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.

Pull-ups are an activity I’ve wanted to be good at for a long time, however the truth is I hate them. I’ve tried to work them into my exercise rotation many times but they’ve never stuck. For as long as I can remember I’ve despised doing them, probably because I’ve got a runner’s body with toothpicks for arms.

Well, 2026 is the year I will get better at pull-ups. A few days ago I bought a pull-up bar and hung it from the door frame of my office. I chose this location because it’s unavoidable as I pass through this threshhold numerous times a day. I wanted an undeniable way to establish muscle memory and create a habbit.

For the past few days, each time I enter and leave, I do as many pull-ups as I can. Entering in the morning, pullups. Grabbing a refill of coffee, pullups. Hitting the head, pullups. Leaving for the evening…you get the picture.

It started on Monday when I could not complete just one good-form rep. Today is Thursday and I just completed five pull-ups as I entered the room to sit down and write this, which feels like a small milestone. My goal now is to progress to the point of being able to do ten perfect-form pull-ups.

I’m not sharing this to humble brag, although I am proud of the progress. I’m sharing as an acknowledgement that the human body and mind are amazing things. All I needed was the persistent reminder to keep trying. Repitition and consistency are the enablers of rapid growth and progress. I’ve known this, but it’s interesting to see tactile results so clearly in just a few days.

Casey Newton in Platformer:

One of the more famous papers about artificial intelligence last year came from METR, a nonprofit that evaluates frontier AI models. In July, it published results of a randomized controlled trial studying experienced open-source developers. It found that when they use AI tools, completing tasks takes them 19 percent longer than when they go without. That was surprising enough. But the real twist is that when these same developers were asked what AI had done for them, they reported that it had sped them up by 20 percent.

This was a fascinating dive into the professional productivity that’s promised by our AI overlords. We’re starting to learn that much of this productivty is perceived. I’ve felt this in my own professional life, and have drastically reduced my use of Copilot at work because I found myself spending far too much time reviewing and correcting incorrect output from the model.

I also found many of the outputs, when accurate and correct, were just OK and simply not up to my professional standards. So much of my daily work requires communicating effectively through writing – explaining value and impact to leadership; acting as a translation layer between engineering, design and the business; and aligning stakeholders to broad, complex initiatives – all of which need to be buttoned-up to my highest standard. I’m simply not getting that quality from any AI model I’ve tried.

Last week I posted about the differentiation opportunity for companies and organizations who publicly lean into humanity and away from artificial intelligence. Since posting that, I’m starting to notice some examples of this in the real world.

I think it’s important to raise the visibility of Companies With Guts. Therefore, this post is will become an evolving list of organizations that take a public, pro-human, anti-AI stance. If you know of good examples, please share via email and I will update the list here ASAP.

• Bandcamp (via reader email)
• Procreate (via reader email)
• San Diego Comic Con (via 404 Media)
• Vivaldi (via reader email)

Last updated 2026-01-21

Scott Belsky writes about the promise and vitality of ‘Superhumanity’ in a world that’s becoming ever-obsessed with artificial intelligence. Several of the ideas in this piece resonate with me.

First, I think Scott’s definition of taste as a combination of INPUTS, FILTERS and DISCERNMENTS is really smart. As AI evolves, humans will remain tastemakers. How we lean into the experiences we seek out (INPUTS), the things we actively choose to ignore (FILTERS) and the decisions we make (DISCERNMENTS) based on our inputs and filters will be the key to thriving in a post-AI world.

He rightly points out that establishing human taste will not be enough. We will need to activate our human agency to act upon our tastes. This often resembles – and in the post-AI world it should continue to resemble – audacity. Our human-centric audacity that we can achieve the impossible or be the first to accomplish something. AI can only know the past, but humans can envision a future.

I also thought his jazz-based approach to using AI is unique and worth considering:

You must engage AI with flexibility rather than having a fully formed sonata in your head and no willingness to deviate from it. You must discover the “instruments” AI is best at, and you must complement AI with what it lacks - your taste, agency, and natural human tendencies.

I highly recommend this piece, as well as Scott’s other writing, for anyone who thinks critically about technology and our human experience living with it.