We had a fun weekend watching Adeline and the Steel City FC metro team compete at the Nike Challenge Cup Tournament in Columbus, Ohio. The ladies played hard and left it all out on the field, but came up just a bit short in the final, falling 0-2 to Ambassadors FC.
I love this sentiment from Jeffrey Zeldman with respect to how the proliferation of words ultimately degrades meaning:
The web taught us to fill space. AI finished the job. Content covers every surface now, every silence anxious to be noise. Learn to be quiet on purpose.
I knew the fanfare around this mediocre band was fabricated.
It’s a great day for local journalism and media here in Pittsburgh. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has been acquired by Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, publisher of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Baltimore Banner, and will not shutter operations on May 3rd as originally planned.
Check out this dude repping Turnstile on the Artemis II recovery ship. Hardcore makes everything possible.
My guy secretly recorded more than 10,000 concerts beginning in 1989, cleaned up the audio and posted them for free on the Internet Archive. Some great stuff in here. Early Nirvana, Afghan Whigs in their prime, rare shows from Rachels, and so many more. Aadam Jacobs is a national treasure.
The Center for Humane Technology has published an excellent report called The AI Roadmap: How We Ensure AI Serves Humanity. It’s a very well-done, comprehensive and thoughtful proposal that centers on three key pillars required to alter the existing ecosystem: establishing behavioral norms, passing responsible legislation and introducing some level of governance over AI product design.
I’m not sure what the next steps will be for CHT after publishing this roadmap, but it seems like a solid foundation upon which to build action.
I did not have “the Pittsburgh Pirates inspiring me to search the internet for places to source a traffic cone” on my 2026 bingo card. However, I’m loving it and I’m all in. Hoist the cone! ⚾️
Watched: Project Hail Mary 🍿
It’s rare to find a movie that all four of us like these days, but the entire family left the theater raving about this film. I really enjoyed the story and cinematography, and would describe the vibe as this generation’s E.T.
Fantastic & recommended.
This is cool. Rob Weychert shuts down his website on Sundays:
This site is closed on Sundays. I’m trying to avoid screens at least one day out of the week, and this is my way of encouraging others to consider doing the same. I’d apologize for the inconvenience, but I think in many ways modern expectations of convenience have gotten way out of hand, don’t you? Feel free to bookmark this page and come back another day, and I hope you’re able to step away from the screen and find another way to enjoy your Sunday.
Love it. Has me thinking about ways to add a bit of subversion to this site 🤔
Jilly and I were out late on a school night to see Pile play at Bottlerocket Social Hall. What a show. They were so tight. This was one of the best shows I’ve seen in recent memory.
Imagine if all the money being invested to make consumer-grade LLMs more intelligent was being invested in schools and curriculum to make young human beings more intelligent.
Ridicule as praxis. Jason Koebler writing about the implosion of the agreement between Disney and OpenAI that would have brought user generated AI slop from the latter’s Sora into the streaming services of the former:
Sora is dead. May the memory of its four-month existence as a copyright infringement machine that was also used to make videos of men strangling women and ICE arresting undocumented immigrants be a blessing.
More of this please. More critical thinking. More vocal and open ridicule of these AI hype mongers. This is all snake oil.
Finished reading: The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere by Pico Iyer 📚
This was a quick and enjoyable read, and a read I think I needed at this point in my life. Work is ramping up. My personal life is hectic. This book was a much needed reminder that we occasionally need to take the time to remain still, look inward and go nowhere.
I spent the majority of the weekend working with my hands. It felt good. It felt natural. My mind was clear. I was tired and sore by the end of the day.
When the severe storms blew through last week, we had several trees down. All the limbs missed our house, thankfully, but we were left with a large amount of wood to process. Last weekend was about cutting up the trees and hauling away debris. This weekend was about splitting and storing what the chainsaws diced up last week for our summertime supply of campfire wood.
Before splitting, though, I needed a spot to house the wood so it would stay dry and season appropriately. I could just stack it at the back of the lawn and put a tarp over the pile, but Jilly and I didn’t like the aesthetics of that approach. We wanted something that could dress-up the yard a bit while storing the wood.
Saturday morning I grabbed some pressure-treaded 2x4s and my circular saw and got to work. I am not a carpenter. I’ve done very little construction work, but I decided to just vibe out on the build. Eight feet wide by four feet tall, capped off with a corrugated tin roof. What I ended up with might be laughable to artisan woodworkers, but I enjoyed the creative process of making it with no pre-set plan.
After the firewood rack was complete, it was time to start swinging the axe. Sun’s out, guns out. What a workout. It was warm and I sweat. By the end of the weekend I had blisters on my hands from all the chopping and there’s still more to do.
Throughout the weekend – as I assembled the structure, swung the axe and stacked the wood – I kept returning to the Zen proverb ‘chop wood, carry water.’
Before enlightenment? Chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment? Chop wood, carry water.
The mundane, foundational work of life is important because it reinforces mindfulness, presence, consistency, discipline and humility. This labor did just that. My work this weekend was a meditation through movement and I’m looking forward to splitting the remaining logs, although that will happen after some well-deserved rest.
404 Media disecting the the death of the Metaverse, an $80 Billion Dumpster Fire Nobody Wanted:
The complete and utter failure of the metaverse is a reminder not just of the fact that the future Silicon Valley is force feeding us is not inevitable, but that quite often these oligarchs quite simply cannot relate to real people, don’t know how or why people use their products, and very often have no idea what they’re doing.
The sentiment in this quote is what helps me sleep through the night with respect to AI & LLM fetishization. The future we’re being force fed is not for certain.
Steve Magness makes the case that reading a book is the most counter-cultural thing we can do right now:
Perhaps it’s because a book asks something of you that almost nothing else in modern life does: it asks you to stay with one idea, in one place, for an extended period of time. It asks you to wrestle with complexity, pay attention to someone else’s thinking, and ultimately think for yourself.
Elan Ullendorff describes the AI conundrum facing university students & staff in the latest Escape the Algorithm newsletter:
The large language models evolve with each waning moon, peeling off a layer of scabrous skin and beckoning the students to stay ahead of the curve. The students tremble-walk this curve like a tightrope, trying not to look down for fear that they will catch sight of the world they are setting aflame.
My ‘breaking 1:45’ half marathon plan called for 7 miles with intervals this morning. It was 15ºF when I left the house to stretch. I wanted nothing more than to stay indoors with a warm cup of coffee and ease into my day.
The icy air froze my nose hairs as I started the warm-up. An easy 2 mile warm-up still requires you to inhale at rhythm. You know that feeling when you’re about to sneeze but can’t? That’s what the first few breaths felt like.
I passed another runner going the opposite way during the warm-up. We gave each other a nod, acknowledging each other’s dedication and crazy.
Mile 3. Go time. My interval target was 7:00/mile. Within a few yards of starting, my lungs felt like they were on fire as I gulped frigid breath to stay on pace. Ladders, up and down. 400, 800, 1200.
It was a helluva workout. I’m hoping these tough speedwork sessions pay off in May.
A short and insightful post from Seth Godin: The hollow orange
I see the indie web as an antidote to the barrage of hollow oranges being served to us. Niche, personal websites. Digital artisans. There’s a wave of ‘returning to craft’ on the horizon and it’s carrying ample supply of ripe, juicy oranges.