Archive

When I finished reading The Small Stuff (a non-fiction book), I excitedly told my wife and she asked me how many books I’d read this year. I thought for a second before saying, “Maybe three or four?” After I logged it to my GoodReads I went to check where this put me on my 2026 reading challenge. To my shock I didn’t even have a 2026 reading challenge. It was my first book to finish this year.

I’d started out as a fantastic reader when I was a kid, but I started to have trouble as soon as the books were too big to finish in one sitting. I loved going to the library but often my eyes were bigger than my appetite. I’d check out 3-4 books that I knew were interesting and/or important, but I’d shamefully take them back unread because I couldn’t get more than 25% into a book. I wanted to love reading, but my brain wasn’t letting me.

When it came time for the barrage of standardized tests kids have to take for benchmarking and college, my reading comprehension was almost always my lowest scoring one. As an adult, my doctor told me that trouble finishing what I read is one of the more commonly overlooked signs of ADHD, and that it gets missed most often in high achieving students like I was.

Throughout the rest of school, I only read the books I was assigned to read. My classes in college didn’t require I read any literature, so I didn’t. Throughout my college years, I almost completely stopped reading fiction for fun. I say almost, because in the last semester of my last year in college I bought a Kindle.

The novelty of an eReader worked for me for a while. It was directly responsible for the only fiction books I’ve read since high school: the first four Harry Potter books (circa 2010-2013, not recently), Ready Player One and David Levithan’s The Lover’s Dictionary. If I also count a re-reading of The Hobbit I did before those movies came out, that’s just seven books in 18 years. But that’s not really a fair accounting of things, because as best I can recollect, I read all of those more than a decade ago.

However, owning a Kindle did not magically turn into a fiction reader. Looking back through my GoodReads, Kindle and Audible history, I can confidently say I did not finish a single fiction book between 2014 and 2024. Six years after I bought it, I traded in my Kindle because I wasn’t using it anymore and we could get a nicer one for my wife with a upgrade offer.

It’s not that I wasn’t reading entirely though. Between 2014 and 2024, I finished about 25 different non-fiction books and started but did not finish about 10 more. Even now, “currently reading” items on my GoodReads profile are non-fiction.

Even if those numbers are accurate I don’t think ~2.5 books per year is especially good, and no fiction for a decade is actually quite bad.

I finished The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life by Ian Bogost a few weeks ago and meant to write a post about it, but never did. Before I finished it, I had an idea to write a series of questions that I should answer afterwards, not just for this book but potentially for any book I’d finished. This is my first post using these questions, and I’ll probably tweak them over time. The one thing I deliberately did not want to include was a rating system or a yes/no recommend scale. My thought was that I don’t need to spend any time bashing a book. My goal is to share my experience with books I enjoyed without trying to overpromise for them.

When I restarted this little writing project, I set a goal of 2 posts per week. Yesterday was the last day of my fourth week, so I thought I should take a moment to grade my little experiment. For the purposes of this exercise, I’d previously decided a week starts on Sunday, and a blog post should contain at least 300 characters of text I wrote (e.g., block quotes don’t count). Anything else is what I’d consider a micro-blog post and not part of my personal goal.

The post you’re currently reading is my eleventh in less than four weeks. I’m quite pleased with that. Eleven posts with more than 10,000 combined words in 25 days is probably some of the most prolific blogging I’ve ever done. But for how I defined my goal, I haven’t managed to stay within the parameters.

This project kicked-off mid-week, but I still managed to publish 4 posts before the next Sunday. In my second week, I hammered out three posts on separate days. That all tracks for the excitement that comes from a new or revived hobby.

But, like always happens with a new or revived hobby, the shine wears off at some point. In my third week of this experiment, I only found the time to publish one post. The same ended up true for Week 4. Luckily, I know what the problem is.

I currently have about 10 unfinished drafts of posts sitting in Drafts. Some are further along than others, but collectively, it’s approximately 5,500 unpublished words. So, basically, about a third of my writing this month never even got published.

I had started and probably could have finished my post about new data centers and still hit my weekly goal, but I had a hard time letting go and calling it done. I don’t use LLMs to write, but I did ask Claude at one point to review what I had written and it said that what I had resembled two different essays shoved together.

Instead of taking that feedback as a sign to publish them as two posts I redoubled my efforts to make it one much longer, but hopefully cohesive one. I don’t know that I succeeded. I certainly didn’t feel that way. Finishing it and publishing it felt like a chore by the end. I just wanted to be done with it.

If I’d published them as two, separate, lighter posts I think I would have gotten them up faster and been able to be happier with them. It was the fact that it grew so long that made me have a hard time letting go.

I’m still going to keep my posting goal at 2 per week, but the thing I’ll try to consider more is to publishing faster, shorter and earlier than I might think I should because the alternative is not publishing at all.

Yesterday I saw Coyote vs. Acme. It’s enjoyable as heck and worth seeing in theaters, if only to vote with your dollars that this is still the kind of movie worth making. I don’t typically write movie reviews, but after seeing such a good movie, I only had one real grievance I felt kept it from being an all-timer. (No spoilers ahead.)

I didn’t love every second of the movie’s plot and pacing. A PG movie starring animated animals must cater to children, over-explain the plot and hit trademarked catchphrases as many times as possible. I can accept that. Well-made family films pack in just as many jokes that aim high and push the limits of the rating, and when those land right they’re even funnier for the adults watching¹.

But from a script and story perspective, I don’t really have notes. My issue is its visuals.

Of the four hybrid live-action and animated Looney Tunes films ever made, this might be the worst the gang has ever looked on the silver screen.

Like 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Coyote vs. Acme puts cartoons and humans in the same world, so the 3D characters are meant to read as their original 2D selves. The film is clearly reaching for a cel-shaded style, but it doesn’t always work. Some scenes and characters look far better than others. I found Foghorn Leghorn especially hard to look at, and it might be the first time I’ve ever experienced the uncanny valley effect from a cartoon character.

Often, the CGI feels closer to 2000’s The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle than to 2021’s Space Jam: A New Legacy, which was released by the same studio a year before Coyote vs. Acme started production.

It reminded me a lot of Fortnite’s skins for characters from traditional 2D animation. The game has featured 2D-inspired cel-shaded skins of Bugs Bunny, Hank Hill, Goku, Hatsune Miku and even 2D (the animated frontman of the band Gorillaz). Fortnite’s version of the effect is exaggerated and over the top, but I still think Epic Games figured out something that Warner’s animation group has not.

In fairness, there haven’t been many movies that mix live-action and animation with 3D-rendered characters expected to pass as their original 2D selves. Adaptations of Scooby-Doo, The Smurfs, Alvin and the Chipmunks and Sonic the Hedgehog all sidestep the problem by reimagining them from scratch in 3D. I don’t necessarily think all of them turned out especially well (the original Sonic model was famously rather bad), but the new designs definitely have less uncanniness.

I could find only two real examples of characters transitioning to 3D while staying very close to their original look. The first is the 2021 mixed live-action Tom & Jerry movie, oddly enough also made by Warner Animation Group. The other is the 2022 Disney+ original Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers, where the style is partly a gag because 2D characters in that world can opt for “CGI surgery” to improve their visual fidelity.

I decided not to count 2015’s The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water, because while the 2D crew comes ashore pretty well, they end up looking more like plasticized vinyl figurines than living cartoons.

I go to all the trouble of saying this because it’s an absolute shame, and likely indicative of just how little WBD believed in the film from the beginning. Money may not have been the only problem, but it seems likely to have been part of it. Modern 3D adaptations of 2D animation have had a real renaissance in the last few decades. One of the trailers I saw before the film was for the upcoming Bluey movie. I had heard about it, but I hadn’t seen it yet. Bluey and Bingo had a lot more visual fidelity in their appearance than any of the characters in Coyote vs. Acme, but it’s clearly “CGI surgery” and certainly isn’t being done on the cheap.

While writing this, I found a VFX reel from one of the effects houses that worked on the Disney+ Chip ’n Dale movie. Some of what made it into the final cut of Coyote vs. Acme feels closer to the Rescue Rangers’ PreVis footage than the finished shots. It makes me wonder if that’s part of what happened.

It’s no secret this film had a far smaller budget than the Space Jam sequel, and I’m sure recreating the traditional 2D effect from the original Space Jam and Back in Action would have cost more than the CGI they used instead. I accept Coyote vs. Acme for what it is despite the constraints it had to navigate just to get released. I still enjoyed it, and I still recommend it despite my own criticism.

If this were my own work, I think I’d have struggled to ship it as is. It’s by no means state-of-the-art, and I’m sure they knew that. But they shipped it anyway.

It isn’t the best-looking Looney Tunes movie ever made, but it’s good enough. I got to spend two hours in a theater enjoying it, and hours more talking and writing about it.

Existing like this is far better than not existing at all.

My family first got online with Prodigy dial-up when I was 8. We connected to it via a local phone number, and so I thought that meant the offices of our local phone operator down the street was where “internet” lived. As I got older I began to understand it was far more complex than that.

One of my next-door neighbors growing up was a tall man named Craig. He spoke in a loud, but friendly, North Carolina accent that likely wouldn’t make you think he was the kind of guy who gets really into computers. With his characteristic strawberry-blond horseshoe mustache, he looked, talked and even dressed like a long-lost cousin of Dale Earnhardt.

But in the same way my dad just knew how to work on any car, Craig knew computers. Every so often he’d help my family out, upgrading our first desktop from a 2GB hard drive to 8GB and later helping us make the jump from Windows 95 to Windows 98.

I’ve been thinking about Craig recently because he was the first person I ever knew who worked in a data center. When I think about data centers, I still picture them exactly the way he described them: large, cold rooms filled with rows of whirring computers packed into racks and watched over day and night by people like him.

I can’t remember where Craig worked, and I may not have known at the time. For all I know, what he oversaw was a private network for a single company and not even part of the public internet. But the image sticks with me because it was likely the first time I understood, even vaguely, that rooms full of computers somewhere were doing something important enough that somebody had to watch over them day and night.

From the birdwatching colophon:

Posts are written in Markdown because writing requires restraint.

I added some new pages to the site recently, including a colophon. I’m pretty sure the first time I ever saw the word “colophon” was the one on Daring Fireball. His is a lot shorter than mine.

Admittedly, I wrote a colophon to be like all the other cool kids, but I’ve always loved the concept and am excited to have one of my own.

The quote from my colophon above is one of the core ideas of this blog. Constraints can be a good thing.

One of the things I’d say I loved now, but hated at the time, was my university newspaper’s hard print deadline. If I didn’t have the files on the FTP server by 5pm, there simply would not be an issue. Plenty of mistakes are more forgivable than not printing. To work at the paper was, more than anything, to work for the stress of that deadline.

When I graduated college, I fully expected I’d land in a newsroom somewhere where the always-on, deadline-driven kind of work never ceased. The corporate marketing job I landed instead still had deadlines, but they might be weeks or even months away. When I have too much time to work on an idea, it doesn’t become richer, and more defined. It languishes, rotting in my drafts folder before it ever gets the chance to actually be flawed. Ze Frank called this “brain crack.”

The reason my college paper’s deadline was effective for me is because it was externally imposed and had real consequences. Writing for myself is neither. But with this blog I do have two key constraints I’m willingly adopting:

Constraint 1: I can’t host the blog (and allow hosting it to become its own hobby)

Constraint 2: I should only write in Markdown.

Markdown is a famously opinionated plain text alternative to rich text markup. Earlier this year, Anil Dash wrote about how Markdown took over the world. He and Markdown’s creator, John Gruber, were also on The Vergecast to discuss some of Markdown’s history.

I love Markdown and have been using it more and more since I first tried Bear.app in 2017, though now I mainly use Drafts (for writing) and Obsidian (for knowledge keeping and organized notes). Gruber’s original version doesn’t have all the same functions as other “flavors” of Markdown (such as the version GitHub uses, or the CommonMark spec), but they all have a common goal: the text you type with a standard keyboard should more or less resemble the formatting it would render.

Markdown doesn’t reliably solve for every type of common text formatting (hence the opinionated-ness). Notably, most “flavors” of Markdown don’t even have a standard way to underline text. Other things like tables, LaTeX and certain kinds of images and embeds vary in compatibility, but still aren’t that easy to do by hand. These range from difficult to type/scaffold on your own or are highly specific to certain flavors.

Ultimately, this is the key tradeoff of the format, and to me it’s a feature. I don’t think this blog needs all of those formatting options anyways. My intention is to limit formatting in posts to “standard” Markdown. Some non-post page content may break this rule sparingly.

My colophon states that my goal is to write at least twice a week. A pretty low bar if I count short/micro posts. I’d really wanted to commit to at least do 300+ words in a fuller post like this one with some regularity but I intentionally didn’t. I’m still easing back into writing and I wanted to set the bar low enough that I will always be able to clear it. At some point, hopefully, I’ll have done this for so long I can’t stop. I’ll raise it then, and no earlier.

Setting big, lofty goals is one of my biggest personal failure modes. So this time, I set a small one.

Writing requires restraint. Every kind.

Someone on NetNewsWire’s Discourse site recently asked, “How to find motivation for reading feeds?” Below was my response.

As a longtime RSS addict, this question reads to me like “how can I start smoking cigarettes?”

I was nigh-endlessly scrolling newsfeeds before I was endlessly scrolling social media, so in some ways they’re the same to me. But what sucks me into social media more than my newsreader are the notifications. Notifications ends up making social media a destination about me as much or more than a place to stay up on news, friends and my interests. I really should turn more of them off. One of my worst app habits is to always agree to turn them on under the belief that I’ll turn them off if I dislike them (except I never do the second part).

How Claude marks AI-generated content:

When a supported Claude model generates text, it weaves an imperceptible watermark directly into the text itself. You won’t see it, and it doesn’t change the meaning, quality, or readability of Claude’s response.

Because the watermark is part of the text, it will travel with the text when it’s copied and pasted elsewhere, and may persist through some editing. Watermarking will be applied at the model level, which means it will be present no matter which Claude product or surface the text comes from.

Today Anthropic rolled out a new support page aimed at users in the European Union as part of signing the EU AI Act’s Article 50(2) Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content. The new watermarking will apply to Claude models launched in the EU on or after August 2, 2026. Existing models are covered by a transition period but Anthropic says they’re working to add marking support to them too.

While I understand the concept of how this can work in theory, how it would actually work in practice is mind boggling. Even more so that this will apply even to API outputs from providers like AWS, Microsoft and Google.

How many characters will you have to use for something to be detectably Claude-marked? If I asked Claude to reply only with a single character, how can we be sure it’s marked? The answer is that we don’t know yet, and perhaps Anthropic has really just shipped an CYA page, especially as it pertains to marking older models.

Everyone seems to have an opinion on the effectiveness of “AI detectors” these days, but it will be interesting to see how well Anthropic’s works. If it’s any good, I expect other large economic powers will come knocking.

But I don’t see how the marking system they describe can be any good. Unless the Claude mark is complete gobbledygook (and they said it won’t be), there’s plausibly already text somewhere that would “match” this mark that wasn’t created by Claude. What’s the point of a mark if it’s more likely to cause confusion than no mark at all?

Imagine an author submits their original work to a publisher and they check it against an official Claude mark detector. Even a work with no use of AI whatsoever could may still not pass 100% because there’s nothing preventing someone from choosing the same words Claude might. And if doing so you choose to believe the author, why even check it in the first place?

So far it sounds like a system that solves for a very specific regulatory requirement, but no real problems. I’d anything, it might actually create more problems.

The case for open models just keeps getting better and better.

Simon Willison recently reshared some advice he gave in an interview:

My number one tip for blogging is to lower your standards! Aim to hit publish while you are still actively unhappy with what you have written, because the only alternative is a huge folder full of drafts and never publishing anything at all.

The number one reason I’ve not published more on my blog was that I kept thinking it still needed something. Moving to Micro.blog is in large part a way for me to lower my own bar, and write more on my blog and less just on social media.

Last week I was talking to my friend Josh about blogging and our conversation was self-inspiring enough that I decided to set up another blog.

Well, now my new blog is my old blog too. For the past few years, I’d been occasionally posting at b10g.xyz using a multiple blog platforms hosted on various cloud services over a span of four years. The version I retired last week was hosted on Cloudflare Pages with a site statically generated using Lume from Markdown files I kept in a private GitHub repo. Over the blog’s life, I’d also used Astro and Next.js on Vercel, hosted the current version for a bit on Deno Deploy, and briefly experimented with Emdash. This final version was what worked the best for me. Moving isn’t an indictment of Lume, Cloudflare, or even using Markdown in Git as a CMS. All of those things are great, except maybe the last one, and I still recommend them wholeheartedly. Just not for me.

I originally wasn’t planning to migrate, because that felt like “fixing” something that wasn’t exactly broken. But something was broken. Even though I’d published more blog posts in the last year than I had in a while, I’d come to realize that my self-managed setup lacked restraint. Any feature or tweak I wanted to add, I could. And with the help of AI agents, I often did. What I ended up with was more than enough to validate my desire to write, but I wasn’t publishing all the things I wanted to write because managing what I’d built took more of the time. I still have drafts in my Notes.app that never saw the light of day because actually publishing involved sitting down at the right machine and doing a few manual steps that I couldn’t easily do on mobile.

I’ve learned too late in my writing journey that wrangling your workflow can will drain your capacity for writing and creating if you let it. I really enjoy building platforms. It’s my day job. But I want writing to be joy, not more work. Micro.blog as a platform is exactly what I want. It’s available anywhere, it helps me syndicate to my various social accounts, it has no ads or built-in analytics, but most importantly… it has constraints I can’t change. I’m so excited I signed up for an annual subscription.

Building was fun, but I think writing will be even more fun.

Josh Gammon:

The industries built to help facilitate third spaces in our communities keep getting bought out and shut down. When I think about my stint at Blockbuster during college, I like to joke that I was one of the last employees. It’s not not true. Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2010 and I was working at one of Tulsa’s last remaining stores until it closed sometime in 2011.

Josh and I have been friends since high school and I remember occasionally going to visit him at his Blockbuster before it closed. Even before they announced its closing, the store felt like a relative everyone expected to die soon but wasn’t comfortable discussing. His store finally closed in April 2011 on the same day as half of the 21 stores in the Tulsa metro area, including the one in Broken Arrow I always went to as a kid. I was sad, but I hadn’t rented anything from a Blockbuster it probably 4 or 5 years.

It’s easy to look back and say Blockbuster should have innovated, and in my MBA program that’s exactly what my textbooks and professors said. They thought Blockbuster should have merged with someone bigger. Or they should get rid of late fees, or offer DVDs by mail, or do monthly subscriptions, or kiosks, or streaming. But Blockbuster actually did every single one of these. The reality is that they did these badly and too-late. Blockbuster did not die of a failure of imagination or even a failure to implement new ideas. Blockbuster died because consumer tastes were changing faster than they could.

Jynn Nelson, writing for The “Inside Rust” Blog:

At the time of writing, there are 1,281 open PRs to rust-lang/rust. This represents a staggering amount of time invested by both authors and reviewers. We have long had the problem that there are more people who want to write code than people willing to review it. With the advent of LLMs, this problem only gets worse.

If you’re technically minded, the policy they agreed to adopt is an interesting read, but the overview has its own summary:

It’s fine to use LLMs to answer questions, analyze, distill, refine, check, suggest, review. But not to create.

Jon Udell:

I dislike the phrase “human in the loop” because it cedes authority to the machines. Let’s flip the narrative. It’s our loop, we work the same way we always have, now we recruit agents to join the team. An agent-assisted process need not be a black box that takes in prompts and emits features.

Jon made me realize how easily I accepted the term “human in the loop” in the first place. Of course we’re in the loop, we made the damn loops! Just saying “human in the loop” implies there might one day be a loop without humans at all, which some people are trying to sell but not many people want.

I tend to agree with Jon that “agent in the loop” is a more appropriate disclosure, but if AI was ever capable of doing what big tech said it could, we might end up saying “agent(s) in the loop.” Not because we rightfully acknowledge and wish to disavow machine-centric language, but rather that we would want to acknowledge when an AI agent was keystone reviewer of a loop. As of right now, humans are still better than AI at a large variety of important review tasks, and until that changes “human in the loop” is the better name because human operators are the most valuable part.

I’ve been a fan of Hank Green, and his brother John, since their “Vlogbrothers” series in YouTube’s early days. As well-meaning and well-spoken nerds, they rapidly assembled a community of like-minded terminally online followers. One channel quickly turned into a network, laying the groundwork for educational franchises like SciShow and Crash Course. But with a big audience and community, they’ve also made good. In 2012, the brothers launched a foundation aligned with their goal to “decrease world suck”, and since then it has granted $17 million to more than 100 charities. Earlier this year, Complexly, the company the Green brothers started to produce educational content for their channels and partners like PBS, became a non-profit after both brothers donated their equity in the company.

Which is why the recent fallout over Hank admitting to using ChatGPT for research feels like such a seismic internet event. Hank Green isn’t a faceless media conglomerate chasing a payout, he’s a beloved creator at the center of the internet’s fiercest debate about automation, scale, and burnout. Hank first addressed the issues in a reply to a tweet, but the original tweet to which Hank replied to was deleted, and later posted a longer Reddit apology, admitting he had fallen into an unhealthy habit of relying heavily on generated notes to keep up with his brutal publishing schedule. He announced a pause on several of his personal projects, conceding that “the level of dopamine I’ve been getting from interacting with LLMs… is not healthy for me or good for the world.”

(This post was originally on codybrom.micro.blog before I migrated b10g.xyz to micro.blog)

In the middle decades of my life so far, sometimes I’d become so feckless that I’d yearn to bedrudge my innermost angst in some kind of ruled book for notes. Each time I performed this ritual, and I must confess it was many times, I’d say to myself, “Aha! This office supplies purchase will surely cure my writer’s block.” Dear reader, it did not.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped buying new journals and notebooks. Not because I didn’t want to, but simply because it became too depressing to look at how wasteful it had become. I expect the good people at Field Notes in particular enjoyed some lavish parties at my expense.

But weirdly, I’ve never held any contempt for any of the blogs I’ve started and abandoned. My Xanga, then the blogs feature of MySpace, various iterations of self-hosted “tumble”-logs, Tumblr (obvs), multiple Wordpress sites and even now, as I write this, I technically already have a blog. The problem with my newest one is I almost never write for it because that requires me to commit MarkDown files to a GitHub repo, something I can’t do comfortably from most places. But that was the issue I had with the others as well. They were always a very specific place that was harder to write to anytime, and often required needlessly more formality to post than not.

I thought it was easier to buy a new journal than to deal with the sense of failure I felt about the last one. I suppose this post is also mostly journaling, and not “blogging” though I think I forget what the distinction is (if there ever was one).

Maybe this platform subscription will finally cure my writer’s block.

For most of the twentieth century, you couldn’t buy a Coca-Cola in the Soviet Union. It was one of the most American things in existence, and like Levi’s and Michael Jackson, the Iron Curtain kept it out.

Today is Apple’s 50th birthday. Tim Cook shared a letter about “50 Years of Thinking Different.” There are animated homepages, Paul McCartney concerts at Apple Park, commemorative t-shirts, David Pogue just published Apple: The First 50 Years and there’s a lot of well-earned celebration for a company that really has put a dent in the universe.

But I’ve been thinking different about a lost side of Apple’s legacy. The side that hides yaks in software.

On the Macintosh episode of Version History, David Pierce and Nilay Patel had a lot of fun riffing about Mr. Macintosh, Steve Jobs’s obscure concept for a digital cryptid who lives in your computer.

About 15 years later, Apple actually shipped something very similar, except instead of a mysterious little man it was a yak named Bruce.

If you interacted with my last LinkedIn post, I owe you an apology. It was 100% AI slop.

This post isn’t, but here’s why I did it.

In December 2025, Anthropic invited Claude users to sit down with an AI interviewer and share how they use AI, what they hope it could become and what concerns them about where it’s headed. Over 80,000 people across 159 countries participated, and Anthropic recently published their findings.

The findings are about what you’d expect. People want AI to do their boring work and they’re worried it’ll take their interesting work. The things they love most about it are the same things that scare them. Anthropic’s term for this is “light and shade,” which is a polite way of saying nobody knows if this is going to be good or bad.

This more or less describes how I feel too, and that’s pretty relevant because I was one of the 80,508 people interviewed in this study.

For a few years now, I’ve been chipping away at a historical research project about Will Rogers, the early 20th century humorist and one of the most widely read newspaper columnists in America. I find his story and his role in American cultural history fascinating, and as a fellow Oklahoman I feel somewhat obliged to help tell it. He died 91 years ago in 1935, so the vast majority of his life’s work has already rolled into the public domain, and the rest will soon. My project’s bottleneck has never been a lack of material, but getting access to it in the digital vaults where it is imprisoned. There are many paid-only, private databases that hold incredible, sprawling troves of public domain content but are barely indexed and have interfaces that seem almost designed to punish efficiency. Using them feels like the company is daring you to reverse engineer a better option.

I used to judge people for their overflowing inboxes. You know those screenshots where someone’s mail app shows a gargantuan unread count? I’d cringe wondering why they wouldn’t just deal with it. How hard is it to stay on top of your email?

Turns out: very hard.

I’m in year two of working for a startup, which has meant a lot of late nights and weekends with less time for small but important tasks like working out, laundry, and deleting D2C email pollution. In less than a year I went from inbox zero to inbox disaster. I’d try to clean up here and there, but the Gmail app on my phone is barely equipped for it, and even the desktop web made deep cleaning surprisingly painful. The power was there, it just took six or seven clicks and queries to reach it. It was so much harder than I expected that I built my own app to help (more on that another time). I’ve finally got it down from 14,500+ emails to 14 and I can breathe again, but I have a lot of thoughts about how I got here in the first place.

The most profound insights about technology often come from direct experience rather than theoretical analysis. Last October when I gave my first-ever conference talk on agentic AI I emphasized process over code, specialized roles over general capability, and sequential collaboration over full autonomy. I was right about these architectural principles, but for entirely wrong reasons. The real limitations turned out to be more fundamental: accountability, security and an imperceptible line between capabilities and constraints.

The DOJ is about to drop the biggest antitrust bomb since Microsoft’s Internet Explorer case.

In the late ’90s, bundling IE with Windows licenses played a big role in getting Microsoft labeled a monopoly and for good reason. IE’s complete stranglehold peaked at ~95% market share (150M users). Today Chrome’s “mere” 65% translates to 3+ billion users and gives Google far more control over the web than IE’s team could dream of.

The DOJ’s ideal solution? Make Google do what Microsoft probably should have done: spin off or sell off their browser.

But my question is: who on Earth could even buy it?

I’ve spent a lot of time this year pondering AI’s impact on labor, especially in professional fields like mine.

While it’s a bit unsettling, history is clear: automation leads to obsolescence.

This week, for the very first time ever, I spoke at a conference. And not just any conference, Oklahoma’s largest developer conference: ThunderPlains.

There’s been a lot of chatter lately about the future of the .io ccTLD. The top-level domain was originally created as a country code top-level domain for the “British Indian Ocean Territory”, but like history tells us, countries are not forever and that means ccTLDs aren’t either. Should a treaty by the UK government be passed, the islands would become part of Mauritius, ending the need for the .io domain.

Yesterday Apple announced the new Vision Pro spatial computer (aka headset). One of the things I do at my job is kind of try to predict the future, or at least imagine how to get ahead of it so we can make the right moves today. With that, I’ve been assembling some predictions (most of which I assume will be proven wrong very quickly) on how I think the Vision Pro will change the current state of product, experiences and technology.

A few months ago I started writing a blog post that is probably never gonna get finished and so this is my attempt to rewrite it while it’s relevant and force myself to finish.

This post was originally posted as a thread on the wx.watch Mastodon account.

I guess I’ll start at the beginning. What is wx.watch?

Short answer: I want to make staying up-to-date with NWS weather alerts easier.

Long answer:

In 2009, I didn’t have a smart phone, but wanted to be as weather alert as possible. This was before NWS was on Twitter or emergency phone alerts were a thing so, I set up IFTTT to send me a text message whenever NWS added a new alert item to an ATOM feed for the area that covered my college. Versions of this setup worked well for most of the last decade but changes at IFTTT kinda forced my hand.

When I started using IFTTT, the feed was supposedly being checked every 15 minutes (or more often). For weather alerts timeliness is everything and since I was using IFTTT for free I didn’t mind a mild time delay. Unfortunately, over time this frequency would start slipping. By the end of my use of IFTTT I was getting alerts hours after they were issued, rendering them pretty worthless.

The statelessness of modern hardware design really annoys me.

I’ve wanted to write about things for a while. Product things. Art things. Tech things.

The barrier that held me back was a solid place to publish. I’ve used several dozen digital publishing platforms but none of them ever felt right, or more importantly mine.

The recent leadership change at Twitter served as a good reminder that the platforms you don’t own are terrible places to leave your data. So, I’ve chosen to not do that. This blog isn’t on a fancy new blogging platform, but it is my attempt to build one I want.