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 ☕️

  • Locating the Source of a Mysterious Beep. There often seems to be an extreme when it comes to using AI to solve problems. One side thinks it will replace everything, the other side won't even look at something that has a sniff of AI. I try to put myself in the middle - you need to at least understand it and see where it can be smartly applied. This post was a super fun idea: a beep kept going off in a room full of boxes Simon Willison never unpacked after his last move. Instead of opening every box, he had Claude build a 'beep locator'. By turning several devices into a microphone array, he was able to triangulate the source of the mysterious beep. Use cases like this always fascinate me, as I've been messing around building a lot of software for one: things that are just for me, that I never had time to get to. MacSparky also touched on this: 'Building for myself makes a lot of the decisions easy. I already know which Mac this will run on and how my data is organized. When I’m deciding what a button should do, I can work from the way I actually use the computer. The software only has to work on my systems. Supporting every possible configuration can stay off the list. When I need a feature, I can work on adding it. When something doesn’t matter to me, I can leave it out.' By the way, the beep was an old carbon monoxide detector that needed new batteries.
  • Map Showing Where People Keep Their Shoes On vs. Take Shoes Off Indoors. I do love an interesting map, and this one didn't disappoint - it's a neat look at global footwear and where people prefer shoes on or off. But as the article points out, the map flattens this choice into a yes/no. Britain, for example, is shaded shoes-on, yet a YouGov poll found 69% of Britons kick them off the moment they get home. 'The biggest problem with the map is that it presents a complex cultural practice as a simple binary choice. A more accurate map would distinguish between countries where removing shoes is expected, countries where keeping shoes on is normal, and countries where it varies from household to household.' We're generally a shoes-off house. What about yours?
  • Golden: A Retro, Not Boring Player for Apple Music. Discovered this free iPhone app that shows your library as a spinning record or a retro 8-bit orb, themed in colors pulled from the album art. No account needed, no ads, and nothing collected. Sure, Apple Music does just fine, but this app is just pure fun.
  • Jam-Oriented Programming: Bringing Improvisational Jazz to Engineering. From XConf Europe 2026, Lu Wilson gives a fun talk about coding like a jam session with nobody in charge. 'In a typical jam, there is no one in charge and anyone can make any sound they want at any time they choose. In jam-oriented programming, it's the same. Anyone can add, edit or delete code without any permission. Everyone is admin, nothing is certain and anything can happen. It sounds like chaos and it is.' The talk is super interesting, though I'm still looking for the academic paper that was written up about the process.
  • Post Post Post Digital. Russell Davies built a real-life Rube Goldberg machine that is an experiment on 'how do I gracefully and appropriately do Data In and Data Out with informal bits of paper, real world handwriting, computers and apps.' It's incredibly clever, but seems like it would be more complicated than what I'd personally want to have. Rands has a pretty useful rule for systems like this: if a tool costs more to maintain than the value it creates, drop it. In a similar vein, I've been using this Kurt Vonnegut quote more and more lately: 'everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance'.
  • Let's Fly. Some zen for surviving an airport, especially given Nov 13th's full ground stop. 'Arrive early and move through the airport like the Dalai Lama. You are in no rush. All obstacles are taken in stride, patiently, with a smile. Approach the nearly empty check-in counter. Walk up and say, I’m a bit early but I’m here to check in to ... Marvel at their surprise and then their generosity. Suddenly you are always able to get an exit row or bulkhead seat.' It's the Dichotomy of Control, but with a boarding pass: you can't control the flight, but you can choose to stop being rushed.
  • Life Is the Most Important Problem in Physics. Astrophysicist Adam Frank argues that the biggest open question in physics this century isn’t quantum gravity: it’s what makes a cell different from a rock. Living things repair themselves, set their own goals, and figure out what matters to them, which is why he sees today's AI as a mimic rather than actual intelligence. 'So autonomous agents are constantly needing to make sense of the world to realize what's relevant about the world in a way that no machine that we have built so far is able to manifest.' I really enjoyed this one: skepticism that comes from curiosity, not cynicism.
  • Measuring Up. This week, I learned about Simpson's Paradox. Defined as 'a statistical phenomenon where an association between two variables in a population emerges, disappears or reverses when the population is divided into subpopulations'. Like the shoes map above, a single number can be really misleading: the total can tell a different story than every one of its parts.
  • There's No Slowing Down Media's Pivot-to-Video 2.0 (gift link). Some crazy stats in here: 'YouTube has become the most popular streamer, commanding nearly 16 percent of TV viewing, according to Nielsen. Twenty percent of Americans regularly get news from TikTok, and that number jumps to 39 percent for people 18 to 29 years old.' I'm personally not sure if the latest trend around vertical series is going to be sticky, but it's pretty clear that traditional media needs to reinvent itself on new platforms and formats if it wants to survive. And as Mia Sato points out, a 'view' now just means a post was served to you, watched or not: 'You can’t eat views.' Is anyone even watching?
  • Parsing Your Mac's Personal Knowledge Graph About You. If you're a Mac user, there's been an interesting story going around this week about a personal knowledge graph that your Mac builds about you. 'Mine knows who I am, who my most contacted people are, and includes all sorts of details about them and me — pulled not just from my Contacts app, but from my calendar, my photos, and who I message and call (though not what we said). It also infers whether they’re family or friends, and how important they are. It knows places I frequent and common meetings. Basically, it's aggregated a bunch of data I already know my Mac knows. It doesn’t worry me. Much.' While I'm not really concerned about it, I wasn't aware that my machine was doing this. Lex also provides some scripts if you'd like to explore your own graph; just remember: privacy is often an illusion.
  • The Human-in-the-Loop Fallacy. Sangeet Paul Choudary argues 'as AI takes on more tasks, many companies are assigning employees to review its outputs and handle the exceptions it cannot manage. But this approach creates a shrinking role for human workers: As AI improves, the need for human validation declines, while reviewers risk losing the skills and attention needed to catch errors. Instead of organizing around the work machines cannot yet do, leaders should redesign their organizations around the new capabilities AI makes possible.' I think the cognitive overload we’re already seeing makes 'human in the loop' nothing more than the next bottleneck. And the most important (and scary) part: the more the machines write, the less people understand, the larger the problem grows.
  • Creativity Isn't a Gift, It's a System. Last year, I referred to a video on how to Journal like a Spanish Fighter Pilot. Now I want to introduce you to this week's find: the "Grail method". Named after Henry Jones Sr.'s Grail diary in The Last Crusade, the idea is simple: 'Every bit of wisdom, every thought, every quote, every sketch, every single thing you even think that you might want to write down, you write down. Will you sometimes write down bad ideas or save things that you really don't need to save? Absolutely. But that's by design. See, the idea is to eliminate self-editing and bypass your inner critic.' The most important idea though is the constant review. 'I want to be clear about something here. By review, I don't mean study. This isn't homework. You're not trying to memorize everything you've ever put in the book. Your notebook is now your feed. The reason that this is the most important step is that this is when what you've written becomes useful. That meaningful quote right next to that sketch, that story idea next to a philosophical thought, they start to mingle. You begin to make creative connections that you never considered before. When you separate ideas and information into separate files and folders and lists, you lose the connections between them. The Grail method removes those separations.' So, what’s in your Grail diary?

Amor Fati ✌🏻