Michael Sippey's blog, published semi-regularly since 1995.
Via Kottke , a story of what happens when bots + LLMs + coding agents + prediction markets collide with plain old fashioned websites. The open web was built on assumptions such as that visitors are mostly human, that traffic roughly tracks readership, and that the cost of serving your site is related to the value you get from serving it. Every one of those assumptions is now out of date. … A…
The Times reviews the new Bar Panisse, as well as its more famous next door neighbor. This is a glorious bit of food writing, and makes me want to stand in the “chatty line of locals.” Sit down at Chez Panisse and dinner starts, just like that. No scripted introduction, no mission statement, no spiel. Not even a little, “Have you dined with us before?” If you didn’t already know that Alice Waters…
I don’t love linking to Fallon, but I do love Phoebe Bridgers, and even the fifth time I watched the camera pull back to reveal her backing band I grinned like an idiot. What a move. 🔥🔥🔥 #
This weekend I saw Andy Warhol’s Shadows at Dia Beacon. Shadows is “a single painting in multiple parts,” and is designed to be installed to fill the available space. Dia’s space, as you can see, is large. Dia’s website explains: In 1979 Andy Warhol presented Shadows at the New York gallery of Dia Art Foundation co-founder Heiner Friedrich. The installation featured the environmentally scaled…
On the verge of some big mysterious event at MSG , BD McClay goes deep on her songs about relationships and marriage: In Love Story, Swift sang: “This love is difficult / But it is real.” That real and difficult love remained her ideal across most of her 12 albums. Love you chase, love you let go; love that heals you and breaks you; love the false god, love the king of your heart; love as freedom,…
Looks funnier than I remembered the book being? In the novel Ishiguro created this weird distance between the reader and Klara. Who won’t be able to connect with Jenna Ortega as their Artificial Friend? Here’s a relevant bit from Radhika Jones’ review of the book in the Times… Klara is likable enough — as she was manufactured to be — but it’s hard to empathize with her on the page, which is maybe…
Jessica Winter eviscerates our Vice President’s new book (HOW DOES HE HAVE TIME TO WRITE A BOOK? ISN’T HE SUPPOSED TO BE NEGOTIATING THE IRAN DEAL? Oh, right…I see.) in The New Yorker. One suspects that Vance would have a better grasp of Catholic customs and vibes if he spent more time around rank-and-file parishioners in “fraternal sharing and in ecclesial communion,” to borrow Pope Leo’s words.…
2026 just keeps delivering bangers: It starts by stepping into a shallow pool of golden light. You then begin to descend into the water. Your body passes through a ring of underwater sensors, each acting like a dolphin, using its echolocation. The sensors send ultrasonic sound waves through your body from every angle. With enough waves, and enough angles, we form an image of what’s happening…
This Isaac Chotiner interview in The New Yorker with Shimon Riklin, a television anchor and Benjamin Netanyahu ally, is wild . Putting aside the merits of this war, do you think people such as yourself and the Prime Minister misjudged Donald Trump? I know you said a joyful prayer on the air when he was elected in 2024. You must have had some sense of who this guy is—that he isn’t loyal to anyone,…
Andy Baio: It’s one thing for a fan to share or remix copyrighted material out of love for the source material, with no commercial motive. (“No copyright intended!”) It’s another for a marketing agency to take an entire living author’s book, replace its art with AI slop, add an AI word generator, monetize the traffic, promote it in your portfolio, and then outrank the official site everywhere. And…
From the folks behind Bear: Lettera is a native, refined Markdown editor for macOS. Built for writers, researchers, developers, and anyone who works with documents, from a quick blog draft to a complete technical documentation system. Lettera works around your setup. Open a single file to read and edit it, or open a folder as your writing workspace. I dig it. See also: Vergecast interview with…
Brian Elliot: There’s a fork in the road right now, and Big Tech is waving everyone down the wrong path. The story they’ve been selling is simple: AI makes you productive by letting you cut people. Fewer humans, same output, fatter margins. … We hollowed out the middle of this country once and told ourselves the market would sort it out. It didn’t—many of us were wrong. We can’t afford to do it to…
Mike Monteiro, dropping plain and evident wisdom in the context of the Knicks’ win: There is no 28 point shot in basketball. The only way to come back from a 27 point deficit is one shot at a time. Two points here. Two points there. A few three pointers sprinkled in. Some timely foul shots. And you have to do all of this while the other team is trying to do the same thing. Trying to grind you…
From Jason Snell’s “emptying the notebook” post about WWDC at Six Colors. A lot of frustrating bugs sit, untouched, for years. Apple has its priorities, and shiny new features get the love while rickety old stuff never rises to the level of being important enough to fix. Until, that is, Apple needs to have that feature work right in order to serve one of its priorities for the latest OS release.…
Ben Thompson on the Silicon Valley bubble. What, other cities around the globe aren’t plastered with billboards advertising AI startups ? This reality about the consumer market is a lesson that Silicon Valley has to re-learn every decade or so. Consider Dropbox, whose founder, Drew Houston, is in the process of stepping down. Dropbox was a category-defining product that had a viral hook — if…
Greil Marcus answers this question. “Dear Greil: I have two 17-year-old students working on a podcast, trying to understand what ‘Classic Rock’ is. Is it ‘white-guy music?’ Is it just marketing? Is it just rock and roll? Who decides what is and isn’t?” Classic Rock is what you said: Marketing and White-Guy Music. It’s a strategic concept meant to enforce a narrow worldview and shrink an historical…
Duncan Umphrey at Palladium does a deep dive into Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on artificial intelligence. For Leo XIV, those who feel humbled by the explosive progress of AI in traditional domains of human excellence misunderstand that it was never intelligence or ingenuity that gave human life meaning, but rather the transcendent orientation of the human person and his soul . A human person is…
Her new novel Whistler is out today. When was the last time you reread your first book? I’ve never reread my first. Very few authors reread their work. That’s what I’ve come to learn. I reread Bel Canto last year because I did a hand-annotated version of it, and it was fascinating. My takeaways: way too many adjectives. If I could describe something really brilliantly once, I went ahead and…
danah boyd sums it all up: Today’s social media platforms are no longer centered around sociable activities. Instead, most platforms offer us a broadcast medium and invite us to learn how to game the algorithms so that we too can create assets for the major corporations (Cotter, 2019). Since scale is valorized in this platform economy, we are encouraged to curate ourselves in pursuit of fame and…
José Márquez , in his newsletter : Humans cannot make decisions as quickly as computers. This is our blessing, not a curse. To deliberate slowly is to have time to uncover more than just the immediate answer to the known question but also to arrive at the question behind the question: the known unknowns and the looming presence, the gravitational pull of the unknown unknowns. Emphasis mine. #