Photo by Ryan Snaadt

We were on a road-trip through Wisconsin last month, and one morning I’m about to enjoy my “free” waffle and chef-made omelet.

And then all I hear at a table nearby is a dude on a FaceTime call.

No headphones. Speaker blaring. He and his brother, partner, friend, whoever just eating there with one of them on this annoying phone call that’s louder than all the rest of the chatter and white noise in the place.

Of course I glanced their way. It’s like my neck has no choice but to turn my pissed off head in their direction so they can hopefully register what I think of them.

Inconsiderate Assholes.

Whatever. The rest of the day was great. Sure, that was annoying, but obviously not that hard to shrug off. Fast forward to the next morning and thank god those two guys aren’t here.

I had yet another waffle and omelet in peace. I grabbed a couple coffees to go...

I miss RSS readers.

Maybe not RSS the specification exactly. But the concept of having one inbox for the insane amount of stuff I liked to visit on the internet, so I didn’t have to keep going back to all those sites piecemeal.

But RSS died. Everyone just used Facebook/X/Hacker News/etc as their news inbox. RSS also never provided a good way for folks to still get paid if their whole article was being read elsewhere. And writing summaries for each article was a pain in the ass.

Then we got AI.

So what if there were a news reader that didn’t care if sites even used RSS anymore? What if it didn’t matter that authors didn’t have time to write summaries? What if you could skim those summaries, then go read the original article when something was actually worth your time?

I built that. It’s called PageForth.

It uses a Mac’s AI capabilities to summarize that pile of news and random...

In 1969 a group called The Winstons released a single called “Color Him Father.” It won a Grammy. The B-side was a throwaway gospel instrumental called “Amen, Brother,” and about a minute and a half into it the drummer, Gregory Coleman, plays a seven second solo.

What’s interesting about this? You probably have no idea who any of these people are. Or their songs.

But you’ve heard those seven seconds. Everyone has. The early days of hip hop went crazy with it. Salt-N-Pepa, 2 Live Crew, N.W.A. and on and on. It went way past hip hop. The Prodigy’s “Firestarter” opens with it. Oasis used it on “D'You Know What I Mean?” Jesus, whosampled counts 7,759 tracks with it. Even the Futurama theme uses Amen, Brother.

But the craziest part? The creators of those seven seconds didn’t see a dime from it.

Who owns a word?

On Friday, May 29, 2026, John Gruber posted an article at Daring Fireball...

Gracie Abrams just dropped a new album last week, Daughter From Hell. It’s really good. So of course Gracie is everywhere all at once.

But one interview caught me off guard.

Her producer said, “I don’t know if we’ll ever make a good song again.” And Gracie’s nodding along saying “It’s over.”

She’s 26. Wtf. She’s already worried her best is behind her. That she’s peaked.

But then I realize Look At My Life, a song on this album, sings:

How long have I got. In the hot light till the shine rusts? But oh well, look at my life

In a CBS interview asking about this, Gracie says:

There’s always the next girl, there’s always the next shiny object, there’s always the next great show. My hope is longevity, not like white-hot moment, you know?

Interesting. I mean, I’m 48. You can forgive me for worrying about stuff like this. But a 26 year old?

But here’s the thing. This isn’t a...

Let me short-circuit the flames. He wasn’t using AI, but my attempts at trying to rid myself of AI slop in my feed reader flagged him as the worst offender.

Is he? No. It just points out how hard this is.

So just yesterday, I posted a neat article to Hacker News. It was from Kagi Small Web which I’ve been using in my feed reader a ton because hell yeah I want to support the small blogs out there like the one here. I’m sick of all the usual garbage. And here’s an article that has some interesting bits I’ve never heard before, considering I’ve been in the YC circle since late 2005. Like Airbnb almost went corporate housing to make ends meet!?

Immediately the submission jumped to the top of Hacker News. Lots of upvotes coming in. But then I started seeing “slop”, “AI;DR”, and then someone pointed out the author’s x handle doesn’t even exist.

Crap. I got fooled. This article is...

Single people can be as productive as whole teams.

People are freaking out. There’s so much angst about how their jobs are changing with AI. I get it. It does feel like the things you used to do aren’t as valuable anymore. There’s new things to learn. And the new things keep changing fast. Every day there’s a new tool, or a tool you got used to last week that doesn’t exist anymore or got swallowed into some other company’s features.

And there’s a lot of concern about employment in general, if all of a sudden a whole team can be squashed into one person with an AI.

The funny thing about that quote up top? More on that in a minute.

I remember my first job at Accenture, 20+ years ago.

Work was crazy. The CEO had just quit to join a billion dollar unicorn. And I remember all the learning I had to do to keep up. I’d go to Borders to buy book after book on Java and Linux. There were 15...

AlliHat now can talk to ChatGPT and Gemini.

Still needs to use an API token you provide it. Or use the local Apple model which does a great job for small tasks like summarization of an article.

Photo by Tim McErston

Some asshole made an illegal right turn onto Lake Shore Drive in Chicago yesterday.

There was a line of traffic cones specifically to prevent this. He ran right over them and dragged one cone into the middle of a southbound lane of cars waiting to exit.

Now the lane was stuck.

Some folks just honked. Because they couldn’t imagine why they weren’t moving. So honking was their solution.

The more interesting folks were the ones who saw the problem and decided the solution was to merge back into the flow of Lake Shore Drive traffic. Which is going something like 60 mph. Yes, it’s posted 40. No one goes 40.

So these people were narrowly avoiding an accident because no one wanted to get out of their car and move the friggin cone.

Why?

You could chalk it up to laziness. But I think there’s something deeper going on. Most tweens say it out loud.

“I’d rather die...

I have a bad habit. Pasta. Not that kind. Copypasta. 🤪

Whenever I’m reading something online (an article, a GitHub issue, a dense doc), I end up copying chunks of text, opening a new tab, pasting it into Claude, and asking my question. Then I go back to the original tab. Then I need something else about this article or website. Go back again to Claude. On and on.

It’s a terrible way to work. But I kept doing it anyway because the alternative didn’t exist. Yes, there’s an extension for Chrome. But us Safari users? Nada.

So I built it.

It’s called AlliHat. It’s a Safari extension that puts Claude right in a sidebar next to whatever page you’re on.

Open it, and it already sees what you’re reading. Ask it anything: summarize this, explain that, what sources is this blocked article talking about. Without leaving the page. No copypasta.

Even writing this, it was handy to pop open...