Alas, I must defend that which I despise..... dottxt.substack.com/p/it-pains-m...

Hugely disappointing! blockclubchicago.org/2026/05/20/t...

Even in my "guesting on Taylor Swift podcasts" days I was never as vehemently anti-Scott-Borchetta as my fellow tweeters, but lmao what absolute loser shit stereogum.com/2499541/labe...

The combo of the AI search bullshit and switching to Startpage as my browser search (accidentally, but I like it so far) has flipped me on remedies that would force Google to license its search results and rankings to other search engines

I never thought until now but a huge plus for Google must be that they are competing on a totally level playing field with Facebook re: device integration and compatibility with iPhones for any sort of smart glasses thing

I appreciate Amazon fucking up so catastrophically this, the first time I've ordered anything off them in ~6 months. It's like they saw I was being weak-willed and wanted to give me that shove back away.

I generally enjoy the Acquired podcast, but this Vanguard episode does show a struggle they have whenever they aren't dealing with a virtuous "what's good for the business is also good for the customer" cycle

This feels like the logical extension of my time there. To think I would be looking back on my Stanford experience thinking “wow I guess those were actually the good days?” www.nytimes.com/2026/05/17/o...

For America’s 250th I want a patriotic resurgence of the original lyrics to John Brown’s Body

This is exactly my dad’s problem!!!! He has been a big Meta Rayban fan for the last couple of years but with this specific exception, it will never actually read the thing, it will always summarize!!

A thing I have been pondering, of which this kinda sideways fits into, is the idea of AI generated slop existing at a period when there is already *orders of magnitude more stuff than you could ever consume* katedaviesdesigns.com/2026/04/29/k...

My most insane bugbear is that I would pay $10 a month for a special feed of MBMBaM that replaced the Montaigne theme song with the Long Winters one and made no other changes

Objectively the right move to swerve a bit with this one, but still.... I wanted the actual royal oak moonswatch www.hodinkee.com/articles/int...

This keeps happening where someone builds a cool tool (a way to put other audio you might want to listen to in Spotify next to your podcasts!) but explicitly for a pointless AI "usecase" (so you can get an AI-generated podcast about stuff you're researching) www.theverge.com/entertainmen...

What is being described is a "restaurant" in the same way that a dropshipping shopify app is a "store", namely: it's not! techcrunch.com/2026/05/05/m...

There were few things Google could do to force users off of Chrome faster than this. "We put an entire AI thing on your machine without telling you" I bet the entire marketing department for Chrome is absolutely melting down right now.

omg I got AI-aggregated (I'm the 2nd article) grocto.substack.com/p/2026-ai-in...

Actual post is fine, but I love this bit in the middle that extends a core idea I read about like 2 years ago: the model is at best 1/3 of what makes ChatGPT, the other 2/3 are the Chatbot UI and UX, and the "ChatGPT" character the model plays. handyai.substack.com/p/your-ceo-i...

Som-Mai with the incredible point that it’s a shame the casting Oscar didn’t exist a decade ago because while Civil War is (imo) quite bad as a movie, Tom Holland as Spider Man is maybe the best piece of impossible casting of all time

This is the most 2011-2013-coded video I’ve seen in years youtu.be/JH3mYQaSA7I?...

New nickname. Yes, this is because I've gotten back into Overwatch, for my sins

I might read this more carefully, so caveat I may be misreading, but on skim this doesn't seem to be arguing "the left is not engaging with AI", it seems like more "the left is not *embracing* AI", which seem to be two very different takes! www.transformernews.ai/p/the-left-i...

sometimes you just have to go all-caps in the headline www.theverge.com/podcast/9170...

This…..is true of literally every election ever www.yahoo.com/news/article...

This piece talks a lot about the GIF era of social networking, which reminded me of this post overreacted.io/a-social-fil...; a social media post has never been a "file" in the sense of a self-contained document that can transcend individual apps, but maybe during their heyday GIFs were?

There is something interesting in the Founderism tenets that value decisiveness as its own virtue, independent of whether the decisions are right

Very good with one exception: oh boy oh boy can you go down a real rabbit hole of anticipatory planning for a theme park vacation www.theverge.com/tldr/915176/...

this is just a warmed over david duke speech from 1990

In the past month I had the same experience twice with two different famous people, namely of realizing I had 1) never seen a photo of them and 2) completely missed that the person in question was in fact a hot hipster: Vince Guaraldi, and Edward Gorey

I mean not my industry so this is wild speculation, but I do wonder to what degree is it this vs it being the massively increased competition for movies as an entertainment form?

I keep forgetting to to tweet my weekly posts, so here it is: me tweeting my weekly post dottxt.substack.com/p/watches-an...

Good! Necessary! www.restaurantdive.com/news/chicago...

I was initially skeptical of the Free Bread article being as good as everyone said, given already the Best Article Ever Written is the old Gawker "TGI Fridays Endless Mozarella Sticks" article and this seemed to close to home to compete......... but I should've known!!!!!!!!

My ambivalence about continuing to work in the tech sector has reached “take a practice LSAT” levels 🫣

(I’ll admit I’d never willingly listen to a full podcast from him so maybe this is clearer in the full thing but) with everyone who says this, I can never see the A->C of how AI and agents enable massively flat organizations?

Steven Soderbergh is my favorite filmmaker, I find myself increasingly reflexively anti-ai and consider it’s usage somewhat gross….. but I mean come on, anyone who didn’t think he was going to experiment with it for at least 3 movies clearly has not been paying attention

Ooooo I need to think more about the idea of (what a paper argues for) a Glass-Steagall for AI that separates model ownership from data centers ownership……. That is quite intriguing to me, but I have no idea what the 2nd, 3rd etc order effects would be…..

Regrettably……I’m back into Overwatch

I'm realizing one thing I lost in the shift to work from home: historically I would save my favorite podcast of the week for when I was leaving work on Friday!

There's a possibility, now that I'm listening to it with this focus and this lens, that Welcome Interstate Managers might be the best example ever of thematically appropriate guitar solos????

It’s interesting to contrast AI with a genuine “the tech media hates it but consumers actually love it”: Amazon! It consistently polls in the mid-80s approval/sentiment ratings and has for decades! For all its (genuine, disastrous) evils, that’s what a true beloved consumer product looks like!

If hundreds of millions of people have used your products and AI is still polling below ICE and OpenAI is spending hundreds of millions on a podcast with 70k viewers because Altman explicitly thinks AI has a marketing problem… you know I think the products just aren’t great

A good reminder if you ever hear a consumer app bragging about their user numbers, they only ever use MAU if they’re embarrassed by their WAU, and they only ever use WAU if they’re embarrassed by their DAU

It's very funny that I've read multiple headlines over the last few days about the Snap activist and only just now, reading Matt Levine, realized that Snap is 100% of Snap's public stock is non-voting

Eminently reasonable to ban sharing and hosting of the files, eminently reasonable to punish aggressively for actually printing the gun, continues to be a bad idea to ban on the printer and slicer side www.theverge.com/tech/905922/...

Hey remember how last week it was all about "focus" and "cutting distractions" www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

I like this quite a bit, and it hints at the very end at the third important distinction: there's what's legal, there's what's moral, and there's the reminder *we can always redefine what is legal* writings.hongminhee.org/2026/03/lega...

the venn diagram of people obsessed with immigrating "the right way" and people who put up sheds in their backyard without a building permit and then blow their tops off when their nosy neighbor reports them is a circle

I haven't read the post and obviously won't because I value my time and sanity, but what about AI makes management *less* necessary? www.paymentsdive.com/news/blocks-...

I'm mad about this being april fools because there is a Chicago magician Dennis Watkins who is an expert in Houdini's tricks, who I saw in an incredible Houdini biopic play a decade ago, so I assumed that's what this was going to be!