On the Empire Builder. Starting to turn east, with the moon in the sky. 🚂

Seattle light rail.

John Gruber blogging about the Duo pre-orders:

…pre-orders always start before reviews appear. People are left to guess whether they’re going to like it without any word from people who’ve used it.

At least Apple is generous with returns. $2k is a lot to put down on faith, though.

At the hotel lobby, a bunch of LEGOs to play with.

Happy iPhone Duo pre-order day. I’m skipping it, and looks like serious delays anyway. Current expected delivery is well into January. I’ll be updating the Micro.blog suite of apps with very basic folding screen support in the next minor updates.

Hood Canal.

Automattic has a clever and touching memorial to Eric Binnion, hidden in the HTTP response from WordPress.com.

Interesting to see Meta working directly with Apple to run Muse Spark Open on Macs efficiently. John Voorhees has a good summary at MacStories. But the cost is still pretty insane… Spending well over $10k to get “only” an 800-billion parameter model when the frontier is still a ways ahead of that.

Reading more details in the story of an OpenAI engineer getting arrested after bugging a conference room:

Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, a Saudi national, was arrested Friday and charged with using or attempting to use a device to intercept oral communications. He made his initial appearance in federal court Tuesday and remains in custody.

He seems to have had a fairly normal career, so what caused this flip to espionage? Strange. Not the obvious “he was a Chinese spy” that people might guess.

Sometimes a business has to make difficult decisions to stay profitable. But I can’t accept that major layoffs are needed at companies that make literal billions of dollars in revenue. Often these companies are still hiring even as layoffs are announced. 📺