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Plenty of people are aware of Clarus the dogcow (who says “moof!”) , but I bet far fewer have ever laid eyes on a Wild Eep .
birdwatching
Latest posts
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RIP Claude – Rands in Repose I tried writing with AI, but I quit immediately because they suck at it. LLMs are good at structure, that’s how they convince us they’re smart, but without empathy it reads hollow. If fear of watermarks make people write for themselves again, I say that’s a good thing.
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Looks like I won’t be able to try Manna’s drone delivery today in Tulsa because I don’t live or work inside the very small launch area. Excited to give it a try when they expand it a bit.
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Manna drone delivery launches today in Tulsa. I first learned about Manna last year when Ben Thompson interviewed the CEO . Now 18 months later, it’s crazy to see Tulsa in a list like this. Cue the Sesame Street song. ”One of these things is not like the others…"
Claude to add “imperceptible” watermarks to text outputs in the EU
How Claude marks AI-generated content : When a supported Claude model generates text, it weaves an imperceptible watermark directly into the text itself. You won’t see it, and it doesn’t change the meaning, quality, or readability of Claude’s response. Because the watermark is part of the text, it will travel with the text when it’s copied and pasted elsewhere, and may…
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My blog officially has a new name: birdwatching. The domain (b10g.xyz) is still the same. I’d been considering changing the name for about 4 years, and with all the other changes it felt like maybe the right time to finally do it.
Simon Willison on Technical Blogging
Simon Willison recently reshared some advice he gave in an interview : My number one tip for blogging is to lower your standards! Aim to hit publish while you are still actively unhappy with what you have written, because the only alternative is a huge folder full of drafts and never publishing anything at all. The number one reason I’ve not published more on my blog was that I kept thinking…
Why I moved to Micro.blog
Last week I was talking to my friend Josh about blogging and our conversation was self-inspiring enough that I decided to set up another blog . Well, now my new blog is my old blog too. For the past few years, I’d been occasionally posting at b10g.xyz using a multiple blog platforms hosted on various cloud services over a span of four years. The version I retired last week was hosted on…
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I’ve mostly finished redesigning b10g.xyz after moving to Micro.blog . Their platform doesn’t have built-in analytics and I won’t be adding any of my own. The only measurement I care about is how many days a week I’m posting. My goal is for it to not dip below two.
The Death of Compromise
Josh Gammon : The industries built to help facilitate third spaces in our communities keep getting bought out and shut down. When I think about my stint at Blockbuster during college, I like to joke that I was one of the last employees. It’s not not true. Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2010 and I was working at one of Tulsa’s last remaining stores until it closed sometime in 2011.…
rust-lang/rust is adopting an LLM policy
Jynn Nelson, writing for The “Inside Rust” Blog : At the time of writing, there are 1,281 open PRs to rust-lang/rust. This represents a staggering amount of time invested by both authors and reviewers. We have long had the problem that there are more people who want to write code than people willing to review it. With the advent of LLMs, this problem only gets worse. If you’re…
Agents in the Loop
Jon Udell : I dislike the phrase “human in the loop” because it cedes authority to the machines. Let’s flip the narrative. It’s our loop, we work the same way we always have, now we recruit agents to join the team. An agent-assisted process need not be a black box that takes in prompts and emits features. Jon made me realize how easily I accepted the term “human in the loop” in the…
Two Things Can Be True at the Same Time
I’ve been a fan of Hank Green, and his brother John, since their “Vlogbrothers” series in YouTube’s early days. As well-meaning and well-spoken nerds, they rapidly assembled a community of like-minded terminally online followers. One channel quickly turned into a network, laying the groundwork for educational franchises like SciShow and Crash Course . But with a big…
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I moved my blog over to micro.blog and I’ve ported over my social replies-as-comments system with it. I’ll share more about why I moved and how I set this up soon, but any public replies to this will show up on my site.
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I’m taking up blogging again because the alternative was sending my friends extra-long text messages. They’re too nice to complain, but if I dump my thoughts into a blog instead I can simply send them a link they can give a thumbs up reaction. It’s a win-win.
"Aha! This office supplies purchase will surely cure my writer's block!"
(This post was originally on codybrom.micro.blog before I migrated b10g.xyz to micro.blog) In the middle decades of my life so far, sometimes I’d become so feckless that I’d yearn to bedrudge my innermost angst in some kind of ruled book for notes. Each time I performed this ritual, and I must confess it was many times, I’d say to myself, “Aha! This office supplies purchase…
the end of the singular iphone
For most of the twentieth century, you couldn’t buy a Coca-Cola in the Soviet Union. It was one of the most American things in existence, and like Levi’s and Michael Jackson, the Iron Curtain kept it out. When the Iron Curtain finally came down and Coke started pouring in, the apocryphal accounts all say the same thing: what people couldn’t get over wasn’t the taste. It was…
the yak is back
Today is Apple’s 50th birthday. Tim Cook shared a letter about “50 Years of Thinking Different.” There are animated homepages, Paul McCartney concerts at Apple Park, commemorative t-shirts, David Pogue just published Apple: The First 50 Years and there’s a lot of well-earned celebration for a company that really has put a dent in the universe. But I’ve been thinking…
bruce the wonder yak didn't understand when it wasn't weird
On the Macintosh episode of Version History , David Pierce and Nilay Patel had a lot of fun riffing about Mr. Macintosh, Steve Jobs’s obscure concept for a digital cryptid who lives in your computer. About 15 years later, Apple actually shipped something very similar, except instead of a mysterious little man it was a yak named Bruce. Yakkity Yak If you left older versions of Final Cut Pro…
nobody on linkedin called out my AI slop
If you interacted with my last LinkedIn post, I owe you an apology. It was 100% AI slop. This post isn’t, but here’s why I did it. Vibe shift I don’t scroll or post to LinkedIn as much as I used to, but when I do I’ve started to feel like most of the posts there are… well… AI slop. LinkedIn content has always been performative and formulaic, but I…
anthropic research subject #80,508
In December 2025, Anthropic invited Claude users to sit down with an AI interviewer and share how they use AI, what they hope it could become and what concerns them about where it’s headed. Over 80,000 people across 159 countries participated, and Anthropic recently published their findings . The findings are about what you’d expect. People want AI to do their boring work and…
it's not the future until it's boring
For a few years now, I’ve been chipping away at a historical research project about Will Rogers, the early 20th century humorist and one of the most widely read newspaper columnists in America. I find his story and his role in American cultural history fascinating, and as a fellow Oklahoman I feel somewhat obliged to help tell it. He died 91 years ago in 1935, so the vast majority of his…
your inbox is a disaster and it's not your fault
I used to judge people for their overflowing inboxes. You know those screenshots where someone’s mail app shows a gargantuan unread count? I’d cringe wondering why they wouldn’t just deal with it. How hard is it to stay on top of your email? Turns out: very hard. I’m in year two of working for a startup, which has meant a lot of late nights and weekends with less time for…
point-o-matic: sane dev estimates
I often need sane estimates I can say out loud without cringing later. To solve this, I’ve made the Point-O-Matic to “price” project friction. Scoring Points are basically friction units . They’re not effort, days or hours, but just an abstraction of how much reality tends to slow me down. My goal is to start simple, then nudge a score up or down based on the bumps I can…
revisiting agentic ai: hype or help?
The most profound insights about technology often come from direct experience rather than theoretical analysis. Last October when I gave my first-ever conference talk on agentic AI I emphasized process over code, specialized roles over general capability, and sequential collaboration over full autonomy. I was right about these architectural principles, but for entirely wrong reasons. The real…
for sale: google chrome, never monetized
The DOJ is about to drop the biggest antitrust bomb since Microsoft’s Internet Explorer case. In the late ’90s, bundling IE with Windows licenses played a big role in getting Microsoft labeled a monopoly and for good reason. IE’s complete stranglehold peaked at ~95% market share (150M users). Today Chrome’s “mere” 65% translates to 3+ billion users and gives…