Neal Stephenson’s advice on writing by hand. I’ve wanted to do more of this. Just need to put in the time to get my cursive hand to a place where I’m happy with how it looks, and I need to figure out how to avoid hand cramps, since unlikely Neal I do get those every time I write by hand for more than a minute or two. (Maybe I’m writing too small or holding the pen too tightly.)

Jess Zafarris on rebracketing (words that got broken in the wrong place). Fascinating!

Alan Jacobs quoting John McWhorter on why “h” is pronounced “aitch.” Also fascinating and unexpected.

The Godox C100 screenless camera and the screenless Camp Snap 2 both look interesting.

ReadBeanIceCream on only working at their desk. “I have a toolbox. I do not carry it around with me. I do not bring it the grocery store, on vacation, or anywhere else. It sits on a shelf until I need it and I treat my digital tools the same way.” Intriguing. I already do this for work but hadn’t thought about doing it for personal projects as well.

Petra Stock on a species of jellyfish, turritopsis dohrnii, that is kind of immortal. Crazy. Though having to turn back into a kid and grow up all over again seems like it might be more of a curse.

The Virtual OS Museum. “Want to see the earliest resident monitors? The ancestor of all modern OSes (CTSS)? The earliest versions of Unix? The first OS with a desktop metaphor GUI (Xerox Star Pilot/ViewPoint)? Early versions of mainstream OSes? If you want to explore historical OSes and platforms without having to worry about configuring/installing emulators and OSes or corrupting emulated installations, you’ve come to the right place.” Cool.

Video of Ancient James making a DSLR adapter mount out of an LCD. Mesmerizing.

vga256’s northern perspective. “When technology breaks down in the north, there isn’t a tech support number to call, or dealership or mechanic to take it to. You’re on your own. This encourages you to care for your tools, and make repairs using whatever knowledge and resources you have on hand. People who live on the land only take with them what they can maintain, upgrade and repair themselves. Big, complex, fragile, expensive, high-performance, high-maintenance stuff is left at drydock.” A good philosophy.

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Eamon Caddigan on hating AI in 2026. “Some people find chatbots useful and I can’t argue with their opinion, but nobody is doing anything with them that remotely justifies their socialized costs.”

Johannes Link and Jakob Schnell on the ethical use of generative AI. “Convenience, speed and entertainment are then weighed against numerous damages and risks to the environment, the state and humanity. In this sense, the ethical use and further expansion of GenAI in its current form is not possible.”

L. M. Sacasas on how AI is not a tool. “But AI is not a tool in this sense, it is an environment which envelops the user and works on us from the inside out while we naively think that we remain unchanged by our use so long as we are using it carefully and intentionally. The care and intentionality is beside the point, and our confidence in such vigilance probably works against us in the long run.”

Samis Talwar on how LLMs can’t program. “At no point have I ever met something generated by one of these tools that I didn’t detest. Articles are obsequious, vacuous, and typically boring. Length is a virtue (Pascal would have cried). Poetry reads like the stuff I wrote when I was 14. (I didn’t get better, I stopped.) Ask an LLM to generate short fiction, and you’ll quickly learn it was trained on the worst of internet fanfic.”

Tante on AI as a fascist artifact. “Modern ‘AI’ systems of any relevant capability exist because of violence, are based on violence. Violence is more than just hitting people. Taking away people’s agency is violence, exposing people to suffering is violence. Violence has many shapes and forms. And ‘AI’ needs an acceptance of endless amounts of violence (I will not be able to list all forms of it, this is just a selection).”

HMMZ on AI. “I have no idea how to manage AI at present except by curtailing use, because a tool producing a cheap reward with minimal input and no friction can only be a liability, and achieving that realisation is probably the only real contribution of AI to date.”

Henry on how it doesn’t matter if it works. “The widespread deployment of AI/LLMs constitutes an existential threat to labor whether or not it is an adept move by the adoptive industries. Thus it is essential for workers to stop asking whether or not AI works and start asking who ultimately benefits from its deployment.”

W. Evan Sheehan on how AI is everywhere foisted upon us. “This is not to say that I think that the environmental harms from resource extraction associated with computer chips and battery technology, nor the exploitation of labor in countries like China is in any way acceptable or excusable simply because some electronics have infiltrated our lives to the extent that they are practically indispensable. We can do better — and we should. My point is that we have not yet reached the point with ‘AI’ that we must continue to use it as we demand better. We can instead refuse to use it until it is ethical to do so.”

Dave Karpf on how data center activism is a bankshot. “It can trigger a reset of the status quo, and has the potential to make a lasting impact on the digital future.”

Matthew Butterick on extinction-level capitalism. “AI is inherently political technology. If AI works as intended, it will gradually corrode our liberal democracy, risking an irreversible shift into another political and economic configuration. Among AI risks, this one deserves more consideration, because it requires no additional conditions like malign actors or AI malfunction. AI only needs to amplify existing trends, especially around concentration of capital. This damage will occur even assuming that in the near term, AI will broadly improve material well-being.”

Sylvia quoting Dave Eggers on AI. “This is the first time in history when a whole generation is being told or tempted to have a machine write for them. You are one of one, unprecedented in the history of human evolution. There’s only one of you. So to give your voice to a machine to say speak for me, I’m going to be silent, and I’m going to tell a machine to express myself or to tell my narrative, is such a crime against yourself. It’s so dystopian, beyond anything I could do in a dystopian novel, and I did a lot.”

Ky Decker on burnout. “AI had hooked its tendrils into every corner of my work life. Even if I, personally, abstained from most AI usage, I was steeped in an environment which made it impossible to avoid. Pushing back felt futile.”

Tom MacWright on accidental anonymity. “If you want people to connect with you as a person, you can’t hide behind a machine.”

Nolen Royalty on legibility of effort. “What software (and writing, to an extent) is missing now is legibility of effort — the ability to tell at a glance whether something took a human meaningful work.”

Benjamin Hollon on people asking what he thinks about AI. “I’m really, really tired of having the conversation. Because it’s the same conversation over and over and over again, usually with no actual signs that the person I’m talking to cares enough to change their mind.”

James Zhan on no-AI statements. “You’re never expected to be able to tell handmade ceramics from machine-made ones, so why should anyone be expected to be able to tell human-made content from AI-generated ones?”

Simon Sarris on resisting AI. “I suspect careful thinkers do not gain a mastery of mystery, or attention to detail, by scrolling Reddit or listening to current event podcasts or asking ‘AI’ to summarize anything. Instead I imagine they spend their time with primary sources, correspondence, stories, engaging with their own senses in one way or another, or some other form of exploring the world in detail.” And: “It is an interesting feature of stories and fiction that they resist summary. You cannot read a summary of Anna Karenina and somehow stockpile its pleasures and charms. Narrative resists compression.”

Rutherford Craze on using our human hands. “When we turn design over to generative AI, we remove the human element from the process. When we ask Midjourney to draw an ox, it does not think of home. ChatGPT will never invent a new calligraphy technique, because it has no wrists to feel uncomfortable. A tool that shields us from the friction of the work is compelling, but if we don’t experience the friction, we will never change the work.”

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HellMood’s 16-byte Sierpinski triangle demo. Sixteen bytes!

Derek Sivers on being a netizen. I’ve been online since 1991 and that same early ethos was instilled in me, too. I believe it makes for a better internet.

Harry Roberts on the new No-Vary-Search browser cache control header.

Ally Piechowski with some helpful git log commands for getting familiar with a new codebase. Bookmarking these.

Nishant on Earth’s radio wave bubble, which is only 240 light years across. One of the most compelling answers to the Fermi paradox I’ve seen so far.

Tracy Durnell on human-oriented online posts. Some interesting ideas here. The analog parts made me think of Robin Sloan’s printing projects: “In the years since, the Kindle has matured and curdled … the web has become an even more brutal arena … and only one realm has remained truly, reliably apart. Only one realm has remained reliable, period. That’s the realm of the physical, of course.” Making and shipping zines (or some other printed matter) is tempting.

Asher Cabrera on adding UI for reply posts on a blog. I like this. Lately I’ve defaulted to these batched link posts with a smidge of commentary per link, but maybe I’ll get back into the habit someday of responding more fully, at least some of the time.

James Goldberg on how Mormon literature is arriving. Unrelated to the link: hard to believe it was almost twenty years ago when I first met James and got involved with New Play Project (writing, typesetting playbills and scripts, helping run auditions, selling tickets and concessions, a little bit of directing). Good memories. And that means it’s been eighteen years (18!) since I started Mormon Artist (may it rest in peace). Sometimes I find myself missing those days of working on larger collaborative projects. (On a related note, withdrawing from social media has absolutely been good for my mental health, but it’s come with the undesirable side effect of feeling far more disconnected from other people doing creative work. I haven’t yet figured out how to balance this.)

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Typographica Library’s specimen books of metal and wood type. Lovely. I occasionally dream of using some of these specimens as inspiration for new rough, wobbly fonts in the same vein as the IM Fell fonts, but I don’t know if it’ll happen — I’m beginning to suspect that maybe, just maybe, I might not have the right temperament for doing type design.

Marissa Lingen’s book reviews (twice a month). Enjoying these. So much so, in fact, that I’ve gone back and have been reading through the entirety of her blog archive.

Robert Birming on stories hiding in plain sight, and how perspective determines what’s interesting. This is in context of blogging and perhaps creative nonfiction as well.

Samuel Arbesman’s Microcosm Industries, a register of simulation games like SimCity, Factorio, and Dwarf Fortress. Fun. My brain doesn’t like playing computer games anymore, but when I was younger I would have loved these.

Worse on Purpose. “Corporate autopsies on the brands you trust. Who bought them, who gutted them, and what’s still worth buying.” I think the world would be better off with more rigorous regulations for mergers and acquisitions, and also for private equity.

Andrea Wulf’s recommendations for biographies of 18th-century figures, including Richard Holmes’s The Age of Wonder, which I’ve been looking forward to. And this reminds me that I’ve been itching to read Wulf’s other books, since I really loved The Invention of Nature by her.

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Peter Saint-Andre on pair reading. I’ve been doing a form of this for the last year and a half and have really enjoyed it.

epub-merge, a tool I recently used to merge two EPUBs from Project Gutenberg. Worked great.

Matt Glassman on proportional representation in the House of Representatives. Ooh, I like this idea.

Blain Smith on the bare essentials of development tools. I’m not quite as minimalist as this, but the principles resonate with me. I’ve been working recently on slimming down my Neovim config (I’m planning to post about that sometime soon) and hope to move further in this direction. I also quite liked the posts on software engineering discipline and posture and humanities in the machine.

Sava on living in the terminal. (On one’s computer, that is, not at the airport.) I, too, find the terminal to be soothing and quiet, and using it sparks joy for me.

Ashur Cabrera on asking what you’ve tried, when debugging things. “Eventually I learned to compile this list before asking for help. And, reader, what a difference!”

Frederick Chan on setting up a free locality domain. “In the US, can get a domain name like somename.city.state.us for free.” Had no idea.

Riley Walz’s Empty Screenings, a little web app to show you which AMC theaters around you haven’t sold many tickets, for people who prefer their theaters on the empty side.

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Matt Glassman on influencing politics (by talking with policymakers). Liked this.

Rob Henderson on how he reads. Also see James Marriott’s similar post. I love these kinds of posts.

L. M. Sacasas on reading as counter-practice. “By counter-practice, I mean a deliberately chosen discipline that can form us in ways that run counter to the default settings of our techno-social milieu.”

Hollie on commonplace books. I’m trying to do more of this when I’m reading. (Normally I just read and don’t take notes.)

Sebastian Pagel’s Termcraft, a 2D sandbox survival game in the terminal. Wow.

Ibrahim Diallo on being comfortable modifying hardware to meet your needs. “If you own a tool, whether it’s a car, a computer, or a line of code, you own the right to change it. The manufacturer designed it for the ‘average’ user, but you are a specific human with specific needs.” I don’t think I’m comfortable filing down the edges of my MacBook (at least in part because I might want to trade it in eventually), but the mentality here is still good to remember.

The No CSS Club. Fun! So much nostalgia. While I don’t think I’m realistically going to join the club, lately I’ve been itching to scale back the amount of CSS on this site, to go as minimal as possible while still being something I’m happy with. We’ll see!

David at Raptitude on how social media is the opposite of social life. “This is because social media doesn’t really allow you to interact with people. People are living beings with beating hearts and live emotions. Social life has always been about engaging in the immediate physical presence of such beings. Social media avoids exactly that part, while allowing you to exchange information and symbols of approval.” Yep. I don’t regret leaving social media behind.

Chris Ferdinandi on the anti-work movement. “But this obsession with hard work as a virtue, as a good and righteous thing to do, the glorification of toil and sweat and labor… that’s a tool the wealthy who don’t work for a living use to oppress those who do.”

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Isaac Kolding on how reading is good for you and how it expands your effective freedom. I also enjoyed the post on inefficient books and very much agree.

BDM on how sometimes books are hard to read. “Being easy to read is not the only virtue a book must possess to be enjoyable. If something is not easy to read, that is not a sign that the reader is stupid. Sometimes it is the knowledge that you will need to return to a text over and over that forms the basis of your enjoyment. You are encountering something that cannot be grasped in a single experience.”

Mat Marquis on the end of responsive images. “I’ve been waiting for fourteen years to write this article. Fourteen years to tell you about one relatively new addition to the way images work on the web. For you, just a handful of characters will mean improvements to the fundamental ergonomics of working with images. For users, it will mean invisible, seamless, and potentially massive improvements to front-end performance, forever stitched into the fabric of the web. For me, it means the time has finally come to confess to my sinister machinations — a confession almost a decade and a half in the making.” A fun read.

Sal on cleaning scratches off ceramic dinnerware. I did not know this was possible.

Justin Parpan on painting loose at first. Also enjoyed the post on thinking about texture.

Marco on putting custom firmware on the Xteink X4. I haven’t gotten 0ne yet but it’s getting more and more tempting. (Mostly because of the size, I think. And the weight — 74 grams! My phone is 171 grams, for comparison.)

Ben introduces Bubbles Briefing, a finite-edition blog aggregator. I’ve been subscribed for the past week or two and have found the form factor to be nice.

JTR on writing emails to other bloggers. I need to do more of this.

Jim Grey on how your blog is like a radio station. “Every time you publish a post, you are programming your station. You are choosing what goes into rotation. Some post types are your familiars, the topics and themes readers already associate with you. Some are deeper cuts, things that matter to you but may not matter to everyone. Some are experiments, signals sent into the dark to see if anyone recognizes them.”

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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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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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