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# Espresso Shots 10-11-26
- URL: https://makoism.com/espresso-shots-10-11-26/
- Published: 2026-10-11T12:01:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-11T12:00:59.000Z
- Description: From Claude writing code and authoring apps to pirating the pirates, retro gaming, beauty in DVD menus, and the Tildeverse.
- Author: Steve Makofsky
- Tags: espresso-shots, growth, life, links, #newsletter-espresso, reading, til, thinking

It's that time again for my weekly update, which includes a short collection of noteworthy finds, posts that inspire, as well as a few reflections from the past week or two. I'll aim to land these in your inbox by the weekend, in time to pair with your morning coffee (or your preferred cup of inspiration).

## The Latest Drippings ☕️

- [Acquiescence](https://makoism.com/acquiescence/). Finally got around to getting off my butt and cranking out [a longer post](https://makoism.com/tag/makoism/) on something that's been on my mind these days, **the tyranny of meh**. '*Some of the most dangerous words to any career, company, etc., are 'that's not the way we used to do it.' Contrary to what you will hear at the water-cooler, stagnation does not keep you safe — it puts you at risk. If you, your team, or your thinking chooses not to evolve, it will become extinct.*' Seth Godin calls this [**instrumental reason**](https://seths.blog/2026/10/getting-critical/): '*the habit of thinking about how to do things without ever asking whether we should.*'
- [Exile on Silicon Valley](https://nazhamid.com/journal/exile-on-silicon-valley/). Naz Hamid has an interesting post this week which had me thinking about not just writing software or being a developer, but the entire economy around creators. '*We're at an inflection point again, facing a different kind of existential threat. The younger generation will chalk this up to how tech is today, while those of us with decades in this industry and the long view of experience have either accepted it, made good money from it and retired, or are fighting the good fight.*' I really liked the reference to an interview with Mick Jagger (2010), who said that artists only got paid well for music during one great window: 1970 to 1997\. Are we at that point now with software? **Honestly, I’m not sure.** I got started by taking things apart and tinkering around trying to figure out how something worked. I kept tried new things over and over and over. *That’s harder now*. You can’t crack open a model the way I used to crack open whatever was sitting on my desk. Maybe its that the curiosity just moves up a layer, *from how does it work to what should it do*. I haven’t figured out which yet..
- [Almost Anyone Can Start a Private School. We Put This to the Test.](https://www.propublica.org/article/propublica-private-schools-arkansas-west-virginia-north-carolina). 😳. Another example of why old rules survive because no-one asks them to justify themselves. Apparently old laws have made it insanely easy in certain states to start a private school. '*In Arkansas, all it took was a few clicks on the Arkansas secretary of state website, $45 and an American flag to form a bona fide private school with the Arkansas Times... We used our names and news organization email addresses, following each state’s rules for starting private or micro-schools, a type of private school intended for just a few students. Experience running a school wasn’t needed. No one from any of the states asked us about our backgrounds or qualifications, though West Virginia did ask for proof of a high school diploma. No one questioned what we plan to teach or how we would measure whether students are learning.*' A quick search suggests the state of Washington has much stricter rules, so the **Frappuccino Day School** isn't going to be a thing any time soon. But, if you weren't already aware — it's **just as easy** to get ordained online and legally be able to perform weddings and other services. I became an [official Dudeist priest](https://dudeism.com/whatisdudeism/) a few years back, and online ordination is recognized with **full legal standing in about 47 states**!
- [Claude Writes Code; I Author the Apps](https://lexontech.org/claude-writes-code-i-author-the-apps). [Music producer Rick Rubin has said that](https://americansongwriter.com/rick-rubin-said-he-has-no-technical-ability-but-did-you-know-he-played-guitar-on-this-beastie-boys-track/) he can't play an instrument, has no formal training, can't read music and doesn't know how to operate a mixing board: '*I know what I like and what I don’t like, and I’m decisive about what I like and what I don’t like*'. I like the parallels that Lex Friedman draws from here — he has a background in coding, but that isn't what he needs to do today. '*I know of zero vibe-coded apps that started with a single prompt and then were immediately released. There’s a reason we're not flooded with more amazing apps than ever before. *Great apps take time*. There is a real problem of too many vibe-coded apps hitting the App Store, lacking in craft, skill, and humanity. The question, to me, *isn’t how much code was written by a human. It’s how much the app was authored by a human,* which I think is a more nuanced question. How much care, thought, and humanity went into the app matters far more than tabs vs. spaces or a manually-vs.-machine-built HStack.*'
- [Poople: The Official Daily Word Game](https://poople.io/). Ya know, it's **exactly** the type of game one needs in 2026\. This take on Wordle is a word ladder game in which you start with one 4-letter word and change a single letter at a time until you reach POOP. 💩
- [Pirating the Pirates](https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/pirating-the-pirates). In a bit of counterargument to burning the ships, there are times when the old version of a thing is **worth defending**. This post looks at Hollywood's obsession with recutting and remastering films and groups of fan preservationists that are equally obsessed with restoring the **original** prints. Pirating the pirates with one simple goal: undo the butchery. What I loved in particular is that they even have their own pirate code: '*an attempt to create a parallel set of norms in a context in which the strict definition of legal can no longer operate as a guiding principle. *You have to own a physical copy of at least one version of any given film**'.
- [Beauty in DVD Menus](https://vale.rocks/posts/dvd-menus). A look back at some of the best menus from DVDs.
- [The Haunted Toys R Us](https://www.retroist.com/p/the-haunted-toys-r-us). Since it's Halloween month, read about the Sunnyvale, CA, store which was *apparently haunted*. '*Folks told of lights and faucets turning on and off unassisted. There were tales that doors and toys had minds of their own. Shelves apparently fell down inexplicably and several female employees heard their names whispered in empty rooms. Reports of bangs and loud footsteps emerging from vacated parts of the store were also commonplace.*' The building briefly became a Spirit Halloween and is now an REI.
- [Retro Gaming: It's Not Nostalgia, It's Resistance](https://www.publicbooks.org/retro-gaming-its-not-nostalgia-its-resistance/). '*Maybe that’s why it felt like such a rush in today’s subscription-saturated age to just play your own media, 40 years later. The peace and contented satisfaction of insert cartridge, flip Power, press Play. None of the planned obsolescence that renders old systems mute or forces yet another purchase of a required upgrade. No fumbling against low disk space or a download bar frozen midupdate. No portal going down, no publisher inexplicably removing the game from their servers. Pay once, in the 1980s, and play forever.*' Definitely thinking I need to spend a bit more time with the [Miyoo Mini Plus](https://lomiyoo.com/products/miyoo-mini-plus) and the [Playdate](https://play.date). I miss the days of just playing a game for fun.
- [Your Version Number](https://yourversionnumber.com/). Oh, I loved this one (and definitely need a desktop or iPhone widget for it) as it pairs really nicely with [my morbid math](https://makoism.com/43percent/). Today, as of this posting, my version number is **5.5.169**. '*Your age, written the way software is versioned: a new decade is a major release, a birthday is a minor one, and every single day is a patch.*' Here's also a link to [the 2018 post that started it](https://www.thingelstad.com/2018/02/24/your-version-number.html).
- [Here Is a Person: Enter the Tildeverse](https://brennan.day/here-is-a-person-enter-the-tildeverse/). I used to be \~mako at one point, but I never really considered this perspective previously, and this post was a fun piece of nostalgia that sucked me in. 'Back in ye olden Inter-Net tymes of the 1990s, if you were a (then youngish) nerd like me, you'd get an account on some server called [CyberFox.net](https://CyberFox.net) and your web address would be <http://CyberFox.net/~vixen>. (You were “vixen.”) And you could put some web pages at that address. The early personal web grew up around these little **tilde sites**; that’s what preceded blogging. The '\~' is a little like the '@' on Twitter; a shortcut that says: **Here is a person**'. Turns out the history goes further back, to early Unix and 1969 'social architectures' and [public-access systems](https://tilde.town/~cmccabe/online-communities.html): '*What we wanted to preserve was not just a good environment in which to do programming, but a system around which a fellowship could form. We knew from experience that the essence of communal computing, as supplied by remote-access, time-shared machines, is not just to type programs into a terminal instead of a keypunch, but to encourage close communication.*' Also [read about the history of .plan files](https://en.andros.dev/blog/54572bc7/finger-the-1971-social-network-that-never-died/) I mentioned a [few weeks back](https://makoism.com/espresso-shots-8-23-26/).
- [How to Restore Your Online Sanity, One Webcam at a Time](https://bigthinkmedia.substack.com/p/how-to-restore-your-online-sanity). A fun webcam map over at [World Watcher Live](https://worldwatcher.live) that is a great way to just be calm. '*A special kind of vertigo kicks in when you start clicking the camera icons scattered across the world map at World Watcher Live. Each one drops you into a live feed somewhere on Earth. Despite their wildly different settings, these feeds share a key trait: a complete lack of narrative and drama. Nothing happens. And that’s precisely the point, because what a glorious relief this is*'.

**Amor Fati** ✌🏻