Boring Technology is even more true in the world of AI. You get such a quality benefit choosing technology the models have been trained on. Plus, picking boring things makes it easier for both humans and agents to judge what good looks like.
Somewhere in my context somewhere, I have the word “spine”. And so Claude has decided that everything has a spine. “That’s the spine of this debate.”, “The spine of this problem is in the architecture.”, “We’ll start by building the spine.” It’s… kind of… gory.
It is frankly ridiculous how much tastier Premium Plus saltines are versus No Name Brand. You would think that saltine technology would have reached an apogee to a degree to which brand does not matter. It does.
This saltine opinion is not sponsored by Premium Plus or sanctioned by my employer.
I’ve been a diligent GTD person for years — OmniFocus, Things, all of it. The capture flow on those apps is excellent. But late last year I started bullet journalling, and it solved a problem I’d been having forever: digital task apps never end. Tasks accumulate until you spend more time grooming the library than doing the work. The notebook forces a daily reckoning. Rewrite it or let it go. It also means I get to use a nice fountain pen.
I love the journal. But I don’t always have it with me and I still need to capture things in the moments I can’t reach it.
If I use Things to do capture, I…
Continue Reading…I bet Apple is really happy that they started moving away from Storyboards before AI agents became a thing.
It’s still jarring that you can have a conversation with the AI about complex programming topics and the pivot to a discussion of ideal bread rise timing with the same model.
The grandma pizza attempts continue. Not enough dough for the too-big 16x12 pan I bought on sale. Needs another 1/3 the dough to get that crispy edge. 🍕
“Put a brownie on the menu. Everyone likes a brownie.” “But, we’re Tex-Mex. A brownie isn’t Tex-Mex.” “Just like… make it Spanish or something.”
I’m trying to cancel a Github Actions job. Now, I haven’t actually cancelled the job. I’ve just successfully requested the cancellation. Whether or not the job actually cancels… who knows the future (spoiler: it doesn’t).
“No, Lisa, I’m not some casual amateur. I need a yogurt that can handle my extensive expertise.”
“No, I’m not some goddamned amateur. Give me the professional yogurt.”
Can’t stop listening to Stephen Spencer’s songs with lyrics by his 3-year-old daughter. I need an EP.
The mcp server for Bear is a game changer for my quality time spent shuffling my notes from one organizational system to another.
Waiting in eager anticipation for a new LLM with the personality of Janet from The Good Place.
I don’t know how I should feel about the fact that I can look at a picture of the side of a cat and my brain immediately goes “Oh, that’s Maru.”
I love Simon Willison’s plan to charge for a newsletter summary with less content than his raw blog. Time is valuable. It also provides some space for reflection and pattern hindsight.
It seems crazy to me that in 2025 you can’t make Pocket a viable business.
9yo: “You’re like the opposite of Sonic.”
I’ll watch the new hacker show if the code they show makes sense for the plot. I don’t think he’s destroying the world with HTML. Sloppy.
Holding myself back from building an app to help my kid organize play dates with his friends.
This is the kind of quality journalism I’ve come to expect from the Beaverton.
Bonsai Releaf is some great YouTube. It’s extremely high production quality bonsai trimming over a long timespan. There’s so much effort being put in to showcase a beautiful art.
Holy crap! A whole 10cm! Can stretch right out!
Ah yes, my regularly recurring reminder in my todo manager to change to another todo manager.
Historians will have to figure out when exactly we changed from a culture that wrote dystopian fiction to ward off a bleak future to a culture actively accepting that we’re heading there anyway and there’s nothing we can do about it.