This is bad. Oh, this is bad.
JUST IN: Meta unveils Muse Charm, a Tamagotchi-style AI gadget designed to fit on a keychain, with Zuck calling it a “joyful little device.”
At first, I thought it was a hilariously dumb idea: resurrecting the Tamagotchi, but letting it tap into AI to make smalltalk. Oh, no – this thing is a whole-ass fucking agent. An LLM is an oracle: you ask it questions, it gives wise answers and then goes back to sleep. But an agent has a life of its own: it can go off and screw with your bank account and read your emails while you’re on the toilet and blissfully unaware. It does stuff.
Muse has its own computer, with a file system and a terminal, so it can write its own code and build the tools a task needs. It also has access to a full web browser, so it can search, navigate sites, fill out forms, and complete transactions, like booking and purchasing.
Muse also can produce things for you — documents, PDFs, web pages, and more. It can build a tracker for your spending, an interactive study guide, or a dashboard to find patterns in your sleep.
And Muse is always working. Once you’ve set a goal or a task, Muse continues to work on a schedule and in response to relevant events, taking the next step and following up, alongside whatever you ask it in conversation. When it completes its background work, it evaluates whether the result is worth surfacing, and notifies you only when something is meaningfully new or needs your input.
Muse is always working. I don’t like the sound of that.
The little twee cartoon avatar thingie around your wrist is just your interface. It plugs you into angry GladOS up in the cloud somewhere.
We introduced Muse just a few weeks ago, and the response has been incredible. At Connect we showed what’s next: a Muse you can talk to in real time and reach in more places throughout your day.
A great voice mode: Talking to an agent as capable as Muse is different from voice chat with an assistant. You can have a long, in-depth conversation, and Muse gets work done in the background while you’re still talking. You can also design your Muse’s voice just by describing what you want: faster, slower, or even a specific accent.
See your Muse come to life: Meta Superintelligence Labs is introducing Muse Realtime Avatar, state-of-the-art embodiment technology that turns Muse Realtime Voice into expressive, interactive avatars.[…]
Muse will have its own email address that it can use to get things done, or even just as another way for you to communicate with it.
It’s the cartoon face that really gets me. If it came in a shiny chrome cube with a glowing red eye and a sinister robot voice it would feel more honest.
Go follow the links. We’re screwed.
September 24, 2026 — 5:47 pm
Comments: 1
Guys, I have my doubts about this one…
Silicone feet. I…don’t even. Whatever.
Ebay is doing this advertising thing on Facebook where they post increasingly bizarre things in the upper right corner of the page to show the wide range of products they offer. I guess. One I remember were replicas of the eggs from Alien.
Some of the things they advertise, I had no earthly idea what they do. Like a Parlux Melody Silencer. Turns out, it’s not a karaoke accessory – it’s a dingus you fit on the back of a blow dryer that reduces the noise it makes by 45%.
Ours is a time of wonders.
September 23, 2026 — 5:56 pm
Comments: 1
Life is an adventure
We’re having Chinese food delivered tonight. I’m very excited by this. I’ve never had food delivered before in my whole life.
How sad is that?
September 22, 2026 — 6:50 pm
Comments: 6
You know it. You just don’t know you know it.
I Googled ‘looney tunes conveyor belt music’ and it knew exactly what I meant. And by “Googled” I typed it into the address bar and I think that goes to Claude if you’re using Brave. Judging from auto-complete, it’s a common question.
It’s a big band tune called Powerhouse written by Raymond Scott and recorded in 1937. The “conveyor belt music” is actually the slow interlude in the middle. The faster tune on either side is also used in Looney Tunes cartoons for frenetic chase scenes. You’ll know it when you hear it.
Referred to as Powerhouse A and Powerhouse B. I created a version of it using FruityLoops that was composed of autotuned clicky sounds (I think I clashed silverware together to make the original noises). But can I find it? I cannot.
Oh, just hit the link already.
September 21, 2026 — 4:07 pm
Comments: 5
Dead Pool 201: dead royals edition
Armybrat wins with Princess Astrid of Norway, about whom I knew nothing. The robot tells me she very controversially married a commoner. Not just a commoner, but
Ferner was a divorcé. His first marriage ended in 1955, and the Church of Norway at the time did not approve of remarriage after divorce. This was the more explosive issue — the Bishop of Oslo refused to officiate, the local pastor at Asker Church also declined, and the parish council initially refused to allow the wedding to take place in their church at all.
Two members of Parliament’s presidium boycotted the congratulatory visit, and the Christian newspaper Vårt Land declared itself “in mourning.”
She lost a considerable state allowance by doing so. You go, Astrid!
Are we ready?
0. Rule Zero (AKA Steve’s Rule): your pick has to be living when picked. Also, nobody whose execution date is circled on the calendar. Also, please don’t kill anybody. Plus (Pupster’s Rule) no picking someone who’s only famous for being the oldest person alive.
1. Pick a celebrity. Any celebrity — though I reserve the right to nix picks I never heard of (I don’t generally follow the Dead Pool threads carefully, so if you’re unsure of your pick, call it to my attention).
2. We start from scratch every time. No matter who you had last time, or who you may have called between rounds, you have to turn up on this very thread and stake your claim.
3. Poaching and other dirty tricks positively encouraged.
4. Your first choice sticks. Don’t just blurt something out, m’kay? Also, make sure you have a correct spelling of your choice somewhere in your comment. These threads get longish and I use search to figure out if we have a winner.
5. It’s up to you to search the thread and make sure your choice is unique. I’m waayyyy too lazy to catch the dupes. Popular picks go fast.
6. The pool stays open until somebody on the list dies. Feel free to jump in any time. Noobs, strangers, drive-bys and one-comment-wonders — all are welcome.
7. If you want your fabulous prize, you have to entrust me with a mailing address. If you’ve won before, send me your address again. I don’t keep good records.
8. The new DeadPool will begin 6pm WBT (Weasel’s Blog Time) the Friday after the last round is concluded.
The winner, if the winner chooses to entrust me with a mailing address, will receive an Official Certificate of Dick Winning and a small original drawing on paper suffused with elephant shit particles. Because I’m fresh out of fairy shit particles.
Note: I am woefully behind on dick deliveries. If I owe you one, you’ll know how long. I ain’t gived up, but I haven’t drawn much since lockdown. Some day, your heirs might hear from my heirs.
September 18, 2026 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 36
Obsessive
At the turn into the 20th century, a man named TJ Cobden-Sanderson started a publishing house in London. Later, he took on a partner named Emery Walker. It was called the Doves Press. They commissioned a man to create a typeface for them, a complete set in 16 point.
The two had a falling out and in 1909 dissolved the partnership. The font was part of the company assets, but an ongoing legal battle ensued. For several years, Cobden-Sanderson snuck out of a night and threw the hot metal type into the Thames, until he’d disposed of the lot.
It was regarded as a lost typeface.
In modern times, a few letters at a time would wash up on shore to be picked up by mudlarkers (one man found 41 of them after a dry summer and the removal of ‘wet wipe island’ – I did not pursue this story!).
A designer named Robert Green became interested in recreating the font in 2010, which he tried to do from the few printed examples from the Doves Press. Later, he became obsessed with finding the actual hot metal. Using Cobden-Sanderson’s journals and the previous finds, he worked out where he thought they’d gone into the river. He immediately found three at low tide.
The article doesn’t make it clear whether he hired the licensed divers who found the rest, but it was too dangerous on the Thames for amateurs. The pros eventually found 150 more pieces. And with that, he was able to recreate the font.
You can license it here. I don’t love it. I’m not a font snob (I have worked with font snobs; I know the breed). But those off-center dots over the i and the funny diamond-shaped dot on the exclamation point (other punctuation symbols have it, too). It doesn’t do it for me.
p.s. Says Grok: Yes, the dot over the lowercase i (and j) is called a tittle. Derived from the Latin word titulus (meaning inscription or heading), this small diacritic mark serves to distinguish these letters from other vertical strokes, such as the lowercase l or the number 1, ensuring clarity in handwriting and typography. It is an integral part of the glyph’s shape, particularly in condensed scripts like blackletter where its absence could cause significant confusion.
p.p.s. Dead Pool tomorrow!
September 17, 2026 — 6:57 pm
Comments: 7
Limey
Watched them spreading this on the fields this morning. I think it’s lime, to make the soil less acid. I’m fobbing you off with this because I’m going to the movies unexpectedly tonight.
Oh, and I’m accepting armybrat’s Dead Pool win. Meant to say so last night.
September 16, 2026 — 2:28 pm
Comments: 5
What gives?
I’ve been in the market for a decent, clicky keyboard for ages. Not the super cheap ones that feel like pudding, but a crisp old fashioned IBM-like. So I did an Amazon search and had it list them in price order, from high to low.
What’n the heck is this? The whole first page was keyboards >£1,000. I’ve seen this phenomenon on Amazon before (and, to a lesser extent, Ebay). So I axed @grok.
Number one is automatic price setting software. They’re set to raise or lower prices compared to their competitors. If two of these programs compete against each other and nobody’s paying attention – particularly if their other competitors are out of stock – stupid things can happen. Apparently, a text book was inflated to $23 million this way once.
AI coming to kill us all. Again.
Second is placeholders. If a vendor runs out of something but wants to keep the listing just in case it comes back in stock, they don’t delete it. They put a stupid price tag on it. I think I’d kind of figured this one out for myself, though they more usually slap a SOLD OUT on it.
Third is genuinely effing expensive niche products. Keyboards lovingly hand-machined from titanium, one key at a time. Welllll…maybe.
No, I didn’t buy one.
September 15, 2026 — 6:32 pm
Comments: 11
heeeelllp meee
A couple of weeks ago, scientists announced they had made a complete map of a male fruitfly brain (they’d already done a female fruitfly brain). They call it a connectome.
How did they do it? you ask. I’m glad you asked.
They used a microtome and sliced the tiny brain up very fine and then scanned the slices and put it together again by computer. They had to use an AI to fill in the missing bits – no matter how carefully you slice, something will be lost.
It’s absolutely worth clicking the link, then clicking the picture, then clicking it again to get the enlarged view. It’s wild. I wish it was the sort of online model you could move around in real time.
The brain has 166,700 retained cells and 25,582,938 connections, so naturally someone taught it to play Doom. “Doom frames are converted into sensory inputs, passed through the simulated MaleCNS v1.0 wiring, and that selected neurons are mapped to the game’s turn/move/fire controls.”
It is, by the way, a truly terrible Doom player. I haven’t seen it make a single kill. It must be a very rough approximation of what a fruitfly’s brain actually does, though, because I imagine a fly’s spatial sense is really quite good.
The sharp-eyed will have noticed the chatgpt in the URL of Doomfly (fly-brain-doom.awormuth.chatgpt.site). I asked ChatGPT about it and it said the site was hosted by an Open-AI server, but not actually ChatGPT. The unmodified AI itself cannot play Doom.
And then it posted a laughing emoji, which is just weird.
September 14, 2026 — 5:21 pm
Comments: 7
Have a good weekend!
I never post on September 11, but feel free to talk about anything in the comments.
September 11, 2026 — 4:52 pm
Comments: 2