Once more, with feeling – another season, another newsletter. Trying to get a conceptual hold on how to feel human in this continually liminal time in software and technology. Current hypothesis: maybe thinking slowly and holistically, whilst acting quickly, is worth exploring. We continue to feel all sorts of ways about machines generating code, writing on the web, composing images, deciding things that humans used to decide. Robots continue to feel nothing.

I’m on book six of Dune. But, I’m just now finding out the story runs eight books. (Have Frank/Brian Herbert not heard of trilogies?) Finding focus when working with coding agents, flying too close to the multitasking sun. But, it turns out concise output and taking intentional time away from tokens is the key. Driving more confident in autocross, trying to use the pedals, both brake and gas, more. But, I’m still slow.

Patrick Dubroy, Fast is better than slow: Think about it — if you’re fast, you get data more quickly. That helps you make better decisions, sooner. It also means you learn faster, and over longer periods it means you learn more. Being fast also means you can try out multiple approaches to a problem and pick the best one. Fast is more learning is better execution. Don’t worry about looking dumb.

Frozen 2 should be rated R (Interconnected): Frozen 2 in which the entire city is almost destroyed by a tidal wave… It is SO LAZY. While we’re piling on lazy writing here: LOST, and most American television, is particularly lazy about generating consequence and tension with lines spoken with characters holding guns at each other. Do we need the cheap escalation of a gun to know that the character really wants to coerce the other to action?

If the clankers have you down, I recommend: read your favorites, write like that, discover new favorites, write and edit like that, rinse and repeat. It would seem, at this moment, only a human can produce liveliness by chaining words into language and narrative. Writing is how I build. That’s why I write. —The Motivation

Working with agents, summer of 2026: you have an always-on, amazingly deep collaborator. The coding ones can work themselves out of most problems, if you are willing to pay for the effort and thinking costs. But, wow, you are absolutely right! They are boring as nails and write like an entrance exam question. It is a real relief to spend a weekend, touching grass or concrete, away from the discourse around maximizing, minimizing, or wisely leveraging them.

The frontier labs regularly run promotions like “hey there’s a long weekend or holiday soon! Tokens or this new model is half-off until the next business day back.” I don’t like the nudge to “always be prompting”, working with the models at all time. To trade a long weekend for better token rates smells even worse. The new sabbath was an offline weekend or vacation. The new time offline is time away from tokens.

So what had happened was, my daily reading sort of tailed off. Distractions and all that. Then my writing dropped off. And then, the web hit me with three great ideas hit me right in a row. The web provides energy for reading, the reading transforms into energy for writing. Suddenly, here we are, posting the links again. The web is good. Mandy Brown, Umyazu: Nor do we read when we slip through the stream or flick through the feed.

The web continues to have great reading, I continue to have (okay) ideas.

Exploring the Rich History of Funk and Soul Music: A Journey Through Rhythm and Emotion: Funk and soul music aren’t just sounds; they’re vibrant threads woven into the fabric of musical history. Emerging from the rich cultural tapestry of African American communities in the 20th century, these genres have become a cornerstone of musical innovation. They blend gospel’s fervor, jazz’s complexity, rhythm and blues’ groove, and rock’s edge to create a sound that moves both the heart and the feet.

🛬Back from Spain. Vermouth de grifo, Hieronymus Bosch and Matisse, old buildings, and public green spaces are pretty great. 📚Still at it with Power Broker and the first six Dune novels. Larry McMurtry essays are making me a little nostalgic for the idea of Texas (but not contemporary Texas itself). Contemplating adding the giant book of all the Montaigne essays to this list.😎 🎥_Hoppers_ was fun and feels like possibly a return to form for Pixar.

Fits on a floppy, great idea: Software has lost its way. Apps that once shipped on a single floppy disk now demand gigabytes of your storage, minutes of your time, and far too much of your patience. We accepted this gradual bloat, but that’s not progress. Software should be as small as it can be. Not as a gimmick, but as a discipline. The floppy disk is the measuring stick: 1.

Album · 1991 · 12 Songs

On getting uncomfortable.

Examples of The Eponymous Trifecta: “Black Sabbath” by Black Sabbath from the album Black Sabbath “Motörhead” by Motörhead from the album Motörhead “Iron Maiden” by Iron Maiden from the album Iron Maiden Hopefully you’re starting to see the pattern. (There’s way more of these out there. Let me know your favorite!) Let me throw some variety in: 🤷‍♂️ by Metallica from the album Metallica “Bo Diddley” by Bo Diddley from the album Bo Diddley Ergo: You’re not metal if you don’t have a trifecta.

git-spice – stacked diffs, but without another (SaaS) tool to provision and pay for. Excellent ergonomics, if you’re comfortable with the git CLI as-is. I’ve tried this for one project so far, things went as hoped. Moving between commit ‘stacks’ is easy, and rebasing changes from the main branch is straightforward. This is the quality of tool I’d hope to see in git in the first place. But maybe that’s a 2026 expectation.

When you’re stuck or uninspired, reach for your spark file: This is why for the past eight years or so I’ve been maintaining a single document where I keep all my hunches: ideas for articles, speeches, software features, startups, ways of framing a chapter I know I’m going to write, even whole books. I now keep it as a Google document so I can update it from wherever I happen to be.

This is a guide to implementing atproto OAuth clients "The Hard Way." Optimistically, most developers will have an SDK available for their programming language which supports OAuth, and they can simply refer to SDK documentation. This guide is intended for early adopters, SDK maintainers, or developers with more sophisticated OAuth needs. It is agnostic to whether developers are building clients to work the the app.bsky microblogging Lexicons, or implementing novel application Lexicons.

I bet a lot of the grumbling about coding agents is really about losing out on the joy of moving quickly through code via a deeply learned text editor. I’m feeling it too, but I’m not so great at vim that my whole coding identity is wrapped up in it. As goes the complaint about the decline of manual transmissions, even in sports cars, so goes the decline of emacs/vi/etc. “No connection”, “not enough focus”.