https://textpattern.com/?v=4.8.8 https://www.jaredigital.com/ Premium linkage. Fri, 14 Aug 2026 17:34:31 +0000 A thorough case study of a truly impressive personal project by Jon Hicks in his ongoing quest to find (or in this case, make) the perfect music app. Rolling your own app with Claude (AI) is something I've seen a lot on non-technical folks do, and Jon is perfectly transparent about the mix of potency and toxicity that can come from using such plagiarism-laden technology. https://hicks.design/journal/jacket-app Fri, 14 Aug 2026 17:34:31 +0000 Julie Zhuo: “I’m a big believer that our souls need proof of work to sing. There are, in my experience, no shortcuts to excellence. One must love the hard work’s journey, not merely its fruits. So L, one question I keep thinking about is: what happens to the girl who never sews the crooked seam, because AI gives her a finished outfit immediately? What happens if she never learns to overcome the struggle? I fear that girl may never quite grow her Eye. When given two AI-created outfits, one singular, and one quite mediocre, I fear she won’t be able to tell which is which. That is the danger these tools pose, my love. Not that the machine is a bad Hand, but that in being so polished it decreases our capacity to obsess over the details, and in doing so to learn and grow.” https://joulee.medium.com/eye-hand-ai-a-letter-to-my-daughter-91780b37ff6c Thu, 06 Aug 2026 17:35:30 +0000 Greg Storey: “Make like no one cares because you don't care what they think anymore. Do this enough and confidence shows up. So do the opportunities. More importantly, you'll be making instead of secretly worrying.” https://brilliantcrank.com/your-brain-is-an-asshole/ Fri, 12 Jun 2026 16:27:35 +0000 Jeffrey Zeldman: “The web taught us to fill space. AI finished the job. Content covers every surface now, every silence anxious to be noise. Learn to be quiet on purpose.” https://zeldman.com/2026/04/15/the-courage-to-stop/ Thu, 16 Apr 2026 21:03:52 +0000 A fantastic essay by Henry Desroches that deserves a complete reading, but that culminates as so: “Illich’s thesis is that technology and its derived tools should serve people in a way that enhances their freedom, creativity, independence, and will. The distillation of those principles on the web through manual code, hand-built social networks, and blogs, points luminously to one answer to the question of how the Internet can best serve humans: it’s personal websites.” (Also, massive appreesh for the home page banner: “Trans women are women. Trans rights are human rights. Fix your heart or die.” Forever and ever, amen.) https://henry.codes/writing/a-website-to-destroy-all-websites/ Mon, 12 Jan 2026 16:13:14 +0000 Joan Westenberg: “We have ‘growth hackers’ but no ‘stability hackers.’ We have ‘disruptors’ but no ‘preservers.’ The entire vocabulary of modern business is oriented toward the new, the unprecedented, the revolutionary. What we lack is language for the equally difficult work of keeping existing things from falling apart.” https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-rime-of-the-ancient-maintainer/ Sun, 28 Dec 2025 22:17:10 +0000 I was looking up articles about Belly after seeing them play live, and ran across this gem from 2013. I never knew that Star was originally supposed to be the second Breeders album! Tanya Donnelly: “The genesis of that band was going to be that Kim [Deal] would have an album and then the next one would be my songs. And in fact all of the demos for Star say “The Breeders” on them. Like, on the reels and on the boxes. Because that was supposed to be the second Breeders album originally.” What??? I'm glad the universe or whatever intervened, because it gave us TWO seminal 90s albums: Star and Last Splash. https://spectrumculture.com/2013/11/13/holy-hell-tanya-donelly-talks-about-belly-20-years-later/ Tue, 23 Dec 2025 15:26:20 +0000 “One of the defining bands of the shoegaze wave that washed over the indie-rock world in the 1990s, Lush mesmerized with their otherworldly vocals set against a swirling wall of sound. Assembled by former bassist Phil King from Super 8 footage he shot during the group’s time on the road, LUSH: A FAR FROM HOME MOVIE offers an appropriately ethereal behind-the-scenes record of the Britpop stars at their impossibly cool peak.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ow3jEIV0s74 Fri, 14 Nov 2025 15:22:02 +0000 A fun look back at origin of these influential platforms and the beginnings of collaborative filtering. https://cybercultural.com/p/lastfm-audioscrobbler-2002/ Fri, 14 Nov 2025 14:51:14 +0000 Another excellent essay from Frank Chimero with too many quotable passages, so this one will have to do: “[AI's] danger comes because it operates inside systems with no sense of “enough.” AI needs boundaries, and so do we. The question isn’t just “what can this machine do?” but “what should it serve?” and, most importantly, “when should we stop?” https://frankchimero.com/blog/2025/beyond-the-machine/ Wed, 22 Oct 2025 20:03:49 +0000