Notes from August 2026

Since last month, I released some new stuff at work, clicked a bunch of links, and wrote a little bit.

Things I did this August

• At Ghost, we added analytics for automated email sequences. This helps publishers see how their sequences are doing. This simple feature turned out to be pretty tricky under the hood.
• Learned that Vim has a joke trigger called UserGettingBored.
• I continued to write for Zelda Dungeon, including an interview with a very cool ROM hack developer.

Links I clicked

• “Libertarian futurists weren’t the only people proposing new rules for cyberspace; they just happened to be the people who ended up making the rules.” From “Democracy v the machine”.
• “If civil society is to remain free and vibrant, people must be able to organize, speak and connect without fear of being watched.”
• Learned that most Americans hate data centers. I learned this from a poll and podcast episode.
• I appreciated this overview of digital accessibility technologies. I definitely didn’t know about all of these.
• I think SQLite is incredible, and this talk describes how they make it so reliable. Goes against some maxims I believe—heavy code comments, having ~20% of your “real” code be just for tests—but having the SQLite creator say it changes my view. I also learned about modified condition/decision coverage and a bunch of other things.
• “I don’t really want to think about the fact that the company behind some of the most beautiful 2D games ever made is, in Degrees of Kevin Bacon terms, zero steps removed from an authoritarian ruler who ordered a writer he deemed a nuisance to be entrapped at a consulate, chopped up into pieces that were placed in plastic bags, and incinerated in an oven later used for a barbecue. Bummer alert!!!” From the fabulous Read Only Memo newsletter.
• “…as AI prose proliferates that’s the style new writers will copy: humans learn to write by reading. They will copy the blandness and lack of personal voice many attribute now to AI-generated prose.” I’ve certainly noticed this in my own writing. From “Delve”.
• Sing-song converts “hex numbers like 51ac0759fc4d into singable and memorable sirings like kalo-tadu-komu-tigi.”
• This great talk (which also has a text version) talks about why we need to have optimism. “Otherwise, what are we even doing?”
• From “Why refusing AI is a fight for the soul”, published in March: “One of the greatest problems we face is the way that critique of technology is easily presented as simply a fear of technology, as anti-progress. It is a way of demonizing someone as irrational, and therefore, whose concerns should not be taken seriously. Not anti-progress, only refusing a particular, narrow idea of what ‘progress’ should look like.”
• Summoning Salt back at it again with a thrilling history of a 2018 Tetris championship.

Hope you had a good August.