notes on JB

Ad Infinitum · Matthias Ott

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 07:36:36 -0500

One approach, proposed by Google Research, is what you might call a “token auction.” In this model, advertisers don’t buy ad slots on a page. Instead, they bid, token by token, on the actual text the model generates. Each advertiser brings their own LLM, and an auction mechanism decides whose model gets to influence the next word. The output is a weighted blend of competing interests, shaped by who’s willing to pay more.
Another approach – also from Google researchers – fits the new “Search” much more precisely. It’s called “prominence allocation.” Here, when a user submits a query with commercial intent, the system runs an auction that doesn’t just decide which ads appear, but how prominently the LLM writes about each one. The auction outputs a prominence score for each advertiser, essentially telling the model: give this product 35 words, that one 20, and this one zero. The ad isn’t next to the answer. The ad is the answer. Or rather, it shapes how much space and enthusiasm each product gets within the answer.

This is terrible. I’m glad I signed up for Kagi a while back.

It’s Time to Dismantle the Technopoly | The New Yorker

Mon, 25 May 2026 06:48:57 -0500

It’s Time to Dismantle the Technopoly | The New Yorker:

In a world where a tool like TikTok can, seemingly out of nowhere, suddenly convince untold thousands of users that maybe Osama bin Laden wasn’t so bad, or in which new A.I. models can, in the span of only a year, introduce a distressingly human-like intelligence into the daily lives of millions, we have no other reasonable choice but to reassert autonomy over the role of technology in shaping our shared story. This requires a shift in thinking. Decades of living in a technopoly have taught us to feel shame in ever proposing to step back from the cutting edge. But, as in nature, productive evolution here depends as much on subtraction as addition.

It's difficult to understand the influence of technology on your own mind. I think I keep looking for the straw that breaks the camel's back, and I'm strongly suspecting AI is it for me.

How to reverse AI brain rot — A note to myself

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 07:48:25 -0500

How to reverse AI brain rot — A note to myself:

Keep skills alive that a machine could easily replace, even if it's inefficient. Cooking, writing, repairing, designing etc. Automate everything else if you don't see value in it. But don't just over-automate for the sake of it.
Examples include:
— Try to fix things when they break, sewing, wrenching, have fun with it
— Write long form articles just for the sake of it, it helps you think better
— Edit photos yourself instead of using presets, train your eye and mind
— Write code or design by hand even if AI could do it for you. If you find a task that you actually enjoy, do it manually even if it takes longer.

It’s good to see reminders that what we actually need more of are ways to remain human, and practice human skills. I’m increasingly of the mind that sitting at a computer for 8+ hours a day is decidedly not human.

How to usher in an era of abundant donuts • Buttondown

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 07:28:40 -0500

How to usher in an era of abundant donuts • Buttondown:

What would you say to someone who proclaims, “I want to be a donut maker,” but has never actually made a single donut in their life?

You say “That’s awesome. What can I do to help?”

This is a beautiful essay.

Team Mirai and Democracy - Schneier on Security

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 10:10:09 -0500

Team Mirai and Democracy - Schneier on Security:

Japan’s election last month and the rise of the country’s newest and most innovative political party, Team Mirai, illustrates the viability of a different way to do politics.
In this model, technology is used to make democratic processes stronger, instead of undermining them. It is harnessed to root out corruption, instead of serving as a cash cow for campaign donations.

This is fascinating. I don't know enough about it yet, or have thought through it enough yet to say if it's good, but it is fascinating.

I’m OK being left behind, thanks! – Terence Eden’s Blog

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 08:49:02 -0500

I’m OK being left behind, thanks! – Terence Eden’s Blog:

There are a 16,000 new lives being born every hour. They're all starting with a fairly blank slate. Are you genuinely saying that they'll all be left behind because they didn't learn your technology in utero? No. That's obviously nonsense. It is 100% OK to wait and see if something is actually useful.

Seconded.

How to do the work • Buttondown

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 11:44:23 -0500

How to do the work • Buttondown:

The cruelest thing the tech industry ever did was to tell you that they cared about you. They built you nice campuses, they called you family, they gave you clothes with their name on it. They fed you, they washed your clothes, they got you to ride in their Pride floats. They made you feel like you had not just a job, but a community. And yes, they paid you well. The stupidest thing we ever did—and I say this with nothing but love for you in my heart—but the stupidest thing we ever did was to believe it. IT was neither true, nor never-ending.
The same industry that once called you family is now using the fruits of your labor to commit war crimes. The same industry whose leaders once posted front-page missives to their sites about doing a better job in terms of diversity and inclusion are now selling their technology to fascists who use it to bomb schools.
The industry has decided what it wants to be.

Daring Fireball: Thoughts and Observations on the MacBook Neo

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 17:29:51 -0500

Daring Fireball: Thoughts and Observations on the MacBook Neo:

And the PC world should take note. One of my briefings today included a side-by-side comparison between a MacBook Neo and an HP 14-inch laptop “in the same price category”. It was something like this one, with an Intel Core 5 chip, which costs $550. The HP’s screen sucks (very dim, way lower resolution), the speakers suck, the keyboard sucks, and the trackpad sucks. It’s a thick, heavy, plasticky piece of junk. I didn’t put my nose to it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it smells bad.

Damn, John… tell me how you really feel!

I think he's right about this new MacBook Neo, Apple is going to sell boatloads of these, and my bet is that they'll get great reviews.

Microsoft's new 10,000-year data storage medium: glass - Ars Technica

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 08:37:01 -0500

Microsoft's new 10,000-year data storage medium: glass - Ars Technica:

There’s been a lot of preliminary work demonstrating different aspects of a glass-based storage system. But in Wednesday’s issue of Nature, Microsoft Research announced Project Silica, a working demonstration of a system that can read and write data into small slabs of glass with a density of over a Gigabit per cubic millimeter.

I’m not a big fan of Microsoft, but this is just flat out cool.

Owning a $5M data center - comma.ai blog

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 08:17:00 -0500

Owning a $5M data center - comma.ai blog:

These days it seems you need a trillion fake dollars, or lunch with politicians to get your own data center. They may help, but they’re not required. At comma we’ve been running our own data center for years. All of our model training, metrics, and data live in our own data center in our own office. Having your own data center is cool, and in this blog post I will describe how ours works, so you can be inspired to have your own data center too.

Things have changed since 2014 when I was last administering a data center.

February 15, 2026 - by Heather Cox Richardson

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 07:29:02 -0500

February 15, 2026 - by Heather Cox Richardson:

Extremist Republicans attacked their opponents as socialists even as their tax cuts and deregulation were moving money dramatically upward: at least $50 trillion moved upward from the bottom 90% to the top 1% between 1975 and 2020. Republican leaders and media figures fed their audiences the story that the middle class was imploding not because of Republican policies but because undeserving Black people, people of color, and feminist women demanded government handouts. This narrative fueled Trump’s political rise. He promised to fix the economic dispossession of those the modern economy left behind, by “draining the swamp,” restoring white men to control, and rebuilding the American middle class.

Liberty as Resistance — Matt Gemmell

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 15:35:33 -0500

Liberty as Resistance — Matt Gemmell:

Then there are the services and subscriptions. We use the iCloud family features, and so we pay for additional iCloud storage. Our photos are in iCloud, automatically shared between my wife and I, and we have a couple of AppleCare warranty plans. We currently subscribe to the Apple TV streaming service, and I use a few subscription-based third-party apps which are of course billed through the App Store. Even without money being a factor, we have shared folders of household documents in iCloud, shared notes for shopping lists and such, shared passwords for relevant sites and services, shared calendars and reminders, and we all use Messages and FaceTime extensively. I look at it all with despair.

Matt and I are in the same boat.

The Dangers of “Vibe Reporting” About AI - Cal Newport

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 10:33:26 -0500

The Dangers of “Vibe Reporting” About AI - Cal Newport:

Both of these articles cover the same announcement, but they produce two very different impressions. The Quartz article strongly implies that Amazon is firing people because it can now offload their work to AI. (I mean: look at the Andy Jassey quote they included in the sub-head, they clearly wanted readers to believe AI caused these job losses.)
The CNBC article, by contrast, makes it clear that the connection between AI and these layoffs is more coincident than causal.

It's increasingly important to understand if the article you're reading is trying to convince you of something, trying to anger you, or actually trying to inform you.

You are being misled about renewable energy technology.

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 21:13:19 -0500

Fantastic video. Long, but worth it. Make some popcorn and learn a thing or two.

Why Linux wound up with system package managers

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 09:47:02 -0500

Chris Siebenmann wrote a nice article explaining some of the early reasoning behind Linux package managers:

The abstract way to describe why is to say that Linux distributions had to assemble a whole thing from separate pieces; the kernel came from one place, libc from another, coreutils from a third, and so on. The concrete version is to think about what problems you’d have without a package manager. Suppose that you assembled a directory tree of all of the source code of the kernel, libc, coreutils, GCC, and so on. Now you need to build all of these things (or rebuild, let’s ignore bootstrapping for the moment).

Building everything is complicated partly because everything goes about it differently. The kernel has its own configuration and build system, a variety of things use autoconf but not necessarily with the same set of options to control things like features, GCC has a multi-stage build process, Perl has its own configuration and bootstrapping process, X is frankly weird and vaguely terrifying, and so on. Then not everyone uses ‘make install’ to actually install their software, so you have another set of variations for all of this.

This is good, but it does miss the biggest reason package managers exist: dependency hell. In short, imagine you’re installing a Linux system in the late 90’s or early 2000’s. You’d like to play music from your CD player, so you download a package and try to compile it, but realize that it’s missing a library. So you download the missing library and realize that to compile the library, you’ll have to upgrade an existing library in your system, so you upgrade, compile the library, and compile the music player application. Great, now you’ve got your music playing in the background, but now your web browser won’t launch because it depended on a specific version of the library you upgraded.

I’ve had this happen, and it was maddening. Having a centralized place that manages all the dependencies of a system was a godsend.

On another note, Chris' blog is excellent, I’ve been following it for a while. But the styling is so minimal it almost looks like there’s no css at all. In fact, I had to right-click and view source to verify. Turns out, Chris is using his own publishing system he calls “Dinky Wiki”, which I quite like.

Bruce Springsteen - Streets Of Minneapolis

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 16:47:51 -0500

The Boss.

New Video Analysis Reveals Flawed and Fatal Decisions in Shooting of Pretti

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 08:24:52 -0500

These thugs need to be held accountable. Despicable.

Watch The Video

The Wall Looks Permanent Until It Falls - by Adam Bonica

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 08:24:29 -0500

The wall looks permanent until the day it comes down. So it goes with all institutions. They are not immutable fixtures but human creations, designed to solve the problems of one era and replaceable when they fail the next.

This is the optimism we need right now.

Jump to Post

LLMs have made simple software trivial

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 08:24:10 -0500

I was out for a run today and I had an idea for an app. I busted out my own app, Quick Notes, and dictated what I wanted this app to do in detail. When I got home, I created a new project in Xcode, I committed it to GitHub, and then I gave Claude Code on the web those dictated notes and asked it to build that app.

About two minutes later, it was done…and it had a build error. 😅

But it was a simple fix, I fixed it, and the app was running on my phone. And you know what? It worked. The UI wasn’t perfect, but it was damn close. And I already had a product that achieved the goal I set out to achieve. All in all, I’d say it was about 10 minutes from idea to functioning MVP (and half of that was finishing my run).

If we could figure out how to do this without consuming the power equivalent of New England in the winter, I’d be all for it.

Jump to Post

Accepting friction - listening without a streaming subscription

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 08:23:01 -0500

Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick remembers the “homework” we used to do as music fans – reading reviews, seeking out the opinions of music critics – “all in the service of purchasing music.” Now there’s a pre-made playlist for every moment; we no longer need to spend hours curating playlists for ourselves if we want a different mix for working out, for writing, for cooking dinner. Streaming saves us a lot of work… but, ironically, people like things better when we have to work to find them. Being served music instead of seeking it out for ourselves makes us into consumers moreso than listeners. Fitzpatrick continues: “This passivity makes us as audiences, as people, less engaged with what we’re doing.”

Being more mindful, present, and engaged with whatever I’m doing is in line with this year’s theme of Getting Real¹. I’ve been thinking more about my personal music collection, and how important music used to be to me. I remember doing a presentation for one of my clases on how impactful music can be back in 8th grade. I’ve even started building up a vinyl collection, and have really enjoyed the ritual and intentionality of spending time “listening to music”.

I’m not ready to cancel my Apple Music streaming account, my entire family uses it. But, I think it might be fun to sign out on my MacBook and rebuild my personal, curated, and beautifully organized mp3 collection again.

Jump to Post

Not to be confused with the Basecamp book of the same name. ↩︎

The Year That Kicked My Ass - furbo.org

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 08:22:33 -0500

Consider my ass well and truly kicked.

Absolutely heartbreaking year for Craig Hockenberry. I just purchased Tot. I’d suggest you do as well.

Jump to Post

xkcd - Fifteen Years

Tue, 25 Nov 2025 08:21:25 -0500

Absolutely beautiful.

Jump to Post

The Tao of Cal - Cal Newport

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 08:15:19 -0500

The Tao of Cal

With the end of year rapidly approaching, and people finding themselves with some spare thinking time as work winds down for the holidays, I thought it might be fun to try to summarize essentially every major idea I discuss in one short primer.

I’m a big fan of Cal Newport’s work. I’d like to quote the entire post, but I’ll just post this one sentence. Read the rest of this article, then buy his books and read those too. Follow his advice and live a better life.

Godot Isn't Making it

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 03:54:18 -0500

Godot Isn’t Making it

Outside of a miracle, we are about to enter an era of desperation in the generative AI space. We’re two years in, and we have no killer apps — no industry-defining products — other than ChatGPT, a product that burns billions of dollars and nobody can really describe. Neither Microsoft, nor Meta, nor Google or Amazon seem to be able to come up with a profitable use case, let alone one their users actually like, nor have any of the people that have raised billions of dollars in venture capital for anything with “AI” taped to the side — and investor interest in AI is cooling.

Edward Zitron seems to be a rare voice of frustrated reason in the tech industry. He’s very critical of AI, and, more and more, I’m thinking rightfully so. OpenAI is spending over $2 to make $1, burning through billions with no path to profitability.

Couple that with the environmental cost of AI (and its just plain awful cousin, crypto currency) and the unreliability of the generated answers, and I’m wondering just where all of this goes in the next year or so.

Scout

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 09:51:43 -0500

I’m rooting for these guys. If they can pull off this truck at the $50-$60k mark, I think they are going to have a winner. I’ve been looking at electric trucks for a while, and I’m excited to see another entry in the market. And what a fantastic video:

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A proper body-on-frame truck, 10,000 lb towing capacity, all electric, made in the USA. Count me in.

The Manual with Tim Walz

Sat, 21 Sep 2024 03:44:59 -0500

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Love this guy. Patrick Rhone calls him folksy, I agree.

Morning Links

Wed, 17 Apr 2024 06:48:06 -0500

The Cloud Under the Sea

The Verge

The world’s emails, TikToks, classified memos, bank transfers, satellite surveillance, and FaceTime calls travel on cables that are about as thin as a garden hose. There are about 800,000 miles of these skinny tubes crisscrossing the Earth’s oceans, representing nearly 600 different systems, according to the industry tracking organization TeleGeography. The cables are buried near shore, but for the vast majority of their length, they just sit amid the gray ooze and alien creatures of the ocean floor, the hair-thin strands of glass at their center glowing with lasers encoding the world’s data.

Fantastic article, reading it I’m nostalgic for my time as a Sailor in the US Navy. If I was a younger man, I might be tempted to seek out a position on one of these ships.

Morning Links

Wed, 03 Apr 2024 06:47:24 -0500

Tackle complex reasoning tasks with Mistral Large, now available on Amazon Bedrock

Link

Calculate the difference in payment dates between the two customers whose payment amounts are closest to each other in the given dataset:

‘{ “transaction_id”:{“0”:“T1001”,“1”:“T1002”,“2”:“T1003”,“3”:“T1004”,“4”:“T1005”}, “customer_id”:{“0”:“C001”,“1”:“C002”,“2”:“C003”,“3”:“C002”,“4”:“C001”}, “payment_amount”:{“0”:125.5,“1”:89.99,“2”:120.0,“3”:54.3,“4”:210.2}, “payment_date”:{“0”:“2021-10-05”,“1”:“2021-10-06”,“2”:“2021-10-07”,“3”:“2021-10-05”,“4”:“2021-10-08”}, “payment_status”:{“0”:“Paid”,“1”:“Unpaid”,“2”:“Paid”,“3”:“Paid”,“4”:“Pending”} }’

Output

To find the difference in payment dates between the two customers whose payment amounts are closest to each other, we first need to identify the two closest payment amounts and then find their respective payment dates.

The payment amounts are: 125.5, 89.99, 120.0, 54.3, 210.2

The two closest payment amounts are 125.5 and 120.0. The payment date for the payment amount 125.5 is ‘2021-10-05’ and for the payment amount 120.0 is ‘2021-10-07’.

The difference in payment dates can be calculated as follows:

Date difference = |‘2021-10-07’ - ‘2021-10-05’| = 2 days

So, the difference in payment dates between the two customers whose payment amounts are closest to each other is 2 days.

AWS does well when taking complex systems and packaging them up for consumers. I don’t think we’ve seen the full impact of AI yet. Not even close.

Casey Liss - Every Failure is an Opportunity

So, I called Sonos support this morning, and braced for a fight — I’m about six months out of the warranty coverage.

Thirty minutes later, without any sort of arguing nor complaining, I have a RMA, and I’ll get a new Roam in a couple of weeks.

Reminds me of a time when I took my newly broken iPod Mini into an Apple Store. I showed it to the guy at the counter, he said he couldn’t say for sure if it was accidental or manufacturing defect, so he went in the back and brought me a brand new one. I’ve been a fan since. Sounds like Sonos learned the right lesson.

New Spatial Personas

A pair of links for this one, one from each point of view:

I was able to invite my friend Stephen Hackett’s Persona over to my house for a play date and we were able to chat face to face in a way that just seemed more natural than talking to a persona in a box. It felt more like it was him.

After our excellent ideation session, we played a round of Battleship in the excellent Game Room on Apple Arcade. After I sunk all of his ships, we watched a few minutes of For All Mankind in a couple of immersive environments.

I had always wondered about SharePlay, prior to the Vision Pro. Why would I want to keep my phone up looking at someone on FaceTime while we both watched a movie? Never made sense. Now in the light of immersive virtual reality, it makes perfect sense.

The one about the web developer job market

Baldur Bjarnason

We have the worst job environment for tech in over two decades and that’s with the “AI” bubble in full force. If that bubble pops hard before the job market recovers, the repercussions to the tech industry will likely eclipse the dot-com crash.

Well, this gave me a lot of food for thought.

xz Utils Backdoor

Schneier on Security

I simply don’t believe this was the only attempt to slip a backdoor into a critical piece of Internet software, either closed source or open source. Given how lucky we were to detect this one, I believe this kind of operation has been successful in the past. We simply have to stop building our critical national infrastructure on top of random software libraries managed by lone unpaid distracted—or worse—individuals.

Not great news the past couple days from the software industry.

Solar-powered system offers a route to inexpensive desalination - MIT News

Sat, 13 Aug 2022 09:26:39 -0500

Now, a team of researchers at MIT and in China has come up with a solution to the problem of salt accumulation — and in the process developed a desalination system that is both more efficient and less expensive than previous solar desalination methods. The process could also be used to treat contaminated wastewater or to generate steam for sterilizing medical instruments, all without requiring any power source other than sunlight itself.

That’s good news, more of this please.

notes on JB

Ad Infinitum · Matthias Ott

It’s Time to Dismantle the Technopoly | The New Yorker

How to reverse AI brain rot — A note to myself

How to usher in an era of abundant donuts • Buttondown

Team Mirai and Democracy - Schneier on Security

I’m OK being left behind, thanks! – Terence Eden’s Blog

How to do the work • Buttondown

Daring Fireball: Thoughts and Observations on the MacBook Neo

Microsoft's new 10,000-year data storage medium: glass - Ars Technica

Owning a $5M data center - comma.ai blog

February 15, 2026 - by Heather Cox Richardson

Liberty as Resistance — Matt Gemmell

The Dangers of “Vibe Reporting” About AI - Cal Newport

You are being misled about renewable energy technology.

Why Linux wound up with system package managers

Bruce Springsteen - Streets Of Minneapolis

New Video Analysis Reveals Flawed and Fatal Decisions in Shooting of Pretti

The Wall Looks Permanent Until It Falls - by Adam Bonica

LLMs have made simple software trivial

Accepting friction - listening without a streaming subscription

The Year That Kicked My Ass - furbo.org

xkcd - Fifteen Years

The Tao of Cal - Cal Newport

Godot Isn't Making it

Scout

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The Manual with Tim Walz

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Morning Links

The Cloud Under the Sea

Morning Links

Tackle complex reasoning tasks with Mistral Large, now available on Amazon Bedrock

Casey Liss - Every Failure is an Opportunity

New Spatial Personas

The one about the web developer job market

xz Utils Backdoor

Solar-powered system offers a route to inexpensive desalination - MIT News

Future Trains Could Provide Carbon Capture on Wheels - IEEE Spectrum

Coding as a greybeard - Hacker News

Use One Big Server - Speculative Branches

Why Study Functional Programming?

Why I Hate Frameworks

Performance comparison - counting words in Python, Go, C++, C, AWK, Forth, and Rust

Non-Obvious Docker Uses

More shell, less egg - All this

What Would Happen If We Slowed Down?

1Password 8 for Mac is now in Early Access

Making a Tiny Mac From a Raspberry Pi Zero

Habits, UI changes, and OS stagnation | Riccardo Mori

Your Wild and Precious Life

We Know What You Did During Lockdown

Multiple Macs, one location for screenshots – Tech Reflect

Daring Fireball - Tim Cook and Luca Maestri on Intel

Foldimate’s laundry-folding machine actually works now - The Verge

Did Hell Freeze Over? My Republican Dad Is Voting for a Democrat - The New York Times

NetNewsWire Comes Home

One Computing Device

How to manage your windows like a pro in macOS | iMore

Why Apple’s education strategy is not based on reality

Bringing Back Skeuomorphic Design

Erasing Complexity – MacStories

The Yale Political Experiment

Why 2017 Was the Best Year in Human History - The New York Times

Medium, and The Reason You Can’t Stand the News Anymore

Scrivener 3 arrives with new interface, export options - Six Colors

On That Which is Correct Politically

My Mac and iPhone setup on The Sweet Setup

Could this be the future of the Mac?

This is the Samsung Galaxy S8, coming April 21st - The Verge

The Arrival of Artificial Intelligence

Creating custom Perspectives in OmniFocus – The Sweet Setup

Outrage is Missing the Point

The Philosophy of Bruce Lee

Focusing is an Art, Not a Science

Your Life in Weeks

Sal Fights For the Users

Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone

Images of New MacBook Pro With Magic Toolbar Leaked in macOS

IBM confirms that Macs are less expensive than PCs