2026-01-25 02:49:16
I'm excited to share another micro app with you today, and this time, I'm making it available for anyone who wants to use it. This one is called Quick Tier List, and it's a very simple website for creating tier lists. I think it looks really nice, it's lightweight, and it just feels good to use. I'm particularly proud of some of the micro-interactions I've implemented to make it feel better than the average tier list website.
If you listen to or watch Cozy Zone, our Comfort Zone companion show, you might recognize this (you should definitely subscribe, it's a lot of fun!), as we've actually used Quick Tier List for several of the tier lists we've done recently, including one about iPads that's coming out on Monday.
A few other things deserve call outs.
This one is also open-sourced, and the project is literally just an HTML, CSS, and JS file, so there's not a lot of secret sauce here. There's nothing you couldn't get by just inspecting the page. So, have fun with it, do what you want, but the next time you need to make a tier list, I hope you consider Quick Tier List.
Some themes below:
2026-01-23 06:56:45
This is probably the quickest I've gone from zero to functioning app in this series so far. Last night I got a bug report telling me that the timing was slightly weird in the latest Quick Subtitles update. I lamented the fact that it was pretty annoying to test the timing in any sort of intuitive way, so I decided to solve my own problem.
SRT Tester is an exceptionally simple app that simply lets me drag in a video or audio file and then drag in my subtitles file, and then it will play them together, and I can validate that the timing works out how I would expect it to behave. I know this can be done with some video players on the Mac, but I've tried to do this and it's just more steps than I wish it was. This lets me do it much quicker, and is optimized around reviewing subtitles, not watching the video ,which is what I need.
If you're interested, I have decided to release this on GitHub, so you can download and build it yourself if you too would would find it useful. There's also a compiled version of the app in the project, so you can just download it and run it on your Mac if you don't want to get Xcode involved.
2026-01-23 04:00:00
Nicholas Carr writing for The Atlantic: Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing.
The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.
In my opinion, the most notable thing about this article is the publication date: 2008.
I almost made this one of those posts I like to do where I swap out one word in a quote from many years ago to make it sound like it's commenting on the modern day, but I just gave it to you straight this time.
But 2008! That is somehow 18 years ago and was before almost anyone had a smartphone in their pocket. The world the author is reacting to is one in which you had a flip phone, you maybe had a GPS in your car, and you had only had Wi-Fi at home for maybe a couple years. And yet, the author is making the exact same points we find ourselves discussing today around AI.
This isn't to say that his concerns in 2008 were wrong, nor that the same concerns are wrong today when raised about things like ChatGPT. I bring this up largely to illustrate some context. In 2026, people will blast ChatGPT for destroying thinking and argue that services like Wikipedia and old school Google are what we should be using to properly think and properly know things. Yet, if you go back to when those technologies were new, people often talked about Wikipedia and Google the same way we talk about ChatGPT.
2026-01-23 00:00:00
Tom Fairless writing for The Wall Street Journal: Americans Are the Ones Paying for Tariffs, Study Finds
By analyzing $4 trillion of shipments between January 2024 and November 2025, the Kiel Institute researchers found that foreign exporters absorbed only about 4% of the burden of last year’s U.S. tariff increases by lowering their prices, while American consumers and importers absorbed 96%.
I've addressed this before, and I'll reiterate: when the U.S. imposes tariffs on imported goods, it's essentially a tax on American consumers. Every time Trump complains about the massive amount of money the tariffs have brought it, remember that's when he's boasting about massively raising your taxes.
It's also worth noting that the impact of these tariffs on you depends significantly on your income level. Those with lower incomes are more affected because a larger portion of their income goes toward goods and services. For wealthier individuals, obviously some spending goes toward goods and services as, but a substantial portion is typically allocated to investments, retirement, and savings.
2026-01-22 22:00:00
Stevie Bonifield writing for The Verge: I spent a year on Linux and forgot to miss Windows
Customizing every visual element of my desktop has become one of my favorite parts of using Linux. It doesn’t offer any performance boost or practical benefit; it’s just fun.
Two quick things on this…
One, I continue to think that something is happening in 2026 with Linux and normal consumers. I think gaming is where we'll see more of a shift immediately. But I also do expect to see more people kicking the tires on Linux as their normal computer operating system this year. I'm not predicting mainstream acceptance yet, but I do think there is some momentum here.
Two, if I had to sum up my frustration with the average Apple pundit these days, it’s that 20 years ago, the above-quoted behavior of messing with your computer's UI for fun was available on the Mac as well, and we loved doing it. Today, I would suspect a lot of Apple pundits would say, “what a waste of time this is, let's talk about how Apple could increase their profits even more.”
Previously: I'm not saying it's the year of Linux on the desktop, but I'm not not saying that.
2026-01-22 21:15:37
Casey Newton quoting one of his readers: Meta’s scam problem, UK edition
I did not know what an SQL database was, and GitHub’s interface used to give me hives. And through this process I have actually learned quite a bit about how to use them. That’s actually super cool! For whatever reason — perhaps by design — ChatGPT has never taught me anything about anything ever.
I really liked this insight because it aligns well with my experience over the past year using Claude to write most of my code. Yes, I have accelerated my ability to deploy code to production, but I have also learned a great deal during that time. I now know much more about iOS development, Swift, web development, application structure, data management, Git, and many other things that I simply did not know a year ago. I am much more knowledgeable now than I was then. These assistants have enabled me to do things faster, but there are still things that require me to think critically.
Long story short, a year into my AI-accelerated coding adventure, I am far, far, far more knowledgeable about development than I was when I started.