These thugs need to be held accountable. Despicable.
Posts in "notes"
The Wall Looks Permanent Until It Falls - by Adam Bonica
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.
LLMs have made simple software trivial
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.
How the hell are you supposed to have a career in tech in 2026? - Anil Dash
What you can control, though, are small iterative things that make you feel better on a human scale, in little ways, when you can. You can help yourself maintain perspective, and you can do the same for those around you who share your values, and who care about the same personal or professional goals that you do.
A lot of us still care about things like the potential for technology to help people, or still believe in the idealistic and positive goals that got us into our careers in the first place. We weren’t wrong, or naive, or foolish to aspire to those goals simply because some bad actors sought to undermine them. And it’s okay to feel frustrated or scared in a time when it seems to many like those goals could be further away than they’ve been in a long time.
I do hope, though, that people can see that, by sticking together, and focusing on the things that are within our reach, things can begin to change. All it takes is remembering that the power in tech truly rests with all the people who actually make things, not with the loudmouths at the top who try to tear things down.
Lovely essay by Anil Dash, and besides his abstractions he does include some very actionable advice. Like building expertise and investing in relationships.
Solving for Meaningfulness - MacSparky
Some things deserve to be slow. That’s where the meaning lives.
Good reminder for the new year from the Apple communities uncle, MacSparky.
Accepting friction - listening without a streaming subscription
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.
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Not to be confused with the Basecamp book of the same name. ↩︎
The Year That Kicked My Ass - furbo.org
Consider my ass well and truly kicked.
Absolutely heartbreaking year for Craig Hockenberry. I just purchased Tot. I’d suggest you do as well.
xkcd - Fifteen Years
Absolutely beautiful.
The Tao of Cal - Cal Newport
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
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.