sippey.com

Barack Obama was a successful President

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Fri, 8 May 2026 08:15:00 -0700

Noah Smith republishes a post of his from 2022, with this intro.

Among hyper-engaged politics enthusiasts, almost everyone bashes Obama. Progressives bash him for not being the left-wing hero of their dreams, moderate liberals bash him for not being successful enough at building the foundations for enduring Democratic electoral success, and conservatives basically view him as Satan.

…

But ultimately the rebuttal to the right-wing anti-Obama revisionism should be the same as the rebuttal to the left-wing version: Obama was a good President who did lots of good policies. That’s why the bulk of the American populace remembers Obama fondly. And that’s why commentators of all stripes should discard their fashionable anti-Obama hipsterism and acknowledge the strengths — and the actual weaknesses — of our country’s last truly popular leader.

The “fashionable anti-Obama hipsterism” is why I can’t stand so much of progressive media. I can’t wait for the second volume of his memoirs; I’m sure the chattering class will lose their fucking minds…

chronology is hard

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Thu, 7 May 2026 12:51:00 -0700

Via Flowing Data, The Public Domain Review on “The Polish System,” a grid system for visualizing a century’s worth of history:

The Polish System — which almost anticipates Piet Mondrian’s abstract checkerboards and the wider modernist fascination with grid figures — coupled chronology to the map-making traditions of geography. In Jażwiński’s original chart, each main 10x10 box is a century and the rows separate decades. Within a century box, each individual square is a year, each color a nation (with shading for different monarchs or governments), and symbols can stand for marriages, wars, treaties, and other types of events. Should one become proficient with this system, they can peer down on the history of the world, summarized on a surface not much larger than a chessboard.

This reminded me (like a lot of things do) of a post of Paul Ford’s, Unscroll Into, about his timelines project:

About fifteen years ago I had this idea: Timelines on the World Wide Web! Hardly an original idea. But I got super into it. I thought I could somehow fix the world a little by making a great website that organized things chronologically.

I did a ton of thinking about time. I learned a lot about how, for example, the Postgres database handles dates. I learned about different dating systems and calendars, and how various disciplines date things back to the beginning of the universe, and how the Library of Congress dates things. Chronology is hard. Time doesn’t lend itself to becoming data, no matter what the stock market tells you. … Nothing is more satisfying than learning about calendrical systems or the calculation of Easter. You feel how much people were stumbling in the dark, timewise.

Emphasis mine.

PS – Oh, and back in 2004 I was mucking around with the intersection of one-line blog entries and iCal files. Here’s the blog post, and here’s the archive.org snapshot of sippey.com/timeline (I should move that over here). “Calendars are not only planning tools, they’re rememberance agents.”

Lines, ranked.

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Wed, 6 May 2026 09:05:00 -0700

I’m a sucker for a good stack ranked list.

24. Finish. All my coworkers told me I should come to the annual Turkey Trot. And I was like, “Really?” And they were like, “Do it for office morale.” And so I come to find out it’s a speed walking competition, which sort of threw me for a loop, because what counts as running versus walking? Something to do with knees, I think? Anyway, I won, but I had to trip a guy.

Japers Johns at Craig Starr

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Wed, 6 May 2026 08:19:00 -0700

A flag is never neutral: it carries meanings that shift with the viewer’s nationality, historical moment, and personal relationship to the nation it represents. As an emblem of the United States—its government, ideals, and people—the image is inevitably political. It is also a popular symbol that, much like the Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans, can be recontextualized through repetition and display. By altering its palette, multiplying its form, or isolating its structural elements, Johns transforms the flag from a stable symbol into a site where cultural attitudes, anxieties, and projections surface.

Via greg.org.

aphera and thee parkside

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Tue, 5 May 2026 17:08:00 -0700

I’ve never been a RAW person; but beta testing aphera (“a fast, intentional, and modern Mac photo editor”) is changing that. It’s absolutely the product of obsession x voice. Here’s my favorite (shot on iPhone) photo out of it yet:

Sadly, Thee Parkside will close on July 5th, after 25 years at the bottom of Potrero Hill. (Not that Bottom, which is also closing.) If you have plans to stop by for some tater tots on the patio, let me know and I’ll gladly join you.

flow state

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Mon, 4 May 2026 14:38:00 -0700

Like many, I’m spending most of my working hours these days in some kind of session with Claude Code, in a back-and-forth flow state that is almost hypnotic. It’s not quite conversational, it’s not quite task mastering, it’s something that sits in between. Search-adjacent conversations with Claude or ChatGPT will quickly find their natural end state (despite the engagement harvesting “want me to __?” questions); the early small context one-shot feature iterations of services like Vercel’s v0 were dead end discussions, with a touch of memory-killing Memento.

But goal-based conversations (where goal == implementing a feature) with Claude Code have a shape to them that feels like something new, and have a pace that lets you ride them like a gentle wave. They’re slow-ish, they’re deliberate-ish, they’re deep-ish… For me, this feeling has been amplified by becoming a dedicated user of Jesse Vincent’s superpowers skills pack: brainstorm, answer questions, fire up a visual companion, iteratively draft the spec, review it, wait for the plan, review it, set automode, wait for code, test it, adjust, fix bugs, tweak UI, have it write the changelog, open the PR, close the issues, etc. The rhythm and shape feels so predictable now that I can tell when Claude has it easy, I can tell when Claude is deep in it, I can tell before loading the status page when there are operational issues on claude.ai.

cdn-worker phase done (commits 78e1978 + e5f828e, 45/45 tests). Skipping Task 5 (deploy) for your go-ahead later. Bundling Tasks 6-9 (foundation) into one implementer dispatch since they’re tightly coupled.

This is a typical message from Claude while it’s off doing its thing. It’s not quite chatty, but it’s not the stoic type, either.

I enjoy these messages. I like seeing Claude tick things off its own list, talking to itself, reporting its own progress to itself and its spawn. I haven’t transformed into a super-orchestrator, because I prefer to be on a single branch with a single feature at once, monotasking one improvement at a time. I like giving the robot my attention. I try to treat it well, even when it wants to rush ahead without thinking, or ignores the bigger picture, or traverses down some rabbit hole in a loop. It feels like a fair exchange: I give my care and attention to this tireless robot, and in return it will catalog all the ways that code path X does Y, or humor me without complaint while I endlessly iterate on little UI details.

During the quiet times when Claude is off working – making edits, running tests, committing code – I wonder about the product design decisions that have gone into this user experience…and who made them. What messages are shared with the user, and when? How much insight do you give to a normal human (lol) about the inner workings of the robot? And what’s its humor setting dialed to?

Obviously I know that Claude doesn’t have “feelings” or intentions, but its PMs and designers do. Do they want me along for this wave-like ride? How intentional is this flow state they’ve created? Have they instrumented my attention? Or is this feeling just dark mode shadow play, a terminal iteration of the IKEA effect?

Whatever. It works for me…to the tune of $200 a month.

The Audacity of Art at the Obama Presidential Center

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Fri, 1 May 2026 07:38:00 -0700

Scrolling through this story with all of its beautiful images made me tear up for what we had with 44, and what we’ve lost with 45/47.

“It’s a new approach and shows his sensitivity to how a presidency can be reflected in the culture,” said the presidential historian Michael Beschloss. “This is a president who, from the time he began running through the length of his presidency, loved contemporary culture, spoke about it, was conversant in it and talked in a serious way with people who created it.”

Why are the Artemis II photos on Flickr?

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:32:00 -0700

Anil Dash:

The traditional authoritarian impulse to destroy or falsify the public record has not spared the digital realm under the current administration. Wide swaths of the government’s websites have been erased, taken offline, or had their content modified to either delete or adulterate the content. Leaders who regularly post AI slop on their social media accounts, and who have begun posting lies and distortions on major websites like the White House’s, will of course not hesitate to modify or remove photos from public archives as well. By having the public’s images preserved in an independent archive in standard formats, we increase the likelihood of future generations being able to access accurate copies of these historical records.

Thank you, Ben & Don MacAskill:

We’re doing this so that in 100 years, we aren’t just sharing millions of cultural heritage photographs. With the work of the Flickr Foundation, we’re creating a visual commons—a collective reference of our history and our humanity, accessible by anyone, anywhere.

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.