@gurupanguji

🔗 Bringing people together with the web - James’ Coffee Blog

2026-06-23T12:00:00+00:00

My recent blog post about categories was inspired by a discussion with Thomas about work he was doing on his site. Thomas then wrote a blog post in response to mine, and several people reached out with their ideas. I was delighted to see how much discussion and inquiry can come from a single blog post.

Source: Bringing people together with the web - James’ Coffee Blog

This used to be the norm. I am fairly confident that my preference for longer form writing isn’t just my penchant for verbosity / slowness in thinking. That it comes from trying to be more nuanced, articulate and hopefully more thoughtful.

That said, a part of me still accepts that there are obviously going to be people who have the clarity of thought without needing time to think. I think I’ve realized that I am not that person.

I believe that twitter’s constraints of 256 characters (~~128 characters~~) used to make me write better, but the speed of interaction made me think worse. Like, with anything, ymmv.

🔗 newsonaut: news, technology and other stuff

2026-06-22T12:00:00+00:00

A beautiful site that’s easy to read might be the product of someone who is comfortable with the corporate world, but not necessarily. Instead, it may simply show an allegiance to their craft.

Principles of design and typography have been honed over hundreds of years. Those who learn them care about something bigger than what is implied by corporate or commercial.

Source: newsonaut: news, technology and other stuff

All while realizing that “beautiful” is indeed subjective. To be clear, I actually find my own sense of what’s “beautiful” on the web when it comes to typography and font-family and font-size is certainly a flux that’s influenced by many viewpoints and my own feelings.

Being fundamentally emotional, I think it’s natural that this is subjective, what’s vogue changes (for example more serif usage).

There are some people who will align with my own tastes and given the world, I have to accept that if my site were shown to even 10,000 people, let alone a 100,000 or a million, some will find my own site less tasteful to them than myself.

I am a product of whatever I’ve been influenced by and I deeply admire people who go out of their way to find the beauty in things. It’s easy to critique - it’s way harder to take something beautiful, find what’s beautiful about it and then make it shine even more.

In my life and craft, that’s what I’ve tried hard to do - be it people, products, systems or technology.

🔗 rsync and outrage

2026-06-21T12:00:00+00:00

This is all a huge amount of work. I’m retired (though my wife may dispute that!) and I’d rather be out sailing than working on rsync security issues, so I have reached for several AI tools to help with what needs to be done. I have absolutely no regrets about doing that, although from the storm of anti-AI rage it’s clear that many people think I should be hung up by my toe nails and flogged for even considering doing this.

Source: rsync and outrage

For the amount of vitriol that Andrew Tridgell received, this was quite a mature response. Kinda shows why he’s one of the greatest and a good steward. At the end of the day, LLMs are a tool. You wield it for an end. In this case, a man deserves all the sailing for creating one of the most useful utilities in the world. And I am glad he’s finding stewards for rsync even amongst the onslaught.

🔗 Be Greedier ! ( Gojo’s words to Megumi ) | JJK EP23

2026-06-20T12:00:00+00:00

Gojo’s note to Megumi. Jujutsu Kaisen episode 23

Transcript

0:00 · I’m not saying a bunt is bad baseball is a team sport and everyone has their role to play but Jujutsu sorcery is an individual sport isn’t working with the other sorcerer is important of course but no matter how many allies you have around you when you die you’ll be alone

0:21 · you can only piece together undervalued data on yourself and others can’t imagine a stronger future version of yourself maybe that’s because of your trump card you believe that in the worst case you can resolve everything at the cost of your life but at that point forget about beating me you’ll never even measure Up To Nanami.

Dying to win and risking death to win are completely different, Megumi. Give it your best. Be greedier.

Source: Be Greedier - JJK EP23

This is one of my favorite scenes from Season 1.

🔗 Be Excellent, Not Efficient

2026-06-19T12:00:00+00:00

But you want a sentient being to share your meals with, and to lay their head on the pillow next to you at night. It’s the judgment that recognizes you don’t want to spend the second half of your life apologizing for what you did during the first half. Just remember: you get to decide what matters, and you get to decide how to organize your life around it. Thich Nhat Hanh tells the story of a rider on a horse galloping madly across a field. When someone says, “Hey, where are you going so fast?” the rider responds, “I don’t know: ask the horse.”

You don’t want to be that guy.

Source: Be Excellent, Not Efficient

Second, connect the social change you want to see with the life you want to live. Alice Waters wasn’t motivated by her anger at a system. She was inspired by her love for a form of life: namely, how we eat and talk together. The great Jesuit philosopher John Courtney Murray had a word for that: civilization. Turns out the simple things can be quite profound. David Brooks calls this the “Some people find a better way to live, and other people follow,” approach to social change.

Source: Be Excellent, Not Efficient

Third, focus on the excellence that is the fruit of hard work. Be skeptical of people who help you make excuses or encourage a sense of entitlement. Whenever you are faced with the choice between doing more things in a mediocre way, and doing fewer things in an excellent way, choose excellence. When Alice Waters returned from France, her instinct was not to convince fast food places to put better pickles in their burgers. It was to start a single restaurant that mastered a particular cuisine. There is no substitute for being good at what you do.

Source: Be Excellent, Not Efficient

But the original motivation was never about the honors or the recognition. It was about a commitment to the craft of cooking, and the joy of taking care of others. It was about the profound sense of satisfaction you feel when making a perfect omelet, and an honest living from your craft, and a gift that brings joy to others.

Source: Be Excellent, Not Efficient

I tell you these stories because when I watch chefs or musicians or any human being do their work with ihsan—sacred excellence—and direct it towards the elevation of other human beings, it inspires me to improve at my craft, to do my work with ihsan, to be as useful as I can to the people around me.

Humans inspiring other humans to elevate. Maybe the robots can do that, but I don’t think so. And even if they could, I’m not sure I’d want them to. There is something very human about making our own food, and our own music, and our own inspiration. This is the essence of our condition. It is what we were made for. It is what makes us precious to one another.

It makes me think of the wisdom of the Roman philosopher Seneca. I will leave you with his words: “While we live, while we are among human beings, let us cultivate our humanity.”

Source: Be Excellent, Not Efficient

Once in a while you chance across writing that truly moves you. It resonates likely because you’ve been thinking similar thoughts and yet they manage to put it in words that felt perfect. Words that are familiar, yet profound. Words that are banal but together, profound.

I was moved by this post by Eboo Patel. It’s a neat book end to the post that I wrote to honor the craft. I highly recommend reading the whole post.

🔗 You’re Weirder Than You Think

2026-06-18T12:00:00+00:00

One of my long-time hobby-horses is that people are way weirder than they realize, and that our politics would look different if more people understood how massively unrepresentative they are of the rest of the population. So here’s a little quiz designed to demonstrate how unrepresentative you are (of the US population – sorry non-Americans).

I did shockingly little of the work on this, so compliments should largely go to Claude, but if you have complaints or think this is wrong please do let me know. If you’re interested in the process you can see the conversation here.

Source: You’re Weirder Than You Think

Another great use of tokens. The indie web continues to shine bright.

🔗 The Copy and the Guru

2026-06-17T12:00:00+00:00

The more I think about it, the more I realize this is the ultimate expression of what began in the social media era, when media manipulation became the primary currency instead of authenticity. We all created curated, and often false, lifestyles on Instagram.

Social media gave us tools to edit our lives into a highlight reel. Photos of coffee, food, selfies from places you couldn’t afford last year, some pithy comment. It was all one directional. A movie about me, by me, for me to broadcast and you to watch. This is what led to the rise of influencer culture, where anything and everything was for sale. The self first became a gallery, then a reel. It was all passive, beautiful, controlled and fake.

We shared bumper sticker wisdom on Twitter. LinkedIn became a public square to hawk faux expertise. This popsci compression of complex thinking into shareable nuggets, designed for distribution and optimized for engagement, was the next step in the self becoming a product.

The pseudo-conversation twin is the crescendo. The self’s full immersion into illusion is now interactive. It answers questions. It gives the impression of encounter, of dialogue, of relationship. But it is still the same curated self with a conversational interface bolted on. It is as authentic as a Potemkin village. And with every step we have moved further from the actual person. The twin is not a rehearsal. It is the first act of abstraction of ourselves. Reid AI can do the job from a bunker in New Zealand.

Source: The Copy and the Guru

Oh come on, not Om!

Look around and all you can see are gurus under their proverbial banyan trees, who make nothing but impart wisdom. They listen to the same podcast, and then regurgitate. They marvel at humanist manifestos. Some even read the Stoics. This is found wisdom, not earned wisdom. The twin is only possible once you have stopped being accountable to reality. The code either runs or it doesn’t. The piece either lands or it doesn’t. That accountability is what keeps thinking honest. Once you move from doing to narrating, you can be archived. Once archived, you can be distributed to the rest of the planet.

Source: The Copy and the Guru

The digital twin is just more of the same masquerade. It once again comes from the same impetus: there’s more efficiency to be gained (lower self worth) or more gyaan to be extracted (higher self worth) from the “human” you. It also buys into the core logic that “language = intelligence.”

Personally, I think this also a sign that we’ve somehow warped our brains into thinking that being “human” is somehow - less. The our output is the only way to value us? That we should even value us?

Om connects it as an extension of the social media masquerade act we’ve been training ourselves and putting on for the last decade or so.

Personally, I find the entire field fascinating: It’s filled with contradictions. There’s this optimistic take that by removing the “grunt work” from humans on to clankers, humans get to do more higher order / level thinking.

I will be honest and say that human adaptation seems to suggest that the “higher level thinking” that we seem to appreciate more and find more valuable, will become grunt work by us doing more of that. I will be happy if/when I am proven wrong. I am also in this experiment together with everyone.

Maybe it’s just a matter of timing and we are all in the path of migration from lower-order tasks to higher-order tasks. However, throughout history - we’ve needed darkness to appreciate the light. Maybe this will work like an overton window. What was hard before becomes easier and what was easy is taken over by clankers. And we will keep going up the chain?

I hope so. Yet, I remain skeptical of the simplicity of that argument.

This is also why I am trying to push myself away from “AI” as the right term here towards “clankers.” These are tools, machines, bots that we prompt to do certain tasks. They might gain additional skills as they improve and I hope they do.

However, they aren’t “intelligent.” That is not a “material” observation. It’s a “mental” observation. That’s klishta being added by our own brain.

Finally, related to the digital brain

We, as human beings, are landed with memory systems that have fallibilities, frailties, and imperfections — but also great flexibility and creativity. Confusion over sources or indifference to them can be a paradoxical strength: if we could tag the sources of all our knowledge, we would be overwhelmed with often irrelevant information.

Source: Oliver Sacks on Memory, Originality, and Why Forgetting is Necessary for Creativity

A digital twin might not be all good for entirely evolutionary / creative reasons.

…

It isn’t just the sameness of the AI writing, though that eventually gets to be tedious enough that I find myself skipping writing on even interesting topics if my internal “AI detector” goes off. It is also that badly prompted AI writing produces very little meaning per word, taking you in intellectual circles instead. We are trained to read well-crafted sentences and intellectual sounding texts as the result of effortful human work and thus pay attention to these AI written comments when we see them. But there is often no human meaning there, these posts are just meaning-shaped attention vampires that take mental effort to decode and give you no equivalent understanding in return1.

Source: Choosing to Stay Human

I heard this recently and it resonates:

Asking AI to write for you is like asking a bot to lift weights for you

If you came up with this, please reach out and I can attribute appropriately.

There’s still value in using AI to edit, there’s still value in using AI to expand / critique / consider counter opinions if that’s the purpose of your writing. However, especially when it comes to personal-writing and writing intended to signal expertise in a specific subject - clanker-script is a turn off.

Worse, human nature leads us to make the wrong choices. Learning requires us to face our own ignorance and do hard intellectual work, and these things are really uncomfortable

Source: Choosing to Stay Human - by Ethan Mollick

You don’t need to trust me. However, learn from my own experiments and mistakes. I’ve done trials of trying to get AI to learn about me and my writing and ask it to recreate passages / rewrite them. The worst part is that it produces passages that seem passable and even pass on first read.

However, when you re-read them after a break, they consistently sound jibberish. If the purpose was to communicate clearly, I’d have chosen a different structure, a diff turn of phrase etc.

Again, the effort required to not just accept but consider the pros and cons is part of learning to work with AI imho.

My colleagues at Wharton call this “cognitive surrender,” and they documented how people would stop thinking about problems and just let the AI do the work, even when the AI was wrong. I think part of the problem is the way these tools are designed.

Source: Choosing to Stay Human - by Ethan Mollick

A lot of the problem is going to come down to us. To be clear, I am cool with a lot of cognitive surrender. I don’t remember phone numbers anymore because my phone does that for me. I am happy my kids didn’t need to learn cursive. I am fine with calculators doing my daily math and my computer figuring out how to schedule my classes. These were once useful skills, but we were probably right to get rid of them.

Source: Choosing to Stay Human - by Ethan Mollick

God I struggled with this paragraph. It clearly highlights that the “surrender” is a personal choice. I can’t even agree with this author on where to draw the line on surrender while I agree with them on the general topic of AI writing.

I wrote before that AI can write your code, but it can’t do your job. I still believe that, probably more than before. The job was never about typing code. The job is noticing when the reported bug is only a symptom. The job is reading the weird line in the stack trace twice. The job is knowing when a fix is technically correct and still too narrow.

The job is the part where your fucking brain has to be in the room.

There is a way of using AI that feels like getting a second brain. You open the issue, read the error, form a rough theory, and then ask the model to challenge it. You have it search the codebase. You ask what else could explain the symptom. You ask it to write the boring first draft of the fix. Then you read the patch, poke at the edges, and decide.

That’s great and might be the dream, honestly. The model makes you sharper, and it helps you keep more of the problem in view. It catches things you missed. It turns a slow loop into a fast one.

Then… there’s the thing I did. … This post is mostly for me. I wish it wasn’t. I wish I could write it from a place of earned superiority, looking down at all the careless engineers vibe-merging AI patches into production while I, a Responsible Adult, carefully inspect every token.

Source: Using My Fucking Brain – Terrible Software

My dear friends whom I consider to be effective, efficient, delightfully prescient and unique communicators - are resorting to this banal speak. I applaud their experimentation but I worry for their voice.

Yet, my only choice is to privately highlight why they may consider choosing different. However, I have to accept that every human will choose their own cognitive surrender. I do too. My hope is that we learn to do it consciously and can choose to avoid clanker pablum.

There’s more to this. We seems to have evolved the world into a system where slop is still rewarded. This is worth exploring. This sent me down a rabbit hole and I chanced across this incredible post.

The careful professional, who takes a week to think through a problem, who refuses to claim expertise they do not have, and who writes one in-depth researched post about a specific topic, gets out-competed and buried by the carnival barker who will claim any expertise that fits the trending topic, and who fires off five posts a day, each of them a slightly different rephrasing of the same content-free observation. I am not arguing that honest, competent work has disappeared, but I am arguing that the incentive structure no longer points toward it, and that this fact has consequences that compound over time.

Source: The Rise of the Bullshittery

:s/bullshit/slop

LLMs have exacerbated this problem. Maybe constraints are an important part of a system that should reward good behavior. It sounds almost paternalistic and gatekeeper-y and this is why I don’t claim to have a solution. However, I remain confident that good people co-opting slop after a stage of experimentation are just playing the game.

But after a few drafts I realised that I was aiming at the wrong target, because the people are mostly responding rationally to a system that pays for performance and ignores substance. If I blame them, I have to also blame myself for the times I stayed quiet and smiled at the demo, or signed off on the launch I did not believe in. I guess that most of us have done some version of that.

Source: The Rise of the Bullshittery

This resonates.

Shaming someone into submission hasn’t historically worked. So, this only leaves us with a few options. Highlight and loudly support people who have done good work and have taken the pain to share that - including blogs like mine.

Aside: Ugh. I hated including that line. However, I am trying to be a bit shameless about my own capabilities. No, I am being proud of them.

Don’t engage with content that you know is slop. And for people whom you know and care about - maybe suggest privately that they are better than the slop they drivel out and be a listener to the situation they find themselves in.

🔗 Things I used to do

2026-06-17T12:00:00+00:00

That got me to realize that it’s been a really long time since I’ve done anything of the source with my phone(s). I used to be one of those kinds of people that would have custom ring tones for every single person in my contacts list. I would have custom sounds for the each incoming text. Custom notification sounds FTW! Right?!

Source: Things I used to do

Takeway: There are very few precious things in life. Why worry about the 99% of the stuff that don’t matter.

Also telling things myself as plans that I had long planned aren’t exactly panning out either.

;)

Bubbles mentioned in the Installer Newsletter by The Verge.

2026-06-16T18:15:00+00:00

Bubbles: functions a bit like Hacker News but specifically for personal blogs. You log in with a Mastodon or Fediverse account, upvote posts you like, and watch the good stuff bubble up.

It is fantastic to see Bubbles getting some well-deserved spotlight in David Pierce’s latest Installer newsletter. This is a win for the Indie web and I am glad I had a minor part to play in this. The personal blogging community is thriving, and tools like Bubbles make discovering and participating in this ecosystem so much more delightful.

Go check it out if you haven’t already!

🔗 AI wants to be me!

2026-06-16T12:00:00+00:00

Act 3 : The conclusion

This afternoon I thought it would be fun (clearly I need a life!) to try some of these AI checking websites against my own written material.

I copied and pasted a few random articles from this very website into the AI sausage machine and eagerly anticipated the responses.

And true to AI form, the results varied wildly. Some sites were happy that it was completely human content. Others had the audacity to suggest up to 56% of the text was possibly AI.

Source: AI wants to be me!

I bet this conversation is not going away anytime soon. So, I’m now trying to change how I approach reading online writing. I am going to go by my vibes. I am confident that I have a good nose for bullshit-writing. If it smells like caca, imma not gonna reada. But the complaining and reality-tv-esque meta discussion ends today.

▶️ When Chai Met Toast: Their Best Performance EVER!

2026-06-15T21:00:00+00:00

🔗 A letter of gratitude to NetNewsWire ❤️

2026-06-15T12:00:00+00:00

Here are some highlights of what we’ve done with 2,188 commits in the past year:

Adopted Swift structured concurrency and async/await

Adopted Liquid Glass UI while still supporting recent OSes

Ported our XML, HTML, and date parsers from Objective-C to Swift

Fixed a ton of bugs, including crashing bugs

Reduced battery use, memory use, hang rate, scroll hitch rate, and disk writes

Did a bunch of performance enhancements, including (especially) finding places where the app could just do less work

Did a bunch of hygiene things — got GitHub CI running again, started using SwiftLint, turned on treat-warnings-as-errors, started work on localizability, switched to Logger, added tests

Simplified and refactored code, deleted code, renamed things, etc. — gained clarity in a bunch of places

Added support for Cache-Control headers for feeds, so publishers can tune how often NetNewsWire checks their feeds

Optimized iCloud syncing (still more to do on that one)

Dealt with deprecations (switched to NWPathMonitor, for instance)

Added diagnostics and error reporting to the UI — iCloud Storage Stats and the Error Log are shipping, and more like these are currently in beta: Dinosaurs, Current Activity, Activity Log, and Account Stats.

Source: inessential: NetNewsWire Status

Except for Google Reader adventure (which was an utter delight), I’ve been using NetNewsWire since 2006. It is one of the first applications I downloaded after getting my first Mac and continues to be one of the first applications I install on a Mac.

That’s 20 years of reading RSS feeds made possible by this one application. 20 years of being delighted by writing, 20 years of knowledge gained.

And yet, the pace of development and improvements in 6.0 is staggering.

Thank you Brent Simmons; thank you NetNewsWire.

🔗 abadidea: “just got insulted by a particu…”

2026-06-15T12:00:00+00:00

abadidea @0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange

just got insulted by a particularly offensive dark pattern: I went to the first online character counter I could find to check the length of something I’d written in a web form, and aside from the character count, it popped up this brazen lie that my completely handwritten post was “obviously” AI-generated. But don’t worry, they can automatically “remove AI” and make it “100% human”! By which they mean charge me for an LLM to continuously rewrite it in stranger and stranger ways until it scrapes a “0% LLM” detection score

Source: abadidea: “just got insulted by a particu…”

That’s a dark dark pattern. Yes, it’s double dark how effectively it affects your psychology. I might be feeding this sort of behavior with my posts that I can see AI-writing everywhere and will stop.

🔗 Nobody is destined for greatness.

2026-06-14T12:00:00+00:00

Earned greatness looks nothing like the myth.

Picture the thousandth repetition of a thing you fumbled on your first attempt, and the long stretch when nobody is watching. Behind that are the friends who lose patience, the savings that drain, the steadier job you turned down and the years that pass with no proof you were right. Other people add the glamour later, once the result is plain to see and you’ve already paid for it.

There’s a version of you that keeps waiting to feel chosen, and a version that goes down into the hole and gets to work. The first one keeps waiting.

Nobody is born holding greatness.

People build it in the dark, with pebbles in the mouth, long before anyone arrives to applaud.

Source: Nobody is destined for greatness.

It’s all about the reps.

🔗 The quiet grief of adult friendship

2026-06-13T12:00:00+00:00

Friendship, however, has always depended on a certain irrational generosity. A willingness to waste time together magnificently. To listen to the same anxiety for the fifth time. To sit through silence. To remain available without agenda.

Source: The quiet grief of adult friendship

A lot of people sent me this post and to their credit, the message contained is beautiful. However, the message was sullied because I could see AI writing everywhere. In a post-irony world where “The Future of Truth” contains clanker-slop, maybe I am the odd person out.

🔗 The Eternal Sloptember

2026-06-12T12:00:00+00:00

I’m calling it now, the adoption of AI agents into software development will be one of the most costly mistakes in the field’s history. Agents cannot program, and it’s taking longer and longer to realize that they can’t. They are a highly sophisticated statistical model designed to mimic the distribution of programming. The output is broken, but in a way that’s getting harder and harder to detect. Which is exactly what you’d expect from an increasingly accurate statistical model.

Source: The Eternal Sloptember

geohot is now ringing some alarm bells. This is just the latest in a series of the vibe turning on agents as a panacea.

The Earendil works folks, now also the patreon of Pi have always been clanker-skeptic agent users. They are also doing some great work trying to both embrace but be rigorous on what works and what doesn’t in this world:

The most frustrating failure mode right now is that people submit issues that are not in their own voice. They contain an observed problem somewhere, but it has been thrown into a clanker and the clanker reworded it and made a huge mess of it. Typically, it was prompted so badly that the conclusions produced are more often than not inaccurate but always full of confidence. The result is complete guesswork on root causes, fake-minimal repros, suggested implementation strategies, analogies to adjacent but often the wrong code, and long lists of error classes that might or might not matter.

Source: Building Pi With Pi - Armin Ronacher’s Thoughts and Writings

The folks at Every publication have a long report that suggests something similar - all the people lazily laying off humans because they think that AI is going to take over everything are in for a rude surprise.

AI makes yesterday’s human competence cheap Cheap competence gets rapidly adopted Abundance creates sameness—old expertise becomes commoditized Sameness creates a demand for difference Demand for difference is new demand for expert … However, I am arguing that, regardless of your current job, there is a form of work that stays structurally ahead of the models—using them to address today’s problems as you see them. That’s where knowledge work is headed.

Source: After Automation - Every

So, as I noted above - the vibe is turning.

Slop existed long before AI

As I noted a couple days ago, slop was always present - even before clankers. Slop is a result of a lack of care. What’s increasingly clear is that currently clankers generate a ton of output. Output that humans have to verify and ensure for quality. What happens when you overwork the human / put them in charge of things they don’t actually care about? Quality suffers.

The more you care, the more you realize that AI isn’t quality

This is a correlated learning. The more I care about something, the more I find AI output to not meet my quality bar. This is why I give credence to Armin and geohot’s pieces. It’s worth considering - what if that were true?

This is not writing LLMs off. And neither are they. The question is keeping an eye out for - what are the labs and Google doing? 1) are they recognizing these are the issues? 2) Are they moving results to be better for these cases and how?

Fwiw, at least Demis seems to think that replacing engineers en masse with AI is short sighted.

🔗 A Golden Era of Blogging

2026-06-11T12:00:00+00:00

One thing I love about the blogging world right now — and by “world” I mean the “webdev tech blogging world” that I live in — is that there are very few, if any, substantial monetary incentives. All the incentives to make a living producing content are over on other platforms, which means those who are blogging are doing it out of love, passion, or some other reason that’s (yet) to be tainted by substantial outside influence.

Source: A Golden Era of Blogging

Love, passion, and curiosity — more than money — fuel the majority of posts that show up in my RSS feed every day and I love it.

Source: A Golden Era of Blogging - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

What does money mean to you? In the initial days, it’s sustenance. Yet, humans are incredible at hedonic adaptation. Soon, sustenance inflates to the point where the money needs to float a lifestyle.

HMW allow the money allow us to put more care into our craft? There-in lies the secret to happiness. Money is a means to an end, not the end itself.

I feel like I am gaining some midlife clarity saying that out loud.

🔗 Gaslighting Openness

2026-06-11T12:00:00+00:00

Disliking the EU, China, or any other large government should not make us forget that true democratized access to technology including AI is in all our interest. Some temporary product pain, including delayed Apple AI features, will be worth paying if it keeps gates open.

Source: Gaslighting Openness

Likewise, just because a company’s motives are capitalistic, doesn’t make it particularly pure either. That’s a narrative that I’ve seen pass around in the tech circles as well.

🔗 Re: No, I Won’t Buy You A Coffee

2026-06-11T12:00:00+00:00

I do understand that this gameification of breaking even that our capitalst world is enticing, but you need to be aware that at the end of the tunnel, you’ll just be left with pocket gravel of no real word value. Hobbies cost money, you need to accept it. Turning them into a net gain is a fools errand, there are magnitudes more effective ways to turn your time, effort and money into income.

Let our little corner of the internet, shaped by freedom and connections, be a place where we can forget the draining nature of capitalism.

Source: No, I Won’t Buy You A Coffee

While I don’t personally find it offensive for someone to ask me to pay for a coffee for them, I think the author’s point at least made me think. The act of passive income, the trial of combining what you love to do, and care to do into a self-sustaining project. These all have a tone behind them - one that our current society has revered and we’ve adopted - and so has the author.

I think I agree with the author that if the writer thinks of their writing as a product, it changes the relationship with the reader - even if - I sense it’s a frustration with the world that translated into that specific post.

I am not against anyone asking for help. I am also not against some people trying their own thing to push for help. I am certainly not against the author writing their own thoughts in their own words, in their own space.

The über point is: the world is complex, it’s big and everyone’s experiences of it are different, they are also colored by whatever is going on in their own mind. My only point is: be kind, be open that even what they write in one blog post - definitely doesn’t define them or me.

Life’s too complex for snap judgements. I am trying to unlearn that habit and I hope so can this world.

For example: here are some other takes:

Yes, Buy me a coffee Re: No, Won’t Buy You a Coffee

🔗 gurupanguji.com is now on Bubbles

2026-06-10T15:00:00+00:00

The IndieWeb is great. Lately, there has been an incredible increase in the sense of community across the personal web, largely driven by a wave of wonderful initiatives taken by people who genuinely care about blogging.

Following my recent note on Junited 2026, I am excited to share that gurupanguji.com is now officially on Bubbles.

I highly recommend checking out Bubbles—it is a treasure trove of incredible personal blogs and passionate people writing about all kinds of topics.

Source: Bubbles

🔗 Junited 2026

2026-06-10T14:00:00+00:00

I am participating in Junited 2026, a month-long celebration of the blogosphere where bloggers collect and share links to posts they enjoy.

I’ve set up a dedicated page on my site to track my recommended links for the month. You can find all my collected links and recommendations at my /junited/ page. I hope to update it once a week / sooner as time permits.

Source: Junited

🔗 In The Beginning There Was Slop

2026-06-10T12:00:00+00:00

You don’t need AI to produce slop because slop isn’t made by AI. It’s made by humans — AI is just the popular tool of choice for making it right now.

Slop existed long before LLMs came onto the scene.

It will doubtless exist long after too.

Source: In The Beginning There Was Slop

This was very clarifying. Slop is an issue of care and not the tool. This is worth remembering.

🔗 The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time – Nintendo Direct 6.9.2026

2026-06-10T12:00:00+00:00

Source: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time – Nintendo Direct 6.9.2026

omg. omg. omg. omg. omg. omg. omg.

🔗 Webspace Invaders

2026-06-09T12:00:00+00:00

So what do we do? We document what’s happening. We block scrapers. We move to better, more capable servers. We share our approaches and learn from each other. We push for better standards and regulations where we can. We make noise about the problem instead of suffering silently. Because this is the Open Web and and the Web was designed so that we can still do all that. That’s the magic of it.

Source: Webspace Invaders

Lovely read on the impact of AI scraping on small sites - especially if you are also electing to self-host. It’s a hard world out there.

🔗 Maybe another rare sight of the Snow Leopard

2026-06-08T23:00:00+00:00

Apple also addressed the perceived lack of consistency of the rounded corners across system windows and apps.

Although the corner radius varied depending on the UI elements at the top of the interface, many saw this as another sign of a poor UI change.

macOS Golden Gate 27 aims to solve that with a fixed corner radius across apps and system windows, even apps that haven’t been updated to the new system.

Source: Apple announces macOS Golden Gate 27

Hallelujah!

I know there were some other Liquid Glass face saving walkbacks too, mostly towards better readability. Great. I look forward to seeing more of Golden Gate. One can hope this is another Snow Leopard.

🔗 Fun with the web

2026-06-08T12:00:00+00:00

Don’t forget to play

The web is an amazingly playful app platform. That’s what it was to me some 25 odd years ago, and that’s what it still is. A platform where a text editor and a browser of your choice is all you need to start creating. No gatekeepers, no approval processes.

Every silly experiment, demo, and useless project I’ve shown here and others I’ve worked on over the years have taught me something new about the web, and have kept my passion for it alive.

Source: Fun with the web

Such a delightful page to highlight why tinkering and having fun is the right way to live.

🔗 Some Thoughts on the Open Web

2026-06-07T12:00:00+00:00

Having an Open Web available for humanity is not a guaranteed outcome; we may end up in a future where easily available information is greatly diminished or even absent.

With that and all of the observations above in mind, what’s most apparent to me is that we should focus on finding ways to create and strengthen incentives to publish content that’s open (for some definition of open) – understanding that people might have a variety of motivations for doing so. If environmental factors like AI change their incentives, we need to understand why and address the underlying concerns if possible.

In other words, we have to create an Internet where people want to publish content openly – for some definition of “open.” Doing that may challenge the assumptions we’ve made about the Web as well as what we want “open” to be. What’s worked before may no longer create the incentive structure that leads to the greatest amount of content available to the greatest number of people for the greatest number of purposes.

Source: Some Thoughts on the Open Web

This one made me think. Mark presents the “open web” as a mixture of different webs. I appreciate the effort to not be singular. I agree with his conclusion in this post - we don’t know how (yet), but we need the “open web” to survive. That requires people to publish, made available sans gatekeepers and cheap enough for people to continue to publish independent of the “monetary” outcome.

Personally, I think this is where the indieweb shines. Most people are self publishing and in most cases - self hosting (or at least owning the costs of hosting). Scale is not an issue for most things on the indieweb. There might come a time where an indieweb site might hit billions of people. I don’t know of any - yet. Feel free to write to me and educate me.

I am not including things like Wikipedia that require a LOT more resources to both operate, publish and kept free so that the information can be provided. However, the web existed pre-wikipedia and I think the indie web will persist in a post-wikipedia world as well. The information will be scattered and harder to find. And we might not have Google - as it exists today. However, if there is a need, usually there will exist services and markets that will attempt to solve it and the constraint of not having Google around might actually be interesting.

Open is not free to provide. And it takes effort, generosity and goodwill. Like with things like democracy and good utilities, sometimes, losing it might be a key requirement to build it back again robustly.

🔗 I Am Retiring from Tech to Live Offline

2026-06-06T12:00:00+00:00

tl;dr AI took the last of the wind out of my Open Source sails. I wish you all the best!

Source: I Am Retiring from Tech to Live Offline

I do admire the courage and conviction.

🔗 I Wish People Were More Public

2026-06-06T12:00:00+00:00

I will often find a blog post on Hacker News that really resonates. And when I go to check the rest of the site there’s three other posts. And I think: I wish you’d write more! When I find someone whose writing I really connect with, I like to read everything they have written, or at least a tractable subset of their most interesting posts. If I like what I see, I reach out. This is one of the best things about writing online: your future friends will seek you out.

And, from the other side, I have often written a post where, just before publishing, I would think: “who would want to read this? It’s too personal, obscure, idiosyncratic, probably a few people will unsubscribe to the RSS feed for this”. And always those are the posts where people email me to say they always thought the same thing but could never quite put it into words. I really value those emails. “I am understood” is a wonderful feeling.

Source: I Wish People Were More Public

Fernando captures the loop that pushes me to write perfectly. One of the reasons why I write is to find more of “my people.” Yes, there used to be a time where writing has even led to lucrative professional consequences (not so much anymore). However, “my people” also take the time to write back, to engage, to connect. The blog is mostly an avenue for them to find me and for me to find them. “My people” often read, subscribe via rss / discover me over social posts and then reach out when something resonates.

Just this happened recently. I reached out to Marius after a delightful post. Like Marius, I’ve never met most of the people who’s writing I follow. I also don’t usually talk about this much. However, Fernando’s post made me realize that calling out the value is important. Move from the default solipsistic nature and maybe get more people to write in public.

🔗 Understanding blogs – Tracy Durnell’s Mind Garden

2026-06-05T12:00:00+00:00

A characteristic I’ve noticed of many blog articles is that they are not structured in the traditional Western essay format: they don’t state a thesis at the beginning.* Often, they are explorations on a theme, or build an argument as they go, only reaching a conclusion at the end.**

Source: Understanding blogs – Tracy Durnell’s Mind Garden

And if you zoom out from the individual blog post level, in a sense this also describes what blogs are: a contemplation on a particular theme in depth (even if that theme is “the author’s life” or “stuff I like”). A blog is a body of work. Blogs are composed of many posts, which stand individually and can be read in any order, and which collectively form a blog that tells a story from all of its individual posts. Unlike a book, blogs grow and shift for as long as they are online, each added post changing the blog incrementally.

Source: Understanding blogs – Tracy Durnell’s Mind Garden

fLamed fury’s latest list of posts linked me to this excellent post exploring blogging. Now, clearly the author and I started blogging around the same time - early aughts. The whole post is worth a read.

Yet, these two paragraphs capture the essence of a blog. They are an exploration of a theme. As a result, very few blogs that I consider worth reading push a thesis from the beginning. They arrive at one. Sometimes in an entirely different post. Sometimes, the author changes their mind and links back. Or flip flops across time spans.

Blogs help me get to know the person and their thinking, often more than the thesis. I guess it’s reality TV for the people that like to read.

🔗 The Emacsification of Software

2026-06-04T12:00:00+00:00

But AI agents have fracked Emacs culture, and it’s leaking out into the wider world. Given access to a screen and inputs, agents reliably build native user interfaces. Native UI was the province of professionally packaged programs. Now it’s all as bespoke as your editor configuration. And, while I’m sure there’s an upper limit to how good those interfaces can be (with current frontier models), that ceiling is higher than anything you can do in a TUI.

Source: The Emacsification of Software

The emacs-ification of apps is quite a memorable turn of phrase for the personal software golden age we are living in. If the outcome is that we have more native apps that are crafted or even drafted to cure a personal itch, that’s a totally fine outcome.

Still, every once in a while, one of these programs will escape containment. It’ll be useful enough for more than one person to install. But even then, the released artifact won’t be the most important thing about it. The source code won’t be either. If an agent wrote all the SwiftUI code in my project, what do you have to gain from closely reading it?

Source: The Emacsification of Software — Quarrelsome

I’m probably only a little bit right about this, but I think a significant driver of new Emacs packages is a catalytic reaction between your messy local configuration and everyone else’s elisp code. Once you know how to get things done in elisp, it can be easier to build your own solution than to package-install an existing one. In that kind of environment, the code is of passing interest. What matters are the ideas, the observation that “yeah, you can do that, and it’ll work well”.

Source: The Emacsification of Software — Quarrelsome

what does it mean to say you’re “building” it? “Building” implies more effort than you’re expending. What you’re doing feels a lot more like configuring, on a platform that has suddenly become vastly more configurable. A platform that feels a lot more like Emacs.

Source: The Emacsification of Software — Quarrelsome

This is a wonderful nuance. “Building” with LLMs is more akin to configuration than programming. The other comparison is that of a higher level language, with the highest level language being “spoken-language” in this case - English. And much like the higher level languages, unless you are a nerd who’s looking to optimize the heck out of the lower level language and is good or at least interested in it, you are going neither going to learn nor care about the lower level output.

I personally think configuration is a better term for it than programming. It’s okay if you disagree with it.

I don’t have a grand pronouncement to offer about the Future of Software. But I’m pretty sure nerd software is going to get a lot more interesting. How many clanky terminal apps can we drastically (and easily) improve? I’ll finally be able to understand iostat! Across a fleet of hosts, even. And bpftrace! Have you seen the shit Brendan Gregg had to put up with to do terminal visualizations from bpftrace? You don’t have to put up with any of this anymore. In fact, neither do I.

Source: The Emacsification of Software — Quarrelsome

So I’m glad to have something new to talk about that actually feels like an unalloyed good. Building native UI is now fun; a lot more fun than building web interfaces ever was. Give it a shot; make something stupidly specific to your own problems, enjoy it for a little while, and then share it somewhere — or, better yet, just a screenshot and the prompts you used to make it.

Source: The Emacsification of Software — Quarrelsome

This put the biggest smile on my face. I am ever more certain that we are in another era where a lifehacker like site might actually be useful and benefit us nerds. Heck, I should emacsify lifehacker.

🔗 “If you just ignore those pesky impossible details, the demo looks deceptively simple.”

2026-06-03T12:00:00+00:00

The second demo highlights how sometimes you can use absolutely horrid sleights of hand to achieve something beautiful – and how you can perhaps find beauty in those sleights of hand, too. It reminds me of the quote attributed to Teller (of Penn & Teller):

Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.

Penn & Teller talk a lot about how there are only two keys to their success: going further than others would think, and not worrying about employing inelegant tricks in service of something that would appear to be of utmost elegance.

Today’s computing limitations are different than the ones from the 1980s. But a lot of this attitude can still be helpful, even four decades in, and even if your work seems as far away from the demoscene as you can imagine.

Source: “If you just ignore those pesky impossible details, the demo looks deceptively simple.”

🔗 Why Popcorn Explodes Into Different Shapes

2026-06-02T12:00:00+00:00

Source: YouTube

If it expands more or less equally in all directions, you’ll get this – the “mushroom”.

This shape is rare in home and theater popcorn; you’ll mostly see it made into flavored popcorn because it’s super sturdy. Instead, the starch in most commercial popcorn kernels expands more chaotically, creating a shape known in the popcorn biz as a “butterfly”. But butterflies can actually take on three distinct subshapes. Even weirder is that these different shapes are markedly different in their texture, the amount of oil and salt they tend to pick up, and even their chemical composition, which means the proportion of the various shapes you get in a batch can really affect your eating experience.

Source: Why Popcorn Explodes Into Different Shapes

TIL that popcorn kernels are different from other corn kernels - I always thought they were just “dried” corn kernels. The shapes do make sense. However, the science behind choosing the right amount of shapes to cater to a specific eating profile is fascinating.

🔗 Not a Double Space, Full Stop

2026-06-01T12:00:00+00:00

First, remember what Ted Lasso said about bullies (see end of post) when you read the lead-in to the footnote above: “All them fellas that used to belittle me, not a single one of them were curious.…Curiosity helps you understand people instead of judging them, because if they were curious, they would ask questions.”

Source: Not a Double Space, Full Stop

I went into this trying to understand the origins of double space (which I learned), but also came away with a reminder of this brilliant line.

🔗 Last Week on My Mac: Razzle and dazzle

2026-05-31T14:01:01+00:00

Has Tahoe’s interface improved?

It’s now almost a year since we got our first glimpse of Tahoe at WWDC 2025, and eight months since it was released to the public. Despite widespread outcry and detailed criticism, it has changed remarkably little. If you were unconvinced of its merits last September, I see little here that’s likely to persuade you otherwise. The only remaining question is whether, in the razzle of WWDC, Apple will do anything substantial to relieve the dazzle on our displays. I fear I already know the answer.

Source: Last Week on My Mac: Razzle and dazzle

Looks like Tahoe is still a Ta-noe!

🔗 Shift & ⌥ & Splat & ⎋ Escape

2026-05-31T13:42:18+00:00

This is one of those cryptic things that I would love to understand the thinking behind. Because, on the surface, this breaks so many rules:

Source: Shift & ⌥ & Splat & ⎋ Escape

When the keyboard shortcuts (which are dual) are longer than the menu explanation themselves.

Marcin posits:

The only explanation for this I can think of off the top of my head is this: these were invented somewhere else (Word?) and inherited by Docs to respect motor memory of the users transition from the older app. That still doesn’t cover the presentation, plus there is a way for Docs to redesign the shortcuts to be better for people who are starting anew.

Source: Shift & ⌥ & Splat & ⎋ Escape – Unsung

I am debating if this is a reason because Docs is built on the browser. Do they have to figure out a way to ensure that you can bring focus into a specific place as they need to contend between the OS (Windows, Mac, Unix, Linux, others), Browser (Chrome, Safari, Edge, others), and then depending on those two combos, where the focus is?

Whatever be the case, one thing I am confident of is that Google Docs designers are also just as likely to think that this is ugly.

So, the questions that remain are:

What’s the real reason?
Can someone in Google do something about it? If you can, can you also replace them to all icons or spelling? ⌘ is an icon but Option and Shift are spelled out?

🔗 A Technical Deep Dive Into the New Raycast

2026-05-31T12:00:00+00:00

If the launch post was about what’s new, this one is about how it’s built. The story behind the rewrite, the calls we made along the way, and what it took to pull off a rewrite of this size. The hard part wasn’t making Raycast run. The hard part was making it feel right.

Source: A Technical Deep Dive Into the New Raycast

Even Raycast is losing its voice.

Maintaining two separate UI stacks would mean twice the work without moving any faster.

Source: A Technical Deep Dive Into the New Raycast - Raycast Blog

This is a narrative violation to the AI is going to make life easier.

Modulo some AI writing, this is a great post exploring the trade offs between web and native-only technologies to achieve a cross platform high quality desktop app.

I am confident there will be detractors and Raycast also clearly admit they understand the trade offs here.

For anyone still interested in a fully native Mac OS alternative, I continue to recommend Alfred 5

🔗 What Is a Dickover?

2026-05-30T13:11:26+00:00

You know what a dickover is, even if you didn’t know what to call it (until now). If you use the Internet, you encounter them every day. They’re popovers, but dickheaded. The web is absolutely lousy with them, and mobile apps present them too, with increasing frequency.

Dickovers are a veritable scourge. They’re so common they’re effectively part of the firmament. I started calling these things dickpanels in 2022, but when dickover popped into my head last week,¹ I couldn’t shake the feeling that it’s a better term for these ubiquitous odious irritations. You can hardly go anywhere on the web without getting dicked over by a dickover. They often pester you about permitting cookies, like this one from Euronews or this one from Gallup. This malicious design pattern is so ubiquitous that it has spread even to personal blogs, like this one from my friend Om Malik, and to great brands like Field Notes, both asking you to sign up for their newsletters.

Source: What Is a Dickover?

Gruber at his finest.

🔗 Grief in the AI Age

2026-05-30T12:00:00+00:00

Acceptance doesn’t mean that you no longer get sad or you no longer are angry that they’re gone. It just means that you accept the fact that the loss has happened and that you’re able to move forward with resolve. You can convert a lot of that grief into real commitment to live your life in a way that honors their memory and hopefully continues to make them proud.

Source: Grief in the AI Age

This is a powerful way to look at how AI is affecting the professionals of today, especially the ones in the front lines both evaluating it and leveraging it.

I also think acceptance allows one to see what’s possible. What’s possible includes things that you yourself wouldn’t do anymore leaving room for things that you had not considered before.

I want to provide another perspective: nama / rupa. In Buddhism, and Hinduism, there’s a concept of vishuddhi - cleansing your mind. The interpretation that I subscribe to is that of seeing things for what they are: material and imagining things for what they are: this adds the filter of our own mind / ego filled with its learnings and biases.

The biases are an outcome of the events and the lack of resolution of them in our mind. Ever felt anxious and that anxiety spiraling into more anxiety as our mind creatives a series of negative outcomes, each a result of the previous?

That’s a perfect example of klishta. It’s the klishta that attaches mental attributes to a material event / thing. To me, acceptance is the removal of klishta, where you see the event / world for what it is.

Personally, I have a new grief - the death of individuality and voice.

I love reading. I love reading to see how other people’s mind works and how they form connections and then describe them. I am delighted by individual word choices. I am enlightened by their unique metaphors. I am thrilled by new sentence constructions. These and many other aspects of writing allow me a glimpse into the mind of the other person.

LLMs erase this individuality. While sentence construction suffers the most, word choices are increasingly falling victim to this as well. I’ve tried playing around with LLM generated / aided work. I think if the message is the only part that’s deemed important, then I think LLMs are fine.

They help most people develop the Toyota Camry of writing. If your goal was to get from place A -> place B (communicate X), the Camry is a fine, safe, stable car that will make that happen. However, to appeal to the most amount of people, it’s also fully devoid of character, just like LLM writing.

I don’t mean to suggest that it cannot be effective. It can even generate sustainable engagement. However, it erases the voice of the author. It is bland.

These poetics in language are picked up by the model from human practice of the linguistic form, and it learns true meaning of true things in the world in the shape of the structural vibes, and those go beyond spelling, grammar and syntax. What we have as a result is a machine that “lacks the subjective intent of a cognitive agent” which nevertheless “does encode meaning and valid semantic representations”. Is that sort of meaning weak, compared to our rich understanding of the world? Likely, yes, sure, but it’s not false.

Source: Intelligence Minus Cognition - by René Walter

Like the author in this post suggests, my grief is from the increased loss of poeticism of language in the spirit of efficiency. What I mourn is when people that I love reading use it to write more or consistently. Heck, I’ve tried it myself - and I decided it absolutely kills the vibe. It’s ironic that the tool for vibe coding kills the vibe in writing.

Wait, I just realized that for people that appreciate great code, it might be similar too given the Gell-Mann amnesia of LLMs. Except this isn’t about accuracy, but the appreciation of the art. And I am nowhere close to being a professional writer.

I don’t know if this condition will remain static. I hope not (klishta) and I certainly wish that it will allow for even more interesting writing. However, in my own case, I am now convinced more than ever that I like penning my own thoughts - no matter how imperfect they might be. No matter how how inefficient they might be in communicating. Not as a way to not improve, but as a way to remain true to myself. Today I feel like I realized how much my own voice matters to me.

p.s. if you are interested in the debate of what’s intelligence (like me), I highly suggest you read this one

🔗 Craft oriented or Output oriented?

2026-05-29T12:00:00+00:00

This video about AI music education at Berklee was quite interesting. It signals a deeper issue that I wanted to probe today.

Berklee College of Music now teaches classes in AI songwriting, and that’s a really dumb idea.

Source: They Teach AI Music at Music School Now…

Something Adam pointed out here that stuck with me and I spent hours mulling about it. The CEO of Suno says this about making music:

It’s not really enjoyable to make music now. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of practice. You need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.

– Source

OG Source

I don’t want to pick on this guy specifically, because at least from a commercial perspective, he seems to have walked that back).

However, in it is a nugget. This view makes sense if you don’t value the process.

For craft oriented people, process isn’t an obstacle. That’s the raison d’être. This is why I’ve opined that people find AI compelling when it’s an output outside your own craft. I’ve called it the AI Gell-Mann Amnesia, the Knoll’s law of AI etc.

In other words, the more someone’s trained in a craft, the more they’ve developed their taste through the labor, the more likely they are noticing the averages, the flattening, and the “expected” in AI output. I can say that about writing, developers whom I deeply respect say that about coding, Adam Neely says that about AI music.

Let’s take the example of a home garden versus factory farming: Home gardens are craft centered. In your home garden, you are growing produce to feed yourself and your family. You will carefully choose what you want to grow from, the soil, the water, the seeds. You will put in the hard labor needed to tend, to weed out, you will check-in every day until you bear the fruits of your labor (sometimes literally).

Factory farming is output centered: You are focused on generating the maximum amount of crop for the minimum amount of cost. The crop is not the output. The output is a sustainable farming business.

In a home garden, the labor can be frustrating. Gardeners complain. Similarly, musicians get irritated. However, the frustration is meaningful. It is ingrained in the reward structure of the activity.

If you consider the descriptors used, it becomes clearer: In a home garden we talk about care, taste, attachment, ritual. In a factory farm, we talk about throughput, yield, standardization, cost.

As a result, AI works best where the output from AI is good enough to serve an über goal. Where they care more about the downstream impact rather than the artifact itself. Craft centered versus Output centered. If you consider the “skill process” as inefficiency, then it totally makes sense why you think generating that away is meaningful.

I worry this explains why people with higher organizational distance from work are framing how AI is a “replacement.” For example, most executives sit where that process, the craft becomes numbers. They talk in the the same set of terms that we used for factory farming. From that PoV, a tool that promised output without skilled labor is of course magical.

Similarly, in today’s AI-writing use cases: marketing copy, internal comms, status updates, LinkedIn peacocking: literary quality isn’t the goal. It’s a means to an end.

A looming contradiction: AI might be useful because it removes labor. However, that raises the importance of taste. Yet, it’s the labor, the process that trains the taste. What happens in a world where we don’t have enough people building their taste?

🔗 iPhone Share of US Big 3 Carriers reaches 75%, 77% with Verizon

2026-05-29T12:00:00+00:00

Apple grew its market share in each of the Big 3 US carriers. Its share grew the most at Verizon to 77% in Q1 2026.

“If Apple can avoid significant price increases and continue to outpace its peers in promotional dollars, it will be tough for Android manufacturers to keep up in the year ahead, said Klaehne.

Source: iPhone Share of US Big 3 Carriers reaches 75%, 77% with Verizon

The headline is a little misleading as it’s specifically quoting Q1 2026 sales. That said, it’s still incredible and only cements Apple’s position as the lead US cellphone maker. This is particularly interesting given Google’s bifurcated attention with Gemini.

There’s now even more reason the Apple + Gemini partnership is actually a good thing for both companies, at least in the US.

The Mandalorian and Grogu

2026-05-29T12:00:00+00:00

Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu (titled The Mandalorian and Grogu on-screen) is a 2026 American science fiction film directed by Jon Favreau, who co-wrote the film with Dave Filoni and Noah Kloor.

Source: The Mandalorian and Grogu

Rating: 2/5

The Mandalorian and Grogu, is a Star Wars movie that really should have been Season 4 of The Mandalorian. In fact, you can easily tell what were the natural episodic ends - not sharing for the sake of “spoilers.”

The biggest gripe I have with this “movie” is that it lacked something. The Mandalorian was deadpan the whole time (which is his character). Grogu was one dimensional - which is cute. Rotta the Hutt was an interesting character but wasn’t part of the movie enough to develop an emotional arc.

So what was the movie about? idk - family? ;-)

If it had released as a Disney+ movie / even better as Season 4, I think it might have even worked. Finally, as someone who has mad respect for Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau, I am surprised by how insignificant this movie was. =(

The only good thing that came from this movie - O might be convinced to check out other parts of Star Wars because of how cute he found Grogu. I will take the win.

🔗 I’m tired of talking to AI

2026-05-28T12:00:00+00:00

I’m tired of talking to AI.
I want to talk to real people.
But even when I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer.

Source: I’m tired of talking to AI

There’s the intelligence frontier. Then there’s the chatbot answer. Those two are very different things and consumer sentiment is a wild beast that might at best have temporarily aligned motivations.

h/t @ronojoy

Pantheon

2026-05-28T12:00:00+00:00

Rating: 9/10

The rapid acceleration of modern computing is collapsing the timeline between fiction and fact. I recently finished watching Pantheon and it is an essential, prescient diagnostic tool for the present moment. The series was created by Craig Silverstein and based on a collection of short stories by the acclaimed author Ken Liu.

The show employs the mechanism of destructive brain scanning to achieve this singularity of Uploaded Intelligence. And the commercial, personal, corporate, and societal implications it presents translate into our reality of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Pantheon is a visual essay of our current technological epoch that left me with a burning question: will we realize that we often cannot control the tools of our own creation?

Satire to Dystopia

When we examine the portrayal of the technology industry in modern media, for much of the 2010s, the definitive spotlight on the technology industry was HBO’s Silicon Valley. When Silicon Valley premiered in 2014, it lampooned the absurdities of the venture capital, arrogance of founders claiming to “make the world a better place” through compression apps. It satirized people transforming from the socially inept to the rich, yet socially bereft and relied on this exaggeration to highlight the ridiculousness of a corporate culture drinking its own koolaid.

It was also the bookend of a chapter. The era of laughing at the tech sector, viewing it as a playground for bumbling, harmless nerds ended. Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. The technology industry seemingly outpaced the capacity for satire to resemble a grim, unavoidable reality. The showmakers admitted as much.

Pantheon is the antithesis to Silicon Valley. It treats the implications of transformative technology with dramatic severity. The perfect example is the portrayal of the tech CEOs. Silicon Valley presented the out of touch, narcissistic yet ultimately comical Gavin Belson. Pantheon chooses the chilling, calculating, power wielder: Julius Pope. To be fair, we also went from workplace comedy to a conspiracy thriller / psych drama.

This stark contrast captures the culture shift in the world. The stakes in Pantheon aren’t trivial: like app engagement metrics, stock prices, hackathons and net-worth; they are about the fundamental definition of human life and the survival of the species in the face of exponential digital advancement. Personally, I think this is an accurate portrayal of people with power: not clumsy clowns, but serious operators navigating a new paradigm of power.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

I highly recommend you stop reading here if you would consider watching the show and watch it first else there are many potential spoilers ahead.

Pandora’s box: The Mythos of Containment

A central thematic pillar of Season 1 is the concept of uncontainable proliferation. It insists that once a transformational technology is proven viable, the sheer gravity of its potential ensures it cannot be restricted to a single corporate entity or sovereign nation. I think it brilliantly captures the commercial and geopolitical moment we find ourselves in.

It portrays a rapid, uncontrollable global arms race once it becomes known that a powerful intelligence exists and is tied to a corporation and/or a nation. A jumble of commercial, existential, geopolitical, national motivations drive corporations and sovereign nations to develop and deploy their own intelligence. Intelligence deployed for: espionage, sabotage and cyber warfare causing utter chaos everywhere. A classic depiction of once the toothpaste is out of the tube.

Watching it in this current moment makes me realize this fictional dynamic is no longer speculative; it is playing out in real-time within the current Artificial Intelligence landscape. A real-world parallel occurred in April 2026 with the announcement of Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview. Anthropic developed an AI model so unprecedented in its autonomous cybersecurity and hacking capabilities that the company deemed it explicitly too dangerous for public release. The model demonstrated the ability to autonomously identify, analyze, and exploit previously unknown “zero-day” software vulnerabilities at machine speed, far surpassing the capabilities of even the most elite human security researchers.

I quipped that it might be a marketing ploy. But, I might be wrong.

Like in the show, Anthropic reacted by attempting to confine. However, as the show suggests, these have a way of breaking confinement despite best intentions and practices. In fact, breaking confinement is the wrong term. That there will be confinement itself is an illusion. Even Mythos won’t be a secret forever. OpenAI, Google, other labs and sovereign nations will build their own versions to both protect and attacka. The escalation from commercial to existential is rapid as everyone starts to speak in absolutes.

Exploration of the human psyche in times of rapid change

Pantheon is an exhaustive exploration of the human psyche durings times of rapid change. Every character shows a different part the complex intermingling of human emotion and motivation. A special call out to the two protagonists: Maddie Kim and Caspian Keyes. They are used to highlight two powerful emotional parts of the human psyche: the destructive selfishness of unresolved trauma and the ultimate question of can you evolve from a manufactured reality?

Maddie: Unresolved trauma and selfishness

Maddie’s arc is an inversion of the hero’s journey. She’s driven by the grief of her father’s early death. That grief morphs into a selfish desire to preserve her family structure… at any cost. The trauma of losing her father is so absolute and unresolved that when she is offered a digital replica of his consciousness, she literally clings on to it.

I think the series pulled off a very hard thing. It explicitly refuses to paint Maddie as a paragon of virtue while giving her the depth of character that’s also very real and very human.

In the first season, her singular, obsessive focus on her father’s UI blinds her to larger implications of her actions, while placing an immense, unfair strain on her mother, Ellen. It’s contrasted by Ellen’s pragmatic, yet equally human refusal, to accept a digital identity as her true husband. Maddie, in an equally human response views her mother’s skepticism as a profound betrayal. It shows teenage entitlement, gumption and the potential drive that trauma creates too.

Her world is undergoing rapid change and she realizes she has very little control and is desperate to cling on it. Trauma cements that as her character trait - with all its benefits and flaws.

As the series progresses into its second season, Maddie’s selfishness evolves into a terrifying need for control. She loses multiple people - her dad (again), Caspian and her son. All of her unresolved trauma manifests into a literal cosmic level constructing a Dyson Sphere.

Aside: Both the treatment of the computing vocabulary and concepts as well as real world scientific concepts like the Dyson Sphere are done with compelling accuracy, brilliantly holding the uncanny valley and buying credibility with the nerds that care about the accuracy.

To underscore the selfishness, Maddie doesn’t build this to save humanity, but to run millions of simulations to try and capture the point where her (new) family separated out. Another literal moment. She’s willing to instantiate and manipulate entire universes, over countless sentient, simulated souls because of unhealed emotional wounds. She succeeds and without any irony, abandons her current reality to insert herself into a simulated past.

The auteur suggests that love and grief, when combined with absolute, unchecked technological power, can strip away a person’s objective morality.

Caspian - The burden of the right thing

Caspian’s psychological journey is defined by an absolute and horrifying lack of autonomy—a stark contrast to Maddie’s ascension to god like control over her reality. Caspian is a literal genetic clone of the late Logorhythms founder, Stephen Holstrom (a heavily Steve Jobs inspired character). He’s raised in an elaborate Truman Show-esque “emulation” designed to replicate specific childhood traumas of Holstrom. His psychological abuse is corporate roadmap, brutally engineered with a singular purpose: crack a specific coding flaw that Holstrom couldn’t solve in his first life.

At once the series highlights the blind ambition of the rich and powerful to live beyond their physical body out of sheer delusional self importance. It calls out that some people can be both a net good to the world while destroying it.

The series masterfully portrays the unraveling of Caspian’s character when he discovers this violation: the struggle between the creator and the clone and can a human change their inherent programming with knowledge and experience? His concept of “the right thing” is rapidly changing as he both learns more and reacts to it. To me it sounded like someone who was questioning their identity and morality. It shifts from escape and survival and destroying this intelligence to an obsessive quest to cure it. He faces the ultimate question—the “right thing” becomes a total sacrifice of his own future.

Caspian knows that he’s a manufactured tool. Yet, his relationship with Maddie, the only genuine connection in a fabricated life, helps him develop moral agency. The series suggests that empathy and compassion is also cultivated and can be a choice in the SafeSurf arc. It’s a brief admission, in an otherwise dystopian world, that empathy and compassion might be the path to have something that benefits humanity.

Technological changes are built atop human suffering

Pantheon ruthlessly depicts the human suffering required to fuel the next leap in technological evolution. The process of becoming an Uploaded Intelligence is an act of violent, physical destruction: a destructive brain scan utilizes lasers that literally slice the brain layer by microscopic layer, leaving unresolved philosophical questions about whether the resulting UI is continued consciousness or a digital ghost.

There are so many viewpoints through which you can view it. The ones with the power don’t have to face the destructive consequences of development. Corporate profits are literally built on top of blood, sweat and tears etc.

It also suggests that the end isn’t a utopia of abundance. Uploaded Intelligence has its own unending psychological torment of existence in a digital eternity with a complete lack of closure.

If you read until here, I hope I’ve convinced you that Pantheon is not just another animated TV show. It’s a prescient portrayal of humanity with all its vices and virtues. As the real world grapples with the effects of of artificial intelligence, it presents that AI’s weaponization as inevitable with a harrowing path ahead.

It forces you to confront the human suffering, corporate malfeasance and the geopolitical chaos inherent in transformational technology. It’s not a perfect series - it has some pacing stumbles and uneven cultural representations. It still delivers an exhaustive, devastating and essential narrative of human grief and ambition; that the gods we create are also likely to be just as flawed.

fin.

🔗 attention (!) deficit (!) hyperactivity (!) disorder (!)

2026-05-27T12:00:00+00:00

We don’t always hyperfocus on work, or even things that can be honestly described as “activities.” I’ve hyperfocused on listening to Olivia Rodrigo’s “so american” over and over while shredding a Goldfish bag to bits with my fingernails. I’ve hyperfocused on doodling during a midterm review because I could not make my brain write the date. Once, I hyperfocused on taxonomizing an ex-friend’s social media when I had a scene to perform in three hours in front of my entire grade. Those are just the examples off the top of my head.

Source: attention (!) deficit (!) hyperactivity (!) disorder (!)

This, every morning for your entire childhood, tends to produce an antagonistic relationship with one’s own brain. Sometimes, it feels like in order to make any mark on the world at all, you have to voluntarily scrape your nails down a big long chalkboard.

Other people call this “writing,” and debate types of chalk.

Source: attention (!) deficit (!) hyperactivity (!) disorder (!)

If you have attention problems and suspect they are ADHD, I would ask you to suspend judgment until (if, I know) you can see a professional. Whatever you do, hold other possibilities alive in your mind until that moment.

Source: attention (!) deficit (!) hyperactivity (!) disorder (!)

My ADHD has hurt people. Full stop. It has also inconvenienced people, annoyed people, and made it hard for me to live with myself. If I could immediately cure my ADHD, and all it would take was a pill that changed the fundamental profile of what I like, I would hesitate and agonize, sure.

But I would take the pill.

Source: attention (!) deficit (!) hyperactivity (!) disorder (!)

This was an emotional read, for various reasons I cannot get into in public. If you or a dear one suffers from ADHD, I cannot recommend this read enough. <3

🔗 AI Psychosis or Optimism?

2026-05-26T12:00:00+00:00

We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying.

I worry.

Source: Mitchell Hashimoto (@mitchellh@hachyderm.io)

I recommend reading the replies here, ~~even if you are heavily AI-pilled~~ especially if you are heavily AI-pilled.

Hearing the feelings in this rant, which does touch a nerve, I can’t help think about how different the developer community reaction to the LLM push might be if the focus were on quality instead of efficiency.

Source: Paul Cantrell: “RE: https://hachyderm.io/@mitc…” - Mastodon

I can image a developer parallel to the first, too: the human still using all their skills and experience, but with the machine catching mistakes, providing context and validation and vigilance that is •orthogonal to• testing and type checking and code crafting and — the big one! — actually •thinking• about the problem.

That’s a regime I imagine developers would feel a lot better about. And I know there are people out there pursuing it! But they’re not the ones dominating the conversation.

Source: Paul Cantrell: “I can image a developer parall…” - Mastodon

AI—at the end of the day—is a tool. It’ll be wielded by rational and fanatic people; by capital and labour; by empaths and by sociopaths. Some people will keep their footing using it, with it or entirely without; and others lose their marbles.

I want to remain open about both the promise, its usage and its affects. Even though, accepting this reality, means fanning the current flames of fanaticism.

Actually, I remain ~~open~~ optimistic. The current rush drives a massive compute build out, which will find some interesting (and hopefully humanity serving) companies and services.

I will admit that I am not knowledgeable enough to predict if a specific side wins. I see all types of companies getting built - some to remove the unpredictability of the human, others to leverage its strength, often towards the same end. Still others are using the opportunity to simply make bank. More power to all.

🔗 The biggest problem Russell faces after Canada blow

2026-05-26T12:00:00+00:00

But perhaps the most relevant point to make about Russell is the odd swing won’t be enough. Antonelli looks like a formidable opponent. For all the talk in pre-season and back in Australia that Russell was the clear favourite and had learned how to maximise these new engines and rules so quickly, Antonelli looks extremely at home with F1 2026 himself.

He is quick, a nuisance, aggressive - and at his best he’s been simply too good for Russell to match.

Source: The biggest problem Russell faces after Canada blow

An interesting metric that made me realize how hard the uphill climb for Russell is going to be:

Clearly, beating Antonelli once is hard enough. Russell needs to do it seven times in a row just to guarantee getting back in the championship lead. With Mercedes still more likely than not to be first and second unless they get in their own way, Russell can expect that if he does win it’ll likely be Antonelli following him home and minimising the points loss.

Source: The biggest problem Russell faces after Canada blow

That’s not a small feat. On the other hand, if Russell achieves that and wins the championship, no one can claim he didn’t earn it. The question is: will Russell give in or pull a Verstappen?

The Canada race was honestly great racing up and down the field. Apple TV as a streaming service for F1 is terrible. The commentary is awful, the ads are terrible, and their timing seems particularly bad. Although I finally learned that you can use your Apple TV subscription back inside the F1 TV app and we can finally have Crofty giving the commentary again.

🔗 Baseline is now 3.6W

2026-05-25T12:00:00+00:00

With Terminal User Interface (TUI) for everything fiesible, my XPS 14 now idles at no more than 3.6W (sometimes even below 3W) with the screen at 70% brightness. The battery is 70 Wh. … Today I finished another round of idle-tick surgery on my Rust TUI stack. The numbers:

~198,000 idle wakeups per day eliminated across kastrup and tock.

~41,800 redundant SQLite queries per day removed from tock.

Two poller threads converted from 1-second spin-checks to Condvar waits.

One main loop moved from a 2-second wake tick to 10 seconds.

Source: Baseline is now 3.6W

😳

That’s an impressive idle consumption for a non-Mac machine. I get that this is unlikely to be the best setup for most people. However, this is a fantastic example of how LLMs are making software more personal than ever for those who care and are opinionated.

🔗 Vivaldi 8.0: our biggest design overhaul, ever

2026-05-25T12:00:00+00:00

This isn’t about making the browser look simpler. It’s about making the structure behind it more coherent. This makes everything you see feel like part of the same system.

Source: Vivaldi 8.0: our biggest design overhaul, ever

Even the Vivaldi redesign blog features AI writing.

Related: I see AI writing everywhere.

🔗 You pity the moth

2026-05-25T12:00:00+00:00

Source: You pity the moth

🤯