I’d share screenshots of these things, but one of the primary reasons I’ve been enjoying myself so much while making them is because they are literally only for me to see or use. I’ve gone through creative periods where I’m coding outside of work but in the end it has always been shared to some kind of audience - whether that be the designing and coding of this site or my CodePens. This is different.

Robin Sloan coined these type of apps as home-cooked. Following his analogy, technically I am a professional chef but at home I’m creating dishes that no one else has to like. All the stuff I have to care about at work - UX best practices, what our Community wants, or even the preferences of my bosses and colleagues re: code style and organisation can be left behind. I’m free to make my own messed-up version of an apricot chicken toasted sandwich, and it’s delicious.

I’ve been doing the same lately, largely driven by how easy it is to get these home-cooked apps off the ground using LLMs.

My favorite one so far is a tool for helping me manage my sound and public address duties for our local high school’s soccer games. I whipped up a form which lets me set some variables (opposing team name, referees, etc.) and it spits out the script I need to read.

It also contains a mini sound board to easily play stuff like the school’s fight song when they score.

I hope nobody else ever needs to use this thing because it’s certainly janky as all hell, but it works exceedingly well for me.

I’m sure most people are aware of how expensive it is to go out and see shows, but I’m not sure if most people are aware of why.

This video does a great job of explaining how the Ticketmaster + Livenation monopoly works.

We’re quickly approaching election season here in the US. Growing up, the importance of an informed electorate was driven into my brain.

This is the kind of stuff more voters need to be aware of. How do monopolies form? What market conditions lead to consolidation of power, and how do we hold those in power accountable?

Glen Weldon, who hosts NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, said Dropout isn't trying to create shows to please everyone – its content is niche, and that's ok. The show's cast makes the content feel casual and personal to him.

"The reason you show up every week is to see them in this kind of unguarded mode trying to figure things out on the fly," Weldon says. "You are in the room with them, and they're inviting you into their world for just a hang."

This nails what is so exciting about the Dropout experiment. You are rooting for the simultaneous success of the show and the concept. It’s fun to feel like you’re a small part of the creative process.

We’ve gotta be getting close to a new season of Game Changer!

That’s because what really sucks about the web these days, what has us feeling despair and anger, has everything to do with the industry that has formed around the web, but not the web itself. The web is still just a substrate on which anything can be built. Most importantly, the web is the people who use it, not the companies that have established themselves around it.

And the widespread disillusionment that we’re seeing may actually be a good thing. More people than ever have realized that the utopian dreams of a web that could only bring about positive and wonderful things might have been misguided. That tech companies maybe don’t always have our best interests in mind. And that slogans like "don’t be evil" might be more about marketing than about truth.

Once again, Molly White explains how to make the internet fun again in an admirably eloquent way.

Related: I bought a domain with the intention of creating a list of artists who Donald Trump can’t use in his campaign functions. I lost motivation after finding basically what I wanted to assemble on Wikipedia, but reading this article makes me want to give it a go.

Fifteen or 20 years ago, this would not have even been a conversation,” said Ms. Lorre, who has often discussed the benefits of silent walks, most recently on her podcast and on TikTok. But silent walking feels relevant right now because many of us have become tethered to our devices, she added.

The question then becomes: “How do we counteract that?” Ms. Lorre said.

Walking is a well-established balm for the mind and body. Research has shown that walking for as little as 10 extra minutes a day may lead to a longer life. And a 2020 study in The Journal of Environmental Psychology found that a 30-minute walk in an urban park reduced the amount of time that people dwelled on negative thoughts. Walking has also been shown to improve creativity and help fend off depression.

A few months ago, I started turning my walking habit into a silent walking habit.

Sure, some days I’ll throw on an album or podcast, but more often than not, I’m finding myself putting my headphones in, reaching the end of my street, and then pocketing them.

It takes some practice to know what to do with your thoughts, which is a surprising effect of living a digital life. Most thoughts are ephemeral, dismissed as effortlessly as it entered.

Some thoughts are journalible. That’s easy to quickly pull out your phone, wrote them down, and reflect on it later.

Some are scary. Negative. Nasty. Those ones are tough to let go of, but if you acknowledge the thought and permit out to exist, the endorphins will eventually help you move on from it.

I could not encourage you more to get out for a 15 minute silent walk today. Make space for it. You’ll be glad you did.

Engineers are not fans of technologies.

They are also, of course, not dispassionate Vulcans who get every assessment perfectly rationally correct at all times, trivially proved by how much even relatively rational engineers can disagree with each other.

But engineers should never be fans.

There was a moment not too long ago where I closely followed every single Apple rumor, watched every single keynote, and could tell you the names of every single executive.

It’s mid-October and I’m still not exactly sure when Apple intelligence is coming to my iPhone 15.

Maybe part of growing up is being less fanatical about tools and more fanatical about solving problems.

As a self-declared Poet, I can confidently describe the Police because it is a job requirement that develops strong working relationships with these essential humans. I need them because the Police do the challenging work of keeping the trains on time. This isn’t simply holding conductors to a schedule but also maintaining the trains, taking care of the track, and ensuring we have a qualified staff of humans to do all this work. Oh, and how about a budget? How are we going to afford all of this? Someone needs to build a credible business plan for this train company so we can afford to keep the trains on time.

As a self-declared Poet, we also need to understand the aspirational goals of this train company. I also understand the importance of consistently sharing this vision with everyone. I know we need to listen because we need to understand how the company feels. I’m adept at organizing teams of humans with differing ideas and skills. It’s an endless puzzle that I enjoy attempting to solve. I love celebrating our victories. I feel our failures deeply, but I know that with the Police, we will learn from these failures.

I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking my personality is Police, but I think it’s because I’ve been ashamed to admit I’m actually a Poet.

My kids used to watch Daniel Tiger, and there was a song on there that went, “Everyone’s job is important, we all help in different ways.”

Our society needs Police equally as much as we need Poets.

I left that conversation admiring his conviction, as well as feeling overwhelming self-consciousness that I was—I dunno, too acquiescent? Hearing him speak so confidently—his assuredness ignited envy within me. Embers that smolder to this day. The older I get, the less confident I feel about anything. The less I want to fight. The less I want to debate. I used to burn so hot. I could argue online for hours. Now, the thought of it makes my skin crawl. It's not that I don't feel strongly, but I don't feel so strongly that I want to spend my days mired in anxiety and rage trying to make people see reason.

But Sam, the older he got, the more he seemed to dig in. Why was he so willing to fight? Why wasn't I?

A heart wrenching story about two cousins who slowly drift apart due to our ever-increasing disability to have civilized, polite disagreements with one another.

Getting older brings a certain sadness with realizing the things you once thought were true and unimpeachable were actually broken all along.

And while that may be a truism, it’s how we accept and appreciate the things we have while we have them which makes life beautiful and bearable.

I think that in any new medium in technology, there are the concepts around fair use and where the boundary is between what you have control over. When you put something out in the world, to what degree do you still get to control it and own it and license it? I think that all these things are basically going to need to get relitigated and rediscussed in the AI era.

When I downloaded Llama 3.2 yesterday, I had to agree to a rather lengthy licensing agreement which constrained how I could use it.

When you sign up for a Instagram or Facebook account, you have to agree to lengthy terms and conditions in which you give up your rights around the content you create.

If you want to push my buttons, all you need to do is something deeply hypocritical. Like, for example, the kind of insipid, hand-wavy remark that billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg make when they want "rules for thee, not for me" treatment.¹

There’s another pull quote here which deeply offends me:

“Look, we’re a big company,” he said. “We pay for content when it’s valuable to people. We’re just not going to pay for content when it’s not valuable to people. I think that you’ll probably see a similar dynamic with AI.”

Seriously, the gall of this guy to say “your content isn’t valuable” while raking in billions of dollars serving ads against it.

I keep getting the urge to join Facebook so I can sell some unneeded treasures on marketplace, but this article serves as a reminder that Meta is helmed by an individual who has a truly warped definition of the word “value.”

Many of these kinds of retrospectives contain graphs of views over time or the most popular posts; but I’m not showing it to you because I can’t—I don’t keep any statistics whatsoever.

I don’t really care—and I don’t want to care—about how many readers I have or what posts are and aren’t popular. I worry that if I add statistics to the blog it’ll change from an activity I perform for the activity’s sake, to an exercise in hunting clicks where I write for others instead of for myself.

If I were chasing views I would certainly not have continued to blog for as long as I have, and I’d have missed out on the many benefits I’ve gotten from the blog.

I couldn’t agree more with this sentiment.

I do thoroughly enjoy when people reach out and tell me they read the blog, but I don’t share things here for the social clout.

I share things on here because the act of curating thoughts through the writing process brings me so much joy and clarity.

I’ve been meaning to write something longer form on here for a while, but all my good long thoughts have been sent to Monkey Wrench.

But this post made me reflect on my own blogging journey. I started blogging in a LiveJournal at some point in the early 2000s. I bought my own domain and moved my thoughts over there in 2004. I blogged from a pseudonym starting in 2006 up through college. I bought this domain while sitting in a TV production class my senior year of college and started a fresh blog.

It’s been a while since I burned the stack to the ground and started fresh, but ever since I started building websites for a living, it stopped being fun to do it in my free time.