Replace your whole dev team with AI
Front end and back end developers, security experts, social media engagement managers, and marketing. Replace everyone with an AI powered bot and even create/train your own code GPT for your internal code.
Even Portland is ditching the booze
Despite at one time being the microbrew capital of the country, since Covid the city has seen a 10-15% drop in the number of people drinking. This follows a national trend of people giving up alcohol.
When places are charging $15-20 for a drink, and $10 for a pint, it’s no wonder so many breweries in Portland are closing.
Laika’s Wildwood
Local film studio Laika’s new movie Wildwood is set to arrive in theaters on October 23, 2026.
We’ll see how well it matches one of the most popular trails in local Forest Park: Wildwood trail. It’s not the first time there was a reference to something about the local neighborhood in one of their movies.
Life at Amazon
The Pragmatic Engineer shares an interview with Dave Anderson, formerly Tech Director at Amazon, shares an look at Amazon’s engineering culture.
He covers things like levels, the ‘Bar Raiser’ role, oncall, Amazon’s extreme frugality, the need for a strong relationship with your manager, and exiting with financial independence and early retirement.
Stalin’s Daughter on Defecting
I never knew Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Allileyua, defected from the Soviet Union – and then gave a interview. It’s a powerful reminder that despite many shortcomings – people under communist rule through the 20th century lived under some of the most horrific, oppressive governments in history.
Hacking the old DOS game Skate or Die
This is how hacking/cracking games used to work back in the old DOS days when all of memory is available in a flat structure and you could look at and change anything. What good times!
How easy mass AI surveillance is – today
If armies of AI spies are not a thing now, they soon will be.
Imagine having thousands and thousands of agents watching every single one of your government and company officials morning, noon, and night. Now, imagine they never get tired and only cost as much as a high-end PC.
Using data that most companies collect on users and a few planted agent employees to give you key access and your leaders data is ripe for the picking and exploiting. Low-tier hackers may hack you to ransom your data – the big guys will quietly watch you to see if you’re vulnerable in ways never before.
Here’s just one simple example of what it might look like:
That’s different
Le ravissement de Frank N Stein is a little art film made in 1982 before computer animation would have made the perspective drawing much easier. Today you could likely make this in an afternoon.
These sort of bizarre art films remind me of going to the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The top floor had lots of random video shorts like this. It’s interesting what gets considered ‘art’ – and 99% of it is forgotten by the next year. Maybe that’s why we’re seeing the dramatic collapse of the art world.
One could point to the austere minimalism as an early form of Backrooms, but the Backrooms was inspired by the unease of liminal spaces and not this particular work.
No cuddles
I’ve gotten the same treatment from my girlfriend some days…
Jaguar – A failure like no other
We all saw the videos of androgynous actors in strange clothes that left people unsure what Jaguar was even advertising. There was not a single mention of a car. Jaguar emptied its show floors of older models that were all discontinued and announced no cars – for a year.
Then the Jaguar Type 00 prototypes were shown and the attempt flopped. How bad? How about an entire year with no cars for sale and then a 97.5% sales collapse.
April 2024: 1,961 cars sold
April 2025: 49 cars sold
This lead to the firing of the 3rd party marketing group hired for the effort, the lead designers, and CEO. The current offerings from Jaguar are a 180 degree turn back to their older designs but it is unclear if they will ever recover.
A complete disaster and an intelligent re-invention can look similar at first, but it turns out that burning the bridges with an unproven firm before you even know if there is land on the other side is a very bad idea.