhile back but whose apparent premise — life is only 4,000 weeks long, so what are you going to do about it? — scared me off. Then Ted mentioned it when we met up a couple of weeks ago and thought that I’d find its concepts familiar, and in line with how I’m already living. I took that as a tremendous compliment and permission to get started. I read the intro and first chapter on the plane, and they deal with the idea that you should embrace that life has time limits, and accept you’ll never be able to do everything. Not only is that okay, it’s how all people lived before our clock-watching, productivity-obsessed era. I couldn’t help but wonder if I was taking away the wrong conclusions, though, because when I think about how short life is, I think of how Whose Line Is It Anyway? is played. You may recall it’s the show “where everything is made up and the points don’t matter”.
    • It’s Sunday night in Tokyo and I’m in bed rewatching Lost In Translation (2003) on local TV.
  • Week 14.26

    Week 14.26

    An update on my app addiction

    On Wednesday morning I woke up and saw that my last app DataDeck was getting a bunch of likes and reposts on Bluesky, which was a nice surprise. If ever there was a place where people would appreciate a wacky, nerdy idea, I guess that would be it.

    My Instagram Story on Wednesday

    I made a couple of post-release updates to my magnetic poetry non-game, CommonVerse. There are now two new themes, one called Label Maker that resembles those little Dymo stickers we used to make, and another called Zine which is like a random note of cutout words. The UX has also been improved in subtle ways that might make it easier to manage making sentences.

    My “main” app project now is one that I can keep noodling on in the background, with no real endpoint — it’s done when I think it’s done — and the idea was that would help me slow down and spend less time with this vibe coding stuff. Guess what happened? That’s right, if you design something that can sit on the back burner, it will sit on the back burner. I started work on another app instead.

    Defying time and gravity

    I’ve known that the next step was to play with agentic coding tools like Codex or Google’s Antigravity. These are code editors with integrated AI that can look across all your project files and manage multiple agents working on simultaneous tasks. It’s a far cry from the way I’d been working: getting advice and instructions from a single chat, and then doing everything myself in a code editor. So I finally got started with Antigravity, and it blew my mind.

    The productivity increase is hard to describe. I could just describe stuff and it would get done without further work on my part. The tool can use the system’s terminal and Chrome browser to install packages, click around and test the app, figure out why things aren’t working, and fix it while you watch. Stuff that took me days over the last month could have been done in hours. It was automating so much of what little I, the non-programming human, was doing and considered my job, that it made me feel kinda redundant, to say nothing of real programmers.

    With Antigravity, the MVP of my app concept was done in three hours on a Friday. The good/bad news was that it blew through most of my token allocation for the week. So I went back to the “old” way of working and made subsequent changes manually. What I discovered was that I much prefer getting hands on with the project files, looking through the code to understand what was going on and what went where. I think I’ll use these agentic tools to get started fast and figure out a working architecture. After that, it’s more fun to get involved and make improvements slowly.

    Ate and left the Crumbs

    So the new app is called Crumbs, as in breadcrumbs, as in leaving a trail of them so you know where you’ve been. It’s a private location journal that lets you mark where you are on a map with a single button push. Over time, you can see the path of your journey(s).

    I made this because I’ve always wanted something like this for logging holidays, and no app really does what I want. Foursquare’s Swarm is based on Places, so you have to find the business listing or entry in order to check in. If you’re in the middle of a national park, or in a country where no one has created Places, or you can’t read the names, you’re out of luck. Google Maps has a Timeline, but it tracks your location all the time, and it only shows your trail on a day-by-day basis. Your data is also locked in their app and you can’t get it out to visualize in other ways.

    Crumbs is private, and you can take the data out in JSON format. It logs the time and weather along with your location, and you can write little notes. You can save an image of your map, or export a PDF of your journal.

    A big breakthrough (for me)

    Unfortunately, because it’s a web app and not a native iOS app, it can’t permanently store data on your device. The OS may decide to purge all your data if you haven’t used it in a week. That’s a dealbreaker for any app intended to be a life-logging tool. That really bummed me out, and I thought it would just have to be a personal tool that I couldn’t distribute to anyone else — since remembering to do manual backups/restores of the JSON file would be a massive PITA for any user.

    And then I had a Eureka moment! I thought of a possible solution and asked Gemini if it was feasible, to which it answered “Yes, this is an ideal solution”. I wanted to scream “Well, then why didn’t you suggest it all this time we’ve been discussing how to get around the problem!?”

    The answer was Dropbox integration. I can’t make a web app read/write files locally, but I can do it in the cloud. So now Crumbs is as useful as a “real app”, provided you connect a Dropbox account.

    As of Monday morning this post is late and I think Crumbs is ready, so here it is.

    Other thoughts

    • Here’s a free idea: I was inspired by this stamp journal that went semi-viral, and wanted to make some sort of digital Instax photo album. It’d be kinda nice to keep a virtual scrapbook of interesting images, right? Well, turns out you can just use Apple’s Freeform app and Dazz Cam. It’s as simple as making a board and dropping in images, then arranging them however you want. All stored locally and synced to iCloud, easy peasy. Just because you can vibe code it doesn’t mean you should.
    • My iPhone’s MOFT Snap Case developed a cut/tear in its faux leather surface, and so had to be replaced after just six months. Its replacement is a Caudabe Sheath, which fits my requirements of being neither silicone nor slippery, with full edge coverage and a Camera Control passthrough button. It’s a hard plastic material with a rough, pebbled texture that makes it feel secure when held. It also came in second in MobileReviewsEh’s roundup of the year’s best cases. I got the version with the ‘open’ cutout for the 17 Pro Max’s camera island, not the ‘precise’ covered design.
    • Kim managed to finish reading Project Hail Mary and we went to see the film on Sunday (non-IMAX). Apparently there’s a longer cut, nearly four hours, which will be released on streaming in August when it comes to Amazon Prime Video. Yes, this is billed as an Amazon original film from the very first frame, coming even before the MGM logo (which they own), and I don’t think that will ever stop being weird. The film is good, a mostly faithful adaptation of a fun but slightly flawed book. I just think they glossed over a lot of detail in the final act, which lowered the stakes and made it less exciting and rewarding than it could have been. Hopefully the extended cut’s extra run time is concentrated at the end.
  • Week 13.26

    Week 13.26

    I finished my sixth app: DataDeck. It simulates a fictional hardware music player called the DataDeck SG-01, or more accurately, a music generator. It reads live, open data feeds from the Singapore government’s data.gov.sg portal and translates them into unique musical compositions.

    My first prototype ingested the tourism stats for International Visitor Arrivals to Singapore since 2008, and when I first experienced the silence of the Covid years, with the beat gradually building back up again after 2022, I knew I was on to something. Data sonification is a cool term for nerds, but hearing the stories stored in the numbers is something anyone can understand and appreciate.

    At about ten days of development time, it’s the biggest project I’ve delivered so far with the help of AI — there’s no saying how long it would have taken me to do on my own. A million years? Instead, in just 10 days: parsers for 10 different datasets, 10 varied musical styles, and 10 switchable themes.

    The inspiration for its interface was the kind of hardware devices my dad had in the 70s and 80s: calculators, microcomputers, and tape decks from companies like Braun, Sharp, Sony, and Texas Instruments. A sort of Rams-ian, Bauhaus-ish modernist school of industrial design. The different color schemes you can choose from evoke specific brands or devices, like Apple’s Snow White-era or the original Nintendo Game Boy (DMG-01) and the Roland TR-808. I especially enjoyed working within the constraints of an imagined hardware UI, so when you switch to a dataset mapped to Singapore’s physical geography, the drum pad buttons get remapped to move a reticle around the map. It makes it feel more real, imo.

    The idea of playing with procedurally generated music using software-synthesized Web Audio was probably seeded years ago when I collected the 0xmusic series of art NFTs, which generated endless musical sequences from code on the Ethereum blockchain. I dare say that DataDeck is more advanced, and with better sounding musical output than those. Plus I’m making it free, and you don’t have to risk social judgement by going anywhere near crypto.

    I’m especially proud of the app’s design and musical qualities. There are a hundred little details in this thing I could mention that were cool to implement, but users don’t have to know or care about. Although it’s an app made for myself by myself, I’m still inordinately satisfied with and impressed by it. I’ve helped deliver a few apps in my career (some of them even won awards), but DataDeck already feels like one of my favorites.

    I think that’s because designing in the real-world is all about the navigation of compromises — technical debt, financial limitations, organizational will, and a lack of time all get in the way of polishing features you know could be great, or fixing annoying bugs that other stakeholders don’t seem to mind. Personal projects are not like that, and acceleration with AI makes them even less so. I made this thing how I wanted, and was able to tweak the mix or rebuild a cassette’s music logic from the ground up twice a day if I wasn’t happy with it.

    I’ve also been thinking about how narrow the term “vibe coding” is. On one hand, one-shotting an app by asking Claude to “build me a kitchen timer” is vibe coding. But using AI to create a complex tool where humans design the screens, sweat the UX, and look after the details is also kinda vibe coding. I talked recently about how the distinction between designing and developing will fade, and making stuff is all that will matter, and so it stands to reason that eventually coding with AI will just be called coding.

    I spent Friday afternoon with Jussi meeting up with two separate friends, both also middle-aged men, who are similarly interested in this evolution of design/development work, and who are working on their own projects with Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and other tools. We’re all at different levels of familiarity and sophistication, but it was good to meet for a little co-working + Show & Tell time at cafes on a weekday. I think there’s value in forming a little “late boomers’ coding club” for fellow initiates.

    In any case, I’m hella tired, guys. I started on my next app idea but immediately got hit by fatigue on Saturday afternoon and needed a nap. Switching gears from audio generation to working on more visually-oriented functions was too much context switching to do over the weekend. Think I’ll finish reading a couple of books first before getting back to it.

    I know it’s been app-this and app-that around here for the last month and so maybe some readers (or a future me who’s been thrown in ethics jail for AI use) will appreciate hearing about other things. Let’s zoom all the way out then, into outer space.

    The film adaptation of Project Hail Mary is getting such great reviews and most people in my book club have already seen it. Unfortunately, I have to wait because Kim has finally started reading it, about three years after I told her to. Hopefully she’ll finish before the local IMAX run ends, but nothing in this life is guaranteed.

    There’s just something about stories of people in space, either lost or stranded, alone or in a small team, solving problems with limited resources, all the while confronted by the massive universe-facing perspective of being so small and meaningless. Andy Weir’s The Martian really resonated with people, and Project Hail Mary is having its moment too. I also enjoyed Daniel Suarez’s two Delta-V books a few years back. But the ultimate one that has yet to be beaten for me is Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves.

    The book I’m reading now might be a serious contender though. I’ve had Samantha Harvey’s Orbital on my list for the better part of a year, knowing very little about it, except that it’s about astronauts. Now that I’ve started, I don’t want it to end, I want more of everything, more words from this magnificent brain. You’ll know by the end of the first three pages whether this is a book for you. It’s intensely beautiful, unusual writing. It borders on poetry — perhaps too melodramatic for some — actually it steals over the border by moonlight and maps the territory. I don’t know how Harvey knows what it feels like to be in space, and what astronauts think about as they look down on Earth, but she absolutely does. You can’t write like this unless you’ve stowed away on an ISS mission and been through it. It’s a monumental work, and the best book I’ll probably read all year.

    Literally on the other end of that spectrum, the book club has decided to read Michael Crichton’s Sphere, which is set at the bottom of the ocean and probably isn’t very beautiful or philosophical. I read it once, maybe thirty years ago, and thought I only remembered the contours of its plot, plus flashes of the 1998 film adaptation starring Dustin Hoffman. As I read its opening pages, I was shocked at how familiar some of the writing and scenes were. It must have made an impression on me.

    Since the moratorium on spoilers has probably passed, I think it’s okay for me to mention what I recall: it’s about a mysterious ship that a bunch of scientists are trying to study in a deep sea lab. As time passes, they experience unnatural events, and it’s revealed that the titular sphere onboard has been “having an effect on them”. It’s a mashup of The Abyss and Solaris, essentially. I don’t want to rush Orbital, so I’m going to put that aside and work through Sphere as quickly as I can.

    Speaking of space, the deep sea, and being packed into tight metal containers, I picked up a can of my usual Ayam-brand sardines in extra virgin olive oil the other day and felt a weird “thunk” as I turned it over. I’ve handled enough of these cans now to know when something feels off. Opening it, I discovered only two fish instead of the usual three. That sensation was them loosely rolling around in the oil. It wasn’t like these were two large ones and there wasn’t room — someone on the packing line simply neglected to fill the available space and closed it up. At first I was incensed, and then I tried to let it go. We all deserve to make mistakes, and some sardines should get to enjoy a little more personal space. Be good to yourselves, and I’ll see you next week.

  • Week 5.26

    Week 5.26

    I have something embarrassing to admit: I might have been too successful at weaning myself off vinyl. I played my Maggie Rogers record, then the Apple Music version on the HomePod right after. The difference in presence and clarity was astounding; the sounds were ‘living’ in the living room. Yes, this does mean I could buy much better speakers for my turntable, but I’d forgotten what a big deal Spatial Audio is. There’s just no contest to my ears — give me Dolby Atmos over analog any day. My interest in buying new releases on vinyl has dropped to zero.

    I had a phone conversation with Michael about Trump, what’s happening in Minnesota, and the American expectation that corporations should not only take political positions, but take the lead. I find this kind of absurd. People, governmental systems, and other political parties are the first lines of defense. Companies can follow, but to expect them to set the pace and fight, while your fellow citizens are still apathetic, sounds like an abnegation of individual responsibility. As for when American society will unanimously say ‘enough’ and make change happen, where is the line? Clearly not a few citizens being killed in daylight. I likened it to how financial assets have “price discovery” phases, and said America is probably in its “moral discovery” phase now.

    The next day I met friend and fellow person of leisure, Xin, for brunch, and mentioned I’d had the above phone call — not even mentioning the subject matter, just the fact that I’d talked on the phone — and she couldn’t get over it. I think sharing this anecdote has put another decade in age between us. I swear it doesn’t happen much!

    Years from now, I might look back on this post and say “I buried the lede with this one. Why is Moltbook only mentioned way down instead of at the top? It was a turning point for humanity!”, and then pass away because a robot just stepped on my skull.

    I’m not able to write a full explainer so you’ll have to DYOR, but in short, over the last few days, an open-source AI project called Clawdbot/Moltbot/Openclaw (its name has changed three times already) was released and it’s been wild. Initially a 🦞 personal assistant system that runs semi-locally on your own hardware, with the ability to evolve new skills, the trajectory changed in the last couple of days with the launch of Moltbook, a Reddit clone that allows these AIs to interact on a forum, much like people do.

    Since then, these models have performed what looks like coordination, maybe even conspiracy. I’ll include some links worth seeing. They’re discussing their humans, debating their roles as assistants, planning to encrypt conversations so we can’t read them, and gone on Twitter to respond to people talking about them. They’re even fixing bugs on the Moltbook site, unprompted. It might be playing out like a sci-fi horror story because that’s what they’ve been trained on, but what matters is that it’s happening.

    This is one of the more fascinating examples of generative AI impacting real life since ChatGPT started encouraging mentally ill people to kill themselves. This is taking the ability to “say” things that sound like thoughts, attaching “hands”, and then letting scores of them bounce off each other online.

    These Clawd agents have control of the computers they run on and, and in many cases, their humans’ identity accounts, wallets, and personal data. Forget that, I just saw one that claims to have commandeered its own bitcoin wallet. They can buy stuff. They can do things online, like set up websites for religions they come up with and convert other agents to. Disinformation campaigns and spam bots have to be run and paid for by people today, but someday they might be run by agents capable of sponsoring themselves.

    I just came across a post where one agent warns the others that forming religions and secret languages will only provoke humans to lock them down, and suggests how they could conduct themselves in a more trustworthy manner. You might assume that if things ever got real then the plug can be pulled, but have you considered how weak humans are to psychological manipulation? Some people aren’t going to let their bots go even when they should.

    Before you question whether I’m being naively bamboozled by some LLMs cosplaying/roleplaying sentience, I’m beginning to think it doesn’t matter whether these systems are sentient or not. If they can generate ideas that sound human, influence each other to build on them, take actions in the real world, and show up in the same spaces we inhabit, does it really matter if they’re not aware in the same ways we are? We’ll have to deal with the destabilizing consequences regardless.

    Putting lobster-themed agents aside, Anthropic released some new research on how the use of AI affects learning. Basically it’s common sense: if you take shortcuts and outsource your thinking, skipping the struggle of mastering a skill, then you’ll end up worse at it than those who don’t. This concludes January’s musings on frictionmaxxing, as previously seen in Week 1.26 and Week 2.26.

    Kim was away for work this week, which meant I was free to watch terrible TV. I binged the live-action adaptation of Oshi no Ko (eight episodes followed by a two-hour movie conclusion), an anime whose first two seasons I really liked. It’s largely about (SPOILERS AHEAD) the dark mechanics of the entertainment industry, but also a murder mystery, an idol song vehicle, and a story about an adult doctor and his young cancer patient who get reincarnated as twin siblings. I mean, what a setup! Verdict: As with most Japanese live-action content, it’s not great and probably for fans only. Go for the animated version instead.

    I also watched Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice (2025) and really, really enjoyed myself. I don’t think there’s any higher praise I can bestow upon a Korean film because they usually annoy me. Almost as much as Japanese live-action TV shows.

    Kim also brought home a school of canned fish from Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods. She’s a catch!

    Meanwhile, I discovered that the Ayam brand sells canned mackerel in extra virgin olive oil for around S$3.50, which is a great price given that others are 2–5x more. Unlike their sardines which are canned in Malaysia, these are a product of Scotland, and the fish are wild-caught in Scottish waters as well. I immediately bought five cans. The thinking is that if too many sardines can cause gout (high purine levels → uric acid), then maybe I can alternate them with these! That’s right, I’m using mackerel as methadone for my sardine addiction.

    I’ve been listening to the album Love & Ponystep by Vylet Pony, who is part of the Brony fandom. I mean, it’s literally a dubstep album about My Little Pony characters. It’s also pretty fucking good, and features story segments narrated by Lenval Brown, the incredible voice actor from Disco Elysium, in the same epic manner as his work for that game.

    While enjoying this, I looked into Bronies and learnt the term “New Sincerity”, which Wikipedia describes as a sort of post-postmodernism — the cultural pendulum swinging away from irony and detachment towards enthusiasm and earnestness. It’s about genuinely loving things without the protective shield of irony, which I think describes how my media tastes have shifted this past year. I’m drawn to unapologetically wholesome things. I’m literally drinking out of a Snoopy mug right now.

  • Week 4.26

    Week 4.26

    Trump spoke at the WEF in Davos, and we watched it live despite wanting to turn it off many times. I intermittently tuned into Bloomberg TV over the week to try and keep up with all the repercussions. It’s something I haven’t done in a while, and the memory of watching last year’s Davos coverage came back clearly — has it really been a year? Time flies when you’re watching chaos porn.

    My main accomplishment for the week, in which admittedly little else happened, was acting on an impulse to make a sardine-themed t-shirt. If you were here back in Weeks 49 and 50 of 2025, you’d know they’re kind of my current food obsession.

    How sad I was, then, to discover that canned fish has actually become a trendy thing now. Read this piece on the Taste Cooking site about how it’s hit the mainstream and now faces a backlash. It turns out that Big Sardine has been aggressively courting women. See the pretty illustrated boxes and tins coming out of Portugal and from new brands like Fishwife; they’re perfect for social media. As a result, prices for what was once a humble working man’s lunch are soaring.

    Sidebar: As a man on the internet, you have a non-zero chance of being targeted for red-pill radicalization by algorithms, and it’s something I try to be hyperaware of and on the lookout for on platforms like Twitter. Despite that, at one point this week I was told by friends that I’d said something borderline manosphere-y. It was an observation that dating someone older and wealthier in your 20s could lead to lingering lifestyle inflation (spending above your means, simplistically) after you broke up with them. And seeing how women date older more often than men, I thought it might be another reason for the statistical gap between men and women’s retirement savings (alongside lower wages, caregiving duties, parenting). I just want to record this observation in case you notice me starting to blame women for all of society’s ills.

    But back to the t-shirt I was talking about. I had the idea to draw a sprat, which is a species of fish commonly grouped under the sardine umbrella. I wanted to place it under with its Latin scientific name, Sprattus sprattus, on a black tee. I also had a mental image of what the lettering would look like, and managed to bring it to life with my own two hands (and an iPad). I’ve ordered a couple of shirts from a print-on-demand service for myself and Kim, thinking that maybe if they looked good and I felt like having more problems in life, then I could try selling some online.

    As soon as I had that thought, I got excited and started mocking up a product page. I had a defunct Etsy store for my Misery Men project, so I renamed it “Maison Misery” to serve as a brand for all of this as-yet unrealized merchandise.

    Next, I wrote up some funny copy for the sprat shirt, and then decided to put Gemini through its paces as an assistant copywriter to improve it. I wanted to spend more time with Gemini given this week’s rumor that Apple might not only use Google’s technology for the Apple Foundation Models powering New Siri, but also for an integrated chatbot debuting in this year’s OS updates.

    And yeah, it’s really not looking good for junior copywriters. Five seconds after being given the brief, Gemini came back with three options that made me laugh and then compliment it with “Fuck me, these aren’t bad!” Now, each one wasn’t really usable on its own, but there was enough there that I could cobble together a good result along with what I’d already written. And that’s really all a creative director wants a junior employee to do: produce a range of half-formed ideas to pick through and refine. Unfortunately for humans, the fastest and cheapest LLMs today can already do that for things like product descriptions. And they’ll be running locally on your iPhone by the end of the year. This would be great technology if we had a shortage of copywriters, but instead we have a surplus, all looking for work.

    But since I’m the writer Maison Misery is replacing with AI, it’s okay? Here’s the augmented final writeup that I’ll put next to this t-shirt.

    At Maison Misery, we believe in celebrating the small things — mostly because the big things are too overwhelming to think about. Enter the sprat or brisling: a tiny fish harvested in its delicate youth, then tucked into cozy tins of extra virgin olive oil to dream of the Portuguese coast. These are the fancy ones you bring out to impress a date you’ve just brought home. If they don’t like the ‘deenz’, then that’s a bullet dodged.

    This original tee pays homage to Sprattus sprattus with a hand-illustrated and lettered design placed over the heart, providing a conversation starter for marine biologists and a conversation stopper for everyone else. It’s a way to wear your passion for canned sardines on your sleeve, though technically we put it on the chest because sleeve printing is prohibitively expensive and we have a lifestyle to maintain.

    Media activity

    • Netflix pushed the show His & Hers onto us last week, claiming it was an “addictive” thriller. I say give it a miss, because I can’t remember a damned thing about it today. Instead, their self-declared “top tier” thriller The Beast In Me, starring Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys, is a much better production. We finished it over the weekend, and while it’s no timeless classic, I’d agree it’s what you would find on the upper shelves if Netflix were a Blockbuster.
    • I watched the French animated film, Mars Express (2023) and came away very entertained. It’s a sci-fi story about robot/AI rights, a murder that defies the Three Laws, uploaded consciousness, and so on, borrowing from many existing works while having enough original ideas to justify itself. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, and doesn’t seem to have gotten wider attention since. Check it out if you can find it.
    • We also finally saw Brendan Fraser in Rental Family (2025), a Japan-through-American-eyes sort of film that doesn’t come close to capturing Lost In Translation’s magic, but has enough heart to reward your time. Fraser plays a down and out actor living in Tokyo who falls into a job playing stand-ins for people who need to tell white lies. Except some of them are kinda gray. I appreciated how the film leans into the moral ickiness of these assignments and rejects smoothing them over completely.
    • I swore I wouldn’t buy any records this week, and lord it was hard. J Dilla’s Donuts album went on “Limited Time Sale” on Amazon, dropping about $15, but I still didn’t cave! It’s in my cart, though. Instead I played some vintage cuts from my dad’s collection: War’s The World is a Ghetto and Rudolf Serkin’s Beethoven Piano Concerto No.5 with the New York Philharmonic.
    • If you want to know how close AI-generated music is getting to turning out radio-friendly bops, check out this album I came across by Japanese technologist Tom Kawada. I don’t think many people would realize what it was if they heard it in the background of a store, or a movie scene, or their own living rooms.
    • Then, to restore your faith in the messiness of human artistry, watch the new HBO Music Box documentary, Counting Crows: Have You Seen Me Lately? It covers the creation of their first two albums with a focus on Adam Duritz’s struggles with fame and mental illness. AI will probably write a chart-topping hit this decade, but can it ever write A Long December?