Rivian is about to start charging for cruise control. Which sucks. It's handy for long stretches of I-5, but generally I enjoy driving so I'm not planning to shell out unless they offer a day pass.

There is something I would pay for though.

Fix the fucking turn signal.

I'm pretty sure this wouldn't even need an AI supercomputer. I'm not an automotive engineer but I've sketched out a rough design for this:

1. When you are already signaling one direction, moving the stalk the other way just cancels the signal.

I should probably file a patent before hitting post.

Every car I have owned or rented made the other choice and so trying to cancel the turn signal just lights up the opposite direction. A behavior I need once a decade or so, but the rest of the time I just completed a less than 90 degree turn and I'm ready to stop signaling. Instead I have turn signal tourette's for the next mile. I'd pay a buck or two a month to not do that.

In terms of traffic this blog has always been driven by code. Extracting step counts from Google Fit, automating Azure monitoring, pushing the limits of Apps Script, and so on. Over the past year referral traffic is solid, but Google Search isn't interested any more. It's the same trend as Stack Overflow - programming questions are now answered by LLMs. I do the same thing and so I'm responsible as a user (I used to answer my own questions disturbingly often), and as a content creator (according to WaPo this blog is 0.00002% of CommonCrawl: transformers also die in darkness).

Can I be a social network instead?

I have had a vague integration with Bridgy Fed for a while. This syndicates posts into the Fediverse and will accept comments back but has always been a bit one sided. I just tightened this up a bit and added support for follows, and did a little following. Implementing all the microformats is a lot easier with LLMs. I'm never going back to a social network that I don't own, even a well intentioned Mastodon server. But I'll interoperate all day and iterate in an IndieWeb direction.

You can follow @ithoughthecamewithyou.com@ithoughthecamewithyou.com and starting now I can follow back.

I have been in the habit of posting each plane I fly on for a long time.

This started on Twitter, where for a while there was this #boarding hashtag so you could chat with people in transit from the same airport by IATA code (like #boarding #sfo). That dropped out of usage, because why would you do that, but I continued on Facebook until I deleted social media in 2018. After a brief lapse I started posting to my blog. I have a vague intention to resurrect some older flights with AI and build out a more complete history.

After adding flights here for a few years it seemed like a good idea to do some visualization. The image above (click for a larger version) is my current route map, updated after each flight. The routes are great circles rather than the actual track (created via the .net version of GeographicLib and this geolocation of airports). You can view individual flights here. I could probably use a carbon offset or two (unless this).

Required disclaimer:

This site or product includes IATA/ICAO List data available from https://github.com/ip2location/ip2location-iata-icao.

Updated 2026-02-07 23:07:

The vague intention turned into a mild obsession and so I mined email for more flights. I have email going back to 1996 and quickly whipped up two scripts via GitHub Copilot and Claude Sonnet 4.5 to process them. The first searched and downloaded any likely candidates from gmail and converted the HTML email to markdown to save on tokens. The second ran all the candidates through GPT 5 mini to extract the details. I then added a few older flights from memory resulting in the image above. There are some work emails I don't have access to so I'm sure it's not totally comprehensive, but I'm now up to 277 flights and approximately 779,883 miles.

Roko's basilisk is the improbable theory that advanced AI in the future will punish anyone who failed to help speed the development of the AI.

I'm coining Rob's basilisk, which is the far more likely theory that AI will eventually torture people who made it watch home security cameras. Here's a gem from mine:

"The day began with regular neighborhood activity, including several individuals walking by. Early morning saw garbage collection services, with a person in a yellow vest moving green garbage cans and later a blue recycling bin was picked up. Around 7:34 AM, a person exited the Garage, and shortly after, a green Rivian SUV pulled into the driveway, with a resident exiting the vehicle as the garage door opened. Throughout the morning, numerous people walked dogs, including one with a black dog on a red leash. Later in the morning, a person was seen putting a green suitcase into the trunk of a white SUV, coinciding with an Amazon delivery truck driving by. In the afternoon, a person was observed taking a picture of the house. A UPS delivery person delivered a package around 4:50 PM. As evening approached, a cat was spotted walking across the Backyard, and two people got into a white pickup truck from the Garage. The day concluded with continued pedestrian activity and several trains passing by, including a person seen holding a glowing blue object in the evening."

Nearly a decade ago I whipped up a script to send my Nest footage to the Google Cloud Vision API. The twist was that it only notified me when it saw something novel. It was pretty chatty to start with, and then every few weeks I'd get an alert that it had spotted an ice hotel or ballistic missile submarine. At that point I turned it off (maybe this will save me one day).

Some terrible part of me wants to build a RAG database of Google Home Premium Advanced notifications so that I can do the same thing in prose, and never miss anything unusual on my street. A more practical part realizes that the glowing blue object is probably a phone.

I just finished Alan Wake 2, and while it's a pretty good game this took me well over a year.

It's not (mostly) because I'm still not that great with a Xbox controller. It's a long game and I'm pretty busy. Astonishingly at the end it wants me to play the whole thing again, which seems to be a bit of a trend. It also wants to sell me expansion packs which is completely missing my section of the market.

I would happily pay you twice as much if the game was half as long.

Sadly I'm a completionist and I'm not going to stop halfway through unless the game is bad (e.g. No Man's Sky. I already have a job. I'm not going to find and smelt minerals to weave wiring to eventually twenty hours later turn the light on in my space cabin). But I'd love to play more than one game a year.

Also, making more content is lazy. Taking a scalpel to your plot and getting to the essential core of the story takes skill and guts.

Publishers, please take my money!

(PS, man, I loved Firewatch. More like that please.)

Microsoft is killing Skype in May 2025. I haven't used it for a few years, but I'm going to shed a tear or two.

It's hard to overestimate how important Skype was a little over 20 years ago. I had recently moved to San Francisco and made a lot of phone calls to friends and family back in the UK. There was this thing called a landline, and as well as local service you had to choose a long distance provider with all sorts of complicated tariffs and fees. Cell phones were their own nightmare and even for SMS you paid per text message. Incomprehensibly, ring tones were on their way to being a multi-billion dollar business. My current phone has been on vibrate for its entire life and I travel the world with free high speed Internet included in my plan. Skype marked the beginning of this transition using P2P to open VoIP and video calls to the masses. I even had a cordless phone that made local calls over the phone line but seamlessly switched to Skype for long distance.

Skype's P2P stack could be used for more than phone calls. I built a business to backup your computer over Skype. It's one of the best things I've ever worked on. The Internet was slow for most people. and so you could do a local backup on LAN and then send incrementals P2P via Skype whenever your computer was idle. We also did superior local backups with full history, encryption and locked file support when most competitors choked on PST files. Skype were kind enough to include us as a premium extra in the client. We did some paid search and PR, but the lion's share of our customer acquisition came from this placement.

My current job involves many Teams calls, but before that we operated on hundreds of Skype channels. Before that work was driven by email and conference calls. I'm ambivalent about this shift. Email has some advantages, and hours of video conferences are way more draining than the voice bridge alternative. Teams brilliantly combines channels and chats that look very similar but work completely differently adding an entirely new mental load to the workday. Skype used to display a special cat emoji if you held down three keys at once. I know which philosophy I prefer.

I want to do two things with my digital photos. First, keep them safe, especially all those precious memories of random parking meters and unfathomable HVAC mechanisms. Second, enjoy looking at the small subset that are precious family moments. I'm not a special snowflake, these basic requirements should represent a large and competitive market. Unfortunately I'm not holding my breath for much in the way of consumer friendly regulation for the next four years in the US.

Google is making some changes to their Photos API next month, which amount to "Get the fuck out of our Photos API". They're a polite organization so they phrase it a little differently: "We're excited to see the creative solutions developers will build using the new Picker API and the updated Library API.". The developer documentation is a little more pointed: "If your app relies on accessing the user's entire library, you may need to re-evaluate your app or consider alternative approaches."

I have an Aura Carver Mat, a nice digital photo frame that I synced to a shared Google Photos album. Easy for me to add photos, way too easy for the kids to add photos - a fantastic device. As of next month it's ewaste though. I'm not going to upload photos slowly through some picker API like an animal. I'm going to end up building something complicated out of a Raspberry Pi (adds to actuarially unrealistic to do list).

This change doesn't impact backup, because that was already broken. For a while Google Photos nicely integrated with Google Drive and I ended up with a local copy of everything that I could then backup through other means. I'm never going to trust any one company to look after important files and so my philosophy is to backup twice online and once to an external hard drive that lives in a fire safe. (At one point I even built a backup company based on this model).

Google killed the Drive integration and so I MacGyvered together an apps script based solution that used the Google Photos API. This revealed to me that the Photos API would not return location information. Even worse it was impossible to get the full resolution version of a video to download. So it's not like I was in love with the API before this most recent change.

My current approach is a mix of sad and awesome. The sad part is that I use Google Takeout once a month to get an archive of all my online photos. Thankfully this still works. The awesome - I wrote this photo sorter tool that takes the messy download and organizes it by year and month. And I also wrote a volume shadow copy tool that lets you backup a drive without getting hung up on locked files. Those pieces get my photos safely to an external drive, and I upload to Amazon Photos too (the third leg of my backup stool).

Update - fixed with a Raspberry Pi!