There was an interesting time in German history, right between the two World Wars - the “interbellum”, the time of the Weimar Republic. It was very turbulent, and a lot of it wasn’t pretty in the slightest - social difficulties, unemployment, incredible inflation, squalid living conditions, the emergence of the wildest movements, cabarets and cults imaginable… but there was also something else. The “Roaring Twenties” of Weimar Germany also produced an incredible number of great, whimsical, fascinating artistic movements. From the Bauhaus to the Berlin gay cabarets, from Kurt Weill to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis - it was a booming time, and a lot of what appeared then is still valued and cherished today.

And it was a technological boom as well - the ever more widespread use of electricity, the large-scale deployment of modern pharmaceuticals, the subways, the automobile… fascinating times.

I know how that era ended, and no - that is not the part of the analogy I am after. The part I am after is this: the old order had lost interest, nobody was in charge, the ground was shifting under everybody’s feet - and that is precisely when the most interesting work got made. Great turmoil, great industrial change, no adult supervision. Sound familiar?

Yes, there's a lot about our current AI situation that sucks. Companies are straight up committing felony hacks with zero consequences. Data centers are popping up everywhere, the cost of GPUs is sky high, etc. etc. etc.

But.

The cost to making computers do useful things is now exponentially cheaper. One dork with Claude Code can, for example, completely recreate the entire Adobe suite.¹

Yeah, that means the bad guys can do terrible things with it. But think about the other side of the coin!

With LLMs and some good ol' fashioned engineering, I'm hopeful that those performance dorks among us will pick up the mantle that DHH dropped and keep making Ruby and Rails better for all of us.

I'm always happy to see Unicode get its flowers. I didn't realize the consortium only has four full-time employees!

And as much as I've been disenfranchised by Apple lately, it's also nice to see they still have thoughtful people working for them:

Nez Perce, or Nimipuutímt, does not use capital letters. Rather than having the Shift key toggle traditional uppercase letters, Apple repurposed it to reveal an accented secondary layer, so users don’t have to hold down individual keys to see those characters, which can slow typing. In the Cherokee language, each character mostly represents a consonant combined with a vowel sound, a form known as syllabary. Apple added adaptive vowel keys on the bottom row, so when a user types a consonant, these keys change to show the vowel combinations they can make.

GitHub has hit an illustrious milestone with the publication of the one billionth repository this week. Whether by chance or design, Aasish Pokhrel from Nepal earned the honor of publishing the billionth nugget of code shared on the platform. Unfortunately, it’s ‘shit.’ That isn’t a snarky comment, or our judgment regarding the code, the repo is simply the word ‘shit.’

I’d like to see AI try and replicate this masterpiece.

I'm not sure what keeps me there, what keeps any of us there, beyond inertia. We're in the Looney Tunes stage of the end of social, where we've glided well past the edge of the cliff and it's slowing dawning on us that the only way left is down. Fast.

What if we just stopped?

What if we stopped plugging our selves into the machines, stopped performing (wittingly and unwittingly) for the algorithm, stopped letting bots bait us, stopped all of it and figured out new ways—our ways—to do things again.

Because there has to be a better way of connecting and sharing and existing together, a way that isn't locked into the exploitative doom loops and psychic death of what we currently have. A way that's built around humans again, not around algorithms. A way that values connection instead of confrontation.

Something something indieweb, he mumbles softly under his breath while watching his loved ones succumb one by one to another algorithmic-induced outrage.

There have been some high-profile deaths lately, but none of them punched me harder than this one.

Gilbert continued to be positive throughout his cancer battle. “I have my crying moments where, like everyone, I have to let it out,” he said. “But I like that we can turn it around into something positive… It’s always been just to inspire and grow a community of people that want to go to our shows and smile and have a good time.”

I've had Listen Up! on constant rotation this year. The entire album is wall-to-wall positivity and encouragement, keeping my spirits high even if things seem bleak.

Life will kick you down Be sure of that But stand up, grab it's throat, and yell, "you've met your match."

Turns out Cor64 also has covers of Ken's Theme (from Street Fighter 2) and the Rocky IV Training Montage song, so I guess I found a new favorite band today.

Can you imagine a better gig than touring the country playing live covers of Nintendo 64 soundtracks?

This is so cute, clever, and impressive. An easy subscribe for me.

Mary Bruno was the person who introduced me before I delivered my TEDx talk a few years ago. She's an incredible letterpress artist who runs a shop up in St. Cloud.

Anyway, she sent out a newsletter today linking to these excellent perimenopause greeting cards, and it reminded me that she has an entire shop of dope-lookin' art. I am in the process of designing my new office and it may need to feature one of these prints.

Betteridge’s law of headlines unfortunately applies here, but this was such a fun watch.

I also snort laughed at “ROM MAXXING.”

Angela Collier made an apology video for making people feel dumb for not knowing that physicists use LaTeX instead of Word, and it’s so delightful.

I learned that LaTeX is pronounced “Lah-Tech”. I assumed for decades that it was pronounced like the fabric?

I also enjoyed her anti-Microsoft rants peppered throughout the video. As someone who inherited a legacy .NET project, I could not agree more with her sentiments here.