This is the correct answer.

Perhaps my most old man take: I refuse to watch clips of podcasts/videos/whatever. I can not tolerate a 15 second video. I will either consume the whole piece of content or nothing at all. This has not made my life worse in any way.

Tape 05 YouTube video by Boards of Canada

I don't ask for much in this life, but I NEED new Boards of Canada this year. 🙏 www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bgh...

Register for Gentle Start 200km | Randonneurs Ontario Register for the Gentle Start 200km brevet on April 18, 2026.

Shout out to @epicrideweather.bsky.social for making it so easy to add the best cycling weather forecasts out there to every Randonneurs Ontario event page. Example: register.randonneursontario.ca/register/gen...

I appreciate the challenge of researching a fast-moving field, but this is the risk of publishing on AI capability: by the time the paper appears, the tested models no longer reflect what users actually have access to. These models are all historical artifacts today.

"Geese is a psyop industry plant" feels exactly the same as "Cambridge Analytica manipulated elections." A marketing agency overstated its effectiveness to drum up more business, people blindly went along with it because it validated their beliefs, turned out to be nothing.

Screenshot text: Kennedy recently authorized HHS employees to leave work early on April 3 “in observance of Good Friday,” according to an email viewed by WIRED. “From executive orders to agency-wide directives to even early dismissal emails, it is abundantly clear that this administration is not so much proudly Christian as it is belligerently so,” says one HHS employee who was granted anonymity due to fear of retaliation. “There exists a clear throughline of transgressive delight in violating the separation of church and state, of a similar corruptive mindset as the joy they take in forcing our agency to reduce services to the public whose mission it is for us to serve.”

This article about the Christianization of the US government is infuriating, but this quote gets at what is probably a deeper truth about why it’s happening. www.wired.com/story/govern...

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s Player Piano

Just re-read Vonnegut's Player Piano for the first time since I was a teen in the mid-1990s, and was floored by how topical it is in 2026.

Idiocracy | In The Butt YouTube video by ReplicaPropStore

I have an endoscopy and colonoscopy happening at the same time on Monday, and this is all I can think about: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhl5...

Quark chyron on the news with Quark speaking

News used to be better

This skill has been super helpful to me this week as I've been navigating the diagnosis of a possible cancer recurrence. I've successfully used LLMs throughout my journey, but this skill is a step change in effectiveness. Thank you for making it!

My prompt to Claude Code: "is that the best solution?" Claude's response: "Honest answer: no, there's a simpler one I should have proposed first."

I don't think this trick should still work in 2026, although it also works on my smooth brain after I come up with a solution on my own, so maybe I should give Claude some more credit.

I give Goodreads a lot of grief for deciding that "2012 barely functioning web app" is the absolute ceiling for the product, but credit where it's due: the library export generates a well-structured CSV of everything you've rated and shelved, nearly instantly. Bless the engineer who snuck that out.

Wait, TBPN was real? Whenever I've seen a screenshot of it in a post, I automatically assumed it was some sort of meme template mocking over the top Jim Cramer / 24 hour cable business news network visual design for fintech bros. I never once thought there might be actual content behind it. Wild.

THANK YOU. This is my number one pet peeve on the internet.

The Hollywood Sketches - Key & Peele YouTube video by Comedy Central

Finally found the perfect analogy for what building with Claude Code feels like. Claude is Star Magic Jackson Jr, and I'm a dozen incompetent studio executives. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Brvg...

I'm quite AI-pilled, but at launch I immediately thought Sora was a colossal misstep by OpenAI. For the first few months I was baffled by the tech community's gushing praise, and kept trying to see what I was missing. Glad to know my spidey senses aren't completely off.

RIP to a turd of a product.

My new favorite trick is making a Claude Skill for every powerful, arcane CLI package I've downloaded and then forgot how to use. yt-dlp, I'll never be looking at your docs again!

A weird side effect of doing structured training for cycling and having regular blood tests for iron-deficiency anemia for the last few years is that I'm getting eerily good at estimating my hematocrit levels based just on my RPE during VO2/threshold workouts.

Maybe start collecting Automatic For The People on cassette.

www.thewhitealbumproject.com/articles/rut...

Strongly considering getting really into R.E.M. the way middle-aged Murakami protagonists got into Bob Dylan or The Beatles.

Like make it my whole personality, name a cat Murmur, use the liner notes from New Adventures in Hi-Fi to navigate a metaphysical mystery levels of getting into R.E.M.

China is mobilizing thousands of one-person AI startups Under a national AI push, local governments are turning coworking space and data centers into AI incubators.

This is an interesting idea: incubators for one-person startups.

restofworld.org/2026/china-a...

A row of user avatars, but they are different Na'vi. Or maybe the same guy, I don't know. I never saw Avatar.

Trying out Google's new Stitch AI design tool, and for some reason it keeps making all of the user avatars characters from Avatar. Very amusing bug, no notes.

I'm sorry, but "the so called 'Straight'" is completely breaking me. This is President Camacho levels of hilarity (aside from the fact that it's, you know, real).

So far the best distraction I've found from *gestures broadly at everything* is big meaty tomes. Amazing how I'm able to just devour Infinite Jest or Don Quixote when the alternative is facing reality.

Also: Don Quixote, sheesh. What a masterpiece!

Like & Subscribe for more extremely basic takes.

100% agree with you, I have this thought nearly every time I listen to Sharp Tech. It's basically a Ben Thomson monologue with zero intellectual debate, the equivalent of him rubber duck debugging his articles.

I'm probably the last person to think of this, but:

You can just have Claude Code build a tool on your Hetzner box (or the Mac mini you bought for OpenClaw) that listens for a webhook from Sentry for new issues, creates a PR with the fix and deploys a preview on Vercel.

The future is amazing.

Screenshot from Seinfeld S6E7 "The Soup", Jerry is wearing a sweatshirt with a Northwest Podiatric Laboratory logo on the chest.

Screenshot from the Northwest Podiatric Laboratory website. Text: In the mid-90’s Jerry Seinfeld called the lab looking for help. So impressed after traveling to the lab to have his orthotics made, he encouraged them to use his story. An ensuing friendship landed Dennis, Chris and their wives with invitations to a number of Seinfeld shows, including an appearance in the final episode!

Things that keep me up at night: "Why is Jerry Seinfeld wearing a sweatshirt that says Northwest Podiatric Laboratory in 'The Soup'?"

20 minutes of groggy googling later: "Ok, but if his feet are so bad that he travels to remote parts of WA for special orthotics, why does he still wear Nike Shox?"

If I were a tech recruiter looking to hire great people, I'd be trying to raid Shopify's staff. Most people I know who work there are very talented and also quite socially conscious. The attempts by Tobi to become a mini-Elon can't be sitting well.

Screenshot of a Scorched Earth-style artillary game.

Randomly wanted to play the classic "Scorched Earth" DOS game from my childhood, couldn't find a web port in 60 seconds of googling, so had Claude Code one-shot a version based on the game's wikipedia page that's pretty much what I remember playing.

marktron.github.io/scorchers/