Jim Ray

@jimray.net

1400 Followers 1035 Following

I used to be good at this.

A brown paper bag with the words THE ORIGINAL FUDGE KITCHEN emblazoned on it. A perfectly ripe tomato sits on top.
Robert Pirsig, author of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" and Quality-obsessive, maintaining a motorcycle. I've added a quote bubble, implying he's saying the quoted post. It's a joke, he didn't actually say that, though I suspect he'd agree with it.
Walter Sobchak from THE BIG LEBOWSKI
Opening scroll from THE PHANTOM MENACE Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute. Hoping to resolve the matter with a blockade of deadly battleships, the greedy Trade Federation has stopped all shipping to the small planet of Naboo.
A chart from the Enphase app showing power draw and generation in 2024, 2025, 2026. Out modest solar array generates more power than we use every year.
How much difference really is there between McDonald’s super-processed food and molecular gastronomy? I used to know this guy who was a great chef, like his restaurant was in the Relais & Châteaux association and everything, and he’d always talk about how there were intense flavors in McDonald’s food that he didn’t know how to make. I’ve often thought that a lot of what makes crazy restaurant food taste crazy is the solemn appreciation you lend to it. If you put a Cheeto on a big white plate in a formal restaurant and serve it with chopsticks and say something like “It is a cornmeal quenelle, extruded at a high speed, and so the extrusion heats the cornmeal ‘polenta’ and flash-cooks it, trapping air and giving it a crispy texture with a striking lightness. It is then dusted with an ‘umami powder’ glutamate and evaporated-dairy-solids blend.” People would go just nuts for that. I mean even a Coca-Cola is a pretty crazy taste.
A 4x5 sheet of plywood with two pieces of rigid foam attached and a jig hanging in the center about a foot off the ground. A full sheet of plywood slots into the hanging jig and then lets you tilt the full sheet onto the table
Portraits James Baldwin Ursula le Guinn Octavia Butler Tressie McMillan Cottom bell hooks Michael Pollan John Coltrane Stevie Wonder Thich Nhat Hanh Nina Simone Mark Bittman
Still from Back to the Future II Biff Tannen’s Pleasure Paradise Casino
Tanya was completely blindsided by this. She was told that she was coming into a meeting to discuss the past season and the next season. She walks in; she sits down. And Tom starts the meeting with, the nature of this meeting has changed. We're letting you go. And told her she was fired and had to get out of her office by 5 ơ'clock. Can I give you a little bit of background? The Simon family is legendary at CBS News. Her father was a famous Vietnam correspondent and then Bob Simon covered every single war, everywhere in the world throughout his entire career. I was with him in Kuwait during the Gulf War in 1990. We would stand on the roof of the hotel and watch the missiles come in. He taught me how to be a war correspondent. And then Tanya Simon comes in. She's at the broadcast 30 years. There is no respect for that. Get out of the office by five 'clock? What company in the world treats their precious people that way? [Tears up] Tanya Simon spent her whole childhood waiting for the call that her father was dead, never knowing if she would ever see him again. Her whole childhood. Get out by 5 ơ'clock. Make of that what you will.
A table laden with Korean barbecue
Two butterflied chickens on a weber kettle
Text exchange with my son I'm home! [heart emoji reacji] Your cinnamon rolls were an absolute hit! Me: But not bussin'? Him: They were Bussin [cry laughing reacji]
Cinnamon buns fresh out of the oven
Sonny Rollins wearing jeans and possibly a kimono, sitting cross legged in front of a shoji screen holding a saxophone.
A set of skis and ski helmets
A can of Fat Tire. I pass the brewery and bottling facility literally every day.
To that point, Ben Thompson suggests (in today’s subscriber-only Stratechery column) that the industry simply pay residents: Instead, the most obvious solution is the most crass: simply start giving people money. If data centers are a resource for our AI future, then start paying people for that resource. If that data center up the road weren’t sold to my neighbors based on amorphous tax benefits that my local government may or may not spend appropriately, but rather were to result in a check in the mailbox every year, I suspect you could get a lot more people on board! Just to put some numbers on this, the data center up the road was expected to be 1.6 GW, which could generate around $3 billion in annual operator revenue. DeForest, the village it was to be built in, has around 11,500 people. You could pay every person in DeForest $10,000 a year for 3.8% of annual revenue grossed by the data center — I bet that proposal would have been approved, and I bet that the operator could very easily pass those costs on to the actual data center users (it also highlights how relatively pathetic QTS’s $50 million commitment was). I do get how ridiculous this sounds, but ridiculous is how we do things in America.
Screenshot from a home solar system showing generated energy vs consumption are bar charts
Nikita Bier, boy genius: Ladies and gentlemen, today we're launching one of our biggest changes to 𝕏 Introducing Custom Timelines This feature allows you to pin a specific topic to your home tab. With support for over 75 topics, you can dive deep into your favorite niche on X. It's powered by Grok's understanding of every post with the algorithm's personalization—meaning every timeline is made just for you. And it works even better when it's a topic you already engage with. This was a huge undertaking across many months, so we're excited for you take it for a spin. We're giving early access to Premium subscribers on iOS (and Android coming very soon).
A closeup of John Ternus's shoes from the press photo released by Apple announcing Ternus will be the next CEO. THIS IS IMPORTANT.
From the Wikipedia entry for Squirt (drunk), a brief history of the corporate consolidation the basically defines the latter half of the 20th Century In 1978, Squirt was sold to Michigan bottler Beverage America. 8! In 1986, Squirt was acquired by A&W. 191 In October 1993 A&W Beverages was folded into Cadbury Schweppes. In May 2008, Cadbury Schweppes spun off Cadbury Schweppes Americas Beverages into an independent company called the Dr Pepper Snapple Group, and renamed itself to Cadbury plc. 10] Dr Pepper/Seven Up still exists as a trademark and brand name as of 2024.] On July 9, 2018, Keurig acquired the Dr Pepper Snapple Group in an $18.7 billion deal. The combined company was renamed "Keurig Dr Pepper".
My cutting board littered with does-not-occur-in-nature pink plastic egg shell pieces.
Nikita Bier, head of product at X, the everything app, announcing a new article summarization feature. The author of the article being summarized has responded "you should be in jail"
A classic Onion article from 2002 with the headline "Corporation Reaches Goal, Shuts Down" with Michael Dell standing in front of a display that reads MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
BREITBART BLUESKY CEO JAY GRABER STEPS DOWN FROM TOP JOB AT LEFTIST ECHO CHAMBER
Alright fam, synthetic voice generation is here which means it’s trivial for any scammer to take a snippet of your voice — the podcast appearance you posted on LinkedIn, the call you thought was a survey — and make it sound like you. How about we set up a simple passcode for emergency situations so we know we are who we say we are. The password, btw, is `hunter2`
The coat rack in my home office, containing no fewer than five jackets, workshirts, and/or shirt-jackets, as well as a beaten up cap that has been used as a toy by the resident sheepdog.
A screenshot of the linked article showing a search bar populated with the string `uber`. The word is not found in the article.
A classic cake decorating fail that reads “Just Write Happy Birthday” There are also some balloons drawn in icing. On balance it’s well done!
A message from my wife in Spanish. I have responded “¡Ok!”
A big-ass computer desk with a 15” CRT, tower, keyboard drawer, printer, CD caddy. In red oak my god it’s gorgeous.
A pair of ... I dunno? Lifted loafers? They're like normal loafers with a massive tread.
Time lapse video of your narrator installing a floating vinyl floor. There’s a reason Buddhist monks don’t do this.
A menu featuring a multi course bean meal. It was wonderful!
Tweet from the official Anthropic account: We've raised $30B in funding at a $380B post-money valuation. This investment will help us deepen our research, continue to innovate in products, and ensure we have the resources to power our infrastructure expansion as we make Claude available everywhere our customers are. Response from world's worst human, @elonmusk: Your Al hates Whites & Asians, especially Chinese, heterosexuals and men. This is misanthropic and evil. Fix it. Frankly, I don't think there is anything you can do to escape the inevitable irony of Anthropic ending up being Misanthropic. You were doomed to this fate when you chose your name. The Name of the Wind.
Dan Smith from the Key and Peele college football names sketch
NYT story: How Every Senator Voted to Confirm Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security There’s a table showing every Republican voting Yes
Tweet from Nikita Bier: Ate a piece of fried chicken tonight. It somehow tore part of my throat going down. Now I can barely swallow (or speak). Doctor says: "You can get it checked out with an endoscopy. Earliest availability is in 4-6 weeks." This feels like a Kafka novel.
Tweet from Twitter’s head of product Nikita Bier: Ladies and gentlemen: We’re giving $1 million to the top article posted on X. You have 2 weeks. It's time to write. There’s an image of “$1M” that I think is supposed to imply “drip” but it mostly looks like those metallic balloons you get for your grandpa’s 80th birthday kind of dissolving. The aesthetic is very appropriate (derogatory).
A chart from Down For Everyone showing a Twitter outage this morning. It's a cheap shot but fuck 'em.
Screenshot of a tweet from Nikita Bier, Twitter’s head of product: We are revising our developer API policies: We will no longer allow apps that reward users for posting on X (aka “infofi”). This has led to a tremendous amount of AI slop & reply spam on the platform. We have revoked API access from these apps, so your X experience should start improving soon (once the bots realize they’re not getting paid anymore). [highlighted by me] If your developer account was terminated, please reach out and we will assist in transitioning your business to Threads and Bluesky.
Privately, Ms. Weiss has been deeply frustrated by the negative reaction to her decisions, and has blamed some subordinates for not stanching the criticism, three people familiar with internal discussions said. Ms. Weiss’s wife, Nellie Bowles, *a former reporter at The Times*, openly mocked the objections of the “60 Minutes” staff who had clashed with her spouse in a column published by The Free Press, which Ms. Weiss continues to oversee. “My lovely wife asked some 60 Minutes producers to report out a story a little more, literally Hey guys make a couple more phone calls and then we’ll run the piece in a week or two,” Ms. Bowles wrote. “No! the media collectively shrieked. We shan’t!” (CBS News declined to make Ms. Weiss available for an interview. Referring to Ms. Bowles’s column, Ms. Weiss said in a statement that The Free Press was “completely editorially independent,” and added, “Also: My wife is the funniest writer in America.”)
Simultaneous with the technical crackdown, developers at Elon Musk’s competing AI lab xAI have reportedly lost access to Anthropic’s Claude models. While the timing suggests a unified strategy, sources familiar with the matter indicate this is a separate enforcement action based on commercial terms, with Cursor playing a pivotal role in the discovery. As first reported by tech journalist Kylie Robison of the publication Core Memory, xAI staff had been using Anthropic models—specifically via the Cursor IDE—to accelerate their own developmet.
Jim Downey doing his “Jeff Epstein? The financier?” in Conan O’Brien’s podcast
An Old English Sheepdog in a home office approaches the camera
Headline: “A YEAR OF LISTENING BEYOND THE ALGORITHM”
An at-home testing kit. For RSV, wheeeee!
My family and I, making deliveries. There’s a dorky dad, a hot mom, and two awesome kids. Not pictured: Nathaniel Pawthorne, the Old English Sheepdog
The add to calendar confirmation screen in Safari. In the upper right corner is a giant blue checkmark button, the tapping of which dismisses the dialog and — crucially — does not add the event to my calendar nor does it tell me this. The actual action I want to perform is activated by the much smaller pill at the bottom of the screen, a white text in gray button, that helpfully says Add to Calendar.
Jim Downey, on Conan’s podcast, asking “Jeff Epstein? The financier?”
Your humble narrator in an Oxford cloth shirt, merino sweater, and chunky wool shawl cardigan.
A middle aged man — your humble narrator — in a blue sweatshirt with the USDA label for salted butter printed on it.
Two Detroit style pizzas, one pepperoni one cheese with a few racing stripes of tomato sauce on each.
Pete Hegseth in an ill-fitting suit struggling to contain his paunch, with the jacket lining styled like the American flag. The flag code states: “The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery.”
A stick with some colorful ribbons tied to the ends. As seen in the movie WEAPONS (2025)
A bit of junk mail I received today: Dear James, Now is the time! Your lease is expiring in only 9 months. Based on your excellent credit history, you are pre-approved to finance a new Nissan at the lowest rate possible or lease as low
Screenshot of the App Store Connect terms of service. The check is to indicate I have read the TOS is hidden behind the browser address bar on mobile Safari, rendering the Agree button unclickable. I’m thus unable to proceed.
Same loaves featuring the snout of a nosey sheepdog
Two loaves of country style bread on a paisley kitchen towel