Welp, after running the script for a while, I hit a limit. Apparently Gmail has a limit on the number of filters you can create. Every time I applied my Unimportant label to a new sender, the script would notice that sender and create a Gmail filter for it. One sender, one filter. It worked well, but once I hit the 1000 filter limit, it stopped being able to create new ones. I worked with ChatGPT…
This week I had a lot more time in the car to listen to podcasts. I’ve been following a lot of the discussion and reporting about data centers. Jasmine Sun is doing some of the best reporting on the topic you will find. I haven’t come across anyone else doing the depth of investigative reporting that she is doing. By all means read the article, but her conversation with Ezra Klein was great, but I…
I’ve really been enjoying the work that the DFOS team is doing. I created a space called Ohey Computer. If you want to check it out, this invite code is good for the first 10 people who use it.
One Read serves exactly one article per day, optimized for readability, without all the garbage that litters online reading experiences. If you read it, your streak grows. If you don’t, it’s gone. There’s no archive, no backlog, no “save for later.” Tomorrow brings a different article, and yesterday’s is unrecoverable. I built this little web app for myself and…
I was catching up with a friend I hadn’t talked to in a while (hi, Ethan) and we got on the topic of AI. He asked me if I use AI with my email and I said something to the extent of, ‘Not really, but kinda.’ Email inboxes, much like physical mailboxes at home, are filled with junk. New junk arrives every day. Even the stuff that isn’t junk isn’t fun to open. It’s not personal the way a letter or…
Bear blogger, Peter Gombos , created a simple, Bear-ish (Bear-adjacent?) called Moments that is really lovely. If you’ve been thinking about blogging for the first time or picking it back up, you can’t go wrong with Bear and Moments for sharing a little bit of yourself with the world.
Years of Light is a free art project and musical tribute to the work of Nas and DJ Premier, engineered and mastered by Green Studio NYC. I’m a few tracks in and this is absolutely awesome! (h/t Ian )
I was shocked and saddened to learn that Om Malik died . I always enjoyed his writing and his photography. I didn’t know him personally, but by all accounts, he was a really good human. Knowing that he had such a long battle with heart disease really reframes some of his writing, especially what is now his final blog post . I hope and trust that his family and/or friends will keep his online…
Kinda crazy I waited all this time to finally buy a 3D printer. Bambu was having a sale so I picked up a P2S AMS Combo for $100 off. It took some time to set up, but it’s calibrating now! Kids might be more excited than me. What should I print first?
It was cool to see this BBC article on Oodi , the incredible public library in Helsinki. I spent some time then when I was in Finland in 2022. It had opened only a few years before. It was the most impressive library I have ever seen. I remember thinking to myself how all public libraries should be just like it. Here are a few photos I took inside.
I don’t generally do such things, but I felt compelled to add my name to the Resonant Computing Manifesto . This isn’t a time to be passive about the future.
My brother found some slides that had some never-before-seen photos of my parents. Here’s a great one of my dad. He was my best friend and such a gray dad. I am so lucky to have had him. I model a lot of my own parenting after him. He died from pancreatic cancer in 2007 and I’ve never stopped missing him. Happy Father’s Day (and first day of summer and Go Skateboarding Day) to all of the dads out…
My guess is the Commodore Callback will sell, but it would sell a lot better if it was priced lower. I love the idea of it though. Not crazy about the form factor though.
Nick Cave answers a question in the Red Hand Files about whether he has used any of the generative AI music tools. I often wonder why musicians don’t seem more alarmed by the rise of these songwriting generators. But perhaps I am hopelessly out of touch with how the world functions, and don’t fully understand the immense positive potential they may offer. No doubt there is some truth to this, but…
I’ve been listening to Dave Eggers’s appearance on Tetragrammaton over the last few days. I’ve only read two of his books— A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and The Circle —but I’ve been a fan of his other work for a long time. I subscribed to Might and McSweeney’s when he started them. I think I might even have some McSweeney’s issues sitting in a box somewhere in the garage. They really…
Apparently my Apple Watch Ultra (1st generation) will not be able to upgrade to watchOS 27, which is a bummer. It was released in 2022, which isn’t all that long ago. Four years and now it can’t run the latest watchOS? Pretty lame. It’s my third Apple Watch since they were released and has been the absolute best wrist wearable I’ve had. I did try a Garmin for a while, but the software was…
If ever there was a way to get me to go see a movie in a theater, it’s knowing that I might be the only person in the theater. Bless you, Riley Walz (h/t Lisa Olin )
I’ve always admired Craig Newmark , especially his approach to philanthropy . The fact that he’s being put in a position to defend his philanthropy is absurd. Related: I enjoyed his appearance on Tyler Cowan’s podcast .
Shiny Frog , the fine people who make the wonderful Bear app have a new Markdown editor called Lettera . It’s currently in beta and looks great. (h/t Sippey )
John Gruber has a nice write-up about Cotypist . Like John, I actually enjoy writing, so I don’t end up using it for writing much, but I find Cotypist absolutely indispensable for everything else. Also worth mentioning that I am using Superwhisper for voice-to-text input. I use local models so nothing is sent to the cloud. All of these cool tools that run locally and aren’t dependent on the cloud,…
“being real with yourself” is the most important cognitive skill for the AI age AI makes it easier to lie to yourself. you gotta be able to honestly answer: am I actually thinking with AI, or am I letting it do the hard part for me? is this uessay/product/business a good idea, or did AI convince me it was? then you won’t need hard rules like “always/never use AI for X.” if you pay attention and…
It’s not even optimistic to say we have to try, it’s just necessary . To give up, to stop trying, is to accept that things can’t change. As Audre Lorde put it: “despair is a tool of our enemies.” Despair is a gift to those that want you to believe that what we’ve got is all we’ll get and there’s no way to make things better. From *A pep talk in the…
We watched Billie Elliot for family movie night tonight. Everyone was bawling. I’m not allowed to pick movies or plan hikes ever again. It’s such a great movie though. I saw it at Laemmle Sunset 5 sometime in 2000. There was a Virgin Megastore in the same shopping center. I bought a lot of CDs there. It was walking distance from my first apartment in LA.
I want to push for the idea that a record doesn’t have to mean something. That the point of music isn’t always to decode it and extract meaning from it. That music can be emotionally legible without being confessional. And that distortion and opacity—a sensation of watching someone on the other side of an artificial waterfall in a family buffet restaurant—is often far more interesting and resonant…
Plato had Socrates fret that writing would hollow out memory, leaving people with the appearance of wisdom rather than the thing itself. He was partly right and mostly wrong, because the offloading was modest and slow. What is different now is degree sharpening into kind: recall that is instant, total, external, and increasingly the default. From When Memory Became a Service by Mark Ghuneim