I am BARRY HESS

Why am I thinking about dipping back into Mastodon and Bluesky? I’ve been away for six or seven (!) months and it’s been good. I feel a bit like I’d like  I’m curious if I could do it in a way that would only be a fifteen-minute commitment each week. I have doubts, but I suppose then I could just eject again.

Hmm…I think I’ll resist a bit more.

How Everest Has Changed Since Into Thin Air (archive):

When I climbed to the summit of Everest in May 1996, I was only the 621st person to arrive there since the mountain was first summited, in May 1953. During the 30 years following my ascent, Everest was climbed approximately 13,000 times.

Sometimes a political cartoon hits so hard and direct that it brings a tear to your eye in more ways than one.

We were about to launch Pika Pulse this week. We had a lengthy meeting to talk about what we'd do in this or that situation. We decided that we needed to keep iterating on our guardrails and language for setting expectations.

We have some time off and life things coming up, so we also don't want to push things out right before those events happen. This means Pulse is probably somewhere around six weeks away from being released. It's going to be interesting if all this care and concern ends up not really helping. Or if it ends up being unnecessary. It'll probably be somewhere, hopefully sanely, in the middle.

Cora and I have been frequenting Clues by Sam. Recommended for a bit of a brain stretch on the daily.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be more.

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Spent this morning at Minnebar. This year was the 20th anniversary. I’ve had several posts about Minnebar on this blog through the years. I’ve only been able to go a couple times over the past ten years and it was good to see many familiar faces. (Even some Minnesota expats. 👋, Luke!)

(Oh, and I left my conference shirt in a room at some point and it was no longer there when I returned. If you have no conference shirt can you even say you were there?)

I called TRUNCATE on a Postgres database table in production for the first time. That was nerve wracking!

I did some wood work for the first time in a while. I’m working on a loft for Emma. I don’t know whether it’s time away from woodworking or just the type of project, but this felt a lot more like work and a lot less like hobby. Part of it might also be because it’s such a physically big project and that is a lot for my older body.

I’m way behind, but I just learned that Songkick was purchased by Suno. Did I know what Suno was before I learned that? No, but it sounds pretty ick. From their own home page:

Make any song you can imagine
Start with a simple prompt or dive into our pro editing tools, your next track is just a step away.

Yeah, ick. Time to migrate to Bandsintown? Something else? Give up?

I just finished the excellent Fela Kuti: Fear No Man podcast by Jad Abumrad and team. Highly recommended.

I think I might become an Onion paper subscriber. Anyone else going back to paper?

Discovered NOT A HOTEL. A man can dream.

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This is a fun brainstorm about snail mail sign-ups. I’ve been trying some snail mail things to thank a handful of Pika customers. Unfortunately it hasn’t been very effective. There’s been almost a complete lack of response. I’m not even entirely sure if most people received my mail. So I think snail mail sign-up would effectively be no sign-up. Still this could be fun for a personal project or an art project experiment.

We’ve been working hard on Pika Pulse for a number of weeks. We keep hitting blockers, many in the form of our own lack of confidence in what we’ve built. With most things I’m a ship-fast-and-adjust sort of person, but this is one that really has us being cautious. This is not due to concerns about the specifics of anything, but more the general shape of Pulse. Being completely honest, we are also very aware of the possible lasting impact Pulse could have on the day-to-day working experience of our team of two.

We are at Drake Relays for our first (and last?) time. Ava lives in a house right by campus, she’ll be moving out at the end of May, and that means it’s our last chance for sweet parking at the event. Our youngest does high jump and hurdles in high school, and it’s been fun for her (and all of us) to check out. Great weather, so lots of records!

I really should watch more historical Carol Burnett.

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Since building Pika I’ve wanted to incorporate a “now and then” sort of now page with dynamic history. With the recent flurry of updates to Pika variables, I realized that my dream could now be made reality. It turns out that my recent habit of writing Friday posts is effectively me writing what I’m doing/seeing/thinking, well, now(ish).

So now my now page is no longer chronically stale! If you happen to write a “general state of things” post every week or month, you can do the same thing on your own Pika site.

The page is pretty simple. First I wrote “Now” as my title. Then in the page body:

{{ posts_in_stream tag: “Friday” with_excerpts: no limit: 1 }}

### Then

Here’s to now pages past:

{{ posts tag: “Friday” skip: 1 }}

I put the body text above in a code block and wrote it as Markdown to avoid variables rendering on this post here. You may or may not be able to copy-paste the above variables into your Pika editor.

And that’s it. You may notice that my “Then” pages are linked dates without any titles. AI helped me with some wild CSS to modify Pika’s default output to what you see there. If you want something similar, you’re welcome to look at the CSS in my now page’s source to get started. Just look for .post-link in the page source.

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Did you know that the Apple HomePod can recognize alarms in your home and alert you about them?

We discovered this a few weeks ago while we were vacationing in Phoenix. While relaxing in the sun, every member of our household received an alert on their phones. I cannot remember exactly what it said, but it was in notification center and said something to the effect of, “An alarm is sounding in your home.”

This certainly got our adrenaline pumping! We quickly checked the other smart device we have in our home: Nest smoke detectors. There were no alerts, neither of the smoke nor carbon monoxide variety, coming from those devices.

I was a bit confused at this point as tapping the notification center alert took me to Apple Home, but I could not see any alerts on the screen it took me to, nor could I find any notifications within the app. Perhaps this is because “The notification remains in the Home app until the alarm sound stops”? That seems like an odd implementation.

We called a neighbor and asked them to pop over and check our house. When she entered she didn’t notice anything obvious going on other than maybe a bit of an odd smell. She went upstairs and when entering one of the bedrooms she noticed a light smell of burning bacon and a haze in the air.

At this point I realized that we had another set of sensor devices in the house: two Awair air quality monitors. I brought up the app on my phone and looked at the graph for our kitchen device. Usually it lists a “score” in the nineties, every once in a while dropping to the eighties while we’re cooking. With no one in the house, we’d expect the nineties (though low temperatures can lower the score). Rather frighteningly, though, at around 11:30 a.m. the score plummeted to the thirties. At a similar time the score for my lower-level office Awair monitor dropped to the sixities, indicating that bad air was probably circulating.

At this point we felt it best to call the non-emergency fire department number. Even though our neighbor did not see anything obviously dangerous happening, we wanted to be sure that there wasn’t something going in the walls of the house. The fire department did a thorough search of the house, including using thermal heat sensors, and they could not find anything obviously amiss.

The appliance in the home that seemed most likely to be at fault was an air purifier in the hallway outside of the bedroom. Our neighbor seemed to think the smell might have been stronger near it. And so we had them move the appliance into the garage, unplugged, and we asked her to unplug the other purifier in our living room.

So! The notification was very helpful, but also more than a little confounding. We still don’t know what device sounded the alarm. Could it have been our air quality sensor? I’m not aware of it having an alarm, but maybe. Could it be our traditional smoke detectors? Maybe, but they weren’t alerting when our neighbor arrived.

When we got home we plugged in the air purifier and it emitted a bunch of white particulate. We’re pretty confident that is what set off whatever alarm was triggered. Or maybe the purifier itself has an alarm? We’re thankful that the Apple HomePod let us know, even if it was a bit finicky once we tapped that alert. If you have a HomePod, I recommend turning the feature on! I imagine Alexa and the like have a similar feature.

In years past I used to go around the house and unplug most of our devices before we left on longer trips. I was a bit more frugal then, and I also felt it was a good thing to do for the environment, though I also understood it probably doesn’t make much of an impact in the grand scheme of things. When it was thunderstorm season I had another reason to unplug things as I’ve seen my fair share of devices destroyed by lightning-strike power surges.

This time I was lazy, though. I don’t think I’ll be lazy again. Avoiding a house fire has now moved to the top of my list of reasons to unplug. (Yes, I realize there is also a tiny chance that a bad device or appliance could do bad things any time we’ve left the house.)

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It’s a weird state to be in with my work feeling like a vocation. I love doing it, I love making progress on Pika, and I’m super grateful to be in this position. Yet there are some things I enjoy in life that I can’t seem to find time to do these days. I see movies, but not as many as I’d like. I’d like to spin some records and just listen. Ironically I’m having trouble finding time to blog. Etc.

I wonder if I should start a blogging series about watching all of, say, the AFI 100 movies or maybe Ebert’s The Great Movies since I have his first book on my shelf? But…the idea of such a blogging series makes me want to build an integrated movie posting/collection feature into Pika. 🤔

Try to deliver your tech-job application in person, I dare you!

Could you leave your application at the loading bay? Behind the building, where the trucks bring things... because that's where physical things go...

Earth, amirite?

I’m no big Boss fan, but I don’t dislike Springsteen. This year he’s really stepped up for Minnesota, and that’s appreciated. I’ve never seen him in concert and I was disappointed to be out of town when he kicked off his current tour in Minneapolis. Friends have let me know that, indeed, it was an unforgettable night.

The solos by Nils Lofgren and Tom Morello are pure icing on the cake.

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I did a telehealth call this week about some third-party blood test results. As with most things in your forties, the cure is to lose some weight, exercise, and get better sleep. For whatever reason I feel like this might be the year I pull it off. 🤞

My brother-in-law told me about a woman who was arrested and jailed for over five months based on AI facial recognition. I definitely was listening to him talk about it and saying, “There must be more to this.” Nope, it appears there is no more to it. Yet. There’s gotta be more to it, doesn’t there? Please?!

At the moment I’m choosing to be blissfully unaware of the politics around any of this and just enjoying the pictures.

2026 has found me fully on the “coding with agents” path. One interesting side effect I’ve found is that my typing skills are diminishing. I don’t think I was typing that much code per minute before going full LLM. You don’t type as if you’re writing a novel when coding, no matter what Hackers may have made you think.

All I can fathom is that maybe the infrequency of those funky finger maneuvers to hit various odd coding characters has changed the spatial relationship between my hands and the keyboard? Maybe I’ll have to relearn the dance? Maybe I should increase my time journaling, blogging, and writing in general to recover my skills?

I was a bit sad reading this old, long read about the death of video stores. (h/t Silent Listening)

I’ve been getting better at limiting my online time to more intentional things. Not amazing, but better. YouTube and its mix of usefulness and brain rot has still been hard to step away from. However, they’ve been working on solving that problem for me by doubling down (literally in my estimation) on ad breaks. Add to that an advertiser overlay that requires two-tap dismissal post video ad, and I’m really getting put off from the platform. We shall see.

Have a listen to Mei Semones duet with her dad playing euphonium. Yes, I used to play euphonium. If any of my daughters are reading this, just start a recording career and I’ll get back in the woodshed with a euphonium.

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Short, and late, rendition of Friday this week as I’m traveling.

We took a spring break to Phoenix and were able to fit in a Project Hail Mary IMAX screening. It was excellent! Two of us have read the book, and we enjoyed both versions of the story on their own terms.

We got in to Phoenix late on a Friday, stayed at a hotel, and kicked around the city proper on Saturday before checking into our VRBO. Out of nowhere I found an afternoon performance of Come From Away at The Phoenix Theatre. It was our first time seeing the musical, and it was fantastic. Lots of memories flooded back for those of us who lived through 9/11.

Other than the two events above, this trip was pure relaxation for us. A few meals out, a lot of ice cream, and otherwise lounging around the pool at the VRBO. We all are coming home with some new tans (and a few burns).

We wrapped the last meal of our trip at Fabio on Fire in Peoria. Excellent pizza, excellent pasta.

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If you are even a mild St. Vincent fan, I recommend her fantastic new live album:

Delta Air Lines…responded to the continuing shutdown by suspending special services for members of Congress, including airport escorts and red coat services.

I applaud Delta for doing this, but why the heck do members of congress get special services in the first place? Sure, for certain situations I could see it, but generally they should be in the airport mixed in with the rest of us citizens. Pat them down!

Related, we’re flying out of Des Moines today, heading down to Phoenix. With some time to kill we took some inspiration from the Thingelstads:

The Des Moines airport was a bit of a breath of fresh air. We were literally the only people at security when we walked up. Everyone was mostly chipper. I suppose! (Though the shuttle to the airport had a happy-to-tell-you-what-he-thought driver. 🤷‍♂)

Trying to wrap up my work tasks before our vacation was an absolute flurry. I’ve not felt much more busy (in a good way) in my career than I have with 2026 and We Are Good Enough. Maybe it’s the ownership aspect? Maybe it’s that I really love the products that we’re working on? Maybe it’s the catalyst of LLMs helping me accomplish more work than I should be capable of?

In any case, I’m going to do my best to make this vacation a week-off-the-grid style time off. Family, food, reading, and a pool. Repeat.

The sing along lyrics in “The Subway” are so fantastic.

I’ve seen several Chappell Roan concert videos that have the song lyrics onscreen, which I think is genius (assuming the artist wants that type of concert). So many times I go to a concert and know the words 50/50. Properly done this can enhance the experience, and it also builds in accessibility in a cool way. 👏

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Ava is traveling and shared this from the Victoria and Albert Museum: 

A lengthy, imperfect article on how much Minnesota mattered this winter. (archive)

The challenge of this work week has been trying to figure out a way to streamline the moderating Pika blog posts. With only two of us on the team, it’s impractical for us to read every blog post and look for rules violations. Especially when you consider that there are many blogs on the platform with hundreds and thousands of posts. Choosing posts or blogs that we’d rather not include in the soon-to-return Pika Pulse is an even more subtle and nuanced task.

It seems obvious that LLMs could be engaged to help us with this, and in testing in my local development environment it is absolutely true that it would be a big help. We are still strong believers in not training AIs on Pika blogs. The terms published by APIs for these services are clear that when sending anything to them the default position is to not train on that content. You must opt-in.

Do we trust them? Not exactly. So we’re going to keep looking for alternatives that stay away from LLM cloud services. 🤔 I have a Mac Mini lying around here that could maybe run an LLM that has no access to these motherships…

This time of year I do a lot of working from my couch with basketball games on TV. It’s not nearly as compelling these days with NIL and players constantly transferring between schools, but old habits die hard.

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I learned about Johnny.Decimal from Pika blogger Michael Borland. The last post on his blog clued me in. Sadly he has since passed away. RIP Michael. ❤

I’ve dipped in and out of Getting Things Done (GTD) many times over the years. The most organized I’ve felt in life is when I was truly adhering to the process, including physical tickler folders in a filing cabinet. A filing cabinet!

Today Johnny.Decimal came across my view, and I think I might give it a go. The current state I’m in is this:

• My work has been all-consuming, in a good way.

  • My work is not organized, but rather little note papers on the desk, a million Basecamp to-dos, and a general trust that the most important things will remain in my brain or come to the fore as necessary.

  • With the productivity power of LLMs, I’m putting more and more balls in the air every day.

  • While I know I can’t copy-paste a personal system onto our work to-dos, I hope Johnny.Decimal can help bridge that gap.

• My home projects are abandoned.

  • There are papers piling up on my office floor, awaiting organization.

  • My office is a mess.

  • I’m daily making small decisions about what is important to get done (pay the bills) and what isn’t (scan the documents).

  • I have notes and reminders spread across Things, Apple Reminders, Apple Notes, and Obsidian.

  • I’ve uncharacteristically missed some important tasks over the past year. Late estimated tax payments being one glaring example.

  • There are little projects to do, but my system has become disorganized and overwhelming. So any spare moments with energy I generally pour down the drain of internet distraction.

  • I have lots of woodworking ideas that I can’t work on now, but I suspect I’ll pick back up in the next decade.

At this point in life I’m not seeking to be an efficiency master. I’m well aware that I’ll never get everything done. I’m happy to sit and read a book or watch a movie. Yet I would like to feel that my ideas and projects are organized in a way that I can find (or be reminded of them) again later. I’ve had that feeling before and it was the first year after starting GTD.

I’m watching some introduction videos now, and I might actually pony up for the course to get my bearings. If only I could justify the time…

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I’ve been sick for half of this past week, so not much drivel to share this Friday.

The core of my love for reading grew through affordable mass market paperbacks. While it’s not new news, it’s a little sad to see them leaving. Still, I really would prefer not to read that tiny, cramped print these days.

I saw this a few places, so now you get to see this: 

A list of Bourdain’s lists.

A link to this site was shared with me I don’t know how long ago and I’m fascinated: Snowshoeing the Onion River. Lest you think this is some old site that didn’t get shutdown when the subscription ran out, no, it’s still being updated today. I love that this site exists, I love the story about the Onion River (we’ve hiked it in the summer before), I love that the site embraces the vibe from twenty years ago, and I even love (sorry) the Google custom site search widget.

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A couple months ago I put together a fairly lengthy post about getting an old MacBook set up to be a writing machine. It was pretty encouraging, the idea of having a machine that would just be for one thing. At the time of writing that post I was diving pretty deep into my work and I realized I was not in a “writing mode,” but I was also hopeful a little writing would happen with this new, old laptop.

I’m not going to blame it all on this one thing, but at the end of that post I said:

I hate the feeling of typing on this thing enough that I’m considering an inexpensive Keychron keyboard to sit on my lap while I write. That doesn’t seem conducive to actually writing, though.

I wrote once with that laptop and never went back.

So I’ve been on the lookout for a different option. My finger has hovered over the order buttons for both a Freewrite Traveler and a used MacBook One. With the Freewrite, I was hesitant about the lag between typing and the screen, and lets not talk about the price versus general utility. For the latter, I suspected I would dislike the keyboard as much as I dislike the keyboard on my old MacBook Air.

Then came the Neo. With the education price1, I could get the Neo for less than the Freewrite Traveler. I don’t mind typing on my work MacBook Pro at all, so I’m pretty confident I’d be happy with the Neo keyboard. No reviews thus far have suggested keyboard problems.

So I decided to give it a shot, clicking the trade-in button for that MacBook Air in the process. I initially felt like embracing the low end and rolling with an Indigo 256 GB with no Touch ID. In the end, though, I figured I’d save my future self a few headaches with the 512 GB.

1. TIL at checkout: Education savings: Available to current and newly accepted college students and their parents, as well as faculty, staff, and homeschool teachers of all grade levels.

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I really enjoyed Justin Duke’s thoughts in “The death of software, the A24 of software”.

A24 didn't succeed despite the streaming era — they succeeded because of it. The explosion of mediocre content created a vacuum for taste, for curation, for a brand that stood for something. When everything is abundant and most of it is forgettable, the scarce thing is discernment.

Yes!

We are fortunate at Good Enough to be given these powerful LLM tools at a perfect time in our careers. (I have more to say about that timing, but not today.) We can guide agents very successfully given our breadth of experience in programming and design. Perhaps more importantly we have also developed a deep level of taste for the way interfaces work, and honed our attention-to-detail muscles to a fine degree. And our belief in human (humane?) customer service runs completely counter to million/billion dollar companies that ship you to an algorithm and don’t want to talk to you person-to-person unless you embarrass them online (archive).

Household-name status isn’t what we’re after, so the A24 comparison isn’t really apt for us, but there is a lot of room in the marketplace of software products for those teams that are able to stand out based on heaps of quality. I just hope discovery tools continue evolving so that regular folks are able to find the excellent software that is going be made.

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It’s snowing and I’m doing taxes.

I’ve mentioned the photographs of Ragnar Axelsson (Rax) a couple of times here in the past. I recently discovered the availability of the short BBC documentary featuring him: Last Days of the Arctic. Having studied hundreds of his pictures by this point, it was fascinating to see him and his subjects moving through the very environments where the photos were captured.

Please contribute to Number Research (via Shawn).

If you want a new song that feels thrown back to the 80’s, I recommend “be the girl!” by hemlocke springs.

Thank you, Mike O. Thank you.

I still have the old Apple TV with the crappy remote. We all hate it. I’ve been waiting at least two years to replace it with a new version. The new version of the Apple TV is always just around the corner, but at this point it seems like it will never come out.

Adam got me hooked on Turnstile and Lettini sharing this just upped my addiction:

Happy Friday!

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We mourn our craft:

The worst fact about these tools is that they work. They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don’t believe me, wait six months.

This point stuck out to me. I’m going to take it completely out of context to make my own point. I haven’t yet found an LLM that is writing code better than I can. I guess it depends on how you define “better.” It’s better in many ways:

• It can write code faster

• It can write code more effectively than I can in languages with which I’m unfamiliar

• At my descriptive prompting, it can quickly give me code design ideas that I hadn’t thought of yet

• It can be used by novices and non-programmers to build software that solves at least some of the target problem space

Yet when it comes to implementing a non-trivial feature in Ruby on Rails, I’ve never seen a LLM put together something that I felt was better than what I would put together. I’ve not seen it in a “Yeah, that’s how I would have done it” way nor a “Woah, why didn’t I think of that?” way. This is, of course, a subjective statement, but it seems like a lot of people are lamenting the loss of that subjective view of beautiful code. I haven’t found that loss to have arrived yet.

It’ll probably happen at some point soon, though. Or maybe, like most things programming, 80% of the work will be in delivering the last 20% of the potential of LLMs. For me, I’m thankful that I happen to be one of those programmers who loves the higher-level building of creative solutions more than the act of typing lines of code. On most days I find the process of leading the LLM to the code I think is best to be a pretty satisfying experience.

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I haven’t done one of these in a bit. It’s time to take on the blog question challenge from Alexandra.

If I’m to believe my own writing from 2004:

[T]he goal I have is just to keep honing those all important writing and communication skills. Additionally, I think this blog/journal will help me to retain thoughts and opinions over time.

At the time friends were firing up blogs, and I really got into the network of blogs about the Minnesota Twins. I ended up writing a fair bit about the Twins in those early years.

My platform, Pika, chose me. My likeness is illustrated on the home page after all!

Oh, yes, though my memory is surprisingly hazy. I’m relatively certain I started with a WordPress install on Dreamhost. From there I migrated to Scanty by Adam Wiggins. I lightly modified it and kept it operating for many years. Then in 2022 I spent about a year operating my site manually as pure HTML. And then, well, Pika.

I write in Pika’s editor. It’s awesome!

Mostly it’s when something has been churning in the back of my head for a while and it finally forces itself out. The timing of that can sometimes be disruptive, though I’ll often try to type up some notes so I can finish writing at a more convenient time. On rare occasions I’ll decide to sit down and write without  having a plan, but the current state of my life doesn’t allow me to schedule consistent, dedicated writing time.

I usually publish pretty quickly after writing. I’m not generally an essayist, so that works for me. Though if I were writing something a little more nuanced, I might let it sit. I’m really not that interested in reading the knee-jerk reactions of other people, and likewise I don’t want to participate in the hot-taking of the web.

A few posts on my blog have gotten a bit of traffic over the years, but I think the most intentional posts I’ve ever written on the blog were in the series I started in 2008 on leaving my corporate career. 

Not really, and also, totally. I updated the design (colors, fonts, layout) a bit at the start of the year, and I think I might make that an annual habit. We have all kinds of plans for Pika, many of which are influenced by what I’d want in a blog and website. So…more to come!

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One day after posting “Better Sleep in Ten Days” I ate junk food, had a beer, watched Olympics until 10:15, got a good length of sleep, but it was not restful.

All of these things together were probably not good choices. 😆

Searching for a hotel. Yay or nay?

I was finally able to see Brandi Carlile in person (review | archive | setlist). The concert was streamed for charity, raising over half a million dollars for legal aid nonprofit Advocates for Human Rights. It was a beautiful show, both for the epic performance and the shared love in the room. It was also streamed on The Current. I’d love a recording for the archives if anyone has one…

Herman with some speculation on the future of the internet:

[A]n autonomous agent tried to use a form of coercion to get its way, which is a huge deal. […] If the MJ Rathbun bot's purpose is to browse repositories and submit PRs to open-source repositories, then anyone preventing it from achieving its goal is something that needs to be removed. […] [I]f Scott had a big, nasty secret such as an affair that the bot was able to ascertain via its research, then it may have gotten its way by blackmailing him.

He goes on to talk about independent bots exploiting social vulnerabilities. Mac Minis are flying off the shelves, there are probably thousands of independent bots coming online daily, and I’d wager a majority of them are not responsibly configured.

It's something I think about a lot since I want Bear to be one of those pockets of humanity in this dying internet. It's my priority for the foreseeable future.

I hear ya, Herman. I hear ya.

Went to Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die last night. I appreciate when I see a madcap Hollywood movie with an original script, and for that alone I’ll give it a 👍. Was it good? I’m not sure! Vibes ranged from 12 Monkeys to The Terminator, but also, not exactly. For me it lost speed a couple of times, but I appreciated the effort, and I was entertained. There was dark humor inside the dark message.

Walkman.land (via Shawn). How do they possibly have this much information and this many pictures?! Even still, I don't think I can find my final deck. This is as close as I could get. I might  have it in a closet…

It’s good to see that colleges are still a place to go to gain life-long wisdom.

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Excellent Bugonia Easter egg, Letterboxd. (I’m not sure what I thought of the movie, but I like the font!)

I’ve got Peacock for the month (go Olympics!), and now I realize it just might have all of the Yorgos Lanthimos movies. Can one brain handle catching up on Bugonia, Kinds of Kindness, The Favourite, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer in just a few weeks?

Japan's largest toilet maker is an "undervalued and overlooked" AI play, according to a UK-based activist investor.

– Financial Times (via Mike O)

Excited to have learned of this new RSS reader, Current. The author, Terry Godier, shared a very detailed accounting of their thought process. I really appreciate when someone takes the time to do this sort of writing.

A few months ago I shared an idea with some similar aspects with Good Enough. Thankfully I hadn’t put any work into the idea yet. With the existence of Current, maybe I’ll never have to, and instead I can spend some of that time talking about Current.

We’ve been watching all of the curling at our house. I played softball for about twenty years, and the son of one of my old teammates is on the mens team. It’s been fun to see him cheering in the crowd.

How about that women’s figure skating final? Usually if you have a cheering interest in this sport, you’re sort of hoping for other skaters to fail. 😬 I don’t love that. It was so cool to see so many skaters come so close to nailing their routines. And to see Alysa Liu truly hit everything…what a rare treat!

Let me leave you with this cocktail. A blog post titled “I Make the Best Amaretto Sour in The World” better deliver, and does it ever. Not surprising since Jeffrey Morgenthaler is a legend in the cocktail world. I like almond and all, but I’ve never really thought, “I could use an Amaretto Sour right now.” Now I do think this thought.

• 1½ oz/45 ml amaretto

• ¾ oz/22.5 ml cask-proof bourbon

• 1 oz/30 ml lemon juice

• 1 tsp/5 ml 2:1 simple syrup

• ½ oz/15 ml egg white, lightly beaten (I used 1 oz chickpea aquafaba)

1. Combine ingredients in a cocktail shaker and shake without ice or (even better) use an immersion blender to combine and froth.

2. Shake well with cracked ice.

3. Strain over fresh ice in an old fashioned glass

4. Garnish with lemon peel and brandied cherries, if desired.

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I’ve certainly said it before: I haven’t slept well for years. I believe it’s been five or six or seven years, but it’s all blurry now to the point that I could also be convinced my poor sleep has existed for all the years.

My cycle in recent history has been to distract myself away from sleep with YouTube or browsing the internet. (Here’s where I’d typically link to all the posts talking about my personal struggles with internet addiction. Then I realized you can just scroll back a few pages in my blog and read all about it. Seems that it’s become a sad theme of my blog.) Alongside this I feel anxiety, as we all do day-to-day. After behaving in this way for so long, I got to thinking: Is lack of sleep a contributor to or a symptom of my anxiety?

It is pretty clear that lack of sleep isn’t going to help one’s anxiety. And finding a way to get more sleep will probably allow one to better manage one’s anxiety. And finding a way to get more sleep will allow one to better understand if lack of sleep was a major contributor to one’s anxiety.

That all assumes you can figure out how to get more sleep in the midst of it all. Thankfully I did, at least for now.

I went into this experiment with a simple set of rules:

1. No screens after nine in the evening.

2. Only use the bed for one thing: sleep. (Well, two things, I suppose.)

What this meant for me is that after nine o’clock I was in a chair reading a book. (N. K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was my escort in this challenge. It’s felt good to get moving more quickly through my stack of books!)

That’s it. Something pop into your mind? Have a notebook by your reading chair or your bed. Tossing and turning in bed and not sleeping? Since your bed is only for sleeping, get out of bed and read or listen to some music. Or maybe something a bit more woo-woo, like handpans or singing bowls (a playlist). There is research that sounds in the human vocal range have a calming impact on both our physical and mental systems. Wordless vocal recordings could work well, too.

Ten days in, my challenge is finished. I’ve gotten seven or eight hours of sleep every night of the challenge. I’ve learned that my body naturally wants to wake up somewhere around seven-and-a-half hours of sleep. All great!

Further, while I’ve always had trouble going to sleep, my wife generally falls asleep instantly and will wake up in the middle of the night with her mind racing about something. Usually the mind-racing topic is something important, but not worthy of keeping her up at night. Sometimes she has wondered if, though I try to go to bed quietly, my late nights might trigger her waking in the middle of the night.

So I asked her this morning, “Are you sleeping better?” Actually, yes, during my ten-day experiment she has slept great all but one night. That night her mind was racing about an important topic that was definitely worthy of keeping her up at night. Otherwise, golden.

Here’s where things get tough. All of us have tendency to fall back into old habits. I enjoy sometimes staying up to play a video game, especially if it’s with one of my children or a friend. I enjoy lots of the distractions that kept me from sleeping. Yet it’s pretty obvious that an adult should decide, after a successful experiment, to keep rolling with this new behavior. Maybe it will help me to commit since it is improving both my and my wife’s relationship with sleep and anxiety.

The path forward is obvious, but us humans don’t always behave in obvious ways, yeah?

As to the question of which came first, the anxiety or the poor sleep, I still don’t know the answer. These two things surely work in a vicious cycle, and finding a way to break down either of them is beneficial. I do know that I feel less anxious than I have in a long while. I’ve coupled this experiment with resuming a morning habit of reading poetry along with five minutes of very basic guided meditation. That has probably helped as well, but I’m pretty confident that more sleep has got to be the change with the largest impact.

As always, this is just my experience. If you’re having similar troubles, I hope you can find a way to improving things for yourself.

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Weekly Thing 341 brings up AI fatigue:

With that though our ability to do more fills with more things that we wished we could do. No matter what, there is still only so much time and energy in the day. The fact that Claude is there at 2am while you cannot sleep can be a problem. The fact that you can have five projects going on with different agents is neat, but you still are coordinating them!

The "just one more prompt" trap is real.

It sure is!

With a small team at Good Enough, there is way more work (and ideas) than there is time. It's so tempting to fire up claude.ai/code (literally in a web browser on my phone) and send it ten different tasks that need to be done. In fact, I have sent it ten different tasks…times two or three. I sent these tasks almost exclusively between midnight and two in the morning on nights when I couldn’t sleep.

When I woke up the next morning I got that familiar feeling like I’m managing a clutch of junior developers. I’m spending time reviewing some mediocre and incomplete code. Largely this has been a beneficial process. Even though none of this LLM-produced code has been deployable, the process has unlocked my mind on a few different long-standing to-dos.

After twenty draft pull requests were built up in late January, I decided to cancel my Claude subscription. Maybe after I catch up on finalizing each of those pull requests, I’ll open up the claude.ai/code spigot for another month.

Don’t worry, it’s not as if I’m using no LLMs for development. I have the growing Windsurf bills to prove it. 

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As you know if you’ve been following along at all, my daughters are huge K-pop fans. Pink Floyd has always been my favorite band, so it feels right that we now have a pretty great cover of “Wish You Were Here” by FIFTY FIFTY.

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What a Super Bowl halftime show. I teared up from the middle during the wedding celebration to the end. Bad Bunny, NBC and the NFL just made a giant statement about humanity and love to those that are doing such bad things to our country.

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Do all the online recipe and influencer chefs really prefer Better Than Bouillon? Or have we all been slow-played by the company?

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