It's A Mess. Really.

British actor Anthony Head, best known for his roles in TV shows including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Ted Lasso, Merlin and Little Britain, has died at the age of 72. Head found international fame as Rupert Giles in hit supernatural teen show Buffy in the late 1990s. He went on to have a recurring role in sketch show Little Britain, play king Uther Pendragon in the BBC's Merlin, and appear as former football club owner Rupert Mannion in Ted Lasso. "He passed away peacefully of complications due to pneumonia, surrounded by his family," his daughters Emily and Daisy said. His daughters' statement said "it is with heavy hearts that we announce the death of our extraordinary father". They added: "It has been, and forever will be, an honour and a privilege to be his daughters, and to have witnessed firsthand the impact both he and his work have had on so many." They also said they knew "how dearly he will be missed by friends, colleagues and fans of the show he was in", adding that he "loved his job very much" and "always considered himself incredibly lucky". His family acknowledged that "his legacy will live on" and said they considered themselves "lucky" to have watched him doing what he loved throughout his career. Head's other credits included The Iron Lady, Persuasion, The Inbetweeners and Manchild.

we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)

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Evelyn: “We dig up dead people who often have monstrous curses placed on them!”

Rick: *grabs sword from equally ominous looking wall full of weapons one of which seems to be glowing* fantastic I was getting a bit rusty

Rick: Have I mentioned how wonderful my wife is yet, I really feel like I haven’t really expanded enough on how wonderful she is

Gomez: do go on, I would be delighted to hear about how wonderful your wife is, I strongly encourge all men to extoll the virtues of their wives with rapturous praise, however I should perhaps mention my wife is in fact better

Don’t ever hug a lobster when you see one on the street,

For decorum is essential when a lobster you must greet.

You may comment on the weather, compliment his choice of hat,

But crustaceans like their space if one should stop them for a chat.

Don’t ever hug a lobster when you’re strolling down the coast,

Simply nod and give a greeting, or a handshake at the most,

For a lobster’s first priority is formal social graces,

And one seemes over-familiar if a lobster one embraces.

Don’t ever hug a lobster when you meet one in the sea,

For a lobster’s spines and chitin make it difficult, you see,

And he might become self-conscious if you bring that fact to light,

unauthorized fucking thing!!!!!!

(warning: loud chirping throughout)

Source

Lego's Q3 2025 earnings announcement, October 2025

So Lego just posted another monster quarter and everyone's doing the usual "timeless appeal of analog play in the digital age" garbage and like, no, the actual story is that Lego is a privately-held Danish family company that spent the 2000s nearly going bankrupt and came out of it having figured something out that almost nobody in consumer products has figured out, which is that your core IP is the manufacturing tolerance.

Here's what I mean. A Lego brick made in 1958 still clicks perfectly onto a Lego brick made last week. That is not a marketing claim, it's a manufacturing fact, and it's enforced by tolerances measured in like two thousandths of a millimeter — the stud diameter variance on a standard 2x4 brick is famously smaller than most medical device manufacturers hit on parts going inside human bodies. Which sounds like trivia until you realize it's the entire business model: every brick ever made is compatible with every brick that will ever be made, which means the installed base isn't a depreciating asset, it's an appreciating one, because every new set expands what you can do with the bricks already in your kid's bin (and your bin, and your dad's bin in the attic).

Now compare this to basically every other toy category. Hot Wheels from 1972 don't interface with Hot Wheels from 2024 in any meaningful way — they're both little cars, sure, but the track systems have changed, the scales have drifted, the accessories are incompatible. Barbie has gone through probably a dozen body molds. American Girl dolls from the 90s have different proportions than the current ones. The entire video game industry is structured around planned incompatibility — your Switch games don't work on Switch 2, your Xbox 360 discs mostly don't work on Series X. Incompatibility is the business model, it's how you get people to rebuy.

Lego said no. Lego said the brick from 1958 will fit the brick from 2058. And this is insane, if you think about it, because it means they have voluntarily foreclosed on the single most powerful lever in consumer products, which is forcing obsolescence. Every company that sells a durable good spends enormous amounts of R&D figuring out how to make this year's product not work with last year's product without pissing the customer off too much. Apple is a master at this, Microsoft is slightly worse at it, car companies have built entire industries on it (proprietary charging connectors, OBD-II access, right-to-repair fights). Lego just... doesn't do it.

What they get in return — and this is the thing the "timeless analog charm" people miss — is that the brick becomes infrastructure. A Lego brick is not really a toy. It's a piece of durable manufacturing infrastructure that gets distributed into hundreds of millions of homes worldwide, and every new set is basically an expansion pack for an operating system that already has universal install. Which means the network effects are doing most of the work. When a grandparent buys a Lego set for a kid, they're not buying "a toy" in the sense that a Mattel product is a toy — they're depositing compatible substrate into an accumulating household stockpile, and every deposit raises the marginal utility of the next deposit.

This is also why the IP licensing deals (Star Wars, Harry Potter, the recent Nintendo stuff) work for them in a way they work for basically nobody else. When Hasbro does a Star Wars license, they're making Star Wars figures that sit on a shelf. When Lego does a Star Wars license, they're making bricks in Star Wars configurations, which means even if the kid loses interest in Star Wars in six months, the bricks get absorbed into the general pool and keep producing value. The license is temporary, the substrate is permanent, and the substrate was already the valuable part.

The near-death experience in the early 2000s is the instructive piece here, because Lego almost lost this. They went on a diversification binge — theme parks, video games, clothing, Galidor (look it up, it's hilarious) — and they started loosening the tolerances on the actual bricks because the bricks were seen as a commodity and the "brand" was seen as the valuable part. Which is exactly backwards. Jørgen Vig Knudstorp comes in in 2004, basically says the bricks are the company, tightens tolerances back up, narrows the product line, and the company starts printing money again. The takeaway the business press drew was "focus on your core competency" which is such a domesticated reading of what actually happened — the actual lesson is "the boring manufacturing discipline IS the moat, and when you think the brand is the moat, you are about to destroy the company."

Which is interesting because right now there's a huge knockoff market — Mega Bloks, Chinese brands like Lepin (which got sued into oblivion), various others — and they make bricks that are almost compatible with Lego. Almost. And it turns out almost-compatible is actually worse than incompatible, because when a kid tries to fit a knockoff into a real Lego build and the stud is 0.03mm off, the whole structure gets wobbly, and the kid learns not to mix them. The tolerance is a credential. You can counterfeit the shape but you can't counterfeit sub-thousandth precision at scale without becoming, essentially, Lego.

"I know the Canvas ransomware attack is terribly inconvenient for many people, and sorry if that means you. I, however, am finding it farcically amusing.

For years and years faculty have been pushed to use Canvas. All courses get a homogenized and flattened interface and everything is presented as an easy consumer experience in a one-stop shop and it doesn’t matter if you object to any of that or don’t want to spend 50 hours dealing with an annoying tech product that doesn’t fit your pedagogy. Even communicating with students has been shunted through Canvas. And if you resist any of this, woe betide you. In fact you can’t print syllabi any more even if you wanted to—unless you pay for your own paper, ink, and printer (which I do).

Now Canvas has been taken down by ransomware, tomorrow is the last day of finals week, and YOU are supposed to scramble and solve this problem, using magic. That includes adjuncts who are not even paid a livable wage and faculty who might have hundreds of students.

This is a failure of a tech platform that was forced on us, and the university administrations nationwide who expect you to move heaven and earth are the same ones who are actively undermining their own institutions’ degrees by leaping into bed with AI companies before they even get their pants all the way off. These administrations (and this includes almost all of them) are not *ignoring* the destruction of education and academic integrity by AI—they are actively participating in it by forcibly inserting AI into student life, university email systems, etc. They are literally giving students software designed for cheating and cognitive dependency for free and applauding its use. And they think you are supposed to materialize a magical solution to this Canvas mess to ensure grades are in? Like between dinner and breakfast you are supposed to recreate everything you had to put in Camvas for an entire semester in some nonexistent other platform?

We just got an email telling us to “communicate directly with your students via email or other available tools for any immediate course needs.” How? Also, we should “Consider alternate methods of submitting assignments digitally or completing assignments in person on Friday” LOL what? So, individual faculty member, grab some No-Doz from the truck stop because in the next 12 hours or so, you must materialize a way for your students to take an online exam! Hope you own a server! Oh also you will have to rewrite the exam because you wrote it in Canvas and you don’t even have the questions anymore! Or just tell the students show up on campus tomorrow for an in-person exam—I hope you brought your personal printer!—and I hope nobody else scheduled anything at the same time, with no coordination! Then sit back and listen to the students tell you they already went home to Wyoming or Guam two days ago.

This is ludicrous. It is a problem created by overpaid administrators who have never had an idea that wasn’t sold to them by a software company and who now expect you to abracadabra a solution even as they are pushing chatbot accounts onto the same students so they can learn as little as possible through the degree.