I like building things: it makes me happy. Learning and discovering things is a close second, but building is more satisfactory. Since I’m not that good at actually, you know, building things, the thrill of “building”, in my case, has mostly come from writing software. Software is one of the easiest ways to create something satisfyingly useful out of nothing. For a long time I’ve known, at some level, how much joy building gives me. [1] But it really sunk in while working on two recent hobby…
Also here's a cool unrelated photo of a chipmunk Look at this little guy. They don't know what an AI model is and they're so much better off It’s nothing short of an indictment of our society at large that Aaron Swartz, one of the co-creators of the RSS protocol (among many other things) was effectively assasinated by our legal system for “illegally” downloading about 70 gigabytes of academic articles from JSTOR - charged so excessively to be made an example of (we're talking 35 years in…
I’ve been on a bender lately of reading books about gender, specifically a lot on the experience of women in society, and it’s radicalising me in the best way possible. Many years ago, during my trip through Europe in the summertime, I was lucky enough to spend some time with a wonderful woman who was a fairly dedicated feminist. This person taught me a lot at the time in my life where I think I was a bit more laissez-faire about the inequality of the world and just naively assumed that…
This 404 report justly been getting considerable coverage.Amazon is buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process. A 404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazon’s book buying operation, which hasn’t been previously reported, by placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training data, and following it around the country to its final destination. That final destination was an…
Last night I had the most vivid dream. I had travelled to a large house with my son with the express purpose of him purchasing a Smart ForTwo car off the occupier. We looked around the car and it seemed okay, so my son went inside to pay the guy the £350 asking price. I sat in the driver's seat and checked out the instrument panel, which was a cardboard box with a piece of paper that had been laser printed with a rev counter and speedometer stuck on the front. I was about to flag it up to my…
🍕 I’m JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you like ideas that take their time, you’re in the right place.While you’re here, a few things I’ve built: Kerouac, a writing app | Post Through It, a solo microblogging tool | Distributism.ai, my MCP platform | Laterware, all the AI news you need | Studio Self, a product, brand, and GTM lab.You can buy my book Permissionless here.“Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.”—…
This is the third installment of my series called Hitting the Digital Brakes, where I explore my journey into the use of technology and on ditching some aspects of it now.The first post in the series was about the joys of imperfection and in the second post I asked if we really need the latest tech.This week I've purposely put aside the e-reader I use at home, the Pocketbook Verse Pro, for most of the day and read on paper only.I found that I really love it.When I have my Pocketbook, I'm…
I’ve long liked Federico Viticci’s MacStories, although I’ve drifted away from it as it’s gotten more focused on AI lately. (Note: this is what writers call “foreshadowing”.) I’ve been listening to the Connected podcast he co-hosts since before it was called Connected. Federico is a man of strong opinions and, from all appearances, strong principles. In 2024, for instance, he and MacStories managing editor John Voorhees strongly called for AI regulation, writing, The trouble with the companies…
This is absolutely amazing. A Walkable ASCII Cyberpunk City in One HTML File
The counter to the perennial argument that "humans have seen their work automated before". https://filiph.net/text/2026-08-21-11am-no-we-haven't-seen-this-before.html
Guys this is crazy. On Monday, I dreamt that I searched up the healthiest food on google, and there it was.
A few days ago I was sitting in a café in Sofia, thinking about things that were normal when I was a kid, or even when my parents were, and that now take real effort to get. It’s not that they’re out of reach. It’s that you have to go hunting for them. 1. Being offline The world has gone digital to the point where everything happens online. That brought plenty of good things, but it stripped away something simple: the right to disconnect. Half the time you can’t leave the house without your…
Fremantle2026 August 19 (Wednesday), 8:52AM· websites · blogging · Little Websites Everywhere, by Michelle Barker, 18 August 2026: Building a website feels old-fashioned these days. How many more websites do I have left in me before the old fire flickers and dies? Is snuffed out. Before making websites is no longer a viable way to earn a living? The web will change drastically within my lifetime, maybe someday soon, indeed it already has. Maybe it really will fizzle out, a graveyard haunted…
black holes The moon Seeing planets through a telescope Space in general (except like… life on other planets. That kind of freaks me out cuz we (humans) don’t know how to act and just let things exist) Severe weather, specifically tornadoes Magic/power systems in fiction Ancestral tracing Signed, Susu ⋆˙⟡ Thanks for reading! Here's a cookie: 🍪 Go Home
It’ll be wasp season soon —he says, well aware that the very idea of “seasons” is an increasingly futile one— and so any slight buzzing has me frantically scanning for something, anything, I can use as a weapon. I don’t think I’ve ever told the story of when I was stung. It was, I think, my Mum’s birthday. I can recall helping my Dad organise a surprise holiday for her around that time too. A special birthday then, her 60th? Anyway, they’d booked a meal for friends and family to celebrate, and…
It's nice when studios get a chance to spin out independent rather than be shut down entirely With larger companies doing evil shit on a regular basis and the workers getting inevitably fucked by that, it's nice when there are stories that take a somewhat different route! Coming off a report from Gamesbeat, Compulsion games is officially splitting off from Microsoft and regaining control over their IP. This means a lot of things but most notably, that the 2025 southern gothic third-person…
This is a serious one, folks. Sorry. My dad died when I was 12 years old so I've never had to deal with losing a parent as an adult. Still, reading the accounts from For No One and Absurd Pirate instantly takes me back to how hard it was. My parents were separated, and I had never spent more than just 1 or 2 weeks at a time with my mom. I was visiting her for the summer when my dad died. I remember playing possum on the sofa and overhearing my aunt and mom talking about it; that's how I first…
Forwarding unedited AI-generated content wastes everyone's time.
From GitHub’s blog post, The August 17 outage, and the work ahead: Since April, monthly commits have grown from 1.4 billion to 2.9 billion. Holy shit. That doesn’t look sustainable. And assuming this activity is driven by AI bots rather than growth in paying customers, it’s probably bad news for the bottom line. I guess I echo this guy: I applaud GitHub. However, I think no matter how valiant they are they will not climb out from under this. The scale problem will keep getting worse, and it’s…
→ 404 Media
I purchased Mood camera when it first came out, after taking it for a quick spin and appreciating what the developer was trying to do: I wanted to create an experience that encouraged users to stay in the moment and just take photos, not stand there, tweaking settings. [...] the app is intended to be a point and shoot experience that encourages a creative process that doesn't focus on editing and crafting the "perfect photo". [...] I didn't want people to just blindly import a bunch of presets.…
❝ Don’t worry too much about the details. Just start getting things out there that you care about and the rest will come in time. As you post more, you will realize what you care about sharing the most, who likes your content, and where you fit in the web. I wish I had understood earlier that a blog does not need to launch fully formed. It can become itself while you are writing it.Christian Cleberg , People & Blogs
Chris Wayan's Planetocopia is one of my favorite things on the internet. The author made up fictional planets with weird geology. And he tried to give them scientifically plausible climates and biospheres, along with beautifully weird aliens.1 And he made real globes for them! Who makes real globes for their worldbuilding project? It was also very well-written, to a degree that internet projects rarely are. I encountered Planetocopia as a teenager, and I was obsessed with it. I was going…
Game title: Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced Plaform: pc Rating: 4.25/5 I have fond memories of playing the original Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag. I barely remember the story, but I remember playing countless hours chasing other ships and trying to nuke fortresses off of the map. Black Flag came at a time when I started to lose hope in the franchise. AC III was, well, AC III, and with the retirement of Ezio -- and I really, really loved Ezio -- I wondered what other protagonist could take…
Hey y’all, I’m here today with a PSA that I find myself repeating multiple times a day, every single day. And I’m going to do it again. AI is wrong a lot. And I mean a lot. Both about inconsequential things and extremely consequential things. But the fact it is so wrong so consistently about inconsequential things should make you think twice about listening to it regarding anything even remotely serious. For today’s example of “AI is always wrong and I hate that it just lies so confidently…
I know, I know, we're all tired of everyone writing about AI. It's all the same things, same opinions, over and over again. But I still felt compelled to write this because I saw some people — a lot of people, honestly — confidently say how they can identify AI-generated text or images, and teaching you the "tells." Which I hate. The two categories, text and images, are different but still basically similar, but I have stronger feelings towards text because telling AI text affects non-native…
Cringe: “Thank you for trusting us with your information.” In an email from a U.S. online pharmacy (owned by a huge health insurance company) requesting information outside its remit. Capitalism isn’t satisfied with leaving health to the patient and their health care team, it seems.
Good posts from Moonwriting and Olly about the benefits of using a website platform and why you might not want a fully DIY website. I agree with the points they both make. If you want to self-host and hand-code your website, that’s great. HTML and CSS are good skills to have. But you don’t have to code your own website from scratch. You don’t have to manage hosting if you don’t want to. Lots of people want an easy way to post their writing online (hi, me included), so platforms like Pika and…
Lubin Manufacturing Company in 1911 Introduction Lubin Vault Fire Fox Vault Fire MGM Vault Fire National Archives Vault Fire Universal Studios Fire Still Confusing Conclusion Introduction Tom’s Hardware published an article about Nine PBS’s legal battle to recover 50TB of broadcast materials, representing 70 years worth of the station’s history/1 Tom’s Hardware was rather flippant about the situation, stating: This wouldn’t have been an issue if the organization bought a $1,000 NAS and…
I asked my friend Mike the other day, “What’s going to happen to science fiction when readers realize that interstellar travel will be next to impossible, and no one will want to live on the Moon or Mars?” He answered back, “Nothing will happen to science fiction; it’s only stories.” But I replied, “But some people read science fiction because they believe that someday humans will colonize the solar system and eventually the galaxy.” And he replied, “Nobody really believes that. It’s just fun…
