C33 Technology

Media

Hacking the STLToday Paywall v2025

Welcome back to our continuing series of breaking new STLToday paywall versions. Want to hear something crazy? We’ve been doing this for over 10 years now! Or to put it another way, STLToday.com, the website for the St. Louis Post Dispatch, has been using a paywall for over a decade, and they haven’t been able to make one that isn’t cracked in a matter of minutes.

My Current AI Workflow

Sometimes, after rebutting someone’s extreme exuberance over AI or cracking a joke, I feel like people may assume that I don’t like AI or I never use it. That’s not the case at all! I do use it and I integrate it (or advocate for its use) in my CTO role at Ten2 and when consulting but I do take care to use it in situations that make sense, such as text generation, and not places where it doesn’t make sense, such as decision-making.

Social Media

LinkedIn is Going Great

🚨🔥AI will obviously solve everything because hype is never ever wrong. Do you want to know a thing that will help you?! I have an AI thing that does stuff like, I don’t know, let’s say sales or marketing…whatever. It’s amazing though and it won’t be replaced in a matter of days by a new model.

Software Development is Dead, Long Live Developers!

“If you don’t learn to code, in ten years it will be like being illiterate!” That was what someone exclaimed on a panel discussion I was on in 2013. It was a talk about bringing technology and entertainment together held in Beverly Hills and hosted by a coding bootcamp company. Two of the people on the panel were from a different bootcamp company, and then there was me, an actual technologist working in entertainment.

Apple Intelligence Summaries Are a Mess

Jason Snell over at Six Colors takes Apple to task over the current state of their Apple Intelligence notification summaries. He’s 100% right. They are bad, especially when summarizing news, and that’s unacceptable even with the “beta” tag. Take a look at his included example: A non-apology and the promise of a warning label isn’t enough.

Gadgets

Thoughts on Apple Bloggers and Vision Pro Coverage

I posted this on Mastodon, but I figured I would cross-post it here as well. I wonder if we’re headed for a weird place with the #Apple Blogosphere (AKA the Apple Blog Mafia). All of the main players are talking about Vision Pro all the time and saying things like “I lose track of time in here!

The Simple Pleasures of a Mobile Office Whiteboard

I’ve built a lot of stuff for my home office over the last few years of working from home, but my current favorite is something so simple: A custom rolling whiteboard A couple of weeks ago I gave myself a Saturday challenge to take my existing old whiteboard and build a rolling stand for it only with materials I had in my workshop.

I Made Myself a JARVIS Over the Weekend

With some spare parts, a USB speakerphone, and my Home Assistant server, I was able to make a competent JARVIS for my home office over the weekend…and the exciting part is that it’s only going to keep getting better! Last year was the “Year of Voice” for Home Assistant, the open source home automation platform, and the team accomplished a ton of work that enables Home Assistant users to make their own voice assistants.

Social Media

Substack Needs to Decide If It’s Special or Not

Much has been written about Substack’s Nazi problem and it’s subsequent messaging that it’s OK with Nazis to the point that it will not remove any of them unless they are inciting specific violence. Our content guidelines do have narrowly defined proscriptions, including a clause that prohibits incitements to violence. We will continue to actively enforce those rules while offering tools that let readers curate their own experiences and opt in to their preferred communities.

TidyBot - A Cleaning Robot Configured via a LLM

I’m fascinated by the merger of robotics and LLMs so I was very excited to see the TidyBot project from Stanford, Princeton, Google, Columbia, and Nueva School. In this work, we investigate personalization of household cleanup with robots that can tidy up rooms by picking up objects and putting them away.