Photo by Ryan Snaadt We were on a road-trip through Wisconsin last month, and one morning I’m about to enjoy my “free” waffle and chef-made omelet. And then all I hear at a table nearby is a dude on a FaceTime call. No headphones. Speaker blaring. He and his brother, partner, friend, whoever just eating there with one of them on this annoying phone call that’s louder than all the rest of the…
I miss RSS readers. Maybe not RSS the specification exactly. But the concept of having one inbox for the insane amount of stuff I liked to visit on the internet, so I didn’t have to keep going back to all those sites piecemeal. But RSS died. Everyone just used Facebook/X/Hacker News/etc as their news inbox. RSS also never provided a good way for folks to still get paid if their whole article was…
In 1969 a group called The Winstons released a single called “Color Him Father.” It won a Grammy. The B-side was a throwaway gospel instrumental called “Amen, Brother,” and about a minute and a half into it the drummer, Gregory Coleman, plays a seven second solo. What’s interesting about this? You probably have no idea who any of these people are. Or their songs. But you’ve heard those seven…
Gracie Abrams just dropped a new album last week, Daughter From Hell . It’s really good. So of course Gracie is everywhere all at once. But one interview caught me off guard. Her producer said, “ I don’t know if we’ll ever make a good song again. ” And Gracie’s nodding along saying “ It’s over. ” She’s 26. Wtf. She’s already worried her best is behind her. That she’s peaked. But then I realize…
Let me short-circuit the flames. He wasn’t using AI, but my attempts at trying to rid myself of AI slop in my feed reader flagged him as the worst offender. Is he? No. It just points out how hard this is. So just yesterday, I posted a neat article to Hacker News. It was from Kagi Small Web which I’ve been using in my feed reader a ton because hell yeah I want to support the small blogs out there…
Single people can be as productive as whole teams. People are freaking out. There’s so much angst about how their jobs are changing with AI. I get it. It does feel like the things you used to do aren’t as valuable anymore. There’s new things to learn. And the new things keep changing fast. Every day there’s a new tool, or a tool you got used to last week that doesn’t exist anymore or got swallowed…
AlliHat now can talk to ChatGPT and Gemini. Still needs to use an API token you provide it. Or use the local Apple model which does a great job for small tasks like summarization of an article.
Photo by Tim McErston Some asshole made an illegal right turn onto Lake Shore Drive in Chicago yesterday. There was a line of traffic cones specifically to prevent this. He ran right over them and dragged one cone into the middle of a southbound lane of cars waiting to exit. Now the lane was stuck. Some folks just honked. Because they couldn’t imagine why they weren’t moving. So honking was their…
I have a bad habit. Pasta. Not that kind. Copypasta. 🤪 Whenever I’m reading something online (an article, a GitHub issue, a dense doc), I end up copying chunks of text, opening a new tab, pasting it into Claude, and asking my question. Then I go back to the original tab. Then I need something else about this article or website. Go back again to Claude. On and on. It’s a terrible way to work. But…
I know a lot of folks are worried about their jobs and AI. Another worry folks have is that AI is making them dumber. The things that felt good before: solving puzzling work problems, thinking hard about a project, etc. have vaporized when Claude can do it for you. It’s easy to fall into this trap. But here’s the thing, this isn’t an unknown place. So these researchers ( Adcock, et al. ) wanted to…