The Two Gentlemen of Verona, by William Shakespeare, published 1594, play, 68 pages. Possibly the first of Shakespeare’s plays. His comedies don’t appeal to me anywhere near as much as his tragedies (have I said this before? I probably have and probably will again), but I’m on a quest to read all of his plays and I’d still say I enjoyed this one.

Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, by Karen Hao, published 2025, history, 426 pages. A morbidly fascinating history of OpenAI from the angle of oh wow, this company is swallowing up resources like one of the colonial empires that wrought so much suffering and destruction. It made me, if such a thing can be believed, want to use AI even less. Also, Sam Altman really, really is not trustworthy. Goodness. While the book is fine (I recommend it), I’m glad to be done with it so I can get back to spending less time thinking about AI and the slimy corporations spray-painting the world with it.

Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson, published 2002, fiction, 114 pages. So. Much. Death. (For a novella, anyway.) I don’t inherently mind bleak books drenched in death, but I don’t think I liked this one, reasonably well written though it was. Not sure why. I’m aware of the film, by the way, but haven’t seen it, so I don’t know how it compares.

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Craig Mod on the MacBook Neo and the iPad. Yes, this. I rarely use my iPad these days but could see myself doing so if iPadOS were a better fit for the device.

David Aerne’s Charcuterie, a cool visual Unicode explorer.

ReadBeanIceCream on serving up text files instead of HTML for websites. While I kind of love this delightfully retro idea, the lack of clickable links does make the UX a bit onerous. If you used a browser that automatically linkified URLs, though, then it would work, I think. But at that point you may as well just use the Gemini protocol instead.

John Gruber on how to format ten-digit phone numbers. Hyphens all the way.

Pinery, a macOS app for making ebooks (EPUB and PDF). I haven’t used it, but it looks like it could be nice.

Benjamin Breen on the handmade beauty of Machine Age data visualizations, with some lovely work from William James’s books among others.

Screen Wake Lock API. Had no idea this existed. At the moment it doesn’t work on iOS, though, which is sad. (I want to use it in Scroll, my ebook reader.) Hopefully someday!

Attic, a command-line tool for backing your iCloud Photos up to S3. I don’t use iCloud Photos because I want to have my own copy of the files, but with this maybe it’s now worth looking into.

The making of iA Notebook (video). Enjoyed this. The notebook itself looks very nice, but oof, that price tag. $79 would get you around fifteen Field Notes notebooks (from the National Parks set, naturally), 720 pages altogether. Even though I know the comparison isn’t fair, still I find I’d rather have the Field Notes.

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The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, by Timothy Egan, published 2006, history, 416 pages. Whew, that was harrowing — all the more so because the tragedy was avoidable, if only they’d known what they were doing. For me, the whole thing was a strong warning against having a careless relationship with the earth, and a reminder that there are better, healthier ways to meet our human needs without plundering and savaging this precious world we live in. Greed continues to ruin everything, as always.

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, by Brian Merchant, published 2023, history, 561 pages. An important book, and one that feels particularly relevant right now, at least to me, as I watch my chosen industry mutating in ways I find reprehensible. I am a Luddite in spirit. Enjoyed the interwoven literary angle — Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Lord Byron — and reading about George IV as prince regent shortly after reading Greville’s memoirs, and about Mary Wollstonecraft shortly after reading Godwin’s biography. I like making things and I’ve found factories interesting from that perspective, but the human cost doesn’t seem worth it to me — the horrendous working conditions, the effects on the workers they replace, etc. There must be a better way. From the book:

But it is much more absurd to pretend there are no possible alternative arrangements—to think that technology, the product of concerted human invention and innovation, can only be introduced to society through reckless disruption, or that it’s unthinkable that advancements in technology might be integrated into our lives democratically and with care. If we are ingenious enough to automate large-scale production, build spacecraft, and invent artificial intelligences, are we not ingenious enough to ensure that advancing technology benefits all, and not just a few?

Stoner, by John Williams, published 1965, fiction, 219 pages. This has nothing to do with drugs, and no, not that John Williams. This is the fictional biography (a form I love) of an English professor in the first half of the twentieth century. Other than the earthy parts, I found it compelling even in its mundanity, though happy it is not. Humanity is messy. In the course of reading it I realized it was making me want to be a compassionate person, one who builds up those whose paths I cross in life. (I don’t remember what it was about the book that spawned those feelings, though.)

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Adam Singer with more evidence that short-form video rots your brain. Avoid, avoid, avoid.

Kyle Orland on AI use leading to cognitive surrender. “Overall, across 1,372 participants and over 9,500 individual trials, the researchers found subjects were willing to accept faulty AI reasoning a whopping 73.2 percent of the time, while only overruling it 19.7 percent of the time.” Another reason to steer clear of AI.

Jim Nielsen on skill issues and human-centered design. “Whereas a human-centered approach flips that: the technology exists to serve people as they actually are, not as we wish them to be. Confusion is allowed to be seen as a design failure, not a user failure.”

Ink & Switch’s dither explorer. Cool.

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Teddy Macker on David W. Orr and a healing vision for America. This was so, so good. Highly recommended. This quote from Orr at the beginning sets the tone: “The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.”

Matt Glassman on how you should invite people over to your home regularly. This is good advice.

Han Lee on the AI Great Leap Forward. This really resonated. I really do not like AI mandates.

Becca Rothfeld on how you don’t have to use AI. “I am saying that the bar for using AI for anything, even something stupid and mindless, should be extraordinarily high.”

Henry Oliver’s post of someone else’s comment about teaching poetry to Latter-day Saint students raised on the KJV.

Christopher Drum on CAD-3D on the Atari ST. Particularly liked the parts about friction and UI density.

David Cain on enjoying things on purpose.

kqr on slide rules for kitchen measurements. After reading this, I ordered a slide rule. (Still need to learn how to use it, though.)

Photonist on documentary photography in the age of AI. This feels more human to me.

Elisa Gabbert on the essay as realm.

Ross Barkan on fiction and AI.

James O’Sullivan on writing with AI. “If you need a large language model to write, you are not a writer.”

Aubrey Hirsch’s comic on ChatGPT dads. Ha.

Alan Jacobs on redistributing your media portfolio (going analog, mainly).

Open Printer, “an open-source, repairable inkjet printer designed for makers, artists, and anyone tired of throwaway hardware. Built with standard mechanical components and modular parts, it’s easy to assemble, modify, and repair. You can print on standard sheets or paper rolls and choose between black or color cartridges, refillable at your convenience.” Cool.

W. Evan Sheehan on LLM-generated code in Neovim.

Niels Leenheer wrote a DOOM with CSS. Wow.

Analog cameras that can be 3D printed.

Alex Chan’s personalized garbage collection calendar via a Python script.

Frank Elavsky on why people should stop saying AI is just a tool. Yep. His post on prototyping is also good.

Lisette, a little language inspired by Rust that compiles to Go.

Heerich.js, a tiny engine for 3D voxel scenes rendered to SVG.

Playbit Runtime, an interesting “runtime designed for highly dynamic graphical apps that are collaborative, with a really good set of developer tools.”

Den Odell on Pretext, that shiny new text layout JS library.

Tracy Durnell on personalized computing and agentic AI.

Audrey Watters on AI. “The future that the vast majority of people want – for themselves, for their children – is not one in which we can only afford to buy digital replicas of products and digital real estate (Facebook board member Marc Andreessen has been quite explicit about this goal) because everything that’s actually real is only accessible to the rich; where we’re all yanked around by algorithms; where there are no jobs; where there is no art, only slop; where there is no green space, no wilderness, no water because the planet is covered in the data centers that power this destruction.”

Sharif Shameem on how willingness to look stupid is a moat in creative work.

Matthias Ott on AI and the shape of friction.

Christopher Butler on making art by hand.

Brian Leli on how LLMs are antithetical to writing and humanity.

Pavel Laptev on shiny new CSS features.

ReadBeanIceCream’s plain text kanban reading board.

Cory Doctorow on AI psychoses.

Audrey Watters on AI again.

Marcin Wichary on AI autocomplete suggestions.

Jonas Hietala on one-bag travel for work.

Hyperwood, open source furniture.

Alexander Petros on how XML is a cheap DSL.

Lisa Charlotte Muth on moving all her content back onto her site.

Scott Smitelli on generative AI.

Sean Boots on generative AI vegetarianism.

zkbro on slowing down.

Marcin Wichary on web haptics on iOS.

Ada Palmer on why all science fiction and fantasy writers are historians.

Lev Grossman from 2014 on getting to the halfway point in NaNoWriMo.

Michael Uloth on switching configs for Neovim.

Rusty Foster on how AI isn’t people.

Robin Rendle on how the world is still so full of dinosaurs.

Marcin Wichary on Lotus 1-2-3 and two-line menubars.

Lyra on how you no longer need JavaScript for a lot of things.

Matthias Ott on LLM bots scraping the web incessantly. I’ve run into this as well. Ugh.

Dave Gauer on the love of programming (in the face of AI). This resonated.

A post on holding on to your hardware since the AI data centers could very well make it hard to get in the future.

Mandy Brown on specialists.

Scott on Gopher. Ah, nostalgia.

Halvor William Sanden on anti-intellectual tech.

Marcus Hutchins on the reasons he hates AI.

Bret Victor on AI. “If we take ‘AI’ to mean the current trend of deep-learning models trained on large datasets, there are a number of ways in which these techniques are incompatible with our values.”

Eliot on Henyapente and binary biology in the Gameboy OS.

An HTML quine. Also see Markdown CSS.

Rich Hickey on AI.

Matt Sephton’s WebGL CRT shader.

Matthew Walther on reading one hundred pages a day.

Oliver Burkeman on the power of immediacy.

Jim Nielsen on the anchor element’s href attribute.

Virginia Postrel on libraries of matter.

Fontquant, a tool to quantify what fonts can do.

Whew!

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There never was such a man, or behaviour so atrocious as his—a mixture of narrow-mindedness, selfishness, truckling, blustering, and duplicity, with no object but self, his own ease, and the gratification of his own fancies and prejudices, without regard to the advice and opinion of the wisest and best informed men or to the interests and tranquillity of the country.

Also:

Objects which I used to contemplate at an immeasurable distance, and to attain which I thought would be the summit of felicity, I have found worth very little in comparison to the value my imagination used to set upon them.

And:

Three days ago Lord Liverpool was seized with an apoplectic or paralytic attack. The moment it was known every sort of speculation was afloat as to the probable changes this event would make in the Ministry. It was remarked how little anybody appeared to care about the man; whether this indifference reflects most upon the world or upon him, I do not pretend to say.

Very much looking forward to reading the remaining volumes.

The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath, published 1963, fiction, 259 pages. Oof. I picked this up because I liked Plath’s poetry and maybe also as a small attempt to try to better understand my father’s suicide. The writing was indeed great, but whew, the second half was kind of brutal for me.

Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love, by Dava Sobel, published 1999, biography, 405 pages. I quite liked this, which is no huge surprise given how much I love reading about the history of science. It’s a biography of Galileo’s adult life, with lots of letters from his oldest daughter (a nun at a nearby convent) interleaved with the narrative, which covers Galileo’s research in astronomy and physics and of course the infamous trial. Reading this book made me realize I don’t spend nearly enough time actively thinking, or at least I don’t feel I do, which likely means instead that I’m not thinking about the things I wish I were. This passage is good:

“I believe that the intention of Holy Writ was to persuade men of the truths necessary for salvation,” Galileo continued his letter to Castelli, “such as neither science nor any other means could render credible, but only the voice of the Holy Spirit. But I do not think it necessary to believe that the same God who gave us our senses, our speech, our intellect, would have put aside the use of these, to teach us instead such things as with their help we could find out for ourselves, particularly in the case of these sciences of which there is not the smallest mention in the Scriptures; and, above all, in astronomy, of which so little notice is taken that the names of none of the planets are mentioned. Surely if the intention of the sacred scribes had been to teach the people astronomy, they would not have passed over the subject so completely.”

Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen, published 1811, fiction, 456 pages. Delightful and witty. Loved it. I’d seen some of the film adaptations before but had never read the book till now, and that was entirely my loss. Of Austen’s novels, I have left only Emma and Mansfield Park, and I look forward to completing the set in the not too distant future.

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It started when I came across Karin Hendrikse’s article on building a static RSS reader (oh how I love static files), and then Terry Godier’s post on RSS and phantom obligations nudged me away from the idea that a feed reader has to be something like Feedly or Google Reader. At some point Feedly started adding more AI features (ugh) and I decided it was time to part ways and do my own thing.

Digest is a little command-line tool I built in Go that reads a list of feed URLs from a text file, fetches all of them in parallel, caches the responses, parses the feeds, and then compiles a list of all the posts from the day before into a static HTML file. That’s basically it. I run it manually on my laptop and rsync the HTML up to my server so I can get to it on my phone.

It’s been great so far. A few other thoughts and observations:

• Boundaries and edges feel good. It’s like a personal daily newspaper, where it’s very clear when I’ve finished for the day. Infinite rivers carry more stress, I think. Or maybe I just like checking things off lists.
• The slight time distancing also feels good — quiet and calm. Because it’s a daily digest from the day before, it feels like less of a dopamine slot machine. No more checking Feedly dozens of times a day.
• I originally had Digest run on my server via a cron job, but I moved back to running it manually on my laptop and I’ve found that I much prefer it this way. Fewer moving parts. (If I’m unable to generate the digest on any given day, by the way, I can pass the date as a command-line argument to the tool and it’ll compile posts for that date instead of yesterday’s.) A bit more resilient, too — I can just open the HTML file locally on my laptop if I want, no server needed.
• At first I included the contents of each post in the file, but I’ve since trimmed it down so each entry just has the post title and link plus the blog title and the author, and I open each link in a new tab. After decades of reading RSS feeds in homogenized typographic settings (all posts in the same font, etc.), I thought I wouldn’t care to read posts on their original sites, but I was wrong. I love it. Especially since most of what I read is on the small web.

As of now I have no plans to release Digest as open source, but maybe this description will inspire someone to build their own tool that meets their personal needs.

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The Merchant of Prato: Francesco di Marco Datini, 1335–1410, by Iris Origo, published 1957, biography, 526 pages. Enjoyed this deep dive into the life of a medieval Tuscan merchant. Very detailed, thanks to Datini’s voluminous correspondence. Recommended if you’re into 1300s Tuscany, as I am. The preface includes this gem about the author:

The illegibility of her handwriting was also notorious. Her publisher and friend Jock Murray tells of tackling a passage at the bottom of a letter, which had defeated everyone else, and eventually deciphering the words: “Dearest Jock, I can’t read what I have written. Please type it out and send a copy to me.”

And this, from Petrarch, on doctors back then (glad things have changed!):

No one heeded their prescriptions, for I have always besought my friends and bidden my servants that nothing should ever be carried out on my person of what physicians had ordered, but that, if indeed something must be done, it should be just the opposite.

Giving Up Is Unforgivable: A Manual for Keeping a Democracy, by Joyce Vance, published 2025, nonfiction, 168 pages. I’ve occasionally dipped into Vance’s newsletter for legal analysis on the criminal embarrassment that is Trump and his incompetent administration and all their unconstitutional mayhem, and her newsletter is solid. This book is likewise good, though it doesn’t have much legal analysis; it does, however, review Trump’s current attempts to destroy our democracy and turn himself into a vainglorious dictator, and it has recommendations for how to preserve our freedom. It’s about how rule of law and democracy are our best defense against the capricious, arbitrary whims of a tyrant, things we in America once again have firsthand knowledge of (re: Iran, tariffs, etc.). The book also points out (or maybe it’s just something I thought while reading it; I can’t remember) that anyone who is actively trying to make it harder for Americans to vote (cough SAVE Act cough) is fundamentally anti-American and an enemy of democracy.

The Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio, published 1353 (translation by John Payne published 1886), fiction, 1,075 pages. What a bawdy, bawdy book. I found it repugnant, though near the end there were a couple very refreshing stories where someone chooses not to be immoral. (Shocking!) While I was in the middle of this, we came to Genesis 39 in our family scripture study and that too was a glorious breath of fresh air. I did enjoy the conclusion, where Boccaccio tries to defend his work against the objections he was sure were coming. All in all, I’m glad I read this for the sake of becoming better versed in medieval lit, but whew, never going to read it again. Also, incessant vice is boring.

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You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

I’ve long interpreted that last sentence as a command to stop sinning, but today (and acknowledging that this is probably news to nobody else), seeing it as part of a paragraph and in the context of the immediately preceding verses, I believe I now actually understand it. (I was about to say that I finally understand it, but how final my interpretation is remains to be seen. And who knows — my reading may turn out to be balderdash.)

The epiphany: in these verses, Christ commands us to love our enemies, those who are hard to love, and by extension it’s a command to love everyone, inclusive, just as Heavenly Father loves everyone — a love encompassing, a love complete, and (in the sense of not missing anything or anyone) a love that is perfect. So “be perfect” here maybe doesn’t mean “don’t mess up in any way” (impossible in this life, and that impossibility is precisely why we need a Savior) but rather is a reiteration or summation of the preceding verses: a much more doable “love everyone.”

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