2025-12-18 09:17:26
Calvin Tomkins, leading up to his 100th birthday, wrote a series of journal entries for The New Yorker, a mix of memories from his career and the new challenges of getting older and losing his vision:
When she types my spoken text, I spend the next few days editing it on my antediluvian laptop—changing words, deleting sections and redoing them, fine-tuning the focus. This gets harder and harder, but the alternative, I fear, is doing nothing.
2025-12-18 06:50:44
The technical explanation for how Bluesky has implemented their find friends from contacts is fascinating. I don’t plan to do anything with phone numbers again, but I still learned some things from it.
2025-12-18 02:57:25
Rainy day in Austin. Looking out from my car as the skyline fades up into the mist.
2025-12-18 02:38:18
OpenAI often makes fun of their own product names — “really bad at naming things” — but Google’s image product is literally called Nano Banana. 🍌
2025-12-18 02:11:01
I like this blog post by Robin Rendle about whether the current disruption of search engines might be a good thing:
Perhaps the web needs to be released from the burden of this business model. Perhaps mass readership isn’t possible for the vast majority of websites and was never really sustainable in the first place.
Most blogs are not monetized with ads and shouldn’t be. There are still indirect benefits to writing on the web. Sharing for the sake of it, bringing people into newsletters or subscriptions, and building an audience that leads to other good things, jobs, friends.
