Notes from June 2026

Chicago’s weather is pretty lousy most of the year, but when it’s nice, it’s very nice. June blessed the city with dozens of idyllic days. But don’t worry—I still spent most of the time inside on the computer.

Things I did

I launched my first big project at Ghost: automations! It’s still in beta, but it’s one of the biggest projects I’ve led. If you happen to be a Ghost publisher, please try it out and let me know what you think!

For the sixteenth issue of the Taper online magazine, I visualized time by breaking each unit into sixteenths. For example, as I write this, I’m about 6 sixteenths through the hour. Like every Taper submission, my work had to be under 2048 bytes.

Links about AI ethics

Generative AI continues to, mostly, be a force for bad in this world:

• “If AI is going to 10x our productivity across the board, that means that I should be able to produce the same amount of output by midday on Monday that, in the before times, would have taken all week. So can I just take Friday off?” From“Can we have the day off?”.

•“AI’s PR Problem” has a partial, but scathing, enumeration of many of the problems caused by generative AI. Useful as a reference.

• New AI resistance strategy:get a religious exemption.

• I liked this quote from 1976’s Computer Power and Human Reason: “The myth of technological and political and social inevitability is a powerful tranquilizer of the conscience.”

• The Ladybird browser isno longer accepting patches from the public, due to AI.

Other computer links I found

• I think targeted advertising should be illegal, so I loved seeing“Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising?” in a major publication (WIRED).

•Homebrew creator Mike McQuaid created a website promoting the practice of doing open source work on company time, a practice I agree with. “Open Source software is not a ‘hobby’ for your spare time. Literally every company you have worked for couldn’t run their business without any OSS. They extract value every hour and then ask maintainers to beg for a Friday afternoon, a donation button or a kind word in an all-hands.”

•Solidarity with Wiki Workers United.

•DO_NOT_TRACK is a proposed environment variable that disables tracking.

•“Build a web application that works on a playstation portable on a 3G connection—if you do, it will work for all your users, and it will still work 30 years from now.”

• “At some point you have to actually weave the gossamer. You have to contribute to the infrastructure itself, not just advocate for it.”Hell yeah.

• After our fascist president shuttered Climate.gov, it wasreborn by former members of the team.

• Goodthread about hardware-based attestation. “The purpose of these systems is disallowing people from using hardware and software not approved by Apple or Google. This is wrongly presented as being a security feature.” (I actually think there are legitimate uses for hardware attestation, but not like this.)

Wacky weird links

• Mikhail Gorbachev, former Soviet Union leader, was in aPizza Hut commercial!?

•Symlinking CLAUDE.md to /dev/urandom is good chaos.

•How to make an HTTP request from the command line, without curl.

• The maximum size of a PDF page is about 150 square kilometers.Here’s what that looks like if it were placed over Germany.

Hope you had a good June.