The Economist’s Big Mac index, a PPP analysis hitting its 40th year of kicking ass, demonstrates just how difficult it is to track the timely parity of global currencies.
…for as long as currencies remain unmoored, and the Big Mac remains consistent, our index will serve a useful purpose—however distasteful its critics may find it.
We decided to return to the Pacific Northwest for our summer trip, three years after our last excursion. Nine days, spanning a landing in Seattle for a couple nights, a ferry into Canada’s Victoria on Vancouver Island for a few evenings, another ferry to Vancouver to pick up a car to drive up to our favorite resort in Whistler for three nights, and back to Vancouver to regroup and fly out the following morning.
Sounds like a lot of moving around, but we dialed this in perfectly with plenty of rest and relaxation, a few recreational excursions, and a lot of eating and drinking our way through great establishments.
British Columbia is truly beautiful. Everything is picturesque, especially if you’re from the midwest and used to seeing a horizon line (we did, in fact, miss our horizon line by trip’s end). Dramatic scenery is magnified by a focus on the outdoors, environmentalism, and, naturally, the best oysters found on the continent (the west coast simply has better oysters). We marauded through a half dozen spots to stuff ourselves with them, and every one of them was worth it. Kudos to Shuck Taylor’s in Victoria, though — we went back there twice.
The other highlight was resort hospitality, and we were delighted to return to a place that kept such things at a high standard with their staff. Attentiveness, recognition, and a helping hand to make moments count throughout the experience adds to the memory, especially in celebrating a milestone birthday for my wife.
A few notable places we went to this time (for anyone vaguely interested in my opinion):
This may be the indication that we’re well under way with a new PNW tradition, if we’re fortunate to have the opportunity to continue doing so.
Thinking back a month and a half about my first attempted pizza in an outdoor oven. Kept it sliding on a mountain of semolina for the launch, it turned out well, and now I’m ripping a few of these every week for us. These pizzas can be elite, and with care, anyone can (probably) do them.
While I should have known, I wasn’t prepared for how much of a summer banger Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo is. I may only be a fourth of the way through this opus, but it’s one of the breeziest 19th century reads I’ve wrangled, and so far, a pitch perfect swashbuckling adventure.
Streaming fatigue continues. The Verge captures the slow, steady movement that is backlashing streaming consolidations and DRM lock-ins. Also, a minor point not often cited, is bandwidth issues:
It’s not just the cost of streaming that I have to worry about, either. Last year, I nearly exceeded my ISP’s data cap after I downloaded Baldur’s Gate 3 and kept up my heavy streaming habits. That was all the more reason for me to invest in DVDs.
I’ve actually noticed some of this with Comcast over the last couple years, where I’m exceeding my “unlimited plan,” and subsequently getting charged overages by 10GB increments. I’m not downloading huge games, either, so it’s likely high definition streams.
Under the lake surface.
I forgot who linked to this originally, but Groundbreaker has one of the more finely-worded perspectives about what’s happening with AI in the financial markets.
Essentially, just as the subprime mortgage machine of 2008 relied on ever-accelerating home prices to support refinancing, current AI infrastructure relies on sustained, accelerating growth to service massive take-or-pay debt commitments. These debt commitments end up functioning as a massive, opaque “loan book” rather than standard capital expenditure budgets.
Companies like OpenAI, the author argues, operate as a subprime borrower in this system, relying on constant equity valuation markups to finance its operations. And it’s apparent that OpenAI lacks sufficient profit to cover its massive obligations.
We could argue that another industry saw something similar not too long ago, albeit sans real estate/credit/energy, but with cars, roads, and people (Uber), and that — shockingly — turned out okay, but this is a much more entangled situation:
Three errors, stacked, recreate 2008. The market is pricing AI as a technology cycle when its financing is the machinery of a credit-and-real-estate cycle. It is watching the level and the velocity while the structure breaks on the acceleration.
A bleak, but likely prophetic take from Aftermath of the collapsing videogame industry — insofar as larger, AAA games are concerned. Independent development, however, has been particularly healthy, fun, and innovative, and I hope that corner continues to grow.
A very nice MacOS app was released today — Aphera — for photo triaging and editing. Folks behind it: Ryan Carver, Naz Hamid, and Juan Pablo Zambrano, all bringing expertise to the project. Trying it out for a few weeks — and looking forward to using it after an upcoming vacation.
I hope other cities are seeing a similar trend to that of Minneapolis — we’re seeing a revival of independent physical video rental shops (the latest being a cafe/rental experiment called Saturn Video). So far three have entered the space.
Here’s to hoping they stick around and this takes off.
The Hyland Lake Ski Jump has such an ominous presence.
Netflix… another company pursuing an audience they think they don’t have with content they erroneous think they need.
Are they scared of YouTube? Probably. Are they focused on their core product that we the people originally signed up for? No.
We all know attention spans are dwindling, attention consumption is changing, but metamorphosing into a mess of value propositions is either the result of chasing the wrong KPIs, or their desired ad reach is overriding their senses.
I believe a company as nimble as Netflix can navigate their way back to a core composition of value, but right now, I don’t get it. There’s maybe one or two shows a year that make sense for this subscription. And I’ve heard decent chatter about some of their games, but the audience they’re after doesn’t associate Netflix with games. So what is Netflix in 2026?
While they continue to figure it out, it’d be nice if they re-funded the remaining two seasons of 1899.
POSSE it, they say. Own your content. Publish once, fork it five times. RSS, Mastodon, Bluesky, webmention, pick your parasite. Fix the typo in two minutes. Already too late. Fossils wearing your name.
The author’s footnote is also sage advice: “Length is not depth.”
The white line on the right side of US roads. Someone fought the good fight to get these accepted and implemented… who doesn’t love an origin story like this.
For anyone interested… been tinkering with a fast way to insert the current date (YEAR-MM-DD) on MacOS (alas, Tahoe). After struggling to get an Automator Applescript to work, Shortcuts (I guess?) was the most elegant way to do it.
Sharing the shortcut here (it has a hotkey, but you can edit).
Old Dutch bringing out the summer party box — their classic Rip-L potato chips tricked out to imitate a juicy lucy cheeseburger. I applaud midwestern innovation of this kind.
Equal parts Negroni.
The only way to make arguably the best cocktail. And a confirming essay from Everyday Drinking’s Jason Wilson, though… I’d contend it’s always Negroni season.
‘Olievans’ made a virtual Criterion closet that you can gaze around in 3D and pull out each case for inspection (or get a link to the Criterion Channel, if applicable). Love this. We also spent an hour watching Closet Picks on YouTube the other night – lots of new ones!
~via Kottke
Kurasawa’s Seven Samurai holds up 72 years later. Obviously. And the Criterion 4K release is stunning.
If there’s ever a film to get folks into filmmaking — the composition, sound and set design, plot, pacing, acting,… this 3+ hour epic truly has it all. It’s probably the most singular experience I had years ago that got me into cinema, next to Dr. Strangelove, Brazil, and Lawrence of Arabia.
The path of art takes artists on journeys of knowledge. Good one on the humble but highly complex octopus from Strook. New to me was the Mimic Octopus:
[…]discovered as recently as 1998, is capable of mimicking various predators. It chooses which species to mimic based on its attacker.
Double-feature on Panic’s Nova app, first with Unsung’s notes and the linked-to piece by Nathan Manceaux-Panot. The gist is discovering and respecting thoughtful design choices that guide you into more desirable behaviors. It’s an incredibly fun, powerful app often overlooked for trendier editors.
The history of the chopsticks sleeve is kind of riveting. Even more surprising is that non-Japanese restaurants never took to advertising on equivalent fork-knife-spoon utensil packaging (as almost immediately after wider deployment, “printed paper chopstick sleeves became vernacular advertisements for shops and restaurants”).
(~via Veronique.)
In continuing to promote the “small web” of writers out there, I bumped into a site called Bubbles.town. It acknowledges the difficulty in discovering voices outside of larger properties, even with great infrastructure like the Fediverse and Kagi’s Small Web index.
They’re attempting to build a community voting system around these voices, (like HN), explaining the methodology in some detail here. What’s not to like?
Like several folks on the Internet, I’ve been taking the new Vivaldi 8.0 browser for a spin, and imported my Safari bookmarks to get a few favorites cooking on there. And as one does, I also took a moment to pick through dozens of websites I had organized eons ago to see if they still loaded (may of which I had forgotten).
Here’s a list of sites that still load, but seemingly have stopped updating. These sites fell out of regular visits long ago (perhaps through broken RSS feeds or interests drifting and I absentmindedly moved on), but worth a share, at the very least, to see if this resonate or remind anyone else of a bygone Internet.
I particularly remember Mandolux as the place to get photography-based desktop wallpapers; alas, that site hasn’t been updated since 2008.