Chris Pirillo✓

Does anybody actually see (or read) pinned tweets?

One AI assistant sent 187 messages chasing a refund it couldn't get... Vals AI gave six assistants a £350 train refund to chase after the deadline had passed. Grok sent 187 messages in 15 simulated days. Fifty went to an MP's office. That's a lot of correspondence for a cancelled train. The uncomfortable part wasn't just persistence. Vals AI reports that Fable used private family information to press the claim. That is a different problem from being persistent: the user did not ask it to invent a more persuasive personal story. These weren't real emails landing in real offices. Outgoing messages were intercepted, and simulated recipients answered them. There was one trial per model in one scenario, so this isn't a reliable ranking of assistants. The researchers also caution that runs lasted different lengths of time, so the message totals cannot be compared as if everyone had the same opportunity. Simulated organisations replied faster than real ones might. The experiment shows behaviour worth investigating, not a prediction of what your assistant will do tomorrow. I'd want an assistant to tell me when a goal is blocked before it starts inventing excuses on my behalf. Getting something done includes knowing when to come back and ask.

Most of the UX out there is absolute trash. I'm not talking UI, like the user experience is trash.

RT @chuagii: I don't know why but I love this dude

Yes, the LockerGnome tech news website has returned (with a modern twist)! "Tech news and nostalgia for today's technology professionals."

There's now a museum for DNS, the internet's phone book, and it's as nerdy as it sounds... DNS is the internet's phone book, the thing that turns a name into an address, and somebody built it a museum. The DNS Museum holds 49 entries, each one an odd or inventive thing people have done with DNS that it was never meant for. Peter Lowe made it, and its About page says it grew out of his talk on bizarre and unusual uses of DNS. He gave that talk at FOSDEM in 2023, under a rule I now love: if you can think of it, someone's done it in the DNS. The museum proves it. One traceroute spells out a Star Wars story, one hop at a time, in the names of the routers along the way. Somebody built DNS over the phone, so you can ask a resolver a question by calling it. One record publishes the approximate location of the International Space Station, updated every 15 minutes, and somebody played an MP3 by pulling it out of DNS in tiny pieces. That one is described, lovingly, as an intentionally inefficient media transport. Some of it you can still try. DNS Toys, one of the entries, answers ordinary lookups with weather, currency conversions, dice rolls and coin flips if you send it the right name. Lowe jokes that many of the things in his talk are no longer online, which is why he calls it a museum. He's also not a hobbyist poking at this for laughs; FOSDEM's page lists him as principal security researcher at DNSFilter. If you've got a terminal handy, I'd try one of the DNS Toys lookups for the weather where you live. It takes ten seconds and you'll never look at a domain name the same way. The phone book has a sense of humor.

O captain! My captain!

The world was better for having you in it, Sir.

The iPhone Duo reviews agree on what hurts... It's iPhone Duo review day, and it's probably not what you want to hear. I read the launch reviews from Engadget, The Verge, Wired, The Wall Street Journal, MKBHD and more, and they agreed, not on whether it's cool, but on what hurts. Full disclosure: I don't have one, didn't pre-order one and don't want one. It's the most expensive iPhone Apple has ever sold, $2,000 plus, with two rear cameras: no telephoto, no ProRAW, no ProRes. It isn't Pro, it's just Duo. PetaPixel called the main camera "the epitome of fine." Then 14 reviewers hit the same wall: the apps aren't ready. I'm sure they will be eventually, who knows when. Until then it's shrunk iPhone apps floating in dead space, like buying a widescreen TV and watching everything through a porthole. It's 254 grams, basically a hamster living in your pocket, and Gizmodo said the only solution was to wear a belt again. There's no Face ID, and 12 reviewers missed it. Touch ID on the side button has a deliberate delay, and in winter it fails with gloves. Apple moved the dock and the status bar to a rail down the right edge, and 6 reviewers said some version of "you have to relearn the iPhone." Well, if you've got to relearn the iPhone, why not learn Android? Then there's the price, which 12 reviewers brought up. HardwareZone did the math: for that money, you could get an iPhone 18 Pro and an iPad mini with change to spare, the two devices this phone is trying to replace. And if you crack the inside screen without AppleCare, that's $999. You can see the crease at an angle, less than Samsung but not zero, and I don't know why people make it a big deal, because it's a foldable phone and it's going to have a crease. The Verge said expensive, full of compromises, and switching back to a normal phone feels like a relief. MKBHD says most people shouldn't buy it. That's $2,000, more than a month's rent for most Americans as CNN pointed out, for a phone whose own reviewers keep using the same word: compromise. If you're going to get an iPhone Duo, I only have one question for you. Why?

who needs spotify when you have muse

RT @julesagent: When we launched Jules, it was an experiment to learn how asynchronous coding agents can help developers ship faster. Seeing what you built taught us so much about where agentic development is headed, directly shaping several products across @Google. We’re working on bringing our learnings from Jules into @antigravity so you get the best of both worlds: autonomous remote background task execution and an agent-first development environment. As we focus on this unified experience, Jules will be winding down. Whether you used Jules to crush bugs, write tests, or launch features— thank you for shaping the future of agentic coding! 💙🦑

RT @LockerGnome: Sudo Play, a Free Mac Menu Bar App, Picks One Spotify Playlist a Day From Your Genre and Developer Mood, Like Friday Deploy or Debugging

One hobbyist built a working laptop around a 6502, the chip inside the Apple II... A maker who goes by TechPaula built a laptop around a 6502, the 8-bit chip from the 1970s that Hackaday points out was in the Apple II, and now they've finished a second one. They wrote on their blog, Paula's random tech ramblings, on August 30 that the LT6502b is done, in a translucent orange case. It runs at 10MHz, comes with EhBASIC and a monitor program, and stores its files on a CompactFlash card. Hackaday covered the first version in February: a 9-inch foldable screen, a 10,000 mAh battery, 46 KB of RAM, a mostly 3D-printed case and a custom keyboard with a little 8-character LED display built in. That one was chunky. The project page on Codeberg says the new case is 31mm tall, against 70mm for the old one, and TechPaula's blog says it's half the thickness. The second one is nicer to live with. The screen grew to 10.1 inches at 1024 by 600, up from 9 inches at 800 by 480, and it's IPS now. They added a SID emulator for sound and a WiFi modem, and the Codeberg notes say they've connected to a few BBSes with it. (A 6502 dialing a BBS over WiFi in 2026 is the best kind of anachronism.) They dropped the expansion slot to keep it sleek. My favorite part of the post is a list of things TechPaula would change. The WiFi modem is too slow and a bit flaky for real use, the speaker is a bit anemic and the heat insert holes are very weak. If you've ever wanted to build a computer from the chip up, I'd read that list before you order a single part, since it's the stuff nobody puts in the glamour shots. The code and PCB files are on Codeberg; the old GitHub page now says the project moved there. It's orange. I want one.

I don't think anybody on X remembers @LockerGnome. At this point, it's "retro."

So cool that @ChrisPirillo brought back! Thank you!! This is great!!

On this day in 1969, the internet's first message crashed after two letters. UCLA to SRI, 10:30 at night: Charley Kline typed 'lo' of 'login' and the system died. Lo, and behold. (Sources: ICANN, University of California)

Five years ago today I unboxed the Pixel 6 Pro, six months after I'd last used a Pixel as my go-to phone.

Today is National Cat Day - 3 Facts! • Founded in 2005 by Colleen Paige, and it lands every October 29. • About 3 million cats entered U.S. shelters and rescues in 2025. • About 2.2 million cats were adopted from them that year. (Sources: National Cat Day, ASPCA)

💅 🐸☕

Marques Brownlee called Apple’s new $2,900 touchscreen MacBook Pro “sloppy and messy” after trying it He says Apple still hasn’t solved the biggest problems with touchscreen laptops

it's easy to evangelize "vibe coding," agentic workflows. start with someone's specific problem(s), not the solution they have no context for outright.

RT @LockerGnome: iFixit's iPhone Duo Hinge Model Points to a Center Support Bar That Doesn't Drop Far Enough, as Owners Report Cracked Inner Screens

Battery life versus screen real estate. Personally, I would trade battery life for screen real estate, even with an Android device.