Apple TV acquires rights to the Cosmere! From The Hollywood Reporter:

"The streaming giant has closed what has been described as an unprecedented deal to land the rights to the Cosmere books, the fictional literary universe by fantasy author Brandon Sanderson."

This lines up with what Brandon has said before: Mistborn as a feature, hopefully a theatrical release, and Stormlight as a series. Also:

"Sanderson will be the architect of the universe, will write, produce and consult, and have approvals. That’s a level of involvement that not even J.K. Rowling or George R.R. Martin enjoy." https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/brandon-sandersons-mistborn-stormlight-archive-movie-tv-1236487271/

Gonna try to watch all the Oscar nominations this year. Over the weekend caught up on Bugonia (what the heck?) and The Smashing Machine (not much plot, but really liked the characters). 🍿

More winter storm prep today. Groceries. Went to my mom’s house too to wrap pipes, drip facets, turn the heat up. 😞 I’m sure this is all a foreign concept for folks in the north… Here in central Texas our infrastructure is just not ready for crazy cold. ❄️

Watched: Disneyland Handcrafted. Some great early construction footage. 🍿 https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/1538718

The first time I saw a Waymo, I just about lost my mind, laughing. “There’s no one driving that car!” Now they’re everywhere and it’s normal. When I see one now, I just think, “There’s a safe car that is unlikely to run over a pedestrian.”

Good analysis from Laurens Hofs on ICE getting a verified badge on Bluesky and the resulting fallout. It underscores some confusion in the fediverse about what Bluesky is:

"When fediverse users say they don’t want to be bridged to Bluesky, they’re applying an ActivityPub mental model to ATProto infrastructure. In one sense this is a bit of a category error, the bridge connects to networking infrastructure, not the application."

He doesn’t let Bluesky off the hook either, though. Good points on how ICE presence alone (without any posts) is a fear tactic. https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fr150-on-ice-verification-and-presence-as-harm/

I’m still excited for the Pebble Index ring because of the focus on extensibility, but I cancelled my pre-order. I kept asking myself: will I ever actually wear this thing? Nope.

Meanwhile I’ve been plotting to hack a iPod Mini into a voice recorder, ripping out the guts. Might be beyond my skills.

Rainy, misty morning in Austin. This weekend is going to be cold, with ice and maybe snow. Hopefully we’re ready for it. I’ve been mostly worried about the new tree we planted. Added new mulch to protect the roots. Going with sheets and plastic over it. 🌳

Getting the sense that what’s happening in Minnesota is about to reach a tipping point, or maybe already has, where it becomes so clearly unacceptable to everyone regardless of political party that there will be new pressure for change. This is not sustainable. 🇺🇸

Watched some of the Jack Smith hearing during lunch. What can I say that hasn’t already been said? We screwed up, took too long to bring charges. But I’d put Jack Smith in charge again if there was a way to run it back in 2029, even unlikely, given the statute of limitations. 🇺🇸

Listening to the Open AI podcast, of course it’s marketing, but something that Vinod Khosla said struck me. Essentially the AI bubble is in the stock market, not in real use. Some companies will fail, but usage is not going to go down, just as the internet kept growing through the dot-com bubble. https://overcast.fm/+BP1EV2HwlY

I usually give AI little coding tasks. Go off and fix this one thing, make this small tweak, add this one feature that I will review. Today I had it help with something bigger. I iterated on the plan, then it worked for 30 minutes. Pretty incredible.