Linkblog/2025/03/19

One of the best videos I’ve seen on YouTube for a while, an entire 1hr DEEP dive on corporations and creative software.

This is a very must must watch, a long watch, but really really good.

During Pebble v1, I learned how much harder it is to build a great smartwatch experience on iPhone than it is on Android. It sounds like things have actually gotten worse over the last 8 years.

I want to set expectations accordingly. We will build a good app for iOS, but be prepared - there is no way for us to support all the functionality that Apple Watch has access to. It’s impossible for a 3rd party smartwatch to send text messages, or perform actions on notifications (like dismissing, muting, replying) and many, many other things.

While my daily driver is a Pixel, I am sad for my Apple friends who won’t be getting the proper experience they should get if they choose to purchase a Pebble.

I’ve ordered a Core Time 2, I’m quite excited!

Biomass! Yay!

My last employer worked on the ground station for the mission, hype to see it finally going up!

Skrifa is written in Rust, and created as a replacement for FreeType to make font processing in Chrome secure for all our users. Skrifa takes advantage of Rust’s memory safety, and lets us iterate faster on font technology improvements in Chrome. Moving from FreeType to Skrifa allows us to be both agile and fearless when making changes to our font code. We now spend far less time fixing security bugs, resulting in faster updates, and better code quality.

Google is in the process of pulling FreeType out of Chrome, and replacing it with everyones crustacean.

Merged to FFmpeg Git today is support within the Vulkan code for copying the host-mapping buffer code from the hardware context, working around some issues, support for software-defined decoders within vulkan_decode, enabling VK_KHR_video_maintenance2 extension use when available from the Vulkan driver, and other code refactoring.

FFmpeg is now web scale.

Slack brought channels and channels bought a level of almost voyeurism into what other teams were doing. I knew exactly what everyone was doing all the time, down to I knew where the marketing team liked to go for lunch. Responsiveness became the new corporate religion and I was a true believer. I would stop walking in the hallway to respond to a DM or answer a question I knew the answer to, ignoring the sighs of frustration as people walked around my hoodie-clad roadblock of a body.

[…]

My days had become a never-ending performance of “work”. I was constantly talking about the work, planning the work, discussing the requirements of the work, and then in a truly Sisyphean twist, linking new people to old conversations where we had already discussed the work to get them up to speed on our conversation. All the while diligently monitoring my channels, a digital sentry ensuring no question went unanswered, no emoji not +1’d. That was it, that was the entire job.

Every job I’ve ever had has used Slack, I don’t have the benefit that Mathew has to compare what work was like before Slack, as I’ve simply always had it in my career.

But I think I somewhat agree with the ideas here, I do think that its easy for some days to end up being mostly spent on Slack monitoring and chatting, which sometimes can be productive, especially in a remote setting.

I’d be curious if things like Basecamp are any different, I’d be down to try something else.

• We are releasing our Cube 3D foundational model for generative AI.
• We are also open-sourcing a version of the Cube 3D foundational model.
• The beta version of Cube 3D mesh generation—in Roblox Studio and as an in-experience Lua API—will be available this week.

Roblox 3D model slop.

From GameFromScratch.

Today, we’re announcing that the Taara team is graduating from The Moonshot Factory to become an independent company. We’ve raised a round of funding led by Series X Capital to deploy and scale Taara’s groundbreaking new approach to wireless optical communications, which uses light to deliver high-speed, high-capacity connectivity over long distances.

[…]

Taara Lightbridge brings fast, fiber-like internet access to areas where it’s too difficult or expensive to install traditional fiber, like in dense city neighborhoods, over rivers and seas, or across rugged terrains and national parks. In the same way fiber optic cables in the ground use light to carry data, Taara uses narrow, invisible light beams to transmit information through the air, at speeds as high as 20 gigabits per second and across distances up to 20 kilometers.

Very cool tech.

Discussion on the orange site.

Joshua is onto something here…

Village Roadshow Entertainment Group, the film production company behind franchises such as The Matrix, the Joker and Ocean’s has filed for bankruptcy protection in the US, according to a filing with a Delaware court.

Very sad, the last Matrix move was not super well received, but I was still happy to get more lore in that universe regardless.

We almost got Nginx dark mode…

But, it was rejected…

We live in a society.