Brad East on how AI changes us. “The relevant questions to ask about AI and any and all usage of the variety of tools that go under its name are moral, theological, and formational. What kind of person is it likely to make me to be? What virtues or vices will it develop or diminish? In what ways is it likely to expand and enrich my (our) humanity—the good life—and in what ways is it unlikely to do so?” An angle I haven’t seen mentioned nearly enough.

John Scalzi’s thoughts on AI. Liked this.

Juha-Matti Santala on having different notebook sizes for different ideas. I like this. Lately I’ve been all-in on Field Notes, but I still have other sizes of notebooks (including other sizes of Field Notes) and have been trying to figure out how I want to use them.

Maxime Heckel on halftone shaders. Fun.

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Bob Nystrom on knitting. “Let’s say that, like me, you are a person who stares at a computer and writes code for a living. As a straight male who grew up in a time where knitting was very strongly female coded, it for the most part never occurred to me that knitting was a thing I could do and might enjoy. Regardless of your demographic categories and background, it’s possible that you have also not really considered knitting. This article exists to get you to do so. Specifically, I’ll try to convince you, one software person to another, why it might be a good fit for your life and brain. This is a pitch for knitting, but—for better or worse—an extremely nerdily argued one.” I read this, promptly bought a needle and yarn, and spent an hour learning how to knit. (Have I done anything with it since then? Um, no. But someday soon I hope to get back into it.)

Henrik Karlsson on political power and Robert A. Caro’s books. “But Caro’s subjects are willing to do anything to win, so they will, so to speak, pump fracking fluid into the ground. They will press it into every little crevice, forcing drops of power mixed with sand to the surface. And as it turns out, if you extract all the small things and pool them together, it can be a massive reserve of power, indeed.”

Marcin Wichary on Flickr’s URL scheme, which had a strong influence on me back in the day.

Wm Morris on the current opportunity for Latter-day Saint writers. “There are pockets of interesting Mormon culture happening everywhere. And the lack of a true center for it limits material resources and access to audience, but also liberates artists from the slim hope of wide acclaim and the imprimatur of respectability.” I found this inspiring.

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Jason Gorman on how coding is not necessarily the most productive part. This line especially resonated with me: “And if we’re producing code faster than we can validate it — either by exploring the problem ourselves, or learning from user feedback if our release cycles are fast enough — then we’re piling assumptions on top of assumptions.”

Jeremy Keith on frontend libraries and frameworks and LLMs. “Is it really all that different? With npm you dialled up other people’s code directly. With large language models, they first slurp up everyone’s code (like, the whole World Wide Web), run a computationally expensive process of tokenisation, and then give you the bit you need when you need it. In a way, large language model coding tools are like a turbo-charged npm with even more layers of abstraction.”

Marcin Wichary on Roger Wong’s post about Anthropic’s findings that using AI to write software seems to lead to less understanding of the code. Which makes sense, at least to me.

Elizabeth Goodspeed on analogue creative work. “As a longtime fan of all things analogue, I should be thrilled. There have always been contemporary artists committed to doggedly tactile work – more of them would be even better! But when I look closely at much of the purportedly handmade work floating around these trend reports, I can’t help but wonder how much of it is made by hand at all.” I don’t try to pass my digital art off as being actually handmade, but trying to make digital pieces look analogue? Guilty. Very guilty. For me it’s been a matter of convenience and familiarity and back pain, but more and more I find myself wanting to make real things instead, physical things. Maybe 2026 will be the year where I finally make the leap. Also, I love Goodspeed’s “doggedly tactile” phrase, which I’m taking as a reminder that making things by hand is good, hard work.

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Scott Shambaugh on how an AI agent blogged a hit piece on him after he turned down a matplotlib pull request from the agent. Apparently innocuous intentions aside, I worry how much damage and chaos these agents are going to cause across the internet.

Sophie Koonin on AI-generated code. “As I see more and more people generating code instead of writing it, I find myself wondering why engineers are so ready and willing to do away with one of the good bits of our jobs (coding) and leave themselves with the boring bit (reviews).”

Secrets of Privacy on ads in AI chatbots. Disturbing. Yet another reason to avoid LLMs.

Joe Crawford on how we’re in a web renaissance now. And it’s a wonderful thing. Visiting people’s personal websites is, for me, so much more delightful than social networks ever were.

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Raptitude on covering your twenty-five miles and then resting up. I read this and liked it a lot — this is how you do big things — and then some time later as I was nearing the end of War and Peace I came across the original passage, which was fun.

James Brown on what makes programming great. Liked this.

Matheus Lima on life happening at 1x speed. While I think this is good advice — efficiency often has downsides, and slowing down can enhance the quality of one’s experience — I do also think some things can be consumed at a slightly faster clip without lossiness, and sometimes the qualitative changes that accompany the speed increase are worth it, at least in my experience with reading.

Alex Harri’s deep dive into rendering higher-quality ASCII art. Fun. Using the shape of the characters to effectively bump up the resolution seems so obvious in retrospect.

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Stand with Minnesota. I meant to post this weeks ago. I cannot wait until Stephen Miller is gone — not to mention our criminal-in-chief and all his other cronies — and I hope ICE is brought to heel soon. (I do try to keep these link posts from veering political all the time, but goodness, these are not ordinary times.)

John Gruber on the names they call themselves. “‘Fascist’ and ‘Nazi’ weren’t slurs that were applied to them by their political or military opponents. That’s what they called themselves, and their names became universally recognized slurs because the actions and beliefs of the Fascists and Nazis were universally recognized as reprehensible and evil. And because they lost.”

Brandon Sanderson on the hidden cost of AI art and how artmaking changes us. “The purpose of writing all those books in my earlier years wasn’t to produce something I could sell, it was to turn me into someone who could create great art. It took an amateur and it made him a professional. I think this is why I rebel against AI art products so much: because they steal the opportunity for growth from us.”

Bhaskar Mitra on AI madness and leaving Big Tech because of “an unprecedented concentration of power in the hands of those in Big Tech who want to deliberately enact (or, at least, are incapable of imagining anything other than) a techno-fascist future.” Yep.

Baldur Bjarnason on LLMs. Particularly the list of downsides. (If it feels like these link posts are becoming anti-AI all the time, by the way, you’re not wrong. The hype is ridiculous and needs to be deflated, and I believe there are serious risks that are being glossed over much of the time. But I also don’t want the overall feel of this blog to skew negative, so after this I may take a break from linking to AI posts, at least for a little while.)

Robin Sloan on flood fill vs. the magic circle. Enjoyed this take on how even if AI continues to proliferate, it still won’t affect everything in life. “A pleasing image: if indeed AI automation does not flood fill the physical world, it will be because the humble paper jam stood in its way.”

Marcin Wichary on Switch Angel making a trance track in Strudel. Enjoyed both the video (wow!) and Wichary’s commentary, and dang, Strudel is intriguing.

Neil Sainsbury on mathematics for the self-learner, with book recommendations. After reading through the list, I immediately ordered four of the Dover editions. Read at your own risk!

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Brad East on Wake Up Dead Man. “I have a soft spot for any popular entertainment that doesn’t make a mockery of Christian faith, or reduce it to woo, or project infinite doubt onto all believers, or unmask every pastor as a cynical abuser. Johnson succeeds on all counts.” Same.

Robert Alter, via Alan Jacobs, on Bible translations. “Modern translators, in their zeal to uncover the meanings of the biblical text for the instruction of a modern readership, frequently lose sight of how the text intimates its meanings — the distinctive, artfully deployed features of ancient Hebrew prose and poetry that are the instruments for the articulation of all meaning, message, insight, and vision.” I’ve subconsciously noticed something in this vein lately — while the NIV is clearer and easier to understand, it’s missing the poetry of the KJV. Planning to read Alter’s translation at some point.

Stefan Judis on language-specific quotes in CSS. I didn’t know you could do this!

David Ferry on a newish hypothesis that Parkinson’s might be caused by water laced with TCE. Intriguing.

John Gruber responding to Jason Fried’s post on design regressions as companies try to jam modern technology into everything. Agreed. (I think this pairs well with the Ted Gioia post I recently linked to on secondhand purchases.)

Nikita Prokopov on the rampant inconsistencies in macOS Tahoe’s icons. Maybe Apple isn’t doing design reviews. Regardless, I’m avoiding upgrading to iOS 26 and Tahoe for as long as I can while hoping that Apple comes to its senses soon.

Tash on some contemporary fiction lacking moral gravitas. “In many contemporary novels, I cannot help feeling that I am reading about the actions of characters driven largely by their own whims and passions without any placement in, or reference to, a wider sphere of meaning.” Food for thought. Tash’s post on the negative effects of AI-created art is good, too.

Joel Cunningham’s review of the Xteink X4, a small e-ink reader. The phone form factor (like a smaller Boox Palma) and the price look appealing; the typography, less so. I don’t think I’m going to get one myself, at least not right now, but I’m interested to see where this goes down the road.

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Dan Wang’s 2025 letter on China and the U.S. Good analysis. Looking forward to reading his new book, Breakneck.

Booktime on the legacy of The Power Broker. “I believe its legacy is much more complex than many of the retrospectives published in major outlets over the last month make it seem.” A good counterpoint, at least for this Caro fanboy.

Roy Scholten’s LEGO Letterpress art. Fun.

Lofi microbes to study/relax to. Ha. I don’t actually use YouTube for things like this, but I love the idea of a livestream of microbes.

Graphite, a newish open source graphics app. I’ve played around with it a little, and the procedural node-based editing seems like it may end up being useful in making my art.

Emily Bressler in McSweeney’s with “I Work For an Evil Company, but Outside Work, I’m Actually a Really Good Person.” Ha.

Ted Gioia on why secondhand is now better than buying things new. This does seem true, and what a pity that is.

JA Westenberg on the case for blogging in the ruins. “The blog, at its best (a best I aspire one day to reach) is Montaigne’s direct descendant. It’s a form that allows for intellectual exploration without demanding premature certainty. You can write a post working through an idea, acknowledge in the post itself that you’re not sure where you’ll end up, and invite readers to think alongside you. You can return to the topic weeks later with updated thoughts. The format accommodates the actual texture of thinking, which is messy and recursive and full of wrong turns.”

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Blake Ashley Jr.’s Elephant plain text work system. That daily review template intrigues me! I’m now planning to try something in that vein.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff on interstitial journaling, “a productivity technique created by Tony Stubblebine. To my knowledge, it’s the simplest way to combine note-taking, tasks, and time tracking in one unique workflow.” Interesting idea. And I still need to read Tiny Experiments.

Brad East on being out of touch with pop culture. Quite liked this. I’ve been drifting in a similar direction and it’s lovely and liberating.

Austin Kleon with a quote from Ethan Hawke: “I am so bored by A.I. One of the things I love about the theater is: A.I. can’t do it. I couldn’t be less interested in computers and fake things. I like people. I like the way they smell, I like the way they talk, and I like the way they think. I think of A.I. as a plagiarizing mechanism. That’s all it is. And I know it’s going to change the world, it’s screwing everybody up, and I’m not in denial about any of that. But I’m in open rebellion.” While I am in fact interested in computers, I too am so, so bored by AI and consider myself in open rebellion against it.

Jim Nielsen on how making software is translating intent. “This is precisely why natural language isn’t a good fit for programming: it’s not very precise. As Gorman says, ‘Natural languages have not evolved to be precise enough and unambiguous enough’ for making software.” Agreed. Introducing ambiguity and fuzziness is a regression. This is one of the many reasons why I don’t care for AI.

Anil Dash on what it means to have a tech career in 2026, given the rash of mass layoffs and the general insanity seen in the C-suites. Here’s to hoping things get normal again before too long.

Robin Rendle on websites being small and private things. “Most business models on the web have assumed a mass readership is out there—but what if it isn’t? What if the web, and most websites besides the few obvious exceptions, were instead more like book publishing? A few thousand dedicated readers out there, at best.”

Updates to the Church handbook section on English Bible translations. Over the past few months I’ve been reading the NIV Old Testament and it feels much more approachable, where the story is clearer. I also find, for what it’s worth, that it feels less like scripture to me. (But that may just be from decades of using the KJV exclusively and will fade over time.)

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Steven Johnson on blank paper and notebooks, in response to Roland Allen’s The Notebook (which I really liked). Mmm, notebooks.

Ross Wintle on how software can be finished. Hear, hear. The part of my brain that likes creative constraints really likes this idea. Reminds me of Craig Mod’s pop-up newsletters, too — finite, bounded newsletters that are only published for a few weeks and then they end. Ross’s static not-Scrabble making-of post is also interesting.

Nate Meyvis on frontend maximalism. “Front-end maximalism is the view that considerations like these, under modern conditions and in a wide range of standard applications, should lead us to do much more than we currently do on the front end and much less on the back end.” For the small projects where I’ve done this, it’s been great. I’m planning to consider doing this on some of my personal apps that are currently more backend-heavy.

Affinity is now a consolidated, supposedly permanently free app. Not what I expected, but as long as it doesn’t eventually devolve into some awful big tech money grab, I’m going to try to see it as good news.

Damar Berlari’s visual explainer on dithering. Very cool. Looking forward to part 2, and Damar’s explainer on moving objects in 3D is also good.

David Zaruk on the European Food Safety Authority finding that many microplastic studies were flawed.

GitHub on avoiding toasts because of accessibility and usability concerns. Makes sense. And, lest there be any confusion, know that toast is still fine.

Ava on resisting self-Flanderization. Happy to report that while I used to worry about blogging things that segments of my readership might not care about (blogging about religion when some are only here for the book reviews, for example), I think I’m now doing much better at not worrying about it. (That said, has it had any visible effect on what I’ve posted? Not sure. I’m still very much stuck in the habit of writing only booknotes, link posts, and art posts, and it’s hard to get back into also writing other types of posts like I used to.)

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