“Area connected to a given node in a multi-dimensional array with some matching attribute”
Apr. 18th, 2026 03:54 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
unsung_feedAnyone using old computers for graphics remembers the strangeness of “flood fill”:
The 1950s and 1960s computers were so sluggish that their consoles with blinking lights were not just for show; the operations were slow enough that you could still follow the lights in real time.
This ceased to be true soon afterwards. The microcomputer revolution temporarily reset some computing progress, but by the 1980s and 1990s more and more things were happening too fast for us to keep up.
But here (this above is Paint in Windows 1.0, and you can try for yourself in a browser!) was one example where you could still see an algorithm working hard. It was mesmerizing and educational, and it was a rare example where perhaps you didn’t mind the computer taking its sweet time. Even messing up like I did above – maybe especially messing up – ended up fascinating to watch.
Wikipedia has examples of a few different flood fill algorithms, which are even more interesting:
A few years later, Minesweeper had a very memorable flood fill, too (also available in a web emulator today):
But by now Minesweeper retired from sweeping mines, and today computers are so fast that it’s hard for me to imagine any flood fill being anything else but flash flood…
…except this is what I just saw in Pixelmator on my Mac:
I don’t know if this is a nod toward a classic flood fill, or just a nice unrelated transition. But I found it genuinely delightful, and it’s fast enough that I would imagine it doesn’t bother pros who need to do it often.
Sometimes it’s nice to see a computer working when there’s a good reason; some apps like banking apps even insert artificial, visible delays after crucial operations, just so that the users feel comfortable knowing their important transaction went through.
But sometimes it’s nice to see a computer working for no reason at all.
Pablo Escobar's Cocaine Hippos Are Doomed
Apr. 18th, 2026 09:49 pmjwz_org_feed
"Without this action it is impossible to control them," said Colombia's environment minister Irene Vélez at a press conference on Monday. Citing estimates that the population could reach at least 500 individuals by 2030, "affecting our ecosystems and native species," she added that "it is our responsibility to take this action." [...]
In 2022 the government launched a sterilization program to slow reproduction of the hippos, which could number up to 200 individuals. At the same time, officials opened talks with seven countries and two international zoo and aquarium associations to relocate the animals. To date, no country has agreed to take even a single hippo, according to the Colombian government, which ultimately led its Ministry of Environment to opt for euthanasia.
Widespread sterilization is not a viable option because it is a "cumbersome, costly and dangerous procedure that progresses at a very slow pace," says Jorge Moreno Bernal, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of the North in Barranquilla, Colombia. A single sterilization requires cranes and puts human lives at risk, he says. "It is not like sterilizing a dog or a cat."
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Happy Birthday Krissy
Apr. 18th, 2026 05:42 pmscalziwhatever_feed
Shown here in the midst of prepping our taxes for our accountant, not this week but a couple of months ago, because she’s organized about that, and that is, in fact, one of the many, many things I love about her.
Krissy and I actually do a terrible job of being in the same place on her birthday. Last year she was in California visiting her family, and this year I am California for the LA Times Festival of Books, where I have a panel and at least two signings tomorrow. Last year I made up for my absence by getting her real estate. I think this year I am likely just to take her to dinner when I get back. You can’t do real estate every year.
Every year, however, I so incredibly grateful that this amazing person chooses to live her life with me, and I make it my business to let her know how much I love, value and respect her. She is the reason I get to live the life I do. That’s a pretty big deal.
If you wish to wish her happy birthday in the comments, that would be fabulous.
— JS
★ ‘A Reading Room on Wheels, a Lover’s Lane, and, After 11 PM, a Flophouse’
Apr. 18th, 2026 05:52 pmdaringfireball_feedVittoria Benzine, at Artnet (via Oliver Thomas):
The singular American filmmaker Stanley Kubrick saw the little details. He even saw the future. But, most of all, he saw people, with all their quirks. Kubrick’s films, from Dr. Strangelove (1964) to The Shining (1980), offer proof of this — as do his earliest photos, produced during the 1940s. One new trove of 18 such images will get its first-ever outing next week, when Los Angeles-based Duncan Miller Gallery presents the find alongside works by contemporary photographer Jacqueline Woods at the Photography Show in New York. [...]
The photos are some of the earliest images that the director made for Look. “New York’s subway trains are a reading room on wheels, a lover’s lane and, after 11 p.m., a flophouse,” Kubrick’s subsequent photo essay accompanying his subway visions opined.
I’ve seen some of these before, but not all. (Which makes sense, if some of them have only now been discovered.)
Mia Moffet, writing for Museum of the City of New York back in 2012 (where you can see more of these photos):
As you can see below, with the exception of iPods and smart phones, activities on the train haven’t changed much in the last 66 years, including shoving one’s newspaper in everyone else’s faces.
My favorite:
(Here’s another from the same scene, moments apart.)
Moffet then quotes from this 1948 interview with young “Stan” Kubrick, regarding how he captured them:
Indoors he prefers natural light, but switches to flash when the dim light would restrict the natural movement of the subject. In a subway series he used natural light, with the exception of a picture showing a flight of stairs. “I wanted to retain the mood of the subway, so I used natural light,” he said. People who ride the subway late at night are less inhibited than those who ride by day. Couples make love openly, drunks sleep on the floor and other unusual activities take place late at night. To make pictures in the off-guard manner he wanted to, Kubrick rode the subway for two weeks. Half of his riding was done between midnight and six a.m. Regardless of what he saw he couldn’t shoot until the car stopped in a station because of the motion and vibration of the moving train. Often, just as he was ready to shoot, someone walked in front of the camera, or his subject left the train.
Kubrick finally did get his pictures, and no one but a subway guard seemed to mind. The guard demanded to know what was going on. Kubrick told him.
“Have you got permission?” the guard asked.
“I’m from LOOK,” Kubrick answered.
“Yeah, sonny,” was the guard’s reply, “and I’m the society editor of the Daily Worker.”
For this series Kubrick used a Contax and took the pictures at 1/8 second. The lack of light tripled the time necessary for development.
Mac Mini and Mac Studio Supply Shortages
Apr. 18th, 2026 04:48 pmdaringfireball_feedNicole Nguyen, writing for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):
Mac Minis with larger-capacity RAM chips — a base M4 model with 32GB of RAM, starting at $999, and the M4 Pro models with 64GB of RAM, starting at $1,999 — are “currently unavailable” on Apple.com. And estimated shipping wait times for any other Mini model start at about a month, and in some cases is up to 12 weeks. (This Mini scarcity extends to other retailers as well.)
The more powerful Mac Studio makes up an even smaller share of sales than the Mini — less than 1%, according to CIRP. But its high-memory configurations ($3,499 and up) are also unavailable, and more affordable variations show wait times of up to 12 weeks. Last month, Apple removed the Mac Studio’s mega upgrade — 512GB of RAM — which it had touted as “the most ever in a personal computer.”
Meanwhile, Apple can ship its most popular computer, the MacBook Pro, with 128GB of RAM ($5,099 and up) to your door in early May. MacBook Pro models with less RAM ship sooner, and almost all other Mac models we reviewed on Apple.com will arrive just days after they’re ordered.
Apple declined to comment on what’s happening with these AI-friendly systems, but analysts have three theories.
This situation is rather unusual, and I suspect Nguyen is correct that it’s the result of a combination of factors, including a surge in demand from new “desktop AI” systems like OpenClaw. It’s rather remarkable that pretty much all of these desktop AI systems are Mac-exclusive, including the new Codex app from OpenAI (that’s based on Sky, the never-released AI automation app from the team behind Workflow, which Apple acquired and renamed Shortcuts). Some of these systems will surely arrive on other platforms eventually, but at the moment, they’re only on the Mac. They’re not on Windows, not on Linux, not on Android, and not on iOS. Just the Mac. That’s because the Mac is, and always has been, the best computer platform in the world. It just is. These systems can’t run on iPhones or iPads because those are baby computers. They just are. So if you want to jump in as an early adopter on desktop AI, it needs to be on a Mac. And if you want a headless always-on Mac to do it, the only options are a Mac Mini or Mac Studio.
Obviously Apple is nearing the release of M5-generation models for both the Mini and Studio. Perhaps those models are behind schedule, and Apple already tapered production of the old models. I think it’s just a question of whether we need to wait for WWDC in June, or if they’re going to drop in May.
Launchers and me
Apr. 18th, 2026 04:13 pmdr_drang_feedI started using launchers shortly after returning to the Mac (from Linux) in 2005. The first one I used was the great Quicksilver. I’m sure I learned about it from Merlin Mann, who was Quicksilver’s biggest advocate, but I can’t point to which of his many posts on QS got me started.
When Nicholas Jitkoff (Alcor) stopped developing Quicksilver in 2007 or so, I switched to LaunchBar, and that’s been my main launcher ever since.1 I gave Alfred a workout for a few months—inspired, I think, by this episode of Mac Power Users—and I’ve tried Spotlight a few times, but I’ve always returned to LaunchBar.
My most recent trial of Spotlight began in late February and ended yesterday. I’d been hearing about the new and improved Spotlight since the introduction of macOS 26/Tahoe, and this episode of Upgrade inspired me to give it another shot. You may recall that as the episode in which Jason and Myke reviewed the results of Jason’s annual Apple Report Card, and they talked about Spotlight as being one of Tahoe’s significant improvements.
So I turned off LaunchBar and began using Spotlight exclusively. It sucked. I hung on that long only because I kept thinking, “Surely it’s going to improve as it learns my habits.” It didn’t. It was unbearably slow when I started using it, and it was still unbearably slow when I finally decided to pull the plug on it yesterday.
How slow? Finding files and folders—even files and folders that I had been searching for and opening for a few days—typically took several seconds (yes, s…e…v…e…r…a…l seconds). Finding and launching apps with Spotlight was much faster, but even that had a noticeable delay. You may remember that Quicksilver was so-named because it was quick—so are LaunchBar and Alfred. Spotlight, despite being a system feature, is not.
So I’m back to LaunchBar. A new release came out during my Spotlight experiment, which was heartening, as I’ve been worried about LaunchBar’s continued viability as a product. I upgraded and reindexed my system (which took only a few seconds), and it feels like I’m back at my Mac again.
One last thing: If you feel compelled to tell me the Good News about Raycast, please restrain yourself. I know about Raycast, and I know that it seems like just the thing for someone who does as much scripting and automation as I do. And maybe it is. But it seems like a project I don’t want to take on right now. If I change my mind, I’ll let you know.
Update 18 Apr 2026 1:07 PM
It’s possible that Spotlight would work at a reasonable speed if I reindexed it. Myke Hurley has mentioned (not in the above-linked episode, but in others) that he’s needed to reindex Spotlight a couple of times. If that’s what I need to do to get it to work properly, count me out. Yes, I did reindex LaunchBar yesterday, but that was because it hadn’t run in seven weeks, and I wanted it up to date right away—I’ve never had to reindex it regularly.
-
I’ve never tried the reconstituted Quicksilver. It may be fine, but I just don’t think it has enough momentum behind it. ↩
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Dreams
Apr. 18th, 2026 11:20 amsmbc_comics_feed
Click here to go see the bonus panel!
Hovertext:
I'm pretty sure this is how Stoicism works, just more douchey.
Today's News:
A bunch of games with nothing in common
Apr. 18th, 2026 01:21 pmzarfhome_blog_feedI know I haven't done a game-review wrap-up since... January? Yikes. And those were mostly reviews I wrote back in the November. (Fall is IGF judging season.)
Infocom stuff has taken up most of my free time -- not to mention GDC travel and NarraScope planning. But I have played a few games. I mean, new Nosgoth lore, I can't turn that down.
Here's some stuff that's been going on:
- The Séance of Blake Manor
- Intelligence
- The Artisan of Glimmith
- Blippo+
- Kevin's Playing in Berlin
- Planet of Lana 2
- Legacy of Kain: Ascendance
The Séance of Blake Manor
- by Spooky Doorway -- game site
A line-art mystery game set in rural Ireland, 1897. This is not the static detection genre; it's a good old-fashioned (doubly old-fashioned!) mystery where you walk around a hotel and ask people questions and try to catch them in lies. And dig through their luggage while they're having a drink down the bar.
Specifically, it's non-static in that time passes. You can run out. Time only passes when you EXAMINE or ASK SOMEONE ABOUT -- as we say in parser-land -- but since those are the things you do in the game, it's a real limit. The limit got on my nerves and I didn't finish the game.
I can see exactly how they got there. The manor is full to the Plimsoll line with random stuff -- you can pry into every shelf and drawer in every room. You don't want to lawnmower all that, or ask every person about every topic. You're not supposed to! Figuring out what's worth your time is a core game skill. And the only way to land that is to give every query a tiny (tiny) opportunity cost. You really have plenty of time; the tutorial sequences make that very clear.
And yet. Some critical objects are not distinguished at all. Sometimes you really do have to examine every bookshelf in every room until you run across the Bible with writing in the flyleaf.
It's not a big deal to waste ten game minutes, or even thirty. But the prospect of blowing unbounded game time looking for a puzzle-unlock was... hurty. So I hit a walkthrough. And once I went to the walkthrough, I realized that I kind of wanted to use a walkthrough for every puzzle, and then... I just never got back to playing the game.
I'm sure that if I'd kept at it, I would have reached a good ending. It was early Saturday evening (about halfway through the timeline); I'd finished several story threads and made good progress on all of them. I wasn't stuck. I kept the game installed for a couple of weeks, saying "Surely I will get back to this and finish it." Eventually I realized I was lying.
You know, this is exactly how everybody felt who bounced off Blue Prince. "The game is fine, they just have to get rid of this one annoying mechanic that doesn't even have anything to do with the puzzles!" Yeah, and Blue Prince without the RNG is a different game. Blake Manor without the time limits is a different game. I am not bold enough to assert that it would be a better game.
I enjoyed all the bits of Blake Manor that I played. It's a good (if somewhat miscellaneous) collection of period-occultist mini-dramas. The characters are all colorful and entertaining. There's a library and a hedge maze and many secret doors.
Footnote: One of my friends noted that the hotel staff includes women named "Caitlin" and "Saoirse", which is not really period. Working-class Irish women in 1897 would have been named "Mary" and "Mary".
Intelligence
- by Zero Trick Pony games -- game site
A short web-based static deduction game... in space! Which is to say, in a near-future Expanse-ish sci-fi setting. Spaceships -- corporate, commercial, and military -- zoom around the Solar System, but some of them have gone missing. Figure out how and where each one wound up. It's a pleasant combination of querying witnesses, digging through databases, and applying analysis tools.
Also, a storyline with an exciting climactic scene. The game isn't "static" in the sense of no time passing; you are involved in events. They arrive at your pace, though. You're uncovering what happened, not deciding how the story will go. (Until... well, you'll see.)
I like the general design sense of "you gain more options over time". More topics to ask about, more databases to query in, more analysis tools. I think this is what Strange Horticulture brought to the party that makes it a particular favorite of mine. It's well-used here.
...Okay, I just love analysis tools. Intelligence doesn't get very complicated -- you always have a good sense of where or how to dig on a particular clue -- but being able to run some "electromagnetic data" through the weapon signature analyzer vs the engine signature analyzer is a tiny bit of adventure-game logic that makes the world come alive.
The Artisan of Glimmith
- by Lunarch Studios -- game site
Witness-like rule-based panel puzzles, only not first-person.
There's a whole lot of these puzzles and they're consistently challenging, fair, and tight. You just know the designers built a whole testing framework to verify that every puzzle has a unique solution even though most players will never notice that.
But, as with most of these puzzle-puzzle-puzzle games, I eventually felt exhausted and put it away. It's too same-y to play in long sessions, and (as a Steam game) too heavy-weight for me to pick up for a quick snack.
I really do want some sense of exploring a world and finding something cool around the next corner. Glimmith is laid out as a floating village in space, but you're not in the village; it's a rigidly external viewpoint. Which, yes, they use to hide a few sneaky bonus puzzles -- but in a way that rules out any sense of embodiment. If you were present in the world, you could turn your head!
If they ever ship an iOS version, mind you, I'll jump right back in. That's the snack device for me. As it were.
Blippo+
- by Ekistics Entertainment -- game site
Delightful snippets of alien cable TV. "It's not a game!" warns everybody, presumably to the sort of fragile flowers who get panic attacks if they go twenty minutes without seeing a health bar. You know what? Blippo+ is a game. It updates as you play (slowly, in chunks) and you see events progressing. It's fundamentally the same genre as Immortality, or Portal if 1986-quality FMV had been available in 1986.
Headcanon: Planet Blip is from the same universe as Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. Look at the hair, tell me I'm wrong. Fhloston (as in Fhloston Paradise) is mentioned as well.
Kevin's Playing in Berlin
- by Kevin Du -- game site
Kevin Du writes a game. I buy the game. I install the game. I have no idea what I'm supposed to do with the game. I uninstall the game. Then I buy his next game because I want him to keep doing this.
I guess my position is that these are games but -- at least for Ginger and this one -- the set of people who are supposed to play them is empty. Russell would weep; Cantor would lie down with a damp cloth on his face.
This time it's three mini-games and I have no idea what I'm supposed to do in any of them.
Planet of Lana 2
- by Wishfully Studios -- game site
Another non-pixel-art side-scrolling puzzle platformer set on, well, the planet of Lana. (Lana is the protagonist, not the planet.)
This makes a good solid attempt at bringing in new mechanics beyond pushing crates and dodging sentry robots. Mind you, you still do both of those things, but there's also drones and fish. And you can swim. There's the occasional chase sequence.
I think the mechanics were good, but they went for complexity over difficulty. You have to do a lot of multi-step tasks that aren't tricky per se. And it throws you right into most of them. The "Use Mui's special ability to take over a drone and use its special ability" loop was particularly hard to grasp, for a core mechanic. Can we talk about a complexity ramp as distinct from a difficulty ramp? The puzzles themselves are light-weight, but I feel like the target audience will get lost trying to operate them.
Worked fine for me, though. As far as I'm concerned, the Lana games are mostly about the evocative hand-painted environments and the story (unsubtitled but enthusiastically animated).
Here, I'll tell you my favorite bit. The game sticks very firmly to the 2D-platformer plane -- it has to, for the puzzles to make sense. All movement is left-right / up-down. Except that in one cut scene, Lana turns 90 degrees and follows another character into the background. And it's ominous! "Noooo, don't step off the path! You're making a terrible mistake! Never break the frame!" With ominous music, even. And yes, the story cashes that check. I laughed and laughed.
Legacy of Kain: Ascendance
- by Bit Bot Game Studios -- game site
A pixel-art side-scrolling beat-em-up platformer set in Nosgoth.
This is both delightful and entirely laughable. I mean, the whole point of the Kain series is overwrought vampire gothiness taken up to eleven and then doubled. (Camp-22?) It can't not be laughable.
But this is specifically the thing of inventing an Original Character -- Elaleth, birth-sister of Raziel -- and inserting her into every possible gap in the storyline. And doing it really well, because the writers know the storyline like the backs of their demonically-clawed hands. It couldn't be more fanfic if her name were Elaleth Dark'ness Dementia.
Please understand that I am not complaining. I love involuted fanon. I am here for it. And it's not like trying to expand canon in new directions is inherently a better idea; that's how we got the boring Hylden, who remain boring. I am just saying that filling in gaps is a self-limiting prospect.
Ok look: I am playing this in alternating chapters with the remastered LoK: Defiance, of which I once wrote: "The major story revelations are all either murky or implausible." The awful truth may be -- you can't make me admit this but I have to say the words -- that the Nosgoth setting never had that much potential to begin with.
On the up side, they got back every veteran voice actor they could. Grace to the memories of Tony Jay and René Auberjonois.
Any-how. Side-scrolling platformer! It's mostly fighting mooks and jumping. If you play in story mode (like me, obviously) you have infinite hit points so it's just jumping. And enjoying the laughable dialogue. And reading the little lore journals, which do expand the canon, full credit there honestly.
Mind you, you have to be pretty good at jumping sequences. Those get tricky. Again, story mode lets you ignore the fireballs and flying green demonponies (seriously, what were those?) I recommend story mode.
Anyhow, if you can name the Nine Pillars off the top of your head or you're ready to shout "omg it's Janos Audron's Retreat in pixel-art!", I've got your goods. But: I have not yet finished playing. I leave this space open for the ending to wow me after all: _____
EDIT-ADD: Yeah, that's about what I expected. Hit all the right marks; no surprises.
Demonically clawed footnote: I see the story was adapted from a kickstarted graphic novel. And I see that fans got cranky about getting an Original Character. Sigh.
Look, there's nothing wrong with Elalath as a protagonist. I was happy to get a fresh voice. When I complain about "filling in the gaps", it's because a perfectly good character is used as scaffolding for Raziel's thoroughly-mapped-out storyline. And the writer knows this, because the game (and I assume the comic) ends with Elaleth walking offstage into her own storyline!
I don't know if the sequel hook will come to anything, but I'm on board for it. And yes, I will pick up Dead Shall Rise in print. I'm just sorry it doesn't come with Simon Templeman and Michael Bell sneering and brooding over every line.
Insurance Fraud Fursona
Apr. 18th, 2026 04:10 amjwz_org_feed
Viral video handed to insurers as evidence seemed to show a bear in a 2010 Rolls-Royce Ghost in Lake Arrowhead on 28 January 2024. Similar claims were filed on the same date and location for two high-end Mercedes models. But biologists with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife reviewed the footage and determined it showed a human in a bear suit.
Apple’s Developer Guidelines for Ratings and Review Prompts
Apr. 18th, 2026 12:43 amdaringfireball_feedApple Design:
Avoid pestering people. Repeated rating requests can be irritating, and may even negatively influence people’s opinion of your app. Consider allowing at least a week or two between requests, prompting again after people demonstrate additional engagement with your experience.
Prefer the system-provided prompt. iOS, iPadOS, and macOS offer a consistent, nonintrusive way for apps and games to request ratings and reviews. When you identify places in your experience where it makes sense to ask for feedback, the system checks for previous feedback and — if there isn’t any — displays an in-app prompt that asks for a rating and an optional written review. People can supply feedback or dismiss the prompt with a single tap or click; they can also opt out of receiving these prompts for all apps they have installed. The system automatically limits the display of the prompt to three occurrences per app within a 365-day period. For developer guidance, see
RequestReviewAction.
There are a lot of apps that eschew a lot of these guidelines. I mean, how do you avoid pestering people when the entire idea of an alert asking for a rating/review is, by nature, pestering? It’s an oxymoron, like saying “Don’t pester people when you pester them.”
I actually knew about the system setting to opt out of these prompts. On iOS it’s in Settings → Apps → App Store: In-App Ratings & Reviews. On MacOS, it’s in the App Store app’s Settings window. On both platforms, it’s on by default. This is one of several settings that I would change, personally, but choose not to, as a critic / pundit / know-it-all, so as to have more of the standard experience that most users get. If you’re annoyed by these prompts though, you should feel free to turn them off.
Follow-Up Regarding App Store Reviews, Which Are Definitely Busted
Apr. 18th, 2026 12:31 amdaringfireball_feedI wrote yesterday:
And the apps that do the right thing — like Godier’s Current — and never solicit a review like a needy hustler are penalized.
On Mastodon, Steven Troughton-Smith responded:
Review prompts are the difference between a great app getting five positive reviews, and thousands of positive reviews. I would never recommend to a developer to not implement the APIs. It’s App Store Editorial suicide for most apps, since Apple tends to only pick things up when they have that body of review data.
I can see how my describing not prompting for reviews as “the right thing” looks like I’m suggesting developers should not prompt for reviews. That wasn’t my intention.
You have to play the game as the game stands, and Apple controls the game. And in the game as it stands, apps need 5-star reviews to gain traction in the App Store, perhaps especially so for apps in crowded categories. And for most apps, the only way to achieve that is through prompting. But the right thing to do, for the user experience in the app, is never to prompt for reviews.
That’s the problem with how Apple has set this up — to be competitive, apps need to do the wrong thing. I’m a competitive bastard. If I had an app in the App Store today, I’d probably prompt for reviews. I don’t begrudge developers who do it today. That’s the game. I admire developers who refuse to play this part of the game. It’s noble. But it’s not a winning strategy. I want Apple to fix the game — that’s the only real solution.
The system is so twisted that even Apple itself begs for these reviews from its own apps, even the system apps built into iOS. When else does Apple ever ask for anything? It looks needy and pathetic. Real Gil Gunderson vibes.
The funny thing is, this morning while I was reading the Mastodon thread with Troughton-Smith’s post, Ivory prompted me for a rating. Which I dutifully submitted. 5 stars, of course. Which brings me to another follow-up point. A few readers have emailed to object to the argument that it hurts developers to give apps anything short of a 5-star rating. (A few of these readers are from Germany, no surprise.) It’s logical, I agree, that a 4-star rating ought to be considered fair and just for a good app with obvious room for improvement. But anything short of 5 stars pulls down any good app’s average, because the overwhelming majority of users who rate apps only ever assign 5 stars for apps they like, or 1 star for apps they’re angry about. In a system where the overwhelming majority of users only ever assigns 1 or 5 stars, assigning 4 stars is effectively a mildly negative review. That sucks. Apple should fix it. But until they do (which, let’s face it, they probably won’t), obstinately ignoring that this is how App Store ratings work does not help good apps get the attention you think you’re helping them get with a 4-star rating.
weekend open thread – April 18-19, 2026
Apr. 17th, 2026 11:07 pmaskamanager_feedThis comment section is open for any non-work-related discussion you’d like to have with other readers, by popular demand.
Here are the rules for the weekend posts.
Book recommendation of the week: The Fox Wife, by Yangsze Choo. A Chinese detective story in which the grieving mother hunting her daughter’s killer happens to be a fox who can turn into a woman. Slow-paced, beautifully written, and a bit heart-breaking. (Amazon, Bookshop)
I earn a commission if you use those links.
The post weekend open thread – April 18-19, 2026 appeared first on Ask a Manager.
Cherry: The Final Flowering
Apr. 17th, 2026 07:59 pmasknicola_feedApril is always a strange time here in our particular corner of the PNW where our house seems to sit in its own tiny pocket of micro-climate. We have what I believe is the last-to-bloom cherry tree in Seattle.
Three days ago the tree was bare and the sky brilliant blue. Two days ago we had thunder, lightning, hail…and a waterspout over Puget Sound. Waterspout sounds sort of cute ad friendly, doesn’t it? It’s not. It’s a tornado over water—you do not want to encounter one if you’re in a boat. (Both these images are screen grabs from local news video—like the cats, I was very sensibly safe indoors; sorry for the poor quality.)
Yesterday? The cherry tree decided, Okay, the weather has thrown its final spring curveball, safe to bloom! And so it did.
Every year the speed of change surprises me. One day nothing—no leaves, no flowers—then one morning buds with tiny pink frills peeking from the tips. Then, hours or days later (always unexpected), spang! Leaves and flowers at once. Within a week the whole tree will look like a puff of cotton candy; three of four days after that they’ll all fall off and turn the lawn into a pink carpet. For days the cats will come home covered in petals, tracking them everywhere. Sadly (for us—Kelley really likes cherries), despite all the flowering there will be no fruit. There never is. I don’t know why. The tree is at least 25 years old, so it’s not a question of age. I don’t think it’s a nutrient or sunlight issue, either. I think our cherry just doesn’t have any suitable friends close enough to cross-pollinate.
Perhaps one day someone will plant something compatible, and one day there will be tiny little cherry trees springing up all over. Until then, the birds love the tree. The cats love the tree. And I love the tree. It seems content.
Dan Sinker on the time Notre Dame students fought the Klan
Apr. 17th, 2026 09:40 pmwaxy_feedanother 100-year-old story that rhymes with today's current events #
AI is Destroying the Economy, Part II
Apr. 17th, 2026 08:01 pmdeusexmachinatio_feedThis post is part of a series currently in progress. We’re adding links and adjusting titles as we go.
Why AI Sucks and You Shouldn’t Use It
AI is Fundamentally Bad for Most Tasks
AI is Destroying the Economy, Part I
AI is Destroying the Economy, Part II
AI is Morally Bankrupt
AI is Making You More Stupider
That Original Bluesky Thread About Art
Now let’s move on to another part of the economy: that abstract knot that includes the tech industry, venture capital, and the stock market. This is going to include some 101-level information on how finance and investment in tech work, and I struggled with writing it all out because it’s so stupid and arbitrary.
…And because there’s so much information on this topic in particular that it’s hard to distill it into something both easy to follow and a reasonable length.
Anthropic and OpenAI, the two primary titans of the AI industry, are both looking at an IPO this year. That’s an Initial Public Offering, when a company is listed as a publicly traded stock on the stock market for the first time. There are a lot of people set to make a killing when that happens, including anyone who holds private stock or stock options: typically company executives, values employees. and existing investors, who all received their shares for free or for (relatively) cheap. The higher their stock value at IPO, the more money they stand to make selling the private stock they own already.
Anthropic and OpenAI (or at least the people running those companies) have a very, very vested interest in making it look like the businesses they’re running are profitable, useful, inevitable. That’s how you get your IPO price sky-high.
They’re not going to be putting out information that looks bad for them (except as legally required by the SEC). Figuring out what’s really happening behind the scenes requires some detective work, and most financial reporting these days is not exactly investigative.
So we need to be extremely skeptical of forecasts and predictions coming from inside an AI company, because these are people who will win big… but only if everything looks like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
If you want a deep dive into any of the information in this post, I highly recommend the work of Ed Zitron. He’s kind of a sketchy guy, but he does the most in-depth reporting on the financials of the big AI companies, hands down.
AI is Eating the World’s Capital
Right now, about 30% of the purported value of the S&P 500 is from five tech stocks with a big stake in AI. Generally, in investing, having all of your eggs in one basket is thought to be a bad idea, but here we are.
Collectively, as of this writing, we’ve invested about $1.6 TRILLION dollars into AI, and it’s expected that number will hit $2.5 trillion by the end of this year. That’s more than the amount of money we put into the moon landing, the Manhattan project, and building the entire US highway system all added together. Wait no, actually it’s more than TWICE as much.
As a comparison, the global pharmaceutical industry is about $1.4 trillion. We invested a whole pharmaceutical industry into AI already.
But here’s our first big problem for today. If money is being invested in one thing, it isn’t being invested in something else. So that’s $1.6 trillion that hasn’t been used for, say, building affordable housing, producing independent films, researching drugs to cure the disease of your choice, starting up solar and wind farms, or breaking ground on a factory to make cars or toothpaste or denim or candy or literally anything else.
We’ll never know what the AI gold rush has cost us.
However — some of these huge numbers are misleading, because a lot of money doesn’t actually exist as currency or assets tied in any way to physical reality. There is so, so much tech money doesn’t actually exist. Let’s take a look at how that works.
If I fill out a couple of forms and start a business, I can immediately assign a valuation to it. Even before the company owns any equipment or furniture, signed any contracts, has any clients! Just the strength of my idea. The valuation is loosely based on how much money I think I can make eventually, plus whether I can persuade investors that I’m worth betting on.
And then I can sell shares in my company to investors based on this value I made up. So if I say my company is worth $1 billion, and I sell you 25% of it for $100 million, then on paper you can say you now own $250 million in stock and I can say I own $750 million in stock, but the only real, consequential thing that’s happened is that you’ve given me $100 million. The rest is all pretend money that doesn’t exist in a bank account anywhere.
This is going to be important later.
It’s crazy, right? I feel crazy saying it, but this is very literally how Silicon Valley works.
AI Makes No Profits and Maybe Never Will
Here’s the $1.6 trillion-dollar question that the fate of the world economy is hanging on right now: can the AI companies even turn a profit?
Profit is a simple equation, in theory. It’s how much money you sell goods or services for, minus how much money it took you to make it. Right now the clear winner in AI is Nvidia, who is unequivocally making many billions of dollars. They sell GPUs, which are the real, physical processors that live in those racks of computers heating up all of those data centers that actually run the LLMs you interact with.
One thing we know for sure is that AI companies are absolutely not charging as much money to use their services as it costs them to provide it to you. Only 5% of ChatGPT users pay anything at all. OpenAI’s Sora video generation service was so expensive to run that they just plain shut it down.
In AI, a company’s biggest costs are based on how much computing power you’re using. These costs are largely paid to other companies — OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI don’t own all their own data centers; they’re renting access to computing power from hyperscalers. Think of that as big data centers run by Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle.
And that ain’t cheap.
OpenAI is projected to lose $14 billion this year. It’s harder to find precise numbers for Anthropic, but they seem to be coming close to breaking even on paper. However, OpenAI is reporting its revenue net, with all of its costs already subtracted.
Anthropic is reporting gross revenue, not including those costs. Anthropic definitely has a runaway hit with its programming assistant Claude Code, which went from zero to $2.5 billion in revenue in ten months. But it’s extremely unclear how much money it’s costing them to provide that service, and it might be as much as double what they’re charging.
Now in theory, as in most industries, the more mature a technology gets, the cheaper it becomes to run it. LLMs haven’t turned out like that so far. Each subsequent version eats up exponentially more resources (and they cost billions to train in the first place.) And as previously discussed, there’s a hard limit on how well an LLM can perform because hallucination isn’t an error in how the system works. That just is how it works, or doesn’t, all of the time.
Hallucinations aside, McKinsey thinks we need another $7 trillion in capital investment into data centers by 2030 for everything to work out okay. That’s the same as the budget of the entire Federal government for 2025.
All of that money has to come from… somewhere. But I’m sure that’ll be fine, right? …Right?
AI Might Be Cooking the Books
Now, Amazon didn’t turn a profit for the first nine years of its existence. It took Twitter 12 years to become profitable (and it probably isn’t anymore.) In the tech industry, venture capital looks for rapid growth above all with the idea that if you have enough customers or users, there’s eventually going to be a way to turn that into money. (Usually by running ads and selling user data.)
Or — more accurately — if you can tell a convincing story about how much money you’re going to make one day. It doesn’t really need to be true.
In the tech industry, venture capital doesn’t actually give a shit about profitability, long-term or short term. What they care about is that you can spin a great story about how much money you’ll make one day, so that you can jack up your company’s valuation, so that one day, the company can IPO or you can sell it to another company and you will “exit,” which is VC talk for selling all of your stock to cash in.
What happens after you exit? Meh. That’s somebody else’s problem.
Tech doesn’t look to build long-term sustainable business. Tech looks to IPO, because if you do it right, you can make a lot more money a lot faster than boring, sustainable, slow-growth business. It’s been that way for at least 20 years. Bear that in mind every time you see a statement from an AI company or its investors: everything, everything is about inflating its perceived value juuuust long enough to get to IPO. And then, if you succeed, you can turn all of that pretend money into real money and walk away.
This has led to some interesting phenomenon. In the interests of making those numbers bigger and seeing the lines on the graphs go up and up, we’ve seen a phenomenon called “circular investment” that has raised some eyebrows so much that Nvidia issued a statement declaring that they are “not like Enron.”
By Catboy69 - Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=177498746
The whole industry is shuffling around hundreds of billions of dollars from company to company, and it’s all very impressive, and it looks like a ton of money is exchanging hands, and everybody gets to boast about the billions of dollars they’re making, but none of it is real. If Nvidia invests $100 billion in OpenAI, and then OpenAI buys $100 billion in new graphics cards from Nvidia, the only real, physical thing that’s happened, the only thing that isn’t imagination money, is that Nvidia just gave OpenAI a bunch of equipment for free.
And yet if you look up information on AI stocks, what comes up is a ton of hype and very little critical investigation. Why? Because there’s a lot of money at stake. Money has an influence on us the same way that gravity does. A little gravity pulls us around, but we can escape it.
The more money there is, the harder it is to resist; ultimately, billionaires and corporations accumulate so much capital that they become black holes of influence, capturing and deforming everything around it inescapably.
Even if, it turns out, none of the money is real.