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 ☕️

  • The People Who Tell You AI Is Changing Everything Are Lying. It's 2026, so I guess we collectively can't avoid the noise. Still, it has become an ever-present, exhausting part of every daily conversation. So, I do believe that it's important to observe, listen, and tinker to understand the hubbub. 'We're facing a coordination problem around executives being honest about the AI gains they've witnessed – if they co-operate, they keep their jobs. If they defect, they will possibly be fired by their embarrassed peers (who have now been implicitly called liars, cowards, or incompetents) and then replaced with someone that will toe the line anyway. If they could all admit the truth at once there might be some hope, but there is no way to coordinate that event.' In my own observations, people want to throw AI at a problem, and smear it like peanut butter without fixing the root underlying problems with their data. 'That is why some individual coders report such delight with their AI tools. They engage with those tools on their own terms, to improve their work in the ways that they, in their expert judgment, consider beneficial.' Thinking about it, maybe that's the real problem - there are so many people talking about AI, but who aren't using it daily as a way to understand its real strengths and weaknesses. As someone recently said, 'I feel more pressure to use AI as an adult than to do drugs as a teenager.'
  • How Did Poland Get Left Off The Windows XP Map?. I've always enjoyed these little-known geopolitical aspects that come up when you are releasing software on a global scale. Minesweeper was under fire in the early 2000s because 'an organization called the International Campaign to Ban Winmine (ICBW) launched a protest against Microsoft, arguing that the game was offensive to victims of actual landmines'. But this one was the result of a timezone bug: 'It's because of a glitch involving time zones. From the 1990s to the early 2000s, different versions of Microsoft Windows had an interactive World map (just as above) that users could use to select their time zone. The countries of each time zone would then show up on the screen. Poland and Western/Central Europe both are in the same time zone (GMT+1) and both enter daylight saving time in spring, until autumn. But, back in the 1980s- 1990s, both didn’t change the clocks at the same time. So, in order to perfectly harmonize the clocks of Polish computers, Microsoft had a separate entry for the country : the Warsaw Time. Therefore there were two entries, one for Western/Central Europe, one specifically for Poland which would be the only country to show on the map if its time zone was chosen.'
  • A Physicist Rigged His Pet Hamster's Wheel to Upload to Strava. It Runs Surprisingly Far Every Night. Every once in a while, I come across a post that makes me smile at how fun technology can be. Apparently someone built a speed/distance tracker for his hamster's wheel, created a Strava account, and set up an automated data tracker. Kinda wild how consistent and far the little guy runs nightly. Run Forest, Run!
  • The Original Wind Phone in Japan. I recently became aware of the concept of a 'wind phone' through a conversation with a local artist who is building one for our community sculpture park. 'At its simplest, a wind phone is a rotary or push-button phone located in a secluded spot in nature, usually within a booth-type structure and often next to a chair or bench. The phone line is disconnected. People use the wind phone to make one-way calls to deceased loved ones. Here they can say the things left unsaid.' There are apparently about 450 Wind Phones located in the US, and you can watch more here to find out more about this wonderful idea.
  • Kurt Vonnegut's 8 Tenets of Storytelling. If you've been reading my posts for some time, you'll know how big a Kurt Vonnegut fan I am; this article digs into a video that reveals some of his pearls of wisdom about writing and the creative process. 'Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.'
  • The Importance of Seeing the World Through Different Lenses ... Literally. 'It all started because I was curious about the phrase seeing the world through rose-colored glasses. I wanted to know: Do rose-colored glasses actually make you see the world more positively? So, I bought a pair and wore them for two days straight.' I really enjoyed this one, which posits the effect of wearing 14 different types of physical vision-altering glasses and whether they affected the author's mood or how he was interpreting things. Probably the most important lesson: The project 'drove home a humbling lesson: human vision captures just a small slice of what's out in the world. There’s so much out there we cannot perceive.'
  • A Swarm of Blood Robots. I love essays like this, where someone's curiosity takes over and takes a unique approach to solving a problem or question. Writer/Walker Craig Mod posted a really interesting entry on how he worked with Claude around genealogy. Knowing that he was adopted (and had previously connected with his birth family), he dumped everything he knew about it into Claude. He asked it 'find out as much as you can about these people, their ancestors, using my DNA results and connections therein, and continue to iterate until we've exhausted all data trails.' The result was wild - 'I now have a comprehensive family tree, naming the very boats my Italian and Polish ancestors came over on in the late 1800s, the villages a few came from, the jobs they had in those villages. It clarified a mystery about an orphaned grandparent (who wasn't orphaned but, rather, abandoned; we found the woman his father remarried, his new family). It floodlit for me — someone who had never known a lick about their genetic history, who had never met a blood relative until they were forty-three a dark room that had loomed throughout my life. Wow: history. Each claim backed up by primary sources, compiled into a family tree and a family-history story document.'
  • Recreating The Impossible Rhythm Illusion In The Odyssey Soundtrack. While watching the Odyssey, I thought my mind was playing tricks on me when they exited the Trojan horse and burned Troy. The music was accelerating at an ever-increasing rate, but it never hit a limit. Turns out, there's an illusion at play here. An interesting watch on how someone is trying to explain and recreate it.
  • You're Pointing Your Camera the Wrong Way (Gift Link). Are we turning photography from a way to document and connect into a way of making ourselves the 'center' of every scene? It's an interesting observation, especially how often you see folks looking for that perfect selfie to post on social media; would people be happier if we all turned the camera around and looked out at the world to reconnect?
  • Fifteen Tics. While this one is a look back at the now defunct process of a manager's personal readme, I found the most interesting bit was this insight. 'Pick the human you worked with, or for whom you admired the most. For each of the attributes that you admire, there is an equal amount of strange to bizarre to broken behavior, habits, and tics that you may never have seen, but are certainly there. The competent leaders are aware of these behaviors, their consequences, and the carefully constructed compensation techniques that lessen their impact on themselves and the humans. Thinking takes practice.'
  • How Not to Forget What Matters. Do you journal or write long-form notes/essays? A good lens on how keeping things top-of-mind is best achieved by having a simple, structured collection of important principles. And, of course, how do you integrate these into your daily life?
  • Your Brain Doesn't See Reality, It Tries to Predict It. I've added the book this is cited from, Inner Propaganda, to my reading list, because I found this post so interesting on how 'our brains are gambling addicts placing bets on what reality holds.' 'This happens all the time with people when trying to solve problems, having conversations, and making decisions. The inner propagandist, the inner double agent, runs the show. The truth is whatever prediction doesn’t get proven wrong. The brain deals with a world full of data and ambiguous messages. It makes the best possible predictions in moments of uncertainty. We don’t realize we’re making guesses, of course. The brain fills in the gaps using past experiences and context to figure out what should be there.'
  • How Technologies Create Radical Monopolies. 'As smartphone-oriented infrastructure continues to seep into everyday life, it begets ever-greater dependence on smartphone technology, and thus ever-greater dependence on the producers of this technology. Those who cannot afford smartphones, or those who simply choose to live without smartphones, find themselves increasingly excluded from full participation in society, often with no viable alternative. Like with the automobile, we may soon become locked into this way of being. Perhaps we already are.' An important post on how technology forces society into technology lock-in.

Amor Fati ✌🏻