sippey.com

The Casual Catastrophe of AI

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Wed, 8 Apr 2026 10:20:00 -0700

M.G. Siegler on Mythos and Glasswing:

Given the issues Mythos has already found – across every operating system and seemingly every piece of software they’ve looked into – it’s hard to feel anything other than overwhelmed here. And again, that to me is sort of the story of AI right now. It’s less about “superintelligence”, and more about intelligence scaled in a way that humanity cannot.

…

Creative endeavors feel more protected. And that’s because while AI technically could write the works of Shakespeare – again, time is not an issue, endless possibilities are literal – the system wouldn’t necessarily know when it had. It would only know which version to pick if compared against the existing works of Shakespeare. But what about future Shakespeares?

Enter Book

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Wed, 8 Apr 2026 10:04:00 -0700

Dalia Taha:

Look how beautiful you look as you read.
Look how peaceful you look
as you let an entire continent colonize you;
as you lay the book down on the nightstand,
as if returning to the world
something that belongs to it—
as you stand, dazzled by the hills
as though the book, too,
has returned to the world
something that belongs to it.

Loved this.

OpenAI Buys TBPN, Tech and the Token Tsunami

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Mon, 6 Apr 2026 11:11:00 -0700

Ben Thompson:

I’ve previously wondered if OpenAI might be like Twitter, another text-centric company that fell backwards into a huge market and never developed into a functional business because of it; if Twitter is a clown car that fell into a gold mine, OpenAI might be the short bus at the end of the rainbow. There’s supposed to be a pot of gold there, but it never quite seems to materialize, the colors are fading, and worst of all there just isn’t much evidence that anyone knows what they are doing or that there is any sort of overarching plan. Ads are bad, until they’re the plan; Meta execs are hired en masse, and the ads that launch are low-effort keyword-driven offerings; Apple is a partner until Jony Ive is hired, but he’s still doing projects for Ferrari; meanwhile, Anthropic is focused on the enterprise and shipping, Google is encroaching, and the answer to that is to buy a podcast? What is going on here?

Aperture in the Live Lounge

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Wed, 1 Apr 2026 12:51:00 -0700

I don’t love every song on his new album but I really like this one, and this performance is fantastic.

The World Is an Easier Place Without You In It

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 18:30:00 -0700

Karen Shepard:

Oh, yes, she was often aware of how difficult she was. I’m sure she would’ve said that I was difficult also. It was like a lighthouse: sometimes she could see herself with real clarity, and then the light would swing away, and she was unable to do so anymore. It was difficult, as her daughter, to have to learn how to not rely on that light.

How Not to Interview (Interesting People)

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 15:53:00 -0700

Om Malik:

If you saw the movie Almost Famous, the main character based on Cameron Crowe didn’t get just one hour in a hotel room. He got days on a tour bus. Proximity produces honesty. The subject stops performing eventually. But of course, you could be Lex Fridman. You could talk, and talk, for hours and numb your subjects, not to mention atrophy the brains of your listeners who actually listen.

💀

On Angst

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Sun, 1 Mar 2026 21:59:00 -0800

Jamieson Webster, in the Paris Review, recounts the “forced choice” of the holdup at gunpoint, posited by Jacques Lacan.

The perpetrator says to his victim: “Your money or your life!” Of course, everyone hands over their money. Yet there is an important logical error, for while you assume you have made the choice to escape scot-free, in handing over your money you have not escaped a loss of life, you’ve paid a price to live. Even as the price is worth paying, you live at a cost. Lacan used this example to demonstrate what he called a “forced choice.” Seemingly presented with options, you lose either way. There is only one choice, and you are being forced into it.

The Song of LinkedIn

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Sun, 1 Mar 2026 21:43:00 -0800

Robin Rendle:

The Song of LinkedIn is one of domination and intimidation, a song of con artists and get rich quick schemes. It’s a song of anxiety and lame ideas sexed up into mild takes. But alas the world is not in desperate need of certainty, or any more short cuts, or, indeed, grifts masquerading as nuggets of truth.

Trump Has No Plan for the Iranian People

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 11:24:00 -0800

Anne Applebaum on the lack of a U.S. strategy for Iran.

For decades, American presidents from both parties have oscillated between coercion and engagement with Iran, sometimes offering diplomacy, sometimes sanctions. Doves and hawks both sought to manage the tactics of the Islamic Republic – its nuclear ambitions, its ballistic missiles, its network of proxy militias throughout the Middle East – without ever coming up with a meaningful strategy to combat the root problem: the ideology of the regime itself.

The Islamic Republic is a theocracy founded explicitly to oppose the deepest principles of liberal democracy and the rule of law. During its 47-year reign, this theocratic state underwent no meaningful political reform, made no improvement to its human-rights record, and never stopped trying to export its radicalism abroad. To maintain control, the regime has used mass violence, intimidation, and surveillance. In recent years, the regime has also sought, successfully, to use online smear campaigns to divide and denigrate the Iranian opposition. Nevertheless, as the scholar and activist Ladan Boroumand has written, Western liberal democracies have long preferred to engage the Islamic Republic “almost solely through the paradigm of Realpolitik,” to engage in negotiations that never seemed to work.

Noah Kalina interviews Scott Rogowsky

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 21:28:00 -0800

Scott Rogowsky was the host of HQ Trivia, and is now the co-founder of Savvy.

Does it ever feel like you’re competing with a ghost?

Although I shall always remain Quiz Daddy Emeritus (and continue slinging vintage tees and sports cards on quizdaddys.com), you are correct to call “HQ Scott” a ghost. Not only because that show is dead, that moment in time is dead, and that era of internet culture is dead, but because that Scott who hosted HQ is dead.

…

HQ Scott may have seemed to project a fairly positive outward appearance, but inwardly he was possessed of a deeply unhealthy mindset. Only now can I look back with a gimlet eye at that version of myself and see that I was drowning in a whirlpool of negative self-love (a gentler name for ‘self-hate’), spun by near constant thoughts of self-doubt, self-criticism, self-recrimination, self-consciousness, scarcity, inadequacy, insecurity, unworthiness; plagued by anxiety; shrouded in negativity; chronically complaining; only conditionally content.

Click through, read the whole thing, watch the videos. They’re good.

token body energy anxiety

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 10:29:00 -0800

Three things rattling around in my brain this morning. First, Sam Altman is living rent free in my head, comparing the energy use of a transformer to the energy use of a human. From Matteo Wong’s piece on this in The Atlantic:

Last Friday, onstage at a major AI summit in India, Sam Altman wanted to address what he called an “unfair” criticism. The OpenAI CEO was asked by a reporter from The Indian Express about the natural resources required to train and run generative-AI models. Altman immediately pushed back. Chatbots do require a lot of power, yes, but have you thought about all of the resources demanded by human beings across our evolutionary history?

“It also takes a lot of energy to train a human,” Altman told a packed pavilion. “It takes, like, 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart. And not only that, it took, like, the very widespread evolution of the hundred billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to, like, figure out science and whatever to produce you, and then you took whatever, you know, you took.”

He continued: “The fair comparison is, if you ask ChatGPT a question, how much energy does it take once its model is trained to answer that question, versus a human? And probably, AI has already caught up on an energy-efficiency basis, measured that way.”

Second, Nikunj Kothari’s piece on Token Anxiety, making overly broad statements about life in San Francisco now, but I can sort of relate to this:

Dinner conversations used to start with “what are you building?” That’s over. Now it’s “how many agents do you have running?” People drop the number the way they used to drop their follower count. Quietly competitive. The flex isn’t what you’ve accomplished anymore. It’s what’s working while you’re sitting here not working.

…

Waking up and checking what your agents produced overnight is the first thing now. Before coffee. Before texts. You open your laptop and grade homework you assigned in your sleep. Some of it is good. Most needs rework. But you start shipping a plan before you sleep just so you can wake up to more code written overnight. Saturdays became uninterrupted build windows. No meetings, no Slack, twelve hours of you and your agents. Sunday morning X is all terminal screenshots and shipping receipts. “What’d you ship this weekend?” replaced “what’d you do this weekend?”

Finally, Toby Shorin’s Body Futurism. Terrifying.

“Attention is all you need”—the name of the whitepaper that inagurated the current era of transformer models—is a perfect catchphrase for the transition to a pure attention economy where bodies matter most. AI researchers in San Francisco have all started GLP-1s and weightlifting routines, having convinced each other that physique will be the final competitive edge after AI takes all the white collar jobs. If their conclusion is excessive, the premise is correct. We have already entered an economy of charisma which grants status to various kinds of extreme physicality or virtuosity.

The combination of severely curtailed career mobility and the mainstreaming of gambling have created an economic environment characterized by grift. The biggest winners are naturally those who exude charisma and prowess. Charisma has long been the dominant mode in social media, but athleticism is now rewarded more than ever. Jake and Logan Paul pivoted into boxing; IShowSpeed does exhibition races; philosophy YouTuber Jonathan Bi lectures from exotic locations wearing open linen shirts that reveal how fit he is. Less and less, influencers are talking heads. More and more it is the bodies doing the talking. Only from this perspective can the preoccupation with testosterone levels, jaw angles, and height maximizing be understood.

Send help – in the form of books to read, music to listen to, recipes to make, art to stare at. Thanks in advance.

In Gorsuch’s Homage to Legislative Power, a Subtle Reproach of a Neutered Congress

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 07:16:00 -0800

Neil Gorsuch reminds us we have a third branch of government.

Yes, legislating can be hard and take time. And yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises. But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design. Through that process, the nation can tap the combined wisdom of the people’s elected representatives, not just that of one faction or man.

Amen.

The A.I. Disruption Has Arrived, and It Sure Is Fun

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 16:06:00 -0800

Friend of the ~~pod~~ blog Paul Ford, in the New York Times, nailing the vibes.

When you watch a large language model slice through some horrible, expensive problem — like migrating data from an old platform to a modern one — you feel the earth shifting. I was the chief executive of a software services firm, which made me a professional software cost estimator. When I rebooted my messy personal website a few weeks ago, I realized: I would have paid $25,000 for someone else to do this. When a friend asked me to convert a large, thorny data set, I downloaded it, cleaned it up and made it pretty and easy to explore. In the past I would have charged $350,000.

That last price is full 2021 retail — it implies a product manager, a designer, two engineers (one senior) and four to six months of design, coding and testing. Plus maintenance. Bespoke software is joltingly expensive. Today, though, when the stars align and my prompts work out, I can do hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of work for fun (fun for me) over weekends and evenings, for the price of the Claude $200-a-month plan.

Maria Popova answers the Longreads questionnaire

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 13:38:00 -0800

I love Maria Popova’s The Marginalian (née Brain Pickings); a friend of mine and I send links of hers back and forth all the time. Her new book Traversal is out this week, and the Longreads folks launched their version of the Proust Questionnaire (titled The Longreads Questionnaire, natch) by asking Popova 25 questions about reading, writing and creativity. I loved this one:

What are you really good at?

Pouring liquid from a large-mouthed vessel into a smaller-mouthed vessel without spilling. Including with my non-dominant hand. Including in motion. In the apocalypse, when everyone is rationing water, you want me around.

The crummiest job in Washington—congressman—is getting worse

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 12:59:00 -0800

A great story in The Economist, aptly filed under “Bleak House.”

In the past, lawmakers might get onto an interesting committee, where members on both sides haggled over new laws. But since the mid-1990s power has been hoarded in the offices of the speaker of the House and the Senate leader. To get around partisan gridlock, congressional leaders try to cram all their priorities into a single “omnibus” budget bill, which is negotiated in secret and passed, largely unread, by their rank and file. “[Committee] power has been pulled away,” complains a recently retired Democratic congressman. “And you say to yourself, what am I doing here if I can’t make my own decisions?”

Hearings have become marbled sets for brand-building. For the ambitious, “it’s all about getting that viral moment,” says the ex-congressman. “Members want to land their attack, and then package it up into a 30-second viral [clip] for social media.”

even if it's fake it's real, the michael shannon edition

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 10:44:00 -0800

On a last minute invite from a friend, last night I saw Michael Shannon channel Michael Stipe in a wild mix of nostalgia, fan service, performance art…and true love. Shannon, with guitarist Jason Narducy and a killer backing band (“holy shit, that’s John Stirratt from Wilco!”) has been covering REM and going on tour with it for the past few years. Last night they played Life’s Rich Pageant from start to finish in front of a sold out crowd of Gen Xers at The Fillmore; many of us knew every single lyric from every single song.

This project is wild. I’ve never wanted an 80 minute Netflix documentary more in my life, because I have so many questions. How did this start? How did Shannon and Narducy meet? When did Shannon realize he could pull this off? How did they rope in Stirratt? How did Michael Stipe feel about this when he first heard about it? What are fans getting out of this when they come to shows? And what was it like in the room last year when this happened?

RIP, Greg Brown

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 20:01:00 -0800

“There are a lot of ways to spend your 20s, and going out to see live local music all the time is about as good as it gets.”

That’s Marc Weidenbaum at Disquiet in a rememberance of Greg Brown, guitarist of Cake, recently dead at the way-too-soon way-too-sad (and way-too-close) age of 55. I was lucky enough to see Cake multiple times in the 90s at The Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco…Brown’s death weirdly bookends the announcement that the club will close at the end of 2026 after 35 years.

Can Ozempic Cure Addiction?

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 15:57:00 -0800

Dhruv Khullar, at The New Yorker, touches on one of the most interesting potential impacts of GLP-1s: resetting how society views addiction from a moral failure to a neurobiological difference.

On some level, I’d already understood addiction to be a treatable disease, not a personal failing. Still, these scans helped me appreciate how deeply addiction is rooted in neurobiology. A mere photograph of alcohol—to say nothing of a sip—was enough to send a person’s reward centers into a frenzy. Our decisions still matter; the red circles are known to grow brighter when they’re conditioned by repeated use of a drug. But it was counterproductive, even biologically incoherent, to shame a person for having overwhelming cravings. If GLP-1 drugs prove successful, they might reset not only people’s addictions but also society’s perceptions.

Solving weirdly specific problems

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 10:48:00 -0800

Writer Eliot Peper builds and ships Dialed to the App Store, an app that delivers hyperlocal surf forecasts for the San Francisco Bay Area.

Dialed is extremely simple. All it does is bring data from different public sources into one place to help you decide when and where to surf along this beautiful stretch of coastline.

With its global scale, it would never make sense for Surfline to do something this niche, nor would the teeny, tiny addressable market for Dialed justify the time or investment required to build it without AI tools. But with those tools, I was able to create a piece of software to solve my own weirdly specific problem, and offer it to others who might find it useful.

I love this so much, for obvious reasons.

Stash App

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 12:21:00 -0800

Here’s a slightly edited text from a friend this morning:

Using Claude Code feels like taking drugs. I get high when I use it and then the come down is a bitch.

Truth.

I haven’t blogged much about how I’ve been using Claude Code, because everyone is blogging about how they’re using Claude Code, and I don’t want to become just another one of those people who blog about how they’re using Claude Code. Instead, I thought I’d just ship something that is the result of all of this terminal-powered pseudo drug usage.

Background: I am an inveterate note taker. I’ve tried all the apps, all the methods, and nothing quite works the way my brain does. You can blame all the time working in and living with social media, but my brain loves short little bursts of things in reverse chron, with #hashtags and @people mentions, and expects quick search. I don’t like folders, graphs are cool until they’re not, and speed is the most important thing.

So I built Stash App, and it’s currently in beta. If you want to play with it, you can get the TestFlight for macOS and iOS. You can read more at the little site I built while enjoying the high of Claude Code, but here are the highlights:

Native macOS and iOS apps, and they sync via iCloud.
No folders, just a timeline of notes. Tag them with #hashtags for projects, and @people for mentions. They autocomplete after the first time you use them. #todos get a special visual treatment.
Fast keyword search, or tap on a #hashtag or @mention to filter your view.
Gmail-style keyboard shortcuts in the macOS app (j/k, e, #, c – iykyk).
Archive or trash your notes. Empty your trash to permanently delete them.
Just the right amount of Markdown rendering.
Export to Markdown, import via Markdown, both in the macOS app.

You can learn more here; there’s a draft FAQ which has more details. I have been using it while building it for the past few weeks and it’s now part of my workflow because it works like my brain works. It may not work for you, and that’s fine! But if you think it might, grab the TestFlight and check it out. All feedback welcome.

Oh, and there are more drug-induced things coming soon. Stay tuned.