Zach Nielsen

I just finished American Icon by Bryce Hoffman, the story of Alan Mulally leaving Boeing to run Ford right before the 2008 financial crisis. I thought it was good. At times it got a bit “through the power of friendship, they figured it out,” which glosses over the fact that the friendship came with laying off oodles of people. But there were a few takeaways I wanted to write down.

Officiallly switching back to Apple Music after a 1.5 year dalliance with Spotify. The recommendations were definitely good, the podcasts were definitely lacking versus something like an Overcast.

As one of the first people in my friend group to have a kid, I’ve been wanting to put something together for folks who just found out. It’s such a significant life change with loads of information to absorb, and I find it weirdly comforting that countless generations before us figured it out. Plus, we have Google now. Fair warning: sample size of one here. Every baby is a special snowflake, and what worked for us might not work for you. But hopefully some of this is useful. The way I think…

I wanted to step back for a second to get into what AI is doing as we enter the majority of 2026. Christmas break with Opus 4.5 was really where Claude Code exploded in popularity. I think it had been pretty solid for awhile; I’ve been doing some machine learning stuff with sports data, and it’s been helpful for a bit. I do think they lowered the usage on the $20 a month plan, it definitely doesn’t feel like I could spend the week using it.

From this X thread 𝗕𝗜𝗥𝗧𝗛𝗗𝗔𝗬 𝗖𝗔𝗞𝗘 𝗪𝗛𝗜𝗥𝗟: 360ml Fat Free Fairlife 2 servings Sugar Free Cheesecake Jello Pudding Mix -3 squeezes of SweetLeaf Sweet Drops Vanilla Sweetener 1 serving True Nutrition French Vanilla Egg White Protein Powder 12g sprinkles 2g Xanthan Gum 350 Calories / 45g Protein 𝗖𝗜𝗡𝗡𝗔𝗠𝗢𝗡 𝗧𝗢𝗔𝗦𝗧 𝗖𝗥𝗨𝗡𝗖𝗛 𝗦𝗪𝗜𝗥𝗟: 300ml Unsweetened Vanilla Almond Milk 120ml Whole Milk from Fairlife 68g Trueflavor Cinnamon Toast Swirl Egg White Protein Powder from True Nutrition 41g Cinnamon Toast Crunch…

Alex Albert had a great challenge on X; with the launch of Claude Sonnet 4.5, who could build the coolest thing with Sonnet 4.5 in just a few days. What I built: An interactive 3D visualization that maps 13 years of Stratechery articles as a explorable galaxy. Each article is a star - sized by influence (PageRank), colored by topic, positioned by relationships. Click any article to explore its connections across Ben Thompson’s intellectual universe.

I wanted to note some initial thoughts down on two new products that have just hit my inbox today. The first is Sora (the app) running Sora 2 (the model), used for video generation, and the second is the Droid CLI by Factory. This will be the review for Sora and Sora 2 respectively. Sora is pretty fun! I’m seeing a ton of historical figure selfie videos (i.e. Jesus at the last supper), style transfers (what if Spongebob is in the Oppenheimer film universe), and other Ridiculous videos that are…