Blog
Writing helps me think more clearly. This archive is longer posts; quick updates now live in notes.
Topics: AI, blogging, photography, programming, projects, Signboard
What should I post here? What should I post there? I'm struggling to find a balance that I like. My deepest self says post everything here, right on my own personal website. As broken and beautiful as it is (I'm constantly fiddling lately, sorry). But if I do that should I take the time to share the same…
Maggie Appleton, in a post titled simply January 2026: You might suggest that I spend less time on X, but I’m not inclined to look away just as the train gets up to full speed. Sure it’s a distorted reality, but it points to real ground truth: even if progress on language models slows this year, we are…
Chris Glass, on his cat blog: I’ve turned off comments and other minor features to improve site performance here because I think AI bots are hogging things. The scourge of internet traffic currently are data scraping bots slurping up the web. I don't know why there are so many, why the requests are so often, or if there…
Pretty rich that I am extolling the virtues of boredom while at the same time reviving a recently discontinued series of posts on my site called, of all things, Diversions. But hear me out. These diversions aren't the bad kind of diversions. I mean, my most recent post in this series talked about growing garlic for farmer's sake….
What do you do with your time? I think the modern world has afforded us all more time than we know what to do with and we're squandering it. I know this isn't true for everyone, and certainly not true of people everywhere, but many of us live in a time of abundance and we're not spending enough…
Anon Taranis writes that LLMs are, in large part, a failure and that all AI companies have hit a wall that they'll never surmount. I believe it is always good to read both sides of debates. If I find myself overly positive or negative about a topic or technology, I seek out those that disagree. Hopefully, this has…
Naz Hamid, writing on his personal blog, about forming a small company called Latent Co.: Driven by the creative tooling we’ve cut our teeth on and drawing on our product and imaging experience, we’re making a product for Mac. His partners are Ryan Carver and Julio Pablo Zambrano. I've exchanged many a message with Carver while he was…
Elizabeth Spiers, writing on her own blog again finally, about how blogging is better than social media platforms because it is harder to pick a fight. I'm generalizing off course, go read her post. I think of this now as the difference between living in a house you built that requires some effort to visit and going into…
Andre Franca: The small web persists not because it's winning any battle against platform dominance, but because some things are worth doing regardless of scale. These independent voices, scattered across their own domains, linked through blogrolls and RSS feeds and word of mouth, create a version of the internet that still feels human. This is both the most…
Manuel Moreale, encouraging us all to follow all the links in his seminal series People & Blogs… This series lives on my blog but has nothing to do with me. It exists to connect you, the human who’s reading this, with all the other wonderful humans that are still out there, spending their time making sure the old…
Simon Willison comments on creating new programming languages with AI: My hunch is that existing LLMs make it easier to build a new programming language in a way that captures new developers. My take? Likely an unpopular one. Most modern programming languages were made to be human readable; yet, LLMs don't need us to make new languages human…
I've wanted to write a follow-up to my April 2023 post How I'm using ChatGPT as an accelerator for several months. I want to share how I'm using AI today, what I think about it, and what I think we'll see in the future. But I will admit I hesitated because people I respect and admire on the…
Over the past few months of weekends, I managed to fix several longstanding bugs in Unmark. In fact, a beta of version 2025.2 is now available and will be released this week and is already running on the hosted version. Kyle Ruane and I have been keeping the lights on the hosted version of Unmark at Unmark.it for…
Merlin Rebrović on personal websites being like tending a garden: Sometimes I put in more time and effort, sometimes I neglect it for a bit, depending on the season and other pressures on my life. However, I always come back to it because it’s a space that is occasionally helpful or entertaining to others but always nourishing to…
Update March 2026: Signboard 1.0 is available now! I've wanted this for a long time – a kanban style productivity desktop app that writes Markdown files to disk. And that is what Signboard is. It looks like this. Signboard 0.2.1 And here is this board represented on disk as directories and files. Lists are directories, Cards are Markdown…
I recently had the privilege of recording an episode of Happy Subscribers and representing the team at NerdPress. Allea Grummert, of Duett, and I cover the topic of being ok with constant change, a never-ending to-do list, and finding peace even though publishing online can be hard work. Of course, I found a way to work in an…
Molly White recently wrote about how publications are moving to publishing newsletters because their search traffic is dwindling. One downside to us readers is that managing a bunch of newsletter subscriptions creates a lot of clog in our inboxes. She then goes on to detail how she uses RSS to create her own "newspapers". Which frees her up…
I love my favorite toots page which shows toots that I favorited on Mastodon recently. It is a nice showcase of people doing awesome things and sharing them on Mastodon. But it was broken for a while. I only looked into the issue very briefly months ago and I wasn't able to determine the fix. Well, this morning…
Switcheroo, the default browser that I use everyday, just had a new release over the weekend thanks to Zhenyi Tan. The 1.2.0 update includes a new profile picker UI (seen below) and a new "switch tab to profile" feature making it easier to move tabs between Safari profiles. Switcheroo's new profile picker UI. What is Switcheroo? I wanted…
Florian Ziegler: I tried to do these monthly posts for a while because I like to read them when others post them. But I always forget to write down things I’ve been watching or doing, so at the end of the month, it feels like too much work to try to remember everything and then write a post…
Zhenyi Tan: Technotes is a Safari extension that adds user-contributed notes to the Apple documentation website. The notes can include sample code, warnings about common pitfalls, and other useful stuff. The Safari extension being for all sane, well reasoned individuals. There are, of course, versions of Technotes available for other browsers used by miscreants and ruffians. A commenter…
I'm using the Simply Static WordPress plugin to generate the files for two of my websites. It is a nice plugin with some good features and I gladly pay for it. One of the websites is just over 5,000 files. To me, this seems like an average-sized website. SS takes nearly 15 minutes to generate the website. Tuff,…
Manuel Moreale, who is purposefully taking in far less information during the month of June, mentions this about the silent periods that he used to fill in with podcasts: First couple of days I could see my brain wanting to fill the silence with something but that was mostly out of habit more than anything. It’s now a…
Craig Mod, writing for Literary Hub: When I’m not talking, just walking (which is most of the time), I try to cultivate the most bored state of mind imaginable. A total void of stimulation beyond the immediate environment. My rules: No news, no social media, no podcasts, no music. No “teleporting,” you could say. The phone, the great…