Never doubt that Apple is the master of packaging. My replacement credit card came in the mail today in this unnecessarily beautiful wrapper.

A slightly off-white heavy stock envelope with rounded corners and an embossed Apple logo.

The envelope itself has an NFC chip. You touch your phone to it to activate the card inside.

A rainbow-colored cardboard sleeve with a titanium credit card nestled inside a perfectly-sized cutout.

For Science™ I read the NFC with my Flipper Zero. It didn’t seem to contain any personal information. My guess is it’s a code that the phone interprets as “open the Wallet app and activate that credit card we told you was on the way”.

Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao's home raided by FBI agents - CBS San Francisco

Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao’s home raided by FBI agents - CBS San Francisco:

In an emailed statement to CBS News Bay Area, the FBI said, “The FBI is conducting court authorized law enforcement activity on Maiden Lane. We are unable to provide additional information at this time.”

Election officials just announced that Thao’s recall election petitions met the criteria to be put to ballot. This hasn’t been a pleasant week for her.

EU today decided to postpone a vote of their ridiculous “Chat Control” anti-privacy law. That a government would even consider it is a reminder of the critical importance of distributed, federated systems. A website operated out of Brazil isn’t subject to EU law. A Mastodon server in France can ignore bad US laws. A private mailserver in California doesn’t care about China’s laws.

Huge companies like Meta and Google with international business presences have to follow dumb regulations from around the whole world. You and I do not. This is our strength.

Currently reading: My Struggle: Book 2 by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Many thanks to Jim for nudging me toward Book 1 way back when. It captured me. 📚

I spent all last night dreaming about making a web interface for an AI chat API so I could play with it in a browser. Flask vs Node vs Rust vs Elixir. How to authenticate. Let the user select which model to use. Billing concerns. I planned it all and woke up this morning ready to build this thing I’d thought through.

Until I remembered I have zero interest in using, let along making, such a thing.

I’ve gotten 4 plausible recruiter cold emails today. Nature is healing.

Things I like about our relatively new Whirlpool refrigerator: It usually keeps our food cold.

Things I dislike about it: Random things stop working, such as the lights don’t turn on when you open the door, or the ice maker stops making ice, or it stops blowing cold air into the parts that are supposed to be cold. It doesn’t tell you that something’s wrong. You have to notice on your own. Then you have to reboot it by cutting power at the breaker for 10 minutes.