I should have taken some before pics, but here is an after pic. Spent the morning and afternoon with the chainsaw cleaning up from the storm. We had two downed trees and my neighbor had a 60ft pine down in his yard. At least we both have some firewood for summer.
Ryan Broderick dives deep into America’s Timothée Chalamet crisis:
An internet — and, increasingly, a mass media landscape — populated by video content does not have any room for context. It’s a school cafeteria. There’s no sense as to why anyone is talking about anything and, honestly, even trying to find out why, as I’ve just done here, is probably a buzzkill.
Everyone’s talking, but nobody knows why.
Bernie sums it up well. From here on out, my vote goes to the person who advocates for pumping the brakes and establishing effective guardrails for AI. This is a generational issue and we must get it right.
In case you need another reason to believe Palantir and CEO Alex Karp are simply an arm for this authoritarian regime:
Karp’s message is loud and clear: My technology will take political capital away from one of your greatest enemies—liberal women with degrees—and give one of your favorite demographics to patronize—working-class men—more political power to transfer to you. He’s aligning his technology with both GOP political strategy and the larger male-centered culture war that the right has been waging for the better part of a decade now.
Our new favorite hangout is CoStar Brewing in Etna, PA, where they have Street Fighter on the NES, mountain biking on the tube and an amazing selection of beer on tap. Definitely our kind of place.
New to me: youraislopbores.me
This website feels like the before times, in that fun subversive way we used to critique culture before culture was flattened by the algorithm. Basically, the site let’s you ask other random humans the questions you’d ask ChatGPT. Like Chat Roulette for your mind.
Steel City FC brought home some serious hardware back this weekend. Adeline scored the championship goal deep into the second half, giving the Pittsburgh ladies a 2-1 (F) edge over Red Bank Elite and first place in the U14 Girls division of the Europa Turf Cup in Philadelphia.
It’s a foggy morning on the Delaware River in South Philly.
Seth Godin on slop, be it human or AI-generated:
If we measure the cost of what we create instead of its value, it’s likely we’ll end up with slop.
He’s right. Slop has existed for most of human history. But human slop is the result of human labor. That’s inherently more valuable than AI slop.
Took advantage of the absolutely gorgeous weather and got a relaxed 10-miler in this afternoon. The first week of my “breaking 1:45” half marathon training plan is in the books. Feeling strong, but I’m dreading some of these interval workouts coming up. 🏃🏻♂️
Mike Montiero on the news that Block (a payments company run by Jack Dorsey) shares are soaring after it slashed staff by 50%:
Dorsey’s latest chewtoy, has laid off 4,000 people. Which made its stock rise 24%. When 4,000 people lose their livelihood, their ability to pay their rent, their ability to go to the doctor, their ability to look out for their children, and the system that we live under cheers that on… That system needs to be destroyed.
Finally got a chance to try Rockaway Pizza last night and see what all the fuss is about. Simply put, it’s well-deserved fuss. We went traditional and ordered the NYC Round, half pepperoni. Hands down the best pizza I’ve had here in Pittsburgh. IMO it rivals some of the best I’ve eaten in New York.
We all know Spotify and other big tech music streaming services are evil. They take advantage of artists, their algorithmic business models are designed to flatten the cultural bell curve, and they directly support ICE. I quit using Spotify ages ago, but since that decision I’ve struggled to find a cloud-based streaming platform that was ethical to artists, aligned with my personal political worldview, and accessible to me everywhere and on all my devices.
My first move after Spotify was to switch to Apple’s iTunes Match, not to be confused with Apple Music (which has a similar business model ickiness to Spotify). Rather, iTunes Match sync’d my locally-stored music collection with Apple’s cloud servers, making my purchased music collection accessible on all my Apple devices. This worked well for me for several years. I was able to purchase digital music directly from artists or via ethical outlets like Bandcamp, import the files into my music library on my laptop, and poof – the music would be available on my phone.
Somewhere along the line though, iTunes Match broke. I think it coincided with the release of iOS 26. After that update new additions to my collection would not sync to my phone. I was heartbroken.
My next step was to sync my collection to my phone via a hardwire, like a Neanderthal. This was inconvenient but manageable, and I found the offline availability of the collection to be wonderful. My collection is large, however, and I needed to curate what I was syncing to my phone due to storage capacity. I needed to find a better way to have access to all my music.
Enter Navidrome. I never read blog post comments, but a note from Thomas Brand on Manton’s post about Spotify burnout was enough to peak my interest. Navidrome is a free, open source personal streaming service. After a few minutes reading the docs, I decided to give it a go.
The first thing I needed was a place to host the Navidrome instance. I chose PikaPods because they have an out-of-the-box managed integration with Navidrome and the hosting cost estimate for a collection like mine was ~ $3.00 per month. The price is right!
Creating pod and installing the Navidrome app took me about 10 minutes. I uploaded a Nirvana’s In Utero as a test to see how it all worked. Listening in the browser on my laptop, it sounded great. Could Navidrome become my radio-friendly unit shifter?
But what about listening on my phone? Navidrome doesn’t have a native iOS app, but there are several options that support streaming from Navidrome. After playing around with a few, I settled on Amperfy which is open source, feature-rich and seems to have the most elegant UI of the mobile apps I tried. Yep, works as advertised. Francis Farmer did indeed get her revenge on Seattle via Amperfy’s CarPlay integration as I drove to pick up my kid last evening.
With a quick, multi-device test complete. I bit the bullet and transferred my entire collection via SFTP. It took most of the night, but I am now live with a cross-platform, multi-device, ethical streaming workflow that I think will serve me well into the future. I’m excited to have access to my entire collection on all my devices again.
My father was a real one. He was the kind of guy that skied in jeans. A bourbon drinker. His love for archery hunting was second only to his love for my mom. He took me to see Neil Young at the age of eight and gave me my first electric guitar shortly after.
Dad always had great life advice at the ready, but he never pushed it on me and allowed me to make my own mistakes. And when I inevitably made mistakes, he was right there to help me course-correct. He taught me how to learn from the experience of making mistakes. I didn’t understand this at the time, but looking back I’m thankful for this approach.
We lost him too soon. I think often about how he would have absolutely loved watching his grandkids grow up. He would have relished in being a part of their lives. His memory now lives for them in the stories I tell and the mannerisms I’ve inherited.
Today is his birthday. He would have been 74 years old. Happy birthday, dad. Miss you.
Watched: Bugonia 🍿
Elliott recommended this one. Loved it. Hope it cleans up at the Academy Awards.
Victor Pickard, Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the University of Pennsylvania, in a new paper that breaks down the failures of a media market that values profit over the public good:
“Capitalism incentivizes the degradation of news media — from disinvesting in local journalism to capturing our attention and extracting personal data to devaluing and casualizing news workers’ conditions.”
He’s not wrong, but this is a daunting ask. Accomplishing what he’s proposing will require drastic mindset shifts and political regime change here in the United States.
Meta plans to add facial recognition technology to their smart glasses & they’re looking for the opportune time to release it:
“We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns."
There will always be ample resources to call out this fash-tech for what it is: A much more nefarious enabler of Glassholes v2.0
It’s been a long time since I was out late on a school night for a rock show, but when Justin mentioned that FACS was playing in town on a Monday night, I was game to check them out. I’ve been a fan for a while and their 2025 release Wish Defense is fantastic. They ripped through a solid set consisting of both old and new songs, and sounded great.
The REI flagship store in Seattle this morning. Photo by Dustin Kingman. If it couldn’t be the Steelers, I’m glad it was the Seahawks and happy for my co-workers who are getting a 2nd Lombardi Trophy brought back to their city. 🏈
It’s Bandcamp Friday, where Bandcamp waves their cut and passes 100% of all proceeds on to artists and labels. I always try to grab some wishlist records on these days. Today I picked up new releases from Mandy, Indiana and Ratboys. If you’re a Bandcamp freak like me, what’s on your list?