2026-05-30 21:01:35
One of the key features for a read later service in my mind is a text-to-speech feature, and while that was by far the most difficult thing to implement in Quick Reads, I'm really glad it's there and I use it every day. However, I did want to give it some love and improve the experience to really be top class. Here's what's been updated recently.
I don't know who did it first, but a few services do this thing where they will have a different voice read out block quotes for you. So that while you're listening and not looking at the screen, you can easily tell that it is not the author you're listening to saying this. It is something they are quoting. I follow a lot of blogs that do links like this, and this is really helpful.
This feature just rolled out today.
One of the challenges with doing text-to-speech is latency. If you pass in a full article to a text-to-speech engine, it can take several minutes in some cases for the full article to be processed and returned to me via an API request. Obviously, I don't want to make users tap listen and then wait five minutes to actually hear it, so Quick Reads has some logic implemented that breaks articles up into much smaller chunks and makes sequential requests to get those chunks of the article back. You can actually see this in the user interface on the web as you'll see how many chunks the article was turned into and which one it's currently loading from the text-to-speech service (Async).
If you'll allow me to get into the weeds a bit here, text-to-speech is more natural the more context you can give it for each word that's being said. So you don't want to break it into a chunk for every single word, for example. So you need to find a happy medium where you can get the latency to a good place, but you're also giving each chunk of text enough context for the engine to know how to enunciate through everything. I won't bore you with exactly what logic I'm using, but effectively what I've done in the last couple of days is reduce the size of the chunks early in articles so that you start the audio playing back quicker. Which, in most scenarios on most network connections, should lead to a smooth experience. Kind of like how Netflix sometimes starts streaming at a slightly lower resolution until it can buffer higher resolution video a few seconds later.
Amara is a new voice available in the service, and I think it sounds really nice.
I've added a masculine or feminine label to each voice to give users an idea of what they're going to get before they click the preview. There's only six voices now, but I suspect this number will continue to creep up, and letting users filter by whatever vocal character they prefer will be more and more helpful in time.
This week I made some updates to the general UI of the web app, and those weren't reflected in the now playing modal. So I've implemented some changes there to make the buttons use the same format that we have elsewhere. I hope you all enjoy this update because I really enjoy how tactile the interface feels now, and I've normalized how buttons work across most parts of the UI.
This one doesn't really matter, but I updated the vocal previews that play in the settings page when you're getting an idea for what each voice sounds like. There was nothing wrong with the preview that they had previously, but I wanted to make sure it was clear that these were specifically for Quick Reads, so I gave the service a call out in the sample.
2026-05-29 08:00:00
Daryl Baxter: Metal Gear Solid 2 source code leak: every surprise so far
At first, I thought nothing of it - I figured owner Konami would shut down links to it, and that'd be it. But in the weeks since, we've seen surprises like the flood animation, which only appeared in an E3 2001 trailer, being uncovered, restoring the U.S. flag at the end, as well as early ideas for the third-person camera that would appear in both Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence and Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.
There’s some really cool stuff in here, and it’s great to see the PC community already modding things back into the game from this.
Oh, and:
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty is one of the best games of all time
Hell yeah it is.
2026-05-29 07:41:05
Mike (just Mike): Can we have the day off?
If AI is going to 10x our productivity across the board, that means that I should be able to produce the same amount of output by midday on Monday that, in the before times, would have taken all week.
So can I just take Friday off?
If only.
2026-05-29 06:51:09
One concept I'm obsessed with is the general idea of whether things (art, money, anything) are getting worse, or if we're just nostalgic for when we were younger and simply didn't know as much as we do today. I also like throwing data at my opinions about the world and seeing if they hold up.
Today, let's take a look at the Federal Reserve's data from 1989 through 2025 (which happens to be almost my entire lifetime) on wealth distribution in the US and see how my understanding of income inequality maps to some raw data. Their website has some good visualizations, but I downloaded a bunch of it as well and made my own charts to focus in on specific questions I had.
Obviously, older people have more wealth than younger people, largely because they have had more time to grow in their career and to acquire assets like homes. But how have each age group done over my lifetime?
Below is a chart showing the inflation-adjusted wealth of each age group each year, and while every age group has gone up, there are some clear outliers.
The under 40 segment have seen an 80% rise in wealth, while 40-54 year olds have seen a 120% rise. On its face, that seems okay, but the oldest Americans make those numbers look like nothing. I want to especially point out the 70+ age group, which has seen a 450% increase in wealth (again, inflation-adjusted).
In terms of broad trends, it's interesting that the 40-54 and 55-69 groups were pretty well in lock step through the 90s, and then in 2002 they diverged, with the older group taking off and the younger group basically holding steady for the next 20 years. Also, the growth of wealth in the retirement class is genuinely shocking, a trajectory shift that started in 2008 and has continued through today.
Visualizing these changes as a percentage of overall wealth helps illustrate this as well.
Those under 40 have seen their share of wealth in the US drop by half compared to other age groups. The story is about as bleak for the 40-54 age group as well. Meanwhile, the 70+ year olds are thriving, and the 55 and older age bracket controls 74% of all wealth today, compared to 56% of it in 1989.
My takeaway: wealth is centralizing in older Americans, while 54 and younger Americans have seen their part of the pie shrink considerably. You can't take it with you, but apparently old people are clinging to it as long as they can while they're here.
Income and wealth inequality is core to how I think about my economic policy positions, so it's probably a good idea to check in on whether the income distribution has moved towards the rich or if it's been more steady. Basically, I want to know when statements are made about the US economy growing, does that mean all of us are going up together, or are these gains being realized by one cohort more than another?
This chart is less dramatic than the age one, but I think there are some notable things here.
First off, look at the share from the bottom 50% of Americans, which I think shows some serious pain. They made up 3.5% of the wealth in 1989, and it's dropped to 2.5% today. but also look at how the 2008 financial crisis hurt each group — it's a blip for everyone else, but it was a massive hit to the bottom half of Americans. From 2006 to 2010, they lost 80% of their share of wealth. The good news, I guess, is that this group has recovered, although that recovery seems to have stalled once the pandemic hit.
Maybe most concerning here is the drop in the 50th-90th percentile, which has dropped quite a bit in their share of wealth pretty consistently through the 21st century. These are the people in the middle and upper middle class, and they've seen their power in the market drop consistently. This is supposed to be the "you made it!" group, but even this group is getting squeezed a bit.
In fact, there are only two cohorts that have seen their share of wealth in the US increase since 1989, and Bernie Sanders would be proud, it's the top 1% and the top 0.1%.
There are a few more interesting ways to process this data.
In terms of raw, inflation-adjusted wealth, you can see the higher wealth groups 3-5x their net worth, while the bottom 50% languish far below.
I think this is a good illustration of how wealth changes as you get richer. In the bottom 50% most of your net worth is a combination of your home, your car, and the consumer goods in your house. Meanwhile, the richer you get, the more your wealth is centralized in investments and businesses. I would just note that this is a good illustration of how not all wealth is equal. About 2/3 of the bottom 50%'s wealth comes from their home, cars, and physical goods, which may be "wealth" in economic terms, but it's not exactly liquid in a way that makes you feel wealthy day to day. I guess my car and my PS5 are "assets", but they don't help me pay the bills, and most of them depreciate in value over time.
With that in mind, let's take a look at income distribution.
We get a bit of a different mix here than the wealth charts because income is different than wealth. The 70+ age group may have enormous wealth right now, but they're not taking home much of a paycheck these days. Likewise, for many reasons, income isn't something the super wealthy want to prioritize since they're not living paycheck to paycheck, and there are much more tax-friendly way to increase their financial situation.
Anyway, looking at these inflation-adjusted numbers, we certainly see a trend of the top 20% of earners breaking off from everyone else, once again since the turn of the century. The inflation-adjusted income of the bottom 60% of Americans has gone up 110% since 1989, which is good to see, but the top 40% have seen a 261% increase over that same period.
This is reflected in the income share, which shows the 80-99 percentile holding pretty steady over the decades, but every other income group has seen a drop in share while the top 1% increased their share of the pie.
Let's bring it home by talking about wealth by education level. Once again, here is the inflation-adjusted wealth since 1989 broken down by education level.
I'm omitting the college line for now, so this is how non-college graduate people are doing. Those who don't graduate high school are consistently dropping, which also aligns with the fact fewer people are dropping out of high school than ever as well. Now let's add in the college graduate group.
There you go, the vast majority of the wealth is going to people who graduate college. I hid the college line at first because it is so far above the other lines, it made them look flat. As of 2022, 48% of Americans over the age of 25 had a college degree, which means you know we need to look at the share of wealth held by that 48%.
College graduates have 75% of the wealth, up from 50% in 1989. Interestingly, census data from 1989 shows 21% of American adults had a college degree back then, which tells me that while there certainly is a correlation between wealth and education level, it seems this shift in wealth share maps pretty linearly to the number of people getting degrees.
I tried my best to present this data as fairly as possible, and again, anyone can pull this data and do what they want with it. The data points that stood out the most to me were the age, income numbers, and where people's wealth is held. We really are seeing wealth stagnate with the oldest among us in a way that is genuinely different from what was like four decades ago.
It was also really shocking to see how the 2008 financial crisis impacted the wealth of different groups. It was an annoyance for everyone but it wiped out 80% of the bottom 50%'s share of the wealth in a couple years, which is kind of shocking.
On the income front I thought it was very notable to see how income for the top 20% of people has risen at a far greater rate than everyone below. Basically if you can get a really good job, then you're thriving but if you can't get to the top tier of incomes, then your share of the pie is shrinking every year.
And finally I think it is very notable the difference in where wealth is held in different tiers. I think there's a fundamental difference in what your net worth means when you are worth millions or billions versus when you're worth thousands. For most people your financial comfort is far more determined by the $1,000 in your checking account than whatever theoretical net worth you might have because of the car in the driveway or the gadgets in your house.
2026-05-28 22:32:57
Overworld is a new website by Brendon Bigley and Pablo Marti Cordero that's designed to be a single page to go and see what's going on in the world of video games. As someone who recently dabbled with making something like this for tech new in general, this really appeals to me and I've been checking it over the last few days.
2026-05-28 11:00:00
The original Steam Deck launched four years ago to massive praise, and I was one of those people who absolutely loved it. It released with a very reasonable entry price of $399, making handheld PC gaming accessible to a massive audience. In 2023, Valve followed up on that success by putting out two new editions of the product featuring OLED screens and a couple of minor hardware tweaks to make the experience a bit nicer. Those models went for $549 and $649.
For a while, this lineup was in a really great place. For a modest amount of money, you could buy the entry-level model, which played games beautifully and just lacked the premium screen, and if you could put up a little extra cash, you could get a better screen and those extra little refinements. This balanced pricing structure held steady for a couple of years, but as we entered 2026, things started to get a bit…rough.
First, Valve announced that the $399 base Steam Deck was no longer being produced. Once the company sold out of its remaining inventory, that budget-friendly model was gone for good. That single move pushed the starting price of the Steam Deck lineup from $399 to $549, which is a pretty significant jump for anyone looking to get into the ecosystem.
Then came the challenges facing the current tech supply chain. A few months ago, both of the OLED Steam Decks went completely out of stock with no word on when they would be available again. Today, they finally came back in stock, but they arrived with a massive catch.
Steam Deck itself hasn't changed; these new prices reflect the current state of component costs and other global logistical challenges across the industry as a whole. We’ll keep you updated if anything changes.
While the hardware is exactly the same as what Valve released in 2023, the pricing has been adjusted. By adjusted, of course, I do not mean the price went down, as console and PC prices historically have done over time. Instead, they were adjusted up by a pretty staggering amount. The two OLED Steam Decks received $240 and $300 price increases, bringing them up to $789 and an eye-watering $949. That's an increase of around 45% for each, which is blistering. And let's not even talk about how close we are to a $1,000 Steam Deck that's mostly full of 2022 tech.
As Valve mentioned in their post about the update, this isn't a case of them simply raising prices to screw over their customers. The reality is that their component costs to build these devices have gone up significantly. We are currently living through a perfect storm of AI companies gobbling up every hardware resource they can find, combined with heavy tariffs across a wide variety of computer hardware, and the result is that we are paying significantly more for tech than we did just a couple of years ago.
It is incredibly frustrating to look at the landscape today. A year ago, the entry price for a Steam Deck was $399. Today, the entry price is double that. That just means fewer people can even consider jumping in.
This looms large over Valve's upcoming hardware, specifically the Steam Machine and the Steam Frame, both of which were supposed to launch this spring, but they were delayed due to these same supply chain struggles. Given what we are seeing with the Steam Deck pricing, I can only suspect these new devices are going to be far more expensive than even our worst predictions. I genuinely worry that the manufacturing costs might be high enough that Valve potentially decides not to release them at all.
That would be a real shame, because the Steam Machine in particular looked like a product where Valve had totally nailed it. The hardware looked great, and SteamOS has evolved into a fantastic experience…it's a console-like ecosystem that I think could have won over a lot of console gamers who are curious about PC gaming. We will have to wait and see what happens next, but for now, this reality absolutely sucks.