![\"\"\n](\"https://i.ytimg.com/vi/YEvLKzsEwMw/hqdefault.jpg\")
\n \n Following the announcement of the iPhone 18 Pro, 18 Pro Max and the new foldable iPhone Duo, Apple quietly raised the prices of the older, non-Pro iPhones it will continue to sell. The iPhone 16, 17, 17e and Air are all still available on Apple.com and other retailers, but instead of these old models getting cheaper when the newest flagship model has dropped, which is what traditionally happens, these models will now cost $100 more than they did before the event.
\nThere’s been plenty of chatter this year about Apple raising prices and I genuinely don’t think I have anything to add to that discussion. What I find more interesting is how strongly trade-in values seem to have shifted with this year’s phones.
\nI checked the posted iPhone trade-in values on Apple’s website for every September going back to 2019 when they started listing them.
\nThe Pro line offers the cleanest comparison, because the 18 Pro went up the same $100 the old non-Pro models did. In September 2025, Apple would have given you up to $550 for a year old iPhone 16 Pro. Today they’re offering up to $785 for a year old 17 Pro. Before accounting for inflation, Apple’s offer on a one year old flagship went up $235 while the phone itself went up $100. Adjust last year’s $550 into today’s money and the offer still went up $215.
\nBut what happened with the 17 Pro is consistent with other devices. Comparing every phone on Apple’s current trade in list against last year’s list, the median phone only lost $10 of trade-in value. Last year, phones typically lost $60 year-over-year, and in 2024 the typical phone lost $90. This year, some phones didn’t even go down at all. For example, the 2021 iPhone 13 Pro’s trade-in value actually went up since 2025.
\nThe clearest takeaway is that if you upgrade every year, upgrading with a trade-in on this cycle is absolutely cheaper than last year. An annual Pro upgrader will pay just $414 for the base storage model this year, down from $549 last year. On a two year upgrade cycle, this year’s deals are far more modest at $10 better than last year.
\nNow, none of this is too surprising. If RAM-ageddon makes new gadgets more expensive to manufacture, it stands to reason that old gadgets also become more valuable. Apple’s boosted trade-in offers aren’t charity, just evidence of how values have shifted in RAM-ageddon’s aftermath.
\nAlso, higher trade-in values now don’t really mean much if you keep devices longer than two years. My previous phone was a 256GB iPhone 14 Pro. It cost $1,099 new in 2022 and Apple gave me $320 for it last September. This year, a three year old 15 Pro would get up to $370. That’s $50 more credit than I got, but considering the phone is $100 more, the actual upgrade price is $50 worse than last year. So I’m less sure I’ll keep my 17 Pro for another three year cycle and risk the same fate.
\nAnd yet, I still don’t think I can convince myself to pull the trigger on a 1-year upgrade to the 18 Pro. There’s legitimately nothing that stands out to me as even a “nice to have” and I’ve still got 12 no interest payments left on the Apple Card plan for my 17 Pro. If I did upgrade, I’d have to make payments on both phones for a year to the tune of nearly $70 per month, which seems crazy. My only real argument in favor of doing it now is that these trade-in values look like a peak. The last time they spiked like this was the 2021 chip shortage and they snapped right back within two years.
\nSo this isn’t really a “time value of money” problem, but a bet on whether $785 is the best offer I’m ever going to get for this phone. It might be, and I’m still probably not going to take it.
\n", "summary": "Apple’s offering record trade-in values for your old iPhone. I’m almost tempted to upgrade my 17 Pro for the $785 of trade-in credit but I can’t justify that just for an 18 Pro.", "date_published": "2026-09-14T09:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://b10g.xyz/2026/09/14/iphone-trade-inflation/", "tags": ["apple"] }, { "id": "http://codybrom.micro.blog/2026/09/09/i-sold-cell-phones-at/", "content_html": "I sold cell phones at Best Buy when the first iPhone launched. We didn’t carry it, but you wouldn’t believe how many people asked if it was compatible with their allergy medication.
\n![\"A](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/97485/2026/a15daf51-a23a-485f-8baa-0fff99701870.jpg\")
\n",
"date_published": "2026-09-09T10:47:58-05:00",
"url": "https://b10g.xyz/2026/09/09/i-sold-cell-phones-at/",
"tags": ["tech","apple"]
},
{
"id": "http://codybrom.micro.blog/2026/09/08/getting-back-on-my-fictional/",
"title": "Getting Back on My Fictional Horse",
"content_html": "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.
\nI’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.
\nWhen 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.
\nThroughout 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.
\nThe 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 out1, 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.
\nHowever, 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.
\nIt’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.
\nEven 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.
\n\nI like fiction. I like to watch TV shows and movies that are fictional. I also used to really love to playing deeply narrative single player video games. None of those are short. I’ve logged enough time in some games that it’s best measured in days, and I’ve watched TV shows with hundreds of episodes. I have no problem getting lost in a fictional story, but there’s something about fiction books in particular that I’ve struggled with for a long time.
\nI visited Washington D.C. for the very first time in 2016 to see Chelsea play FC Barcelona, and stuck around for a few days to explore the city. While out exploring Dupont Circle one day, I ended up at Kramers. I always enjoy exploring bookstores because you never know what you might find. I was almost immediately captivated by a book I found there called Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore.
\nThe book’s protagonist, like me at the time, was a twenty-something who worked in marketing and loved technology. The book opens with him finding himself in a strange bookstore where the books mystery would begin to play out. It felt like the book for me in that moment. I was ecstatic to try it because it felt like it was tailor made for me to discover what it contained. I happily bought it, threw it in my bag and… never finished it.
\nPenumbra has sat on at least five different bookshelves across three moves in the 11 years since I bought it. It’s not alone either. At this point I have a small museum of books I would like to love but can’t finish.
\nOf that collection, I end up staring at Penumbra the most. On a few occasions I’ve thought to myself, “maybe this time will be different”, and I scuttled it into my backpack declaring it would be my airplane-read, but in the decade-plus I’ve owned it and the multiple times I’ve attempted this, none were successful. My wife has suggested I donate it rather than torture myself with it, and various other “book people” have told me it’s okay to “DNF” (did not finish) a bad book rather than force yourself to finish it. But I don’t even know if it’s bad. I’m pretty sure I’m the problem (along with my then-untreated ADHD).
\nOr, at least I thought I was, until I picked up the first book in a sci-fi series last year that really turned me around on fiction. And no, it’s not that one.
\n\nBack in January 2025, I opened up the Audible app to listen to whatever non-fiction book I was on at the time, and I noticed that All Systems Red by Martha Wells, the first book in The Murderbot Diaries series, was available to listen for free. A couple days before, my wife and I had gone to Barnes & Noble and I’d seen copies of the book on a table with a sticker advertising it was soon to be made into a show on Apple TV+. Finding it in the app for free made me feel like I had nothing to lose, but realizing it was only a 3-hour listen made me actually give it a shot.
\nI listened to the whole thing in one night. Finishing a book in one sitting like that made me feel like a kid again, in the best way possible. I finished the second book the next day, and had finished the first four books of the series by the end of the month. Books in the series can vary greatly in length, but I was fully caught up through book seven in just 4 months.2
\nMurderbot really helped me find the fun in reading fiction again. It also helped me realize that part of my problem with non-fiction is that it can make me use my brain when it needs a rest. Part of this is the source material I was selecting, because if I’m reading a book about something close to what I do for work then obviously reading it will also kind of feel like work.
\nAs an example, one non-fiction book I read recently was so good, but so densely packed with good stuff that I could really only stand to read it for about 10 minutes at a time because I’d want to make such copious notes about what I’d read. In short, a decade of reading in pursuit of knowledge had caused me to forget what it means to read in pursuit of fun.
\n\nFinishing Murderbot gave me confidence in my ability to read something bigger. My wife isn’t a big science fiction reader, but for years she’d been strongly urging me to read the one book she fully enjoyed: Project Hail Mary. Fast forward to me enjoying reading again, especially science fiction, and it being the summer of 2025 right with the movie version’s trailer about to drop, she wanted me to read the book before anything about the movie would spoil it for me.
\nI initially dragged my feet about it for a few days, but eventually gave it a shot. I’m such an idiot. It was incredible. A true roller coaster, and the first time I’ve ever set with a book and just had to go heads down and hurry to finish it because I was so nervous about what would happen next. I finished it all in four days.
\nI still enjoyed the movie when it came out, but like any book adaptation there’s always more on paper than what makes it onscreen, and I may have even loved more of what didn’t make it to the screen than what did. I don’t think the movie was bad, per se, but it was one of the first times I really felt firmly on the side of the readers in the never-ending debate of books vs. movies.
\nProject Hail Mary was my eighth fiction book of 2025, not just breaking my fiction record for a year but the previous 18+ years combined. I was having too much fun and didn’t want to stop, so I wanted to find something I could read for a while. I was starting to learn that I liked books that were nerdy and funny, and the more I thought about my next read the more it became obvious that I should find another series (and no, it’s still not that one).
\n\nBefore I read my first book of his, I was aware that Terry Pratchett was an author, but that was about it. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you he wrote Discworld, because for a long time I didn’t even know it was different from Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. To me, they were all just circular fantasy planes.
\nYet as a longtime patron of the internet’s nerdier corners, I’ve been absorbing his work through osmosis. Pratchett is simply part of the background noise online, right alongside little Bobby tables, Hanlon’s razor, the IBM training manual, and an ungodly number of references to 42.
\nEven without committing his work to memory, bits of his universe have found their way to me. I’ve heard, at length, about the boots theory of socioeconomic unfairness that explains the punishing arithmetic of poverty through cheap footwear versus durable boots. I knew about Great A’Tuin, the world turtle whose back carries four giant elephants holding up the world. I had run across references to Ankh-Morpork’s “respectable” Thieves’ Guild, which keeps crime at a tidy, well regulated and “socially acceptable” quota. I was even casually familiar with Sam Vimes and the City Watch because BBC America adapted it (poorly I’m told) into a television series.
\nMy first actual brush with his storytelling was the Amazon Prime adaptation of Good Omens. Like many others, I was drawn to it because of David Tennant’s casting. At that time, I was more aware of co-author Neil Gaiman, but his dark, moody books had never particularly interested me.3
\nAfter finishing eight sci-fi books, I was wonder if maybe this was my moment to try fantasy. Aside from The Hobbit, I’ve never even read fantasy, but I was intrigued because when I was sorting for funny adventure books Discworld was almost always top of each list. The final nudge came from a Reddit comment I found suggesting that anyone who loves wacky Dungeons & Dragons campaigns would feel right at home with Pratchett. A critical hit.
\nAs of last week, I am now four books into the 41 book series. I’ve been told there are many different ways and orders you might possibly read the series (some which annoying people on the internet claim are “wrong”), but I didn’t listen to any of them and I started at the beginning. I’ve read The Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic, Equal Rites and Mort. All have been great.
\nI finally get what people have been clamoring about for so long. The writing is sharp, witty and surprisingly quite warm. I even thought the first two books (which people often dismiss as non-essential) were a lot of fun. Someone even told me that if I liked “the worst books he ever wrote,” that I would love everything that followed. I think it was a rather rude comment, but there’s a lot of world riding on that turtle and I’m excited to see how different stories explore it.
\n\nI could have ended this post after the previous paragraph, but it would have left out one other thing I’ve been reading lately: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. After wrapping up Mort, I looked at starting the next Discworld book in the series: Sourcery. The original release order of the books is more-or-less “real time” in the canonical story universe, but it does jump around a lot between different POV characters. The book I’d just finished it considered part of the “Death” sub-series and Sourcery is part of the “Wizards” sub-series. Considering that I was about to completely change POV, I thought maybe I’d take a break and do something different.
\nThe Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series is probably the book series I’ve always wanted to read in full but never have. I’ve owned a lovely (p)leather-bound physical copy of “The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” omnibus for about 15 years, but the pages are that thin Bible-like paper that feels too delicate to actually read. So, obviously, I’ve repurchased it as an ebook twice.
\nDespite owning the series multiple times over, until last week I’d only read the very first book. I wanted to rectify that, so I started with the first book and cleared it in a day. I’m pretty sure this was my third time reading HHGTG, but my first since starting Discworld. I finally understand what people meant when they say it’s Pratchett in space, and I also completely agree.
\nThen, yesterday, for the first time ever, I finished reading The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and I finally know the ultimate question! Everyone and their mom knows the ultimate answer to live the universe and everything is 42 but 21 years4 after I read the book I finally I know the question! AH!
\nI’m now working my way through the third book in the five book trilogy. The series continues to be a fun and imaginative read, and a reasonably good critic of AI capabilities that seemed like distant capabilities. The Total Perspective Vortex in particular was so perfectly spot on. It’s too bad Douglas Adams isn’t here to witness it all. He probably would have hated it, but the way he made fun of it would have at least made everything a bit more fun.
\n\nAfter finishing The Small Stuff, my wife sent me a clip featuring author Jason Reynolds on the NPR podcast It’s Been a Minute.
\n\n\n“In one book everybody can change. In 300 pages every character that you’ve met has become a new character by the end. And so what might you do in 30 days, let alone 30 years? This is incredible. You get a snapshot of your potential every time you read a novel. That I think is what the beauty is, and I wish more men tapped into it.\nI’m so tired of people quoting me the 48 laws of power, whatever it is. I’m so tired. It’s like, bro, we not going to war. Why you trying to strategize about how to get over? I’m trying to figure out how to get you to love yourself. And what in these books are going to teach you that? You say you want to win a war, a war that I’m not always sure we fighting. Who are you fighting other than you? When you going to determine that part? When you going to realize all these women around you love you? When you going to figure out that your children love you? When you going to figure out that not everybody’s out to get you? Novels, fiction is what shows us all of that.
\n
I just sat stunned for a minute thinking about his words. I’m pretty sure it was in that exact moment I picked up Mort and continued my journey into Discworld.
\nIf this kick in the pants doesn’t get you inspired to read more fiction I don’t know what will. 📚
\n\nI absolutely should count it because I got much more out of that reading than when I was forced to read it for my eighth grade Pre-AP English class. ↩︎
\nI was fully caught up before Murderbot premiered on Apple TV. I watched two episodes before bailing because I didn’t like the changes the show makes from the books. ↩︎
\nWith one exception for American Gods. The premise was incredible, and I badly wanted to like it. Despite trying twice, I could never make it past chapter 3 before I really felt like I was really forcing myself to engage with something I didn’t resonate with. I’d also wanted to give the Showtime adaptation for TV a try, but when it got cancelled before reaching the end of the story I lost interest in ever starting it. When credible accusations against Gaiman emerged I fully gave up on the book/show and no longer have any desire to try engaging with his work ever again. ↩︎
\nPure coincidence that’s half of 42? Feels highly improbable to not be. ↩︎
\n![](\"https://cdn.micro.blog/books/9781668062630/cover.jpg\")
\nI 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.
\nSo, without further ado, here’s my thoughts on The Small Stuff:
\n1. Why did I want to read it?
\nI heard about it on The Vergecast, and as someone who builds digital products I was interested in how I might find more inspiration for gratification in physical things and how that can translate to what I build.
\n2. How long did it take to read?
\nAbout two months, which is rather slow for me. I got through the first third quickly, but the later portion took me longer.
\n3. What’s one takeaway from reading this?
\nSmall stuff is okay. You won’t only do big things in your life. Enjoy everything. Even the littlest of things. The littlest of things will provide you more gratification and satisfaction more often than the big things do. Enjoy the small things and you’ll enjoy your life.
\n4. Who would you recommend this book for?
\nAnyone who feels like their life has lost some of its simple joys. People who enjoy the stories of everyday objects. Nostalgic people who feel bad about holding onto old trinkets.
\n5. Did it meet my original expectations?
\nSome of it. It’s non-fiction, but author’s narrative schtick feels a little played out by the end. The book often feels like you’re just reading the same few chapters over and over. They’re enjoyable chapters, but depending on my reading mood, I either found it comforting or like paint drying.
\n📚
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-07T17:03:20-05:00", "url": "https://b10g.xyz/2026/09/07/book-report-the-small-stuff/" }, { "id": "http://codybrom.micro.blog/2026/09/07/i-still-havent-been-meeting/", "content_html": "I still haven’t been meeting my personal writing goals, but I’m not gonna mope about it in blog posts anymore. Just gotta write more.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-07T16:53:02-05:00", "url": "https://b10g.xyz/2026/09/07/i-still-havent-been-meeting/" }, { "id": "http://codybrom.micro.blog/2026/08/30/writing-big-and-small/", "title": "Writing Big and Small", "content_html": "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.
\nThe 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.
\nThis 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.
\nBut, 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.
\nI 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.
\nI 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.
\nInstead 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.
\nIf 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.
\nI’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.
\n", "summary": "Earlier this month I restarted blogging with the goal of posting twice per week. Now that I’m four weeks in, I thought it might be a good time to check in on my progress.", "date_published": "2026-08-30T16:20:37-05:00", "url": "https://b10g.xyz/2026/08/30/writing-big-and-small/", "tags": ["writing","blogging"] }, { "id": "http://codybrom.micro.blog/2026/08/30/shade-of-the-art/", "title": "Shade of the Art", "content_html": "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.)
\nI 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.
\nBut from a script and story perspective, I don’t really have notes. My issue is its visuals.
\nOf 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.
\nLike 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.
\nOften, 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.
\nIt 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.
\nIn 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.
\nI 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.
\nI 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.
\nI 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.
\nWhile 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.
\nIt’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.
\nIf 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.
\nIt 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.
\nExisting like this is far better than not existing at all.
\nShrek is one of the best examples of this. ↩︎
\nPeter Lorre stars as a MacGuffin in a maul-teasing, fowl-conning farce about the lengths people will go to for the things they want.
\nThe film is a love letter to golden age cartoons and film. Exactly what a no-taste exec would want to kill.
\nI give it 4 beep beeps out of 5.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-29T16:51:14-05:00", "url": "https://b10g.xyz/2026/08/29/coyote-vs-acme-peter-lorre/", "tags": ["movies"] }, { "id": "http://codybrom.micro.blog/2026/08/24/til-the-clouds-come-home/", "title": "'Til the Clouds Come Home", "content_html": "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.
\nOne 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.
\nBut 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.
\nI’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.
\nI 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.
\n\nAs a kid, I understood that going online meant my computer was talking to other computers, but I mostly imagined they belonged to other people like me. And, to be fair, my first experiences with the internet in the 1990s came at a time when it was still personal and individual enough that sometimes that was true.
\nThat changed pretty quickly with the dot-com boom and Web 2.0. By the time I was a sophomore in high school, I’d set up my first blog on Xanga.com. Another followed pretty quickly on Blogger, and then WordPress. By then I understood that these websites weren’t running on somebody’s personal computer somewhere, but I definitely had no idea where they were actually hosted.
\nThree decades after I first got online, I now make web-based software for a living and I still don’t have a better answer to that question. I could look, but I don’t have to. My work requires me to trust, but rarely verify, that a data center exists somewhere, anywhere, ready to run whatever I put there.
\nIn my head, I’ve never assigned “cyberspace” a physical address. I still tend to picture it the way the “information superhighway” was depicted on the PBS show Ghostwriter, which apparently made a lasting impression on my childhood understanding of how the internet worked.
\nIt’s so heavily abstracted now that I never really have to think about it. And for a long time, that’s worked pretty well for me. I mean, I’ll probably never see the buildings, hear the machines or meet the people keeping them running. If my site loads quickly, stays online and doesn’t cost too much, should I even care where those machines actually live?
\nAside from this blog and some GitHub Pages sites, the majority of my projects are hosted by Cloudflare. Until I looked just now, I had no idea Cloudflare even had a data center in Oklahoma City. I didn’t know because the serverless workers I use don’t require me to choose a region. So I don’t. Cloudflare figures out where my software should run, and I get to pretend the physical infrastructure behind it is somebody else’s problem.
\nIt’s a pretty convenient arrangement when you’re the person using the cloud. It’s a lot more complicated when your backyard is where somebody else wants to put it.
\nWhich is why the sudden data center boom in my hometown has been something of a head-scratcher. Tulsa isn’t exactly a place I’d ever thought of as an obvious destination for a bunch of enormous data centers. Oklahoma may be close to the geographic center of the country, but it’s definitely not the center of the country’s population mass. I had always assumed you built data centers to solve for latency and geography. That’s not why they’re building these at all.
\n\nLast week, Google announced it was behind a new 506-acre hyper-scale data center being built in the greater Tulsa area. This marks Google’s second data center in Oklahoma, and they have plans for two more. Earlier this year, Meta also broke ground on a data center in east Tulsa, their first in the state.
\nIt’d be easy to just say my hometown needs data centers like I need a hole in the head. But I can accept that the internet, and the ever-growing amount of computing and storage required to power it, ultimately does have to live somewhere. I mean, the internet is a core part of our infrastructure now, so why should a data center be any less necessary than a power plant, refinery or sewer system?
\nModern life has always depended on grotesque behemoths most of us would rather not live next to. Data centers just spent a lot of their existence hiding in plain sight. Calling them “the cloud” only reinforced that illusion, making the whole thing sound simple, abstract and almost weightless when in reality data centers are every bit as physical and resource-hungry as the industrial infrastructure we’re already familiar with, if uncomfortable with.
\nBut looking at a map of Google’s existing and planned data centers, Tulsa doesn’t appear to fill some obvious hole in the network. That’s because adding capacity to the region isn’t really the point. This facility isn’t here to connect Oklahomans or bring the internet closer to its users. It’s coming because Oklahoma has dirt cheap land, equally cheap electricity and even cheaper politicians.
\nA century after oilmen rushed to Tulsa in pursuit of untapped natural resources, tech companies are rushing to exploit a whole new set of them.
\nConstruction on Google’s project was unanimously approved by the Tulsa County Board of County Commissioners about a year ago. Typically, local governments approve projects and offer incentives to companies because, despite the tradeoffs, they expect a project to deliver one or more of the following:
\nBecause of what I do, and how much I personally benefit from cheap and effective data centers, I started writing this expecting to feel pretty neutral about this. I thought that data centers were just infrastructure and we didn’t have to like it, but we should suck it up and deal with it. But once I started examining those points carefully, it became harder to argue there were ever enough ends to justify the means, and the more I looked, the more frustrated I became.
\nI’ll start with the easiest one: Tulsa does not need this particular data center. The internet needs data centers somewhere, but this facility isn’t being built because Oklahomans are underserved or because Google needs to bring its network closer to us. The project solves a problem for Google, not Tulsa.
\nNext are the jobs. Project Clydesdale will definitely employ a lot of people while it’s being built, but construction jobs are temporary by definition. I couldn’t find any requirements that the project’s workers even be hired locally, so it’s hard to know how much of that activity represents genuinely new employment for the Tulsa area or if most of it will go to existing crews just slipping from one big project to another.
\nOnce it’s built, the site’s headcount will get a lot smaller. Phase 1 is expected to permanently employ somewhere north of 50 people, with the developer claiming 100 permanent jobs overall. I’m still pretty unclear about exactly what stage of the buildout that figure applies, but even taking that higher number, that’s quite a small workforce for 506 acres of space. I used to work at a company with 350 employees on a 15-acre campus with separate office and manufacturing buildings. That’s less than 0.05 acres per employee, still more land per person than the footprint of my house. If Clydesdale ultimately employs 100 people across the full site, it would use more than 100 times as much land per permanent job.
\nAnd when it’s all said and done, most of those permanent jobs won’t necessarily be in tech. They’ll mostly be the various skilled trades and maintenance staff needed to keep a data center running: HVAC technicians, electricians, logistics and security. These are all unquestionably real jobs, but go scroll LinkedIn and you’ll see the Tulsa area already has a healthy number of well paying openings for these today. Adding more well-paying trades jobs to the pool is good because it further incentivizes it as a career path, but this is quite an expensive route to adding some.
\nBut if you think the permanent jobs figure is underwhelming, the tax arrangement is even worse. Project Clydesdale received a 100% exemption from property taxes for the next 25 years. In exchange, for each phase the project will make a $1.5 million annual “payment in lieu of taxes,” or PILOT, increasing 1% each year. Phase 1 also includes annual payments of $500,000 to the county for community improvements.
\nThat sounds like a lot until you actually compare it to what they would have actually paid. Based on the projected $1 billion value after phase one, the site might have generated roughly $11 million each year in ad valorem property taxes (before depreciation). That’s less than a penny of every dollar invested. A literal rounding error to someone as big as Google.
\nWhen I first started looking into this, I figured the schools were the ones really being stiffed, but that’s not actually the case. Normally, when hundreds of millions in property value are to a school district’s tax base, that would make the district appear a lot wealthier on paper. So, to compensate, Oklahoma’s school-funding formula would adjust how much funding they receive from the state downward. Because of the tax abatement, that isn’t happening. So the money being put into the PILOT will actually end up leaving more money in the schools pockets than if the data center DID pay its taxes.
\nI suppose it’s better that Google moving in doesn’t leave the school with less state funding, but it’s pretty insane that doing so could have done that int he first place. It doesn’t make me think I have clever county councilors, it makes me think Oklahoma has an extremely broken system.
\nAlso, the largest beneficiary of the PILOT would be Owasso Public Schools, one of the largest and best-resourced districts in the state, with an annual budget over $100 million. Its share would amount to roughly another one percent of its budget each year. That’s not nothing, and no superintendent is going to turn it down, but it’s hardly transformative money for a district of its size.
\nBut while they’re projected to come out ahead under the PILOT, other local services lose out. On the first $1 billion phase alone, ordinary taxation could have meant roughly $500,000 more for libraries, $600,000 more for community colleges and more than $1 million for technical education each year.
\nWe are running out of potential wins, and the last best hope is that new data centers might attract complementary industry. There is little evidence of that around Google’s Mayes County facility. When Google moved into the industrial park nearly two decades ago, the site already hosted more than 75 companies and thousands of workers. More businesses have moved in since, but none that directly benefit from proximity to Google. In short, their data center did not create an economic hotspot. It moved into one.
\nThe thing data centers are good at attracting is… more data centers. For now, Google is still the only hyper-scaler in Pryor, but whenever someone goes to the trouble of building out substations, adding high-voltage transmission lines and wiring up high-capacity fiber, that just makes the surrounding acreage a plug-and-play opportunity for the next operator to jump on.
\nSo that’s it. There are still a few softer benefits around the edges, like promises of future phases and programs to train skilled tradespeople. The developer is also paying for infrastructure upgrades its own project requires. But after going through the usual case for economic development one point at a time, none of it feels substantial enough to justify the bargain county commissioners ultimately struck.
\nOne final argument I haven’t really explored, and probably the strongest case I can steelman is that if we don’t accept projects like this now, something worse might come along and we’ll have less choice. Similar industrial land could end up hosting a fluoride-polluting aluminum smelter or a nuclear waste facility that also includes data centers. Not exactly appealing alternatives, but those projects are at least promising hundreds, if not thousands, of permanent jobs.
\n“Least bad” isn’t really an exciting sell when you’re talking about economic development either. I’m not arguing we should roll out the red carper for a fluoride-emitting smelter or a nuclear wasteland simply because they have jobs numbers that look better in a press release. I’m actually arguing that sometimes “none of the above” could sometimes be the better option my government officials seem to be overlooking.
\nI refuse to accept that my corner of the country is in such dire straits that we have to choose between toxic heavy industry and server farms exempted from ordinary property taxes for 25 years. I consider myself a pragmatist and value compromise, but this isn’t pragmatic compromise. It’s subsidized extraction.
\n\nTomorrow is Election Day for the Tulsa City Council—the leaders of my city, not the county officials who approved Google’s data center. None of the mailers piling up at my house from the candidates have said anything about their views on data centers. I’d considered reaching out to ask, but after considering it for a second I realized a “good” answer would be a mealy-mouthed diatribe about how their role is to seriously consider the merits of the applications put in front of them.
\nNormally, that’s exactly what I want a politician to say. I don’t think someone who promises to reject something without a second of consideration is worthy of my trust. The problem is the system itself is heavily biased towards saying yes.
\nRubber-stamp ready local governments isn’t really a new problem. For decades now, state and local governments have all been competing in a kind of economic development sweepstakes, all trying to out-do one another with tax breaks, land and infrastructure buildouts just to get anything they can plausibly sell to constituents as a political win.
\nThrough that lens, data centers almost fit the bill too well. The don’t have any polluting smokestacks, don’t have any dangerous chemicals to spill, and their headcount is so low it doesn’t affect local traffic.
\nBut when that data center would snatch up hundreds of acres of viable ranch land, add a ton of pressure to an aging power grid, and barely contribute back to the tax base it forced this on, well residents might just end up seeing it as badly as the Superfund site local leaders thought would be avoiding.
\nThe problem isn’t that communities are being forced to weigh the tradeoffs, that just what governing is. The issue is that competing for economic development has turned it all into a race to the bottom. Tulsa County shouldn’t have to give away the store to show it’s open for business, and companies shouldn’t need 25-years of tax breaks to build the infrastructure they knew they needed.
\nBut demanding that leaders “just say no” isn’t necessarily viable policy either. In some places, projects are able to move forward because the rules can’t stop them. If a developer wants to build on land that’s properly zoned, and the project is fully compliant with all applicable laws, a local government may have almost no legal basis to reject it outright. In any case, the bigger issues have far more to do with a lack of regulation on how these kinds of projects operate. But writing new regulations is a slow, time-consuming and often perilous task, because the less regulations you have the more likely your locality is to win the next economic development opportunity. It can make it feel like you legitimately can’t win.
\nA big part of why I typically avoid writing about this stuff online is that there’s a lot of nuance that can disappear pretty quickly. I think of this all as an important civic discussion. I have my own politics and thoughts about AI, but I don’t think we have to share either of them to look at a deal like this and wonder if the community was getting enough in return.
\nBut if you still disagree with me, and think we should demand our local representatives stop every single AI or data center project, I promise that’s not a workable position. Pitchforks and torches are an effective way to rally people, but terrible one to change policy. I both hear and respect the people who say they feel something genuinely unjust is being done to their communities, both physically and culturally by AI and I too want to see the accomplishments of humans celebrated more than machines. But some other rhetoric I see online goes far beyond skepticism about AI or data centers. I’ve even seen people argue, essentially, that it would be better to slow things like cancer research than allow AI to become more entrenched. If your position on AI has siding with cancer, you may want to reconsider if that absolute stance is truly how you feel.
\nSomewhere along the line, this whole thing stops being a disagreement over what specific trade-offs a community can accept and becomes a total break down about whether any trade-offs can be accepted at all. Except that’s a dead-end because when the only acceptable answers to problems are absolutes there can’t be common ground.
\nIt makes me wonder whether we’re actually ready to have serious conversations about what we want the future of this country to look like, because the ongoing disagreements we see hashed out online about AI are just proxy fights for the larger, societal problems that are harder to assign blame for and address.
\nFor instance, we’ve spent decades failing to have a serious national conversation about man-made climate change, severe drought and historically low waterways, but the second someone posts an AI slop party flyer everybody cares about about water usage and cooling systems.
\nAnd though wages have been stagnant, labor protections have eroded and the federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 since 2009, if you believe social media you might think AI job displacement was the biggest threat to working conditions and what’s driving the affordability crisis.
\nI don’t say all of this to imply the negative effects of AI slop or data centers aren’t real, or that we shouldn’t take them seriously. I think we should. But if we want to have a serious conversation about them, it has to start with the world as it actually exists. Not one where AI alone is somehow responsible for drought, deregulation and underfunded infrastructure. I’m not saying AI is innocent or even needs to be exonerated, but let’s hold the right people accountable.
\nHonestly, it’s a lot. It’s exhausting, and it’s far more than I can even attempt to settle here. But it also makes me think about how the more “connected” we’ve made ourselves the less we really know about our own neighbors. I don’t actually know all my next door neighbors the way I did when I was a kid. Having good neighbors was something I mostly took for granted.
\nWhen the clouds do come home, they should at least be good neighbors.
\n\n", "summary": "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.", "date_published": "2026-08-24T18:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://b10g.xyz/2026/08/24/til-the-clouds-come-home/", "tags": ["tech","ai","society","google"] }, { "id": "http://codybrom.micro.blog/2026/08/19/suggested-watch-for-anyone-who/", "content_html": "Suggested watch for anyone who loves design, classic Apple stuff and creative process (a bullseye for me). In case you didn’t know, my blog’s logo is my own homage to Kare’s original icons for the Mac.
\n\n \n
![\"A](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/97485/2026/densediscovery-blankie.png\"){kind=spacer}
Many thanks to Dense Discovery for featuring Blankie in today’s issue!
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-08-18T11:54:46-05:00", "url": "https://b10g.xyz/2026/08/18/many-thanks-to-dense-discovery/", "tags": ["apps"] }, { "id": "http://codybrom.micro.blog/2026/08/18/writing-requires-restraint/", "title": "Writing Requires Restraint", "content_html": "From the birdwatching colophon:
\n\n\nPosts are written in Markdown because writing requires restraint.
\n
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.
\nAdmittedly, 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.
\nThe quote from my colophon above is one of the core ideas of this blog. Constraints can be a good thing.
\nOne 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.
\nWhen 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.”
\nThe 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:
\nConstraint 1: I can’t host the blog (and allow hosting it to become its own hobby)
\nConstraint 2: I should only write in Markdown.
\nMarkdown 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.
\nI 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.
\nMarkdown 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.
\nUltimately, 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.
\nMy 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.
\nSetting big, lofty goals is one of my biggest personal failure modes. So this time, I set a small one.
\nWriting requires restraint. Every kind.
\n\n", "summary": "Setting big, lofty goals is one of my biggest personal failure modes. So this time, I set a small one.", "date_published": "2026-08-18T08:38:00-05:00", "url": "https://b10g.xyz/2026/08/18/writing-requires-restraint/", "tags": ["productivity","writing"] }, { "id": "http://codybrom.micro.blog/2026/08/16/when-people-say-the-mac/", "content_html": "When people say the Mac was weird and funny in the early 90’s, it’s stuff like this little utility from Altura Software that they were talking about.
\n![\"\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/97485/2026/scr-20260816-tqga.png\")
\n",
"date_published": "2026-08-16T22:48:41-05:00",
"url": "https://b10g.xyz/2026/08/16/when-people-say-the-mac/",
"tags": ["apple","mac","classic mac"]
},
{
"id": "http://codybrom.micro.blog/2026/08/16/macencoding-on-cratesio-ive-been/",
"content_html": "\nI’ve been working on some classic Mac projects but I kept tripping over text encodings. My toolchain for the projects is Rust and assumed there’d be a solid, maintained crate for this, but I couldn’t find one. So I made one that follows Apple’s official Unicode maps.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-16T18:10:55-05:00", "url": "https://b10g.xyz/2026/08/16/macencoding-on-cratesio-ive-been/", "tags": ["apple","development","mac","classic mac","rust"] }, { "id": "http://codybrom.micro.blog/2026/08/16/plenty-of-people-are-aware/", "content_html": "Plenty of people are aware of Clarus the dogcow (who says “moof!”), but I bet far fewer have ever laid eyes on a Wild Eep.
\n![\"A](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/97485/2026/7e4d5bafe4.png\")
\n",
"date_published": "2026-08-16T09:05:55-05:00",
"url": "https://b10g.xyz/2026/08/16/plenty-of-people-are-aware/",
"tags": ["art","apple"]
},
{
"id": "http://codybrom.micro.blog/2026/08/13/rip-claude-rands-in-repose/",
"content_html": "\nI tried writing with AI, but I quit immediately because they suck at it. LLMs are good at structure, that’s how they convince us they’re smart, but without empathy it reads hollow. If fear of watermarks make people write for themselves again, I say that’s a good thing.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-13T14:30:44-05:00", "url": "https://b10g.xyz/2026/08/13/rip-claude-rands-in-repose/", "tags": ["ai","writing"] }, { "id": "http://codybrom.micro.blog/2026/08/12/looks-like-i-wont-be/", "content_html": "Looks like I won’t be able to try Manna’s drone delivery today in Tulsa because I don’t live or work inside the very small launch area. Excited to give it a try when they expand it a bit.
\n![\"A](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/97485/2026/c64508e77d.jpg\")
\n",
"date_published": "2026-08-12T13:18:35-05:00",
"url": "https://b10g.xyz/2026/08/12/looks-like-i-wont-be/",
"tags": ["tech"]
},
{
"id": "http://codybrom.micro.blog/2026/08/12/manna-drone-delivery-launches-today/",
"content_html": "Manna drone delivery launches today in Tulsa.
\nI first learned about Manna last year when Ben Thompson interviewed the CEO. Now 18 months later, it’s crazy to see Tulsa in a list like this. Cue the Sesame Street song. ”One of these things is not like the others…"
\n![\"\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/97485/2026/3a71141f37.jpg\")
![\"\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/97485/2026/3b607643cd.jpg\")
Someone on NetNewsWire’s Discourse site recently asked, “How to find motivation for reading feeds?” Below was my response.
\nAs a longtime RSS addict, this question reads to me like “how can I start smoking cigarettes?”
\nI 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).
\nMy FOMO and strong opinions have never really allowed me be a passive participant on social media, but the engagement carrot and stick are hollow. I get about as much fake engagement as real, but both send real notifications that short circuit my brain’s ability to focus.
\nBut like others have said, your biggest motivation to read feeds will come from blocking out the other places you would have received similar information. Video killed the radio star, and all that stuff.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-11T10:59:00-05:00", "url": "https://b10g.xyz/2026/08/11/how-to-start-smoking-rss/", "tags": ["internet"] }, { "id": "http://codybrom.micro.blog/2026/08/10/claude-to-add-imperceptible-watermarks/", "title": "Claude to add “imperceptible” watermarks to text outputs in the EU", "content_html": "How Claude marks AI-generated content:
\n\n\nWhen 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.
\nBecause 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.
\n
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.
\nWhile 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.
\nHow 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.
\nEveryone 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.
\nBut 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?
\nImagine 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?
\nSo 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.
\nThe case for open models just keeps getting better and better.
\n", "summary": "Anthropic added a new support page today with details about how they would comply with Article 50 of the EU AI Act. As a result, models released in the EU will support machine-readable marking at launch, including text generated via APIs and through providers like AWS, Microsoft and Google.", "date_published": "2026-08-10T19:42:45-05:00", "url": "https://b10g.xyz/2026/08/10/claude-to-add-imperceptible-watermarks/", "tags": ["tech","ai"] }, { "id": "http://codybrom.micro.blog/2026/08/09/my-blog-officially-has-a/", "content_html": "My blog officially has a new name: birdwatching. The domain (b10g.xyz) is still the same. I’d been considering changing the name for about 4 years, and with all the other changes it felt like maybe the right time to finally do it.
\n![](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/97485/2026/b10g-logo-card-1200x630.png\"){kind=logo}
\n",
"date_published": "2026-08-09T21:20:08-05:00",
"url": "https://b10g.xyz/2026/08/09/my-blog-officially-has-a/"
},
{
"id": "http://codybrom.micro.blog/2026/08/09/simon-willison-on-technical-blogging/",
"title": "Simon Willison on Technical Blogging",
"content_html": "Simon Willison recently reshared some advice he gave in an interview:
\n\n\nMy 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.
\n
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.
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-08-09T15:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://b10g.xyz/2026/08/09/simon-willison-on-technical-blogging/", "tags": ["writing"] }, { "id": "http://codybrom.micro.blog/2026/08/09/why-i-moved-to-microblog/", "title": "Why I moved to Micro.blog", "content_html": "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.
\nWell, 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.
\nI 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.
\nI’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.
\n\n", "summary": "I’ve learned too late in my writing journey that wrangling your workflow will drain your capacity for writing and creating if you let it. I’m moving to Micro.blog because it has constraints I can’t control.", "date_published": "2026-08-09T10:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://b10g.xyz/2026/08/09/why-i-moved-to-microblog/", "tags": ["writing","blogging"] }, { "id": "http://codybrom.micro.blog/2026/08/08/ive-mostly-finished-redesigning-bgxyz/", "content_html": "I’ve mostly finished redesigning b10g.xyz after moving to Micro.blog. Their platform doesn’t have built-in analytics and I won’t be adding any of my own. The only measurement I care about is how many days a week I’m posting. My goal is for it to not dip below two.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-08T20:46:17-05:00", "url": "https://b10g.xyz/2026/08/08/ive-mostly-finished-redesigning-bgxyz/", "tags": ["writing"] }, { "id": "http://codybrom.micro.blog/2026/08/08/the-death-of-compromise/", "title": "The Death of Compromise", "content_html": "\n\n\nThe 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.
\n
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.
\nIt’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.
\nThe closest thing to a Blockbuster near me now is my local library. There is a lot of talk about libraries being “in” again, but every time I go to mine it is as much of a ghost town as Josh’s Blockbuster was. I love the library, and I am glad other people love it too. But the most common reason I physically walk into one is to pick up a hold or drop one off. If I linger to browse around, I am almost always the only person in the building doing so.
\nThat is far opposite the way I remember the library in the ’90s and early 2000’s. People wandered the stacks and hogged the computers. The stereotypical librarian shushing a loud room now feels like a badly outdated cultural reference because it assumes enough people were in the library to have caused a ruckus in the first place.
\nHere’s my hypothesis: compromise is dead, and it killed in-person browsing with it.
\nPrior to everything being online, or conveniently delivered in 2 days or less, you had to physically go to where something was to obtain it. It was a crazy concept, I know. You could call ahead to ask about something’s availability, but that was a crapshoot and required you look up their phone number in the phonebook. When I worked at Best Buy in college, I spent plenty of shifts on phone duty answering strangers about whether we had a movie in stock. But most people did not call. They just showed up, saw what was on the shelf and made their selections from what was there. Now, you can search their stock without getting off the couch, and if you can’t order it to your door, you might be able to order it for pickup from a variety of locations so you only need make a trip when it’s guaranteed to be there for you. No matter the scenario, you never have to settle. You can now always get exactly what you want.
\nBeing denied the movie you wanted to rent, when you wanted to rent it, and then compromising on an alternative was a normal and necessary part of a Friday night1. I didn’t realize it was one of the things I might even miss most about that time until Josh wrote about walking the shelves to talk to customers. Blockbuster expected employees to burn their ten free weekly rentals on new releases so they could walk the aisles and give recommendations when the title someone was looking for wasn’t available. But in a world without a need to compromise, nobody needs recommendations.
\nWhile a lot of things were at play when Blockbuster died, the one that wasn’t immediately obvious to everyone was that we were in the middle of a major format change. Not from DVD to Blu-Ray, but from disc to digital. Blockbuster made money on all sides of the VHS to DVD transition, clearing out tape inventory to holdouts while selling everyone else the DVDs and the player to go with them. But TV on DVD started to break the video store concept. One season of a show might be a dozen discs and nobody wants to be left on a cliffhanger. Buying and collecting sets also became its own thing. But the success of DVD as a format and box-sets in general caused studios to overproduce, and eventually discs got too cheap not to own. I saw movies and TV box sets for outrageously low prices when I worked Black Friday at Best Buy. Studios did this assuming everyone would just buy it all again on Blu-ray, or digital if it came to that. They didn’t, and it was because they wouldn’t have to.
\nOn September 23, 2010, Blockbuster filed for Chapter 11. Around the same time, Home Media Magazine reported 17% of American households had a Blu-ray player (a misleading number propped up by the PS3) while more than 95% with a DVD player. But the same report said Netflix wasn’t far behind in 15% of homes, and two months later, Netflix upgraded their experimental streaming service for DVD subscribers to its own plan. The Blu-ray format didn’t stand a chance against Netflix, and neither did Blockbuster. Blockbuster’s own discs by mail service barely put a dent in an already leaking bucket, but there’s no reason to keep stores open if the only profitable business is via the mail or the Internet.
\nSo why hasn’t the rise of e-books and digital audiobooks caused a massive downfall for my library? Often when I hear someone talk about their library, it’s a discussion about how they’re 85th in line to get an e-book or an audiobook from Libby. A library’s collection is a living thing. Shelf space is finite, so books that don’t circulate have to be pruned in order to make room for books that do. This churn is necessary but mostly invisible. But a library is not a for-profit storefront, so taxpayer-funded libraries can exist as long as communities decide they should. Setting aside the completely unfair and bullshit nature of digital book licenses for libraries, people are still relying on their local libraries because they could make digital materials a part of their offerings in a way that Blockbuster could never. Your tax dollars support your library’s ability to acquire materials, even digital ones, and it’s great that they can offer it to you in a format that is convenient for you. Instead of replacing churned books exclusively with physical ones, they’ve been diverting more and more to digital. But with fewer physical books to store, it’s also caused the idea of what a library is for to shift. Some systems have started adding things like tool and equipment lending, community tele-health portals and maker-spaces. Adding and supporting those things means less money for books, and you could read that as a loss but I think it’s a clever answer. Physical library spaces continue to be valuable because they’re making the spaces more about what is most valuable in person instead exclusively a warehouse of books. A library continues to exist because it can compromise.
\nThe other part of all of this is that video stores and libraries you physically visited were less obvious “third spaces” than coffee shops and shopping malls. The internet is a third space now, but because it’s digital it offers me more ways to control who can interact with me while also affording me too much ability to exclude unfamiliar things I might actually like.
\nFor both good and bad, physical third spaces are affected by the community who inhabit them. I can’t choose the people who live and work in my community, but their diversity increases what we collectively get to experience. There’s more guarantee in the familiar, whether that be people or media, but that also has a flattening effect where the lowest of lows are effectively gone, but the highs aren’t as high either.
\nSome of the best compromises I ever made happened at libraries and movie stores. I watched movies and read books I’d never heard of, and a few of them became the most important things I’ve ever seen or read. Some were absolute crap, and not even the good kind of crap. But the risk was part of it. There was less information to make decisions with, so you may have just found your next favorite movie but you won’t find out until you get home to watch it.
\nWhen you start looking around, you’ll can see that the death of compromise is all around us, but it doesn’t have to be. Ask for recommendations, take more risks and you’ll see that compromise is actually how to get to a better place than where you even wanted to go.
\nBack in the Blockbuster days, if they didn’t have what you wanted, you couldn’t simply drive to the next Blockbuster, because that’s not really how that worked. Your Blockbuster membership didn’t work at every store, and that worked to their advantage. If it did, you’d just drive a few minutes away to get what you wanted from there. You could technically set up a membership there too, but then it’d be this whole thing and you have to remember which store to return to, and yada-yada-yada. If you didn’t live through it, you just wouldn’t understand. ↩︎
\n