2026-07-09 20:00:00
Parker Molloy wrote what I think is a must read article that has too many quotes I'd like to make, so just go read it: Reasonable Concerns.
Terry Schilling runs the American Principles Project, one of the outfits that spent years writing and bankrolling bills like the ones the court just upheld. In early 2023, he told the New York Times what the group was really after. Its goal, he confirmed, was to do away with transition care entirely, for adults as much as for kids. Starting with kids was just, in his words, “going where the consensus is.”
There's quite a bit here to help people understand why the "trans women in sports" issue is not really about sports, it's about getting a wedge in somewhere so they can take one right away, then another, then another, with the ultimate goal of making these people's mere existence illegal. Don't take our word for it, just take Terry Schilling and people like him at his word that this is literally what they're doing.
Also, if you are a man who claims to be concerned with women's sports, I think you should be legally required to turn over your YouTube history to see how many "male athlete embarrasses female athlete" videos they've watched.
2026-07-09 09:53:20
Robin Sloan: Fable is very good
Yet even the funkiest JavaScript function carries within it many fewer choices than a paragraph of prose. (How’s that for a sentence?) Fable can’t match my writing style yet — honestly, I think that’s beyond the reach of these models, because it’s just too much to simulate, a whole human mind and body, their whole history together.
Fully agreed. I think LLMs are remarkable technology, and they’re incredibly good at writing code. I even think they’re really good at writing boilerplate text for things like documentation. However, while I’ve seen LLMs generate text that takes the form of a Birchtree blog post, they simply can’t get close to the real deal. I’m not saying they write with worse structure or make more mistakes than me (I make way more mistakes than it does), I’m saying it simply doesn’t capture my voice. At its very best, it sounds like a robot pretending to be me, but who’s fooling nobody.
2026-07-09 09:39:18
First off, Quick Reads is finally available on the App Store! Despite being only in TestFlight until today, the iOS app was still the most common way people used the service. I'm glad there's less friction than there used to be. If you've been using the app and like it, now would be an amazing time to go leave it a 5-star review. Seriously, this stuff helps so much, so thank you.
Side note, I was a bit worried app review would reject me for not having Apple's in-app purchase, but nope, it was no issue at all.
The second update come from user Josh, who let me know that Feedbin has a feature that lets you add custom share destinations using a very simple URL format. He built a cool workaround to get this done (built on the industry-leading API 😉), but it was trivially easy for me to build this directly into the service itself. Now you can open this in your browser (title is optional):
https://quickreads.app/app/save?url=${url}&title=${title}
And boom, the url is saved! You know, as long as you're logged into the site in your browser.
This will work in most places that offer a sort of custom sharing feature. It can also work in Apple Shortcuts if you don't want to deal with setting up the full API integration. I even made a little bookmarklet you can save to your bookmarks bar like it's 2010! All of this is documented in a new page on the site.
Try out Quick Reads today!
2026-07-08 08:00:28
Here's a weird one…I had a situation where I wanted to be reminded what happened in a Claude Code session a few days ago. You can revive old conversations in the Claude Code CLI, but it's annoying. You can go into your ~/.claude/projects directory and find them there, but that's a pain too. What if they were all just in your Obsidian vault automatically?
Well, the new plugin, Claude Code Sync, does exactly that.
There's not much to it, either. You just install it, and it immediately starts working.
The sync is pretty simple, as it checks for new chat info every X minutes, and pulls in whatever's changed since last sync. If you delete a chat from your ~/.claude/projects history, it stays in Obsidian.
The notes themselves are sorted into sub-folders for each project, they have some front matter, and then there's the full text of the chat.
I don't think this is something most people need, even people using Claude Code, but I do think there are times where it is convenient to have a history of how decisions were made and what was done in your code. As such, it's really nice to have a searchable, easy-to-access history of all those interactions.
Once again, you can install this plugin for free in Obsidian.
2026-07-07 07:16:36
Since its launch, the number one feature request I've gotten for Quick Reads has been the ability to subscribe to newsletters with the service. I'm happy to say that as of today, all users can do this.
Just go to your settings, go to the newsletters tab, and use the email address there to subscribe to whatever newsletters you'd like. New emails will appear in your reading queue automatically moments after they're sent. If you ever run into issues with the address, you can blow it away and generate a new one on the fly.
Additionally, there are some RSS feeds where you absolutely feel like you must read everything they post. If that's how you feel about a couple feeds out there, then the new feeds feature is exactly what you're looking for. Go ahead and add the website or the actual RSS feed, and we'll automatically add every post to that feed within thirty minutes of it going live. You can also set tags on those feeds, so they're automatically tagged just as you'd like.
Writers such as John Siracusa or Casey Liss, who only publish on an irregular basis, are great contenders for the feeds feature here. If you follow them, odds are you want to see everything they write, and this will let you do that. On the newsletter front, pretty much anything will work here. Just like any article you save, the service parses the content to try to pull out just the article itself. So it should be a really great reading experience for everything from MacStories Select to Christopher Lawley's Patreon. Hell, I bet you it'll work for Birchtree too 😉
Feeds are available to all paying users of Quick Reads, while newsletters are for Pro subscribers only, and you can use them today.