Espresso Shots 4-26-26

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 ☕️

• 55 for 55. As I turned 55 last week, a few nuggets to think about how to spend the time that you have left. 'I now have somewhere around 39% of my time left on the planet. Simple math: 55 divided by 90 puts me at roughly 61% done.'
• Your Boss Might Be Naked (and Everybody Knows It). An incredibly interesting article on two different ways in which authority works: having authority vs. being authority. 'Having authority is based on position. On titles. On org charts. On the uniform. Being an authority is based on competence. On wisdom. On presence. On what a person radiates through who they are, not through what they control.'
• The Music You Were Too Cool For. On my continuing quest to find interesting things to listen to, this post dives into the discovery of music that you were too cool to listen to as a kid. 'Forty-odd years later, actually listening. Properly. With the ears I've got now rather than the ones I had then. And I can hear the craft in it. The melodies. The way he could land a lyric that sounds simple and turns out to be devastating. And I thought about how I had missed this the first time around, through snobbery and judgment.' Speaking of Song Sung Blue, we also recently watched it, and were equally surprised by how good it is. Highly recommended.
• Finally! The Trailer for the Coyote vs. ACME Movie. A day I never thought I would see: an actual trailer for Coyote vs. ACME. I originally wrote about the whole saga regarding this film back in 2024, and I'm thrilled that a release date has finally been attached to it (August 28). Quick summary: 'Ian Frazier wrote a story for the New Yorker in 1990 about an imagined lawsuit brought by Wile E. Coyote against the Acme Company. Fast forward to 2022-23: James Gunn, Dave Green, Will Forte, and others make a movie based on the NYer article ... and then Warner Bros. shelves the movie to take a tax write-off.' Watch the trailer here. Meep meep.
• MacBook Neo and How the iPad Should Be. I love what Apple has done with the MacBook Neo, but I really would love an M5-based 12" MBA. As Craig Mod beautifully puts it regarding the iPad's lost opportunity: 'I love the idea that the specificity of our tools should be radically clear. The iPad should be a highly-focused touch playground. Weird as hell, one-of-a-kind apps. And MacBooks should be for multitasking, moving information and data around, building evermore powerful tools (tools within tools within tools), all bounded by a keyboard-first universe. Keep the iPad screen covered in the goop of happy fingers, and the MacBook keyboards slathered in the smudge of thought. The more separate they are, the more powerful they become.' Side note: I am finding that my iPad usage is slowly crawling to almost zero; I've already sold my iPad Pro, and the Mini is becoming little more than a bedtime reader.
• It's Time. Meet My New Thing.. I've been following Joanna Stern for several years, so her new venture, New Things, was an easy paid subscription for me.
• Why Prediction Markets Are a Sure Sign That Our Civilization Is in Decay. I've only recently become aware of these 'prediction markets', basically, they are gambling on real-world events. 'You'll find markets on celebrity divorces, CEO firings, troop movements, drone strikes, papal health, celebrity deaths recast as "will X still be alive on December 31," and whether a given pop star will release an album in Q3. The biggest volumes cluster around elections and the personal misfortunes of public figures. These are bets on whether bad things will happen to specific people, and groups of people, whether institutions will hold, whether the world will feel more or less stable in 90 days.' Regulation over this space seems like something that has to happen, and while these markets may not be the cause of the downfall of society, they certainly aren't a positive trend.
• Coffee More Popular Than Water, Says National Coffee Association. Well, duh. :) 'When asked about the past day’s beverage consumption, they found that 66% of all participants had coffee, more than the 64% who said they had bottled water. Tea, soda, and juice sat at 47%, 46%, and 26%, respectively.'
• How NASA Built Artemis II's Fault-Tolerant Computer. Premeditatio Malorum: the premeditation of the evils and troubles that might lie ahead. A fascinating read on the design of the fault tolerance systems of the Artemis II spacecraft. 'Running multiple independent computers in lockstep is a notorious challenge in computer science, as slight timing drifts or processor variances can cause healthy computers to appear to diverge. NASA solves this through a strictly deterministic architecture.' Also to read: When It Falls Over.
• What I Learned From One of the Greatest Living Writers. 'You need your space, and that room of one's own. That room is also your time, your space, your silence, that has to be sacred. I need to close the door to my office when I finish for the day, and no one should get in. I have the idea in my mind that the story is an entity that lives in that room, with the characters, the emotions that I have been putting together.' A small excerpt from David Epstein's upcoming book, Inside the Box.
• How the Heck Does Shazam Work?. Have you ever wondered how a tool like Shazam can recognize a song from just a few seconds of audio? This post dives into how to reverse engineer sound, using Fast Fourier Transforms on a small 'slice' of a waveform to make a sound fingerprint. 'By throwing away almost everything and keeping only a handful of landmark peaks, a noisy 5-second clip from a coffee shop becomes a set of coordinates precise enough to pinpoint one song out of millions. Recognition, it turns out, is mostly an exercise in ignoring the right things.' And, while this tech is interesting, there's another important lesson that lies under the surface of the post: 'I think one of the reasons I enjoy this algorithm so much is that it's clever, but also deterministic and transparent once you understand the steps. These types of approaches hold a special place in my heart, because so much technology today is built on opaque machine learning models, which, while very powerful, don't have the same elegance and interpretability.' Simplicity and curiosity can uncover surprising insights.
• Shall We Play a Game?. A wonderful interview on 'how advances in statistics and cartography made wargaming possible, the journey from 18th century Prussian military officers to Midwestern hobbyists, how RAND played an instrumental role in the birth of D&D, and how little the core debates on game design have changed in the past 200 years.' There's quite a lot to unpack in this one on what has influenced the creation of games throughout the years.
• How to Get Some Cosmic Perspective. I immediately purchased Judd Apatow's Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy after seeing this post from Austin Kleon on the sign in the Seinfeld writers' room. 'It would calm me when I would start to think that what I was doing was important, Seinfeld said. You look at some pictures from the Hubble Telescope and you snap out of it.'
• How to Be a Good Explorer on the Lifelong Expedition to Yourself. Back at the start of 2025, I mentioned trying to shift into the 'explorer' mindset. Given I've had some wonderful conversations this past week with folks from the DO Fellowship on a similar line of thinking, I thought this post was relevant to what's been top of mind lately for me. 'Along the way, we keep confusing experiment and exploration. An experiment proves or disproves an existing theory; its payoff is data, fixed and binary. An exploration is a traversal of the unknown, of landscapes you didn't even know existed, with all the courage and vulnerability and openness to experience that demands; its payoff is discovery — of unimagined wonders, of yourself in the face of the unimagined. Discovery, in its purest form, is nothing less than revelation.' Keep exploring, friends.
• Becoming Familiar with Sleep. My sleep sucks, so there are lots of lessons for me to take from this post. 'Sleep patterns and managing the kind of light I am exposed to before bed and in the morning is radically changing how I feel during the day in the first couple of weeks of this new regime.'

Amor Fati ✌🏻