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  • Jay Peters reports for The Verge about the year-over-year rise in the number of CDs being purchased.

    The data suggests that “the CD has been recontextualized from a functional audio format into an affordable collectible,” Luminate says. “This behavior underscores that for younger generations, the act of buying physical music is as much about aesthetic ownership and direct financial support for the artist as it is listening to the music on the product itself.”

    The surprise here is that approximately half of the Gen Z and millennials buying CDs don’t even own a device on which to play them. It’s still about that connection, though. I admitted the other day that I sometimes listen to a CD even when I could just as easily (more easily even) stream the album.

  • Corporation Games

    Will Gottsegen writes for The Atlantic about Sony’s decision to discontinue manufacturing physical discs for their games.

    The convenience of downloads may be an upside, though there are certainly real downsides in the transition away from physical media. When you buy a disc, you own it and can resell it or lend it out the old fashioned way—without online mediation. No corporate middleman was watching me hand my copy of Red Dead Redemption to my friend when I was done with it. Although physical games can be damaged or even decay over long periods of time, I could still loan that same copy out today if I wanted. Digital purchases only grant you a license for use, and that license can be revoked. At around the same time that Sony announced the digital transition for PlayStation, it also alerted customers that more than 500 movies and shows would be pulled from its online marketplace, removing them from the libraries of users who had purchased them. (As an Arts Technica headline put it, “We’re Reminded We Don’t Own What We Buy.”).

    The new rental culture comes with some sobering thoughts about our limited ability to retain access to some of our favorite entertainment, be it games, movies or music. Luke Plunkett has even gone as far as to suggest that, without ownership, we have lost the concept of media piracy.

    Would you be willing to pay $60 for generous rental terms on a video game? Does the framing of the question shift the mindset of how your money is being spent?

  • I’ve been getting car sick when trying to read in a moving car since I was a kid. Little did I know, my favorite computer manufacturer has a solution for that, which was brought to my attention by this piece in The Verge. The technology is called Vehicle Motion Cues.

    According to big-S Science, this type of vehicle motion sickness is caused by the eyes staring at a static display while the inner ear feels the car turning, braking, and accelerating. Motion Cues solve this by placing dots around the periphery of the display that move in harmony with the motion of the car. When the car turns right, the dots sweep across the screen to the left; when the car brakes the dots slide forward.

    I can’t wait to try this out, especially on a long trip.

  • Datatapes

    Louie Mantia offers some new drive icons based on the datatapes from Star Wars, and they’re pretty fun.

    The Imperial data vault on Scarif contained thousands of datatapes, one of them being the plans for the Death Star. After the plans were broadcast to the Rebel fleet, they were transferred to a small datacard.

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  • Black Butterflies

    Kupajo warns us to beware of black butterflies.

    Male grayling butterflies prefer to mate with darker female graylings. When caged with a female grayling and a cardboard cutout of a grayling painted black, the male will choose the cardboard cutout over the female. Beyond being an example of bro falling for an unrealistic standard of beauty, such a preference reveals that even in matters fundamental to survival and reproduction, these creatures can be seduced by artificial models they’d never encounter in nature.

    The analogy holds up when you read about people falling in love with LLMs and being rewired by impossible standards of beauty. Basic humanity is now subordinate to machine slick simulacrums.

  • Pocket Computers

    John Burn-Murdoch writes for Financial Times about the single unifying theory around the decline in fertility.

    The number of births fell first and fastest in the areas that received high-speed mobile connectivity earliest. The authors argue that smartphones have transformed how young people spend time with one another, sharply reducing in-person socialising and leading to the collapse in their fertility.

    The reason for population decline is hiding in your pocket.

    This isn’t at all suprising to me. Marital experience has taught me that it’s hard for a spouse to be as interesting an endless supply of short-form videos.

    Fediverse reactions

  • The Intelligence Is Still Artificial

    The opinions on AI that you find on the internet tend to fall in the extremes of the other side. Either AI is the downfall of humanity or its savior. My thoughts on the subject, as on many others, ride in the middle of the road.

    In my professional life, AI has been a great equalizer. If you know the problems you are trying to solve, absent the knowledge of how to actually go about doing that, AI can be the bridge between concept and reality. It would take me many hours to probe the depths of the Azure cloud through labyrinthine Log Analytics workspaces to find the causes of a spike in ingestion costs. With the Azure MCP and Claude Cowork/Code, it’s done in minutes.

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  • Canvas Attack

    Matt Blaze

    Extremely glad I didn't have students submit their coursework via Canvas, or use it to manage grading, this semester.

    May 8, 2026, 2:23 am 6 boosts 38 favorites

    Hacktivism can sometimes be understandable. Yet it amazes me that some people would think that to attack school teachers and students is to live a meaningful and purposeful life.

  • Attie

    I just signed up for access to Attie, a new AI-based app from Bluesky, which allows you to shape your feed on the social network using plain language. To be honest, I wasn’t that excited about the app when it was first announced. It can be hard these days to sift through the AI hype to locate the value in some of these propositions.

    Then I came across an old quote I had saved about blogging. Henrik Karlsson wrote in 2022 that a blog post “is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox.” Karlsson was sparked to this realization after writing an essay about Ivan Illich and systems thinking, and being introduced to it by many who wanted to discuss the topic.

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  • A Change In The Atmosphere

    With the announcement on the A New Social blog that Bridgy Fed — which has been helpful in syndicating my Fediverse posts from Ghost to Bluesky — was bringing longform to the Atmosphere, I found myself wanting to play with some of the current blogging tools running on AT Proto.1 Unfortunately, even with the aid of a super-smart LLM, I couldn’t get the standard.site integration working. I was either getting errors that I was missing the domain parameter when using my ActivityPub account or a 404 when I was using my domain account. Damned if you do…

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