I mostly talk about technology, music, mental health, 90s/2000s nostalgia, optimism, and more
Thijs de Buck, an MRI physicist based in Utrecht, the Netherlands, recently posted on Reddit that he built a speed and distance tracker for his hamster’s wheel, with the data automatically uploaded to Mollie’s own Strava account. Mollie, his 10-month-old hamster, is now committed to logging nightly runs with distance, pace, and time. One recent activity showed 6.06 miles in 4 hours and 37 minutes.…
These word guessing programs need the hysteria of people running around like Chicken Little claiming the sky is falling because it feeds into smoke and mirror valuations that the Worst People on the Planet™ are selling to investors and the media. These guys need the hysteria because their money will run out if they try to sell a word guessing program instead of the almighty, all-knowing digital…
The solution to technology is not more technology. The solution to loneliness is each other, a wealth that should be available to most of us most of the time. We need to rebuild or reinvent the ways and places in which we meet; we need to recognise them as the space of democracy, of joy, of connection, of love, of trust. Technology has stolen us from each other and in many ways from ourselves, and…
In case you haven't heard: it's the Summer of Doing The Thing ! Charlee and I received our blue belts in kung fu. Doing the entire second form from start to finish is my favorite form of meditation. Right now, my tornado kick gets 270 degrees of rotation, working my way to doing a full 360. I helped a friend add QR codes onto every helmet and pair of shoulder pads at my wife's school. I got ice…
I’ve been listening to music regularly since I had gotten my first walkman in my childhood. I had always been a boring mainstream pop person. Before the internet and mobile phones I listened to music for long commutes. But I think this is the first time in my life I am listening to music – specifically jazz – at every opportunity. I can listen to it while reading or writing because I listen to…
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I can’t predict which post will matter, or to whom. I just keep leaving little lanterns along the path. Some of them will light the way for strangers. Some of them will light the way home for my family. And that’s enough. Actually, I think it’s more than enough. Maybe we’re all leaving lanterns behind in ways we don’t even realize. Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email
WhatCable explains cable speed, charging limits, e-marker data, and connected devices in plain English. Name a cable and it tracks how the cable actually performs over time, so you can spot the one that has started misbehaving. No more guessing why a cable charges slow or refuses to drive your display. Did you know that not every USB-C cable is the same? If you answered "yes" to that question,…
After I mentioned a Jurassic Park anecdote the other day, I watched the movie again. I must have seen it at least ten times now. This time, I researched every computer/software I spotted. I appreciated the continuity error call out; my daughter has started pointing out these things in movies and I am equal parts proud and horrified. Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email
Saw this on Noisy Deadlines , had to give it a go. Introduce yourself with five albums that have shaped you: Neutral Milk Hotel - In The Aeroplane Over The Sea (1998) The Presidents of the United States of America - The Presidents of the United States of America (1995) Daft Punk - Random Access Memories (2013) The Rezillos - Can't Stop The Rezillos (1978) Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere (2006) I…
For years now, I’ve documented the “glimmers” that brighten each month—the small moments that make me pause and feel safe, calm, or hopeful. Glimmers, as coined by psychotherapist Deb Dana, are the opposite of triggers. Triggers, which are unique to each person, tend to pull us into fear or distress. Glimmers, also unique to each of us, bring us comfort and steadiness. Documenting glimmers isn’t…
Without a sense of self, it is impossible to know what we truly want out of our life. Without knowing what we want out of life, we are susceptible to games people play or living on autopilot. It is difficult to have a fulfilling life without being intentional. Knowing what we want out of life will give us the courage and will needed to carve out our own path. All solid pieces of advice, but this…
It is not acceptable to bounce users on old browsers, users with bad network connections, users using assistive technologies. Certainly not from a monopoly public service. A lot of hype and noise is pressing us to extend the cowboy, wild-west phase of the software industry’s expansion. We should set that aside, and take ourselves seriously as a mature industry. Build a web application that works…
My daughter's watching this episode right now, and it makes me wonder... could something like this happen if we all collectively decided not to use social media or AI tools? Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email
Found myself nodding along during this entire article. The vast majority of people in the software industry today were not in the industry in 2000. They did not experience ordering a floppy disk of software from a classified ad in a computer magazine. Or license codes on CD boxes. Or running a SparcStation server under the receptionists desk because that’s the only machine compatible with the…
Amid all this talk about the inevitability of “AI”, I think it’s okay for us to ask what kind of future we want, and then move toward it together. And it’s already happening across the industry. ProPublica’s guild conducted a strike earlier this year, in part to win contract language that would prohibit layoffs resulting from “AI” adoption. UK workers at DeepMind, Google’s AI Research Lab, voted…
Google Chrome’s move to Manifest V3 for extensions is closing its final loophole and, with it, bringing the end of many ad blocker tools. The move to Manifest V3 has been in the works for years at this point, with one of the main points of criticism from users being that the change would break most ad blockers due to the new permissions structure and Google’s focus on privacy. The impacts of that…
How many birds and butterflies did I miss looking at dumb phones? How many good notes or interesting pieces of trash or who knows what? Maybe I do have a phone problem. Never Not Nervous is a solid comic. This one spoke to me as someone who has attempted to use a Light Phone in the past . Related: I spent the weekend in Sheboygan with my family, as is our annual summer kickoff tradition. We spent…
Before running all of these tests, I actually did this the old-fashioned way. With pencil and paper and thinking. This entire project was inspired by putting Blonde on an 8-track and from experience, I can tell you this is a hard problem. The trouble is, I can’t tell you how I did it. There’s some human heuristic I used, definitely not an algorithm, and I can’t write it down. This seems to be what…
I don’t want to go back to floppy disks. I like fast updates. I like security patches. I like sync. I like crash reports when they help fix real issues. What I want is for “phone home” to be treated like a privileged capability, not an assumed right. In other domains, we treat privileged capabilities with care. We put them behind intentional choices. We build guardrails. And we treat abuse as a…
What we don’t yet know is how architectural coherence evolves over years in a fully agent-generated system. We’re still learning where human judgment adds the most leverage and how to encode that judgment so it compounds. We also don’t know how this system will evolve as models continue to become more capable over time. What’s become clear: building software still demands discipline, but the…
Information allows us to act more skillfully. Imagine you come to a fork on a road. Without a sign, you’d need a compass or a great sense of direction to choose correctly. But with a clear sign, you’d quickly know which road to take. The sign reduces ambiguity. The Moylan arrow, too, disambiguates a choice. Pulling in on the wrong side of the pump is an annoying inconvenience. By making the driver…
Sometimes, people in technology believe that we can solve problems by getting people to pay attention. This comes up in security, anti-virus efforts, anti-phish efforts, monitoring and alert handling, warning messages emitted by programs, warning messages emitted by compilers and interpreters, and many other specific contexts. We are basically always wrong. Read this post on the web | Respond to…
I jumped head first into the punk/metal pool this month. Here's what's been bumping on repeat for me lately: Less Than Jake - Anthem I remember a friend of mine (whose birthday is today, ironically) playing this album in his basement on repeat as we tried to 100% Super Mario 64. Good, clean ska fun. Most of the albums on this list contain songs that I haven’t really listened to, but while chopping…
Well gang, I think we can call it a day. Nothing's gonna top this. Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email
A must-watch video from Casey Muratori reflecting on the commencement speech where Eric Schmidt, founder of Google, was booed when encouraging students to adopt AI . This is a case where he had direct decision-making authority during the time period when the very worst most dystopian parts of the technology business model were developed, perfected and entrenched. He is giving this commencement…
A lot of the problem is going to come down to us. To be clear, I am cool with a lot of cognitive surrender. I don’t remember phone numbers anymore because my phone does that for me. I am happy my kids didn’t need to learn cursive. I am fine with calculators doing my daily math and my computer figuring out how to schedule my classes. These were once useful skills, but we were probably right to get…
In contexts not concerning the elite private colleges of New England and their decades-old conflicts and syllabi and on-campus squabbles, this mode of prestige media procedure matters absolutely and enormously, at scales difficult to tabulate. It’s not hard to call them all to mind: “Climate change is increasingly lethal, though critics say… it is not.” Or, “Israel is murdering journalists in Gaza…
This profile on the Fire in the Mountains Festival is a must-read. I’ve been sinking deeper into a rabbit hole of punk, but this article made me want to move laterally toward exploring metal. Tangentally related: I was browsing Apple Music the other day and saw they remastered Dethklok’s original album. Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email
It's not yet summer, but I'm declaring 2026 to be the summer where I "Do The Thing." Shannon and I have been talking about getting tattoos for years now. We went to a friend's brewery's anniversary party this past weekend, and they had a tattoo pop-up stand. You could pick from one of roughly 30 tattoos. Mine was a no brainer: skulls have been a big part of my aesthetic lately, and this one looked…
In thinking about protecting the past, I'm grateful to Brennan Brown for their post, "How are we preparing for the Long Web?," a great introduction to the web-preservation movement that's unfolding right now. I like that the tone of the post is mostly hopeful - it poises us as readers embarking on a project through time, a thought experiment into the future. Personally, I find frameworks like…
Early on, I picked up the habit of checking with him when some technical thing or other wasn’t working the way I expected: “I can’t connect to the thingamabob :(” “The whatchamacallit isn’t working :(” “How do I fix the doohickey?” etc. Without fail, James’s response would be not an answer but a question, one that has shaped my thinking ever since: What have you tried? I just stuck that on post it…
Taking inspiration from my buddy Paul's talk, I decided this week that I needed to commit to finishing my patio project. For those who forgot, I started redoing my patio last summer, but sort of lost steam + got bad anxiety about doing things to my house, so it's sat dormant. A giant sand pit, a daily reminder that I can't finish anything. The last couple of nights, I've pulled up a patio chair in…
Great blog post exploring how techniques for dealing with OCD can be broadly applied to all the feelings we feel. We can either make our internal world foreign, or we can adjust the alarm. This is what mindfulness is, mechanistically. It’s the phone-free walk, sitting with the awkward silence, dealing with boredom standing in line. It’s wrestling with the blank page instead of having AI fill it…
Maya is living the dream here. I could listen to her nerd out about React components for hours. Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email
My buddy Paul gave a talk at Minnebar ostensibly about how he's able to take a 3d scan of a room and throw it into Blender to visualize how a furniture piece will look in a room. It ended up being a love letter to creativity and learning. I've known Paul for more than two decades now. Every time I see him, he's either recently completed or is midway on some insanely cool idea. It's annoyingly…
In the wee hours of the night last April, someone stopped at roughly 20 street intersections across Silicon Valley and launched an unprecedented cyberattack that would eventually spread to multiple states, embarrassing local officials and prompting them to question their security practices. Authorities suspect the unknown culprit took advantage of weak and publicly available default passwords to…
When I’m not talking, just walking (which is most of the time), I try to cultivate the most bored state of mind imaginable. A total void of stimulation beyond the immediate environment. My rules: No news, no social media, no podcasts, no music. No “teleporting,” you could say. The phone, the great teleportation device, the great murderer of boredom. And yet, boredom: the great engine of…
During the peak of mobile app madness, iOS and Android developers would often find themselves cornered by friends, relatives, and random people at parties. “I’ve got a great idea for an app…” More often than not, this dreaded sentence would be followed by a hard sell when the developer didn’t display adequate enthusiasm. If the developer didn’t act fast and feign the exact right level of approval…
The modern advertising apparatus exists to bypass rational thought and trigger emotional responses that lead to purchasing decisions. A sophisticated machine designed to short-circuit your agency, normalized to the point of invisibility. “But it's free speech!” Bullshit. No one is entitled to yell at you “GET 20% OFF THIS UNDERWEAR YOU GLANCED AT YESTERDAY” with a dopamine megaphone in your…
Your blog is a radio station. Every time you publish a post, you are programming your station. You are choosing what goes into rotation. Some post types are your familiars, the topics and themes readers already associate with you. Some are deeper cuts, things that matter to you but may not matter to everyone. Some are experiments, signals sent into the dark to see if anyone recognizes them.…
This whole article is the encouragement I know I'll need to be brought back to at some point. Some great passages from Brian Eno in here: One thing experience shows us over and over, if we pay enough attention, is that the way out of such suffering, out of the abyss of self-concern with our mattering project, is always unselfing. Eno describes the cycle: "It goes like this: me thinking, “What’s it…
The Klan of the 1920s wasn't just a racist organization, they expanded their hate to include Jews and Catholics and immigrants (which back then were largely one and the same, as many Jews and Catholics had recently immigrated to America from Eastern Europe, Germany, Italy, and Ireland). Expanding their hateful scope brought them huge success. The Klan of the 1920s had millions of members, a…
“Sometimes — or a lot of times,” I hedged, “when people think about environment and climate news, they think about doom and gloom. What, if anything, makes you feel optimistic these days?” There was a long pause. An almost uncomfortable stretch of silence. Finally, Amy spoke. “I will be totally honest and say, I think there is something about that question — nothing personal — but this is a…
This article explains how database indexing works in a way that feels hyper-targeted toward me: using a database filled with Pokémon. Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email
Tracking every single song I listen to seems to be a habit I built a long time ago and can't seem to shake. 1 My tracking tool of choice continues to be last.fm . I recently stumbled across this site that downloads your entire history of tracks and presents the data with some seriously fun charts and graphs. You can look at mine if you aren't a last.fm user yourself. I could stare at the race…
And tonight, the category is: covers that go hard. These madlads are back in the kitchen throwing down hard to perhaps my favorite System song. How dare they. How dare they. My daughter is gonna go nuts for that alto sax solo. Of course that song won a Grammy this year. From that first strum in Tema de Guile, I was hooked. Edit: I woke up this morning and the algorithm delivered me more SFII…
I have loved listening to Giant Steps since college, but never knew why so many musically-literate people love this album. I just liked it because it sounds good. This is the first video that explained the circle of fifths in a way that made me want to learn more about music theory. Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email
I was totally sobbing by the end of this beautifully illustrated version of Danny Fenster, an American journalist who was arrested for months in Myanmar for the crime of... uh, journalism. One of the big things I took away from his story was how he trained himself to embrace boredom. I really should try to get into meditation. Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email
Is there anything more punk than spending your snowy Sunday listening to The Rezillos, piling up a mountain of snow, and digging a big hole into it, just because it's fun and makes you happy? Yeah, I'm really proud of this igloo, we kicked butt on it. Next time, we'll make the roof higher and the room bigger to accommodate two adults and two kids. Read this post on the web | Respond to this post…