Something I've learned about myself over the past 6 months is that if I ever discover Harry Potter is nonfiction and magic is real, my reaction will be approximately "OK that's interesting, but is this magic stuff good for anything more complex than writing unit tests?" LLMs have certainly passed that threshold of usefulness, though as of July 2026 and based solely on my own direct observations,…
I just emailed the following message regarding Utah's anti-gerrymandering law, Proposition 4 , to my state representatives and to Governor Cox. Utah residents can find their representatives via this tool , and you can submit comments to the Governor on this page . There is a rally tomorrow, December 9th, at the state capitol building in SLC. Subject: I support Prop 4 Hi [name], I'm one of your…
A few months ago Michael Carruthers asked if I'd like to do an interview for his podcast, Imperfect Creatives . We talked about my time as a solo entrepreneur and my general thoughts on that whole space (I have a few opinions). I especially enjoyed doing this interview because it's really hard to break through the noise when you're writing about such a broad topic. If I write a technical article,…
The following is an email I sent to The Sample subscribers in September 2025. The time has come for me to shut down The Sample. I worked on it full-time from February 2021 to August 2022, but was never able to turn it into a real business. For a while it was able to make enough money to pay its own server costs, so I left it running. However, that changed toward the end of 2024. I've been…
Continuing the Yakread rewrite , last weekend I rewrote the part of Yakread's ranking algorithm that merges your newsletter/RSS subscriptions and your bookmarked articles into a single personalized feed. This is basically the “heart” of Yakread, the whole reason I wanted to make the app in the first place. (And it's about 200 lines of code . Funny how much additional stuff has to be layered on top…
I've been rewriting the Yakread codebase over the past many months. The first part of that involved a lot of experimenting with different ways to structure the code. I came out of that phase a couple months ago and progress on actually rewriting the app (instead of rewriting one part of it over and over) has picked up quite a bit. Once it's complete, Yakread will be faster and better and easier to…
I recently resigned my membership in the LDS church after having been born and raised in it. Now that I've finally studied the evidence from both sides, I can see clearly that it isn't the "one true church" as it claims. So I'm now an agnostic. Below I lay out the issues that I feel are most important, along with some related sources, in case it helps any others who decide to do more research into…
One of my main regrets in life is getting a bachelor's degree. I've sometimes wondered if I would've had a better experience if I went to the University of Washington instead of BYU, but honestly I think my beef is more with formal education in general. I was homeschooled and got used to having a lot of flexibility in what I spent my time on, and being buried in coursework all the time just sucks…
It's been almost two years since I made the first release of Platypub, my own little blogging/newsletter platform. I wanted something that gave me 100% control over the design and structure: "themes" in Platypub are actual programs, not just collections of template files. I also wanted Platypub to be accessible to anyone, so I built it as a web app that could serve many users (as opposed to…
Welcome to my sporadic newsletter about improving the information environment... and whatever else I happen to be thinking about. I'm Jacob O'Bryant . Hey! It's been a while. My weekly writing habit didn't survive my getting a job ; on the bright side, my bank account has been faring much better. I've decided to start drafting posts on my phone while my kids take their bath in the evening. So my…