Links, Jan 2nd, 2026

§The Life and Death of Hollywood

What happens when capital hollows out the industry around an art form. It’s worth noting that most creative industries don’t have nearly the strong history of labor protections that Hollywood has.

Today’s business side does not have a necessary vested interest in “the business”—in the health of what we think of as Hollywood, a place and system in which creativity is exchanged for capital. The union wins did not begin to address this fundamental problem.

Something similar has been happening in music software lately, as private equity acquires company after company, with some smaller companies bypassing a large payday in exchange for their creative ownership; I expect something similar will happen with video games as well.

§I work for an evil company but outside work I’m actually a really good person

McSweeney’s lays the satire on thick:

Mathematically, it might seem like I spend a disproportionate amount of my time making the world a significantly less safe and less empathetic place, but are you counting all the hours I spend sleeping? You should.

§LLMs are a Cognitohazard

A thorough takedown of the common justifications people use for generative AI tech.

Why would I use electricity for this? I can grab a coffee, stare out the window, or talk to an inanimate object on my desk and generate a ton of stupid ideas that I can then iterate on, and I’ve found that works out way better than running a GPU to spit out “ideas”.

§Programming Language Creators on LLMs

Rich Hickey, creator of Clojure (the only language of which I’ve used professionally I actually have any love for) thanks AI for destroying education, the environment, raising utility rates, eliminating entry-level jobs, and more:

Ah, Christmas time. That time of year when our hearts are warmed by the best wishes of an idiot robot. All tingly from the experience, and in the holiday spirit, I thought I’d write my own letter

Rob Pike, creator of Go (of all the other languages I’ve used professionally, the one I perhaps dislike the least) offers instead some more colorful language.

§Against AI

A strong and well-argued case that you can’t just set the bad ethics of gen-AI tech aside, as many people I used to respect have argued, because apparently ethics aren’t convenient to them anymore:

AI is harmful in every possible way. It’s a highly inaccurate plagiarism tool built on creative theft, accelerated environmental destruction, human rights abuses, heightened risks of psychosis, sexual blackmail, educational collapse and the erosion of our collective sense of truth, and the only reason it’s ubiquitous despite all this is because a handful of sociopathic billionaires working in a highly unregulated field have doubled and tripled down on putting it in everything

§And Stay Out

Visual designer Louie Mantia on Jony Ive’s legacy at Apple in the post-Jobs era:

But as he became wealthier, he started to conflate good taste with luxury. Jony often described Apple products with words about craft, material, and precision, all things that appeal to a luxury market. Apple shifted away from making products “for the rest of us” and started making products that appealed specifically to rich people.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but they started making products that appealed to themselves.

There’s also a worthwhile response to the piece by iOS app-maker Garrett Murray:

I hold the opinion iOS 7 was deeply destructive to the field of user interface design. Arguments can be made that “rich corinthian leather” was getting out of hand across Apple’s operating systems, but at least users understood the affordances—buttons looked like buttons.

A distant family member called me in panic over the holiday because their phone was suddenly unusable after an update. Turns out Apple had deceptively installed iOS 26 for them; I mentioned that I found it so bad I actually wiped my phone and reinstalled iOS 18. Their phone is still on warranty support so I suggested going to the Apple Store and demanding from them that they undo the update, with the caveat that I don’t think they can (or will), but they need to hear from people who don’t like Liquid Glass.

§The Kimwolf Botnet is Stalking Your Local Network

Brian Krebs details something I suspected was inevitable with the proliferation of everything you buy wanting to connect to your home network:

The story you are reading is a series of scoops nestled inside a far more urgent Internet-wide security advisory. The vulnerability at issue has been exploited for months already, and it’s time for a broader awareness of the threat. The short version is that everything you thought you knew about the security of the internal network behind your Internet router probably is now dangerously out of date.

The tl;dr of this is, if you have Android devices on your network – including TV boxes or picture frames – they could very easily be compromised by an infected Android phone joining your home network.

By the time your guest has packed up their things, said their goodbyes and disconnected from your Wi-Fi, you now have two devices on your local network — a digital photo frame and an unsanctioned Android TV box — that are infected with Kimwolf. You may have never intended for these devices to be exposed to the larger Internet, and yet there you are.

The best remedy for this is to get a router that supports “guest” networks, set that up, only allow trusted devices on the non-guest network, and nothing permanently connected to the guest network.