2026-05-20 20:14:29
From the Railway blog: Incident Report: May 19, 2026 - GCP Account Suspension
At 22:20 UTC on May 19, Google Cloud placed Railway’s production account into a suspended status incorrectly, as part of an automated action. This action extended to many accounts within Google Cloud. As this was a platform-wide action, there was no proactive outreach to individual customers prior to the restriction.
Quick Reads experienced its first downtime due to this outage, which sucks. I will be very curious to hear what caused the automated suspension.
Railway remains the best solution for me, and this post lays out plans for how they will remove GCP as a blocker as it was in this case to avoid something like this in the future, so here's hoping they nail it.
2026-05-20 20:10:38
Here's a quote from Quinn Nelson's latest video about the MacBook Neo:
The Neo is dominating in its segment because of price, and surrendering that advantage to protect margin would forfeit this entire strategy. Cracking the low end of the market is just the cost of doing business. If they want this beachhead, and I wager that they do, they're willing to pay for it.
Which also means that the recommendation I give is a little bit different than what I had planned. Past Quinn would have said, "Well, just hold off on the Neo because a refreshed 12GB model is right around the corner, probably before a year's end. It's all but inevitable."
Well, but now I don't think that's happening, and the gap in between an 8GB and a 12GB machine that you intend to keep for many years is significant. Now that that bets off the table, it seems that the Neo that you can buy today is the Neo that you'll be able to buy the foreseeable future. So either pull the trigger and suck it up, or, as my recommendation has always gone, find a used MacBook Air or MacBook Pro with more memory, a better chip, faster disk, and frankly, longer-term support for similar amounts of money.
Having said all that, this is a very important computer, and people who buy one will like it.
This can't help but remind me of one of my most controversial reviews I've written in years:
Do I recommend people buy this computer? Sure, it's a capable machine that feels outstanding in the hand, but I’d encourage anyone considering it to also look at the refurbished market. If performance and overall features matter more to you than having the newest thing from Apple, you might find something that better fits your needs for a similar, if not better price.
I still think we're both right here. If your requirement for a new Mac is that you can buy it from an Apple Store, then this is a good Mac you'll enjoy, but if your requirement is more that you want to spend around $600-700 on a Mac, look around at the few year old models you can get. Seriously, just search "MacBook" on Amazon and you might be surprised what other Macs you can get for that money.
2026-05-20 06:47:22
Ben Thompson: Data Center Discontent, Understanding the Opposition, Fixing the Problem
The point of starting with the misinformation point, however, is not to legislate it: there are plenty of folks doing just that, on both sides. Rather, it’s to note that (1) misinformation takes root in the minds of people who are receptive to it and seeking confirmation for what they already want to believe, and therefore (2) trying to solve the misinformation problem through education — or simply calling people stupid — is likely not going to work.
This leads to the second issue: there really wasn’t widespread opposition to data centers when they were being built for the Internet generally; indeed, local governments would compete for them, eager for the economic benefits that came during their construction and the long-term tax benefits once they were operational.
Ben Thompson makes a bunch of points in this piece I thought were worth reiterating here.
First, and this one is close to my heart, I'm constantly amazed how many people think, "you're a fucking idiot" is a compelling argument to change someone else's mind. "Oh man, you weren't able to change their mind? What did you say?" "Well, you know, I called them a fucking idiot and they didn't change their mind, they actually seemed to dig in even harder. I don't know why."
Second, as I wrote in my recent members' post, people don't view tech companies with as much optimism as they did 10+ years ago. It used to be when a big tech company wanted to build a new data center, communities would rally to get them to build it in their town. The economics and environmental impacts haven't changed that much, but the vibe has shifted quite a bit. Tech companies need to learn this.
Third, and related, AI CEOs need to learn how to talk to humans. They'll go, "worst case we're about to destroy the human race, best case we're going to take away all your jobs," and then wonder why people aren't excited. For what it's worth, I don't think they're doing either, but they're in such a bubble that they think this shit lands with people. It lands with their VC friends, after all!
Fourth, it's worth grappling with the fact that while most people say they don't want data centers in their back yards, they are still using these AI tools…a lot. As of today, the top 3 apps on the US iOS App Store are ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. There's a clear anger here at some AI and a clear draw to it as well. Anyone who thinks "nobody wants this" is lying, just as is someone who says, "our data shows more and more people love everything AI".
Fifth, and this is something I've shifted on over the course of my adult life, it is indeed a travesty that we (in the US especially) gave up on nuclear power. Absolutely, there were incidents that were very bad that should never happen again, although the amount of damage to humanity that coal has done in my lifetime is exponentially more disastrous. I love to see the rapid rise in clean energy sources like solar and wind, but I think the world would clearly be in a much better place if we had robust nuclear energy generation instead of coal over the past four decades. This 2021 study puts the yearly death toll from fossil fuels in the millions.
2026-05-19 21:38:15
Today I'm excited to announce Ghosty Posty, which is the best way to publish your Obsidian notes to your Ghost blog. It is available now on the Obsidian community plugins directory for free.
Ghosty Posty is a straightforward Obsidian plugin that lets you take any note from Obsidian and publish it to your Ghost blog as a new post. The plugin supports all manner of markdown formatting, as well as images. Some plugins dump all the post content in a single HTML block in the Ghost interface, which makes them incredibly annoying to edit in the future. But with Ghosty Posty, paragraphs, lists, images, code blocks, and quotes all render exactly as you'd expect in the Ghost backend.
This is the core of what made me create this plugin in the first place. I found that all of the existing plugins involved pretty significant compromises in user experience, and Ghosty Posty delivers a nearly no-compromises way to publish to my blog. This post, as well as probably 90% of the posts I've written in the past year, have been done through Ghosty Posty.
When you hit the Ghosty Posty button to publish, a screen appears in Obsidian, letting you set the title of the post, add tags, change its visibility and post status, and decide if you're scheduling it or posting it right away. It has sensible defaults, but you can also use Obsidian's properties on your note to set these appropriately for the post you're writing. I personally use the Templater plugin, so I have a template set up to add these properties to any new note with a single keyboard shortcut.
I'll also mention that the plugin fully supports images, and you can position them wherever you'd like in your post; they will get uploaded at full resolution to your blog. If the very first line of the note is an image, the plugin assumes you want that to be the featured image on the post and will assign it as such.
Finally, there is an optional archive setting, which will move a note from wherever it is to a specific directory of your choosing after you publish it to Ghost. My setup has a "birchtree" folder in my vault, which has all of the articles I have queued up and partially written. I also have a folder called "archive" in there, and whenever I publish something to the blog, the note goes from the Birch Tree folder into the Archive folder and disappears from my writing queue, which is really nice.
Ghosty Posty is available for free for any Obsidian user. If you like Obsidian and have a Ghost blog, I genuinely think this is the plugin you've been waiting for.
If you were wondering why everything in the plugin is in sentence case and "Ghost" is lowercase all over, it's because I was fighting with Obsidian's plugin review process, which requires sentence case for most things, and does not understand that "Ghost" is a proper noun.
2026-05-18 20:31:07
I'm happy to say that after a lengthy review process, the Quick Reads plugin is available on the official Obsidian marketplace. It may take a few days/hours for it to show up in the in-app marketplace.
The plugin is designed for people like me who want to create highlights in their read later app and have those highlights sync over to Obsidian. Here's what you can configure in the plugin settings.
Quick Reads Sync comes with one action, "sync now". With the way this is built into Obsidian, this means you will see this in the command bar and you can pin it or set a keyboard shortcut to run it on demand. It's your Obsidian vault, do whatever you want!
I have my highlights sync to a folder I call Quick Reads, and as you might expect, I use the default template. As someone who writes a lot of blog posts that link to and quote other articles on the web, this is a great start to my workflow for link posts. Maybe I'll get into it in another blog post here, but I have a custom Obsidian plugin that will take notes like this and automatically convert them into my blog's format for link posts with the title, author, and URL filled out exactly how I like it.
2026-05-18 19:52:53
A new version of Chapterize is out now that includes multi-document editing across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. This is a free update for existing users and you can get it now.
There's really not much more to say in this blog post other than if you're someone like me who works on more than one podcast at a time, this is going to be a godsend. I didn't have it at launch because multi-document workflows implement new challenges in the app, and I wanted to make sure the core experience was up to snuff first. But as I've gone from one to two to three podcasts per week that I'm releasing, it was becoming increasingly untenable to have to work on one, complete it, and then move on to the next.
In addition to this change, I've also made some improvements to how I handle drag and drop. I had a fundamental conflict in the app where you could drag in multiple file types onto an existing episode. You could drag in subtitles files, or you could drag in images for chapters. Because I didn't do things as well as I could have, the UI for this got pretty laggy.
It was especially annoying when you were dragging in images because most of the frame was a drop zone for the transcript file. Now there is a dedicated spot where you can drop your transcript files that looks nicer, is way more performant, and doesn't fight with you when you're dragging in chapter artwork.