Trump says the job market is booming for U.S.-born.
-- The data doesn’t show it. 

Since the summer, Trump officials have been trumpeting the idea that job creation is booming for U.S.-born workers.
Trump said so, too, during a prime-time address last month aimed at assuaging Americans’ concerns about the economy

Trump administration officials also said recently that more than 2.5 million U.S.-born workers gained jobs in 2025
as 1 million immigrants left the workfor…

Trump says the job market is booming for U.S.-born. The data doesn’t show it.
The idea that employment is surging for U.S.-born workers is routinely trumpeted by Trump officials. But economists say otherwise.

Apple replacing Alan Dye with Stephen Lemay may fix Jony Ive's mistake by restoring the Jobsian "design is how it works" ethos in Apple's UI design (John Gruber/Daring Fireball)
https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job

Bad Dye Job
It might have made some sense to bring someone from the fashion/brand world to lead software design for Apple Watch, but it sure didn’t seem to make sense for the rest of Apple’s platforms. And the decade of Dye’s HI leadership has proven it.

Had Fun

Bought a car/micro-camper

Bought a van to do up as a micro-camper, and did a temporary rush job of that conversion myself while waiting in the list for the pro to do it.
Then the pro gave himself a health criss the week it was booked so I took apart my temp job and only got another temp kit-job in it's place.
Went out in it like four times during that and then broke my wrist and couldn't really use it or improve it.
Then had to take it apart even more to try
and figure out where the ad-blue hole was.
I will do a proper permanent job of the
floor and walls and ceiling and adjustments to the kit-job to make it the nicest it's been so far during the spring next year.
My assumption that the prior conversion
into a van and for wheelchair-access meant the microcamper conversion was half-done already turned out to be false.
If I buy a new one, it'll be one that has never been wheelchair adapted.
But it's going okay. Only scraped it once so far.
Fewer than aimed for or booked, but I broke my wrist and had to cancel the second half of the summer.
Went to a conference about money and computers and fringe decentralized social media and it wasn't as boring as you might expect and felt pretty much like a festival.
Exactly the target number! It's lovely.
Took 3 times longer than I'd hoped and
50% more money than I'd planned for really.
Still improvements to make but they will
be incremental and gradual over the coming year or two now.
It's been interest-only for 20 years so a big old lump sum payment that I never really expected to be able to make. Expected to have to sell and move at the end of the mortgage term.
But surprisingly the stocks ISA got high enough to pay it off after all, so I did that.
Cash-flow ruined by that and the bedroom but should start to feel a bit richer next year.

The most common strategy for "AI-proofing" your career is to get good at using AI tools.
This is futile, because no one is using AI tools to make things that are *good.* The goal is to check the box on the project plan at a predictable pace. As long as the box is checked, quality is not a factor.
To AI-proof your job, get out of the project game.

You can't "AI-proof your career" with a project mindset
Competing with LLMs on output velocity is a fool's errand because you will always lose. You can only beat them by curing yourself of your computer brain.

Final tests in and the quality is outstanding. Going from the stock `svt-av1` encoder to the `svt-av1-psyex` encoder is already a nice bump in quality, and the encodes are faster using `av1an` due to using every ounce of the CPU. The `lsmash` speedup is nice as well as the stock method for chunking took a bit longer post-detection.
Also, can't say enough about the Ryzen 9 HX 370: did a great job with the encodes and only burned through ~24W during the encodes along with the Think…

Found and fixed a few configs and learned more about systemd units than I wanted.
But now I have two virtual nodes in the CI SLURM cluster and can submit jobs to both of them, which spawn the corresponding VMs.
So I think the next step is probably going to be to figure out how to set up a "github app" so I can accept CI job requests from github to actually spawn the build jobs.

IME, a lot of good information on how to achieve things with the #OpenHAB Rules DSL requires good searching on the OpenHAB forums or mining through the Javadoc.
I thought I'd use Claude over the weekend/last night to help generify some stuff in my config, and it suggested a cool approach whereby I could put metadata against items and then use that metadata in my rules to customise b…

From The Maple
Carney's Job Cuts Undermine Canada's Position Against Trump
Austerity undermines the foundation for a fairer economy that is less dependent on the US
https://www.readthemaple.com/carneys-job-cuts-undermine-canadas-po…

Carney’s Job Cuts Undermine Canada’s Position Against Trump
Austerity undermines the foundation for a fairer economy that is less dependent on the United States.

UN’s next leader was meant to be a woman.
-- But Trump may ‘insist on a man’
Three candidates want the UN secretary-general job, despite a ‘difficult’ process fraught with politics
— not helped by interventions from the White House
https://www.thetimes.…

UN’s next leader was meant to be a woman. But Trump may ‘insist on a man’
Three candidates want the UN secretary-general job, despite a ‘difficult’ process fraught with politics — not helped by interventions from the White House