2026-03-11 09:04:20
When I started doing YouTube in 2020, I was in the middle of my iPad era, and the only Mac in my life was a 2012 Mac mini. I don't remember its exact specs, but suffice to say it positively sucks by 2026 standards. And while it was very slow, it did technically handle everything I could throw at it, including photo and 4K video editing.
Also of note, this was a year before my switch away from the iPad-only lifestyle, and in retrospect, it was quite telling that I wasn't able to use my faster, much more modern iPad Pro to do this work. Anyway…
I bring this up because, of course, the MacBook Neo is able to run all of your professional apps, and I'm glad Tyler Stallman showed this off in his video. Consider how much faster the MacBook Neo must be than a 2012 Mac mini, and tell me that you can't do awesome, creative work on this thing.
Maybe there's something about the modern computing world of iPads and smartphones where we're used to professional features being gated by specific hardware classes, but that's fundamentally not how it traditionally works in computers. You can certainly spend more on a Mac, and tasks will complete more quickly. You'll have a nicer screen, and there will be other general quality-of-life things you might enjoy. But the work that a $600 MacBook and a $6,000 MacBook do is basically the same. Running large local LLMs is the only thing off the top of my head that's literally impossible on the MacBook Nano, but even then, you can run local models; they'll just be slower and less performant.
So if you're someone who wants to do creative work, even relatively high-end creative work on a computer, and your budget doesn't allow you to go past the Neo, don't worry. I promise you, you can do whatever you want to do. It'll just take a bit longer than doing the same tasks on a much more expensive Mac.
2026-03-11 08:48:41
ColorFlow is a really cool new wallpaper and animation generator from the folks over at ls.graphics, and it's pretty rad (and it's totally free).
2026-03-10 20:00:29
This micro app is pretty simple; it's just a nice, single-page website for uploading benchmark scores and getting nice-looking charts for them, like the one above.
The UI for adding tests and devices is simple, allowing you to create tests and add devices with categories, so that things like laptops and phones can be separated. You can also drag to reorder them or toggle their visibility.
There's a simple table for entering the scores for each device, and you can import or export the current page's values as JSON. All data is stored in your browser's localstorage and never leaves your device. Good for privacy, and good for my back end costs 😉
Benchmark Studio is available here, and you can see the full project on GitHub.
2026-03-09 05:57:38
Terraink is a cool new website that lets you create cool maps of whatever location you want to. That's it, and that's pretty rad.
2026-03-07 21:37:10
From the video:
I've been complaining for years that it feels like nothing has really changed since smartphones came along. And I think that maybe, maybe I should have been careful what I wished for.
It's been 2 years since Tom Scott stopped posting weekly videos on YouTube, but he was still doing it when ChatGPT came out, and this video from February 2023, just 2 months after ChatGPT launched, came up in my feed again today. Given how fresh LLMs were to the public at that time, I think it's actually really impressive how well this video essay holds up 3 years later. Scott comes at the topic with the right amount of humility, clearly expressing the fact no one knew how far along the curve we were in terms of capability. He also spends a good amount of time discussing how he lived through the last couple technical revolutions, he navigated them well, and he'd become comfortable in the current state of the world.
What I find really notable about his feelings are that he did a little coding project in the ChatGPT chat interface, and that is what pushed him over the edge into going "wow, this is already massively disruptive." For some context, he would have been using GPT-3.5 when this video came out. In retrospect, that's an absolute shit model that no one in 2026 would trust to find typos in their writing, let along being their coding agent. But even then, Tom was like, "uh oh, that's already as good as me."
The pull quote I chose for the video expresses something I can't stop thinking about either, which is this seeming desire for tech to get better, to change, and to be interesting, but also for that to happen without changing anything at all. Anything that makes people more productive or could lead to the slightest bit of disruption is seen as bad.
It's impossible not to think about this quote from Douglas Adams:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
And yes, they did say "this time it's different" every single time.
2026-03-07 05:00:32