2026-10-20 23:30:01
What I did learn that day, though, was a form of anxious self-criticism that still follows me to this day. It seems like every time I lay out an article of clothing to wear, I ask myself—sometimes consciously, oftentimes not—“What smartass comment would Jay make about this?” And if I feel like my imaginary Jay might have a point, I don’t wear that thing.
But the thing is, Jay wasn’t any kind of authority. He was just a kid, same as me, but with a penchant for turning simple observations into disparaging remarks. Jay was an asshole, and he is a person I haven’t seen or spoken to in at least 22 years. I don’t know why I still let his words, and more importantly his views, influence my behavior. I couldn’t tell you how many other Jay-like people have planted similar seeds of neuroticism and self-censorship in my head.
One of my earliest CD purchases in middle school was Monsters of Rap.1 I must've listened to the first disk a hundred times. I was particularly captivated by Sir Mix-A-Lot's Baby Got Back.2
I listened to it so much that I memorized all the lyrics. And anytime I heard that song, it was a personal challenge to try and match Mix word-for-word.
At a stag dance in high school, the DJ dropped Baby Got Back, and I got so happy. I started rapping along with the track while busting my best moves.
Halfway through the song, a friend of mine (let's call him Greyson) looked at me and said, "dude, stop rapping. Nobody cares that you know the words, it's just annoying."
Now that I'm a dad, I catch myself occasionally acting the same way as Greyson and Jay, policing the joy that's emanating from my kids because of whatever big feelings I'm feeling.
Those are the moments I most often wish I could take back, and the first I go back and repair the next morning.
Sitting here in my late 30s, I now realize it's my job to decide what external sources of validation I want to bake into my own inner monologue.
It's also my job as a parent to help my kids come to the same realization.
Just like Monster Ballads, it was the late-night commercials during NewsRadio re-runs that sold me on it. ↩
Funny side story: my daughter was almost born to Nikki Minaj's Anaconda. Kinda awkward to be in between labor pushes, and the silence in the room is broken up by repeating choruses of "shake that big fat ass." ↩
2026-10-13 22:40:43
There was an interesting time in German history, right between the two World Wars - the “interbellum”, the time of the Weimar Republic. It was very turbulent, and a lot of it wasn’t pretty in the slightest - social difficulties, unemployment, incredible inflation, squalid living conditions, the emergence of the wildest movements, cabarets and cults imaginable… but there was also something else. The “Roaring Twenties” of Weimar Germany also produced an incredible number of great, whimsical, fascinating artistic movements. From the Bauhaus to the Berlin gay cabarets, from Kurt Weill to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis - it was a booming time, and a lot of what appeared then is still valued and cherished today.
And it was a technological boom as well - the ever more widespread use of electricity, the large-scale deployment of modern pharmaceuticals, the subways, the automobile… fascinating times.
I know how that era ended, and no - that is not the part of the analogy I am after. The part I am after is this: the old order had lost interest, nobody was in charge, the ground was shifting under everybody’s feet - and that is precisely when the most interesting work got made. Great turmoil, great industrial change, no adult supervision. Sound familiar?
Yes, there's a lot about our current AI situation that sucks. Companies are straight up committing felony hacks with zero consequences. Data centers are popping up everywhere, the cost of GPUs is sky high, etc. etc. etc.
But.
The cost to make a computer do something useful is now exponentially cheaper. One dork with Claude Code can, for example, completely recreate the entire Adobe suite.1
Yeah, the bad guys are doing terrible things with it. But think about the other side of the coin!
With LLMs and some good ol' fashioned engineering, I'm hopeful that those performance geeks among us will pick up the mantle that DHH dropped and keep making Ruby and Rails better for us all.
Which, itself, should probably be an entrant on FelonyBench, but also maybe not? ↩
2026-10-13 20:01:23
I'm always happy to see Unicode get its flowers. I didn't realize the consortium only has four full-time employees!
And as much as I've been disenfranchised by Apple lately, it's also nice to see they still have thoughtful people working for them:
Nez Perce, or Nimipuutímt, does not use capital letters. Rather than having the Shift key toggle traditional uppercase letters, Apple repurposed it to reveal an accented secondary layer, so users don’t have to hold down individual keys to see those characters, which can slow typing. In the Cherokee language, each character mostly represents a consonant combined with a vowel sound, a form known as syllabary. Apple added adaptive vowel keys on the bottom row, so when a user types a consonant, these keys change to show the vowel combinations they can make.
2026-09-29 22:42:32
GitHub has hit an illustrious milestone with the publication of the one billionth repository this week. Whether by chance or design, Aasish Pokhrel from Nepal earned the honor of publishing the billionth nugget of code shared on the platform. Unfortunately, it’s ‘shit.’ That isn’t a snarky comment, or our judgment regarding the code, the repo is simply the word ‘shit.’
I’d like to see AI try and replicate this masterpiece.
2026-09-24 20:12:54
I'm not sure what keeps me there, what keeps any of us there, beyond inertia. We're in the Looney Tunes stage of the end of social, where we've glided well past the edge of the cliff and it's slowing dawning on us that the only way left is down. Fast.
What if we just stopped?
What if we stopped plugging our selves into the machines, stopped performing (wittingly and unwittingly) for the algorithm, stopped letting bots bait us, stopped all of it and figured out new ways—our ways—to do things again.
Because there has to be a better way of connecting and sharing and existing together, a way that isn't locked into the exploitative doom loops and psychic death of what we currently have. A way that's built around humans again, not around algorithms. A way that values connection instead of confrontation.
Something something indieweb, he mumbles softly under his breath while watching his loved ones succumb one by one to another algorithmic-induced outrage.
2026-09-22 23:54:19
There have been some high-profile deaths lately, but none of them punched me harder than this one.
Gilbert continued to be positive throughout his cancer battle. “I have my crying moments where, like everyone, I have to let it out,” he said. “But I like that we can turn it around into something positive… It’s always been just to inspire and grow a community of people that want to go to our shows and smile and have a good time.”
I've had Listen Up! on constant rotation this year. The entire album is wall-to-wall positivity and encouragement, keeping my spirits high even if things seem bleak.
Life will kick you down Be sure of that But stand up, grab it's throat, and yell, "you've met your match."