Watching Becky explore the world of bodybuilding, all I know is I would really struggle with my body being scrutinized by others. Surprisingly, though, I'm actually most impressed with the vegan bodybuilders—somehow they all seem to maintain a really healthy self-esteem. Maybe it's because they never whey themselves.
For stupid reasons, I had to downgrade my Vision Pro from visionOS 26.1 to 26.0.1 today. Here's how to put Vision Pro into Device Firmware Update ("DFU") mode and downgrade.
Here's how to restore a Vision Pro in 9 easy steps:
Good luck, have fun. 🕶️
Seems like there's a bug in visionOS 26.1 where the first time you connect the new Developer Strap you get a glorious 20 Gbps connection, but then all subsequent connections are stuck at USB 2 480 Mbps speeds. Neat. reddit.com/r/VisionPro/comments/1ok1lye
Excited to engage with the Orlando developer community for the first time tonight. Going to do a hotseat Q & A on agentic coding and what it means for your weekend. meetup.com/orlandodevs/events/310925222/
A nonstop Orlando-Tokyo route is absolutely HUGE. Zip Airlines may be a budget airline, but the lowest-tier of Japanese service is frankly a superior experience to United/Delta/AA. Becky flew them to NRT earlier this year and it was great—lie-flat seats from SFO for like $1100! wesh.com/article/first-nonstop-flights-connecting-orlando-to-tokyo-announced/69177387
Video of this episode is up on YouTube:
This may be the version 45 release of Breaking Change, but when you factor in its Hotfixes and Feature Release entries, this is somehow the 50th episode of the show!
Why? Why are we still doing this to ourselves? Write in your answer and how you feel about yourself as a result to podcast@searls.co. Seriously, I need some new material.
The web runs on links, so have some:
Like many other Vision Pro sickos, I was far more excited about this week's announcement of a newly-updated Developer Strap than I was about last week's news of the M5 Vision Pro itself.
Why? The original strap allowed you to connect your Vision Pro to a Mac, but at unacceptably slow USB 2.0 (480 Mbps) speeds. This still achieved much lower latency connection than WiFi, but the image quality when running Mac Virtual Display over the USB connection was rendered far too blurry to be worthwhile. The new strap, however, offers a massively-upgraded 20 Gbps connection speed. I rushed to order one at the news, because, in theory, those speeds ought to offer the absolute best experience possible when using Vision Pro as an immersive Mac display.
While Apple's support documentation says both devices "support" connecting to the strap, what wasn't clear was whether the original hardware would be able to actually deliver the increased bandwidth.
Well, I'm happy to report after plugging in the new Developer Strap into my original Vision Pro, System Information indicates a 20 Gbps connection! Moreover, I can confirm Mac Virtual Display performs better than ever.
Seriously, I don't think I'll be able to go back. The increase in visual sharpness and the lightning-quick latency beat the pants off anything I've experienced, and I've been using Mac Virtual Display daily since the product's initial release. Up to now, others who've tried using Vision Pro for this purpose have reported that the display quality is poor—likely attributable to the need for a carefully-tuned WiFi environment to sustain the connection. That Apple finally offers a wired connection that delivers the definitive experience is a huge win.
If you own a Vision Pro and use it as a display for your Mac, you're already a dummy who blew $3500 on this thing—go spend $300 more and treat yourself to a massive upgrade.
Joe Leo and Valentino Stoll sat with me to talk about why I quit speaking and an exciting year of iteration on AI development workflows.
Appearing on: The Ruby AI Podcast
Published on: 2025-10-25
Original URL: https://www.therubyaipodcast.com/2388930/episodes/18044989-the-tldr-of-ai-dev-real-workflows-with-justin-searls
Comments? Questions? Suggestion of a podcast I should guest on? podcast@searls.co
This is a copy of the Searls of Wisdom newsletter delivered to subscribers on October 18, 2025.
It's me, your friend Justin, coming at you with my takes on September, which are arriving so late in October that I'm already thinking about November. To keep things simple, I'll just try to focus on the present moment for once.
Below is what I apparently put out this month. I'm sure I did other shit too, but none of it had permalinks:
brew install searlsco/tap/autochapter)By the way, if you've heard things that make you wonder why anyone would want the iPhone Air (e.g., it looks fragile, it's slower, it only has one camera, it gets worse battery life), this picture was all I needed to stop caring about any of that:
I lift weights, so I know I am literally capable of holding a half-pound phone all day, but I personally just couldn't abide the heft of the iPhone 17 Pro. Carrying it feels like a chore.
To be honest, over the last month I mostly stuck to my knitting and kept my head down trying to get POSSE Party over the line. The experience has been a textbook case of how a piece of software can be 100% "done" and "working" when designed for one's own personal use, but the minute you decide to invite other people to use it, the number of edge cases it needs to cover increases tenfold. Not enjoying it.
Another reason this newsletter is arriving late is that for two days I completely lost myself in OpenAI's video-generation app, Sora. It's very impressive and terrifying! I posted some examples of my "work", much to the confusion of both my hairstylist and Whatever God You Pray To. I also wrote some thoughts on what tools like Sora might mean for the future of visual storytelling, if you're interested.
Interestingly, Sora is designed as a social media app. Its obvious resemblance to Instagram and TikTok is striking. As someone who banished social networking apps from my devices years ago, I (and my wife/accountability partner) was immediately concerned that I was so sucked in by it. But where those platforms addict users into endless passive consumption of content and advertising, Sora's "SlopTok" feed couldn't be less interesting. After you sign up, create your avatar, and follow your friends, it's all about creating your own videos. There is functionally no reason for anyone to visit their feed. Whatever appeal other people's videos might have is dwarfed by the revolutionary creative potential of typing a sentence and seeing your blockbuster movie idea come to life, with you and your friends playing the starring roles.
I guess that explains why I spent so much time thinking about AI and its relationship to creative expression this month. I manually typed that just now, by the way. And an hour ago, I was waffling over whether to manually or generatively(?) fix a bug on my blog. And now I'm typing this sentence right after command-tabbing back into my editor because the realization that everybody is always in the "starring role" on Sora gave me the idea to generate a series of videos where my avatar merely lurks in the background. It is creepy as hell and fantastic.
That distracted impulse to go make a 10-second movie mid-paragraph raises a question: why do I so thoughtlessly reach for AI to generate videos, but agonize over whether to use it to write code? And what does it say that I categorically refuse to let LLMs write these essays?
Greetings, because that is today's topic.
Add creativity to the long list of things I've had to fundamentally rethink since the introduction of generative AI. Up until that singular moment when Stable Diffusion and GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT transformed how people create images, code, and prose, I held a rather unsophisticated view of what it meant to be creative. If you'd asked me in 2021 to distill the nature of creativity, I would have given you a boolean matrix of medium vs. intent. I'd probably hammer out three bullets like these:
TIL from John Hawthorn: If you use Kagi Search you can now search !rb String#gsub
This is so cool! Zero configuration required johnhawthorn.com/2025/searching-ruby-docs/
Video of this episode is up on YouTube:
Post-recording update: As I've been lobbying for (both publicly and behind the scenes), it has been announced that the RubyGems and Bundler client libraries are being transferred to Matz and the Ruby core team.
Mike McQuaid (of Homebrew fame) and I scheduled this episode of Hot Fix a week before the Ruby community exploded. Hot Fix is all about getting spicy, but even we were a little wary of the heat in that particular kitchen. The problem Mike brought to the table is the same one he's always on about: open source is not a career. Incidentally, Mike's favorite topic also happens to be relevant to the latest RubyGems controversy—because it all boils down to paying people to work on open source.
Not content to miss out on the fun, Jerod from The Changelog asked if he could join and discuss the ongoing Ruby drama as a group. So we decided to team up and do a collab episode—call it Breaking Changelog, I guess? It's nothing if not efficient: record once, edit twice, and syndicate everywhere.
If you don't mind swear words, listen to this version. If you don't like swearing, what the fuck are you doing here? (But seriously, you can listen to their edit if you want!)
Please send your compliments to podcast@searls.co and your complaints to editors@changelog.com.
"This is just proof that Matz is in bed with the fascists!" said somebody on Bluesky, I'm sure.
To be clear, this is an unmitigated GOOD THING and is a decade overdue IMNSHO. ruby-lang.org/en/news/2025/10/17/rubygems-repository-transition/
