351 entries under "article"

On the Regular

Another nice thing about being a regular at a place that values regulars is that you meet the other regulars. This summer I was often left to my own devices for dinner and a couple times a week, I ended up at my local. And almost without exception, I ended up having dinner with someone I’d previously met at the bar. Routinely turning a solo dining experience into dinner with a friend is an amazing accomplishment for a restaurant.

Please Use AI

be sure to use AI when your next child
gets married, so that you can write them
the perfect toast or poem or speech or song
because no one wants to hear your
words, the actual poorly written words
of a parent (you) who changed
hundreds of diapers for said child or fed
them in the middle of the
night from your actual body. Or cried
when they were late home because
you were positive they were dead. We don't
want those words—we’d prefer the sterile
words of a machine that never lived, never
had an original thought, never felt
the pain of miscarriage or broken
relationships or the joy of a friendship restored

I’ll be over here in my 50th
year, my youngest daughter asleep on my chest,
my arm falling asleep because I dare not move
lest I scare away this moment,
lying here melancholy about my older
children moving out and my middle
children no longer needing me, at least
not like they used to, weary about this body
that fails me now in ever increasing ways
that will never be restored. Sighing
over stories I tried to write but never hit
the page the way they felt in my mind.

X: Claude Fable 5 will be available globally tomorrow!

X: But what about safety?

Me: First you must decide who you are focused on protecting? Users, citizens or existing power structures and specifically, which ones? The paths are not the same. Market benefit rarely coincides with social benefit.

kottke.org memberships

In an ideal world: I write for you, you pay me, I write some more. No middlemen.

If we knew as much about Haiti as we do about France, the world wouldn't be the way it is!

[Napoleon's bankruptcy from the Haitian revolution forced the sale of Louisiana territory to what we now call the United States; without this, it would be a third of the size today.]

Open Source Psyop

It’s a psyop if you understand the other mind’s decision calculus, and have the ability to override their decision purely via careful selection of input information.

The Intolerable Hypocrisy of Cyberlibertarianism

The thing your industry would prefer not to deal with is reframed as an obsolete burden. Your refusal to do it is rebranded as innovation. Your inability to imagine a world where you don't get exactly what you want becomes a manifesto.

Once the platforms got large enough to be unstoppable, once they captured enough of the regulatory apparatus to write their own rules, the libertarian rhetoric got quietly shelved like a college poster you took down before your in-laws came over. Meta no longer pretends it stands for free speech and seemingly takes delight in putting its thumb on the scale. TikTok users have invented an entire euphemistic shadow language to evade automated censorship like "unalive," "le dollar bean," "graped" that would have made 1996 Barlow weep into his bolo tie.

Copyright and patents matter when they're Apple's copyright and patents. Or Googles. Or OpenAIs. Go try to make a Facebook+ website and see how quickly Meta is capable of responding to content it finds objectionable.

People did not get better because they went online. Giving everyone access to a raw, unfiltered pipeline of every fact and lie ever produced did not turn them into better-educated people. It broke them. It allowed them to choose the reality they now inhabit, like ordering off a menu. If I want to believe the world is flat, TikTok will gladly serve me that content all day. Meta will recommend supportive groups. There will be hashtags. There will be Discords. There will be a guy named Trent who runs a podcast. I will never have to face the deeply uncomfortable possibility that I might be wrong about anything, ever, until the day I die, surrounded by people who agree with me about everything, including which of the other mourners are secretly lizards.

Prepare your “no” and keep it handy

I took an hour to write a really nice “no” in advance. Considerate, but decisive. Not too long, but not too short. Generalized and versatile for all situations.

this refusal is the kindest I could have written. Yet it took three seconds to send. And I can use it over and over again.

The Giant's Cup

[Increasing speed and distance over time by a maximum of 10% per week made each run was challenging but not insurmountable.]

I Deleted My Second Brain

over time, my second brain became a mausoleum. A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions, piled on top of each other like geological strata. Instead of accelerating my thinking, it began to replace it. Instead of aiding memory, it froze my curiosity into static categories.

I’ve been sober for six years now, and that kind of milestone does something to your perception of time. It creates a before and an after, and it invites you  -  forces you  -  to take stock.

PKM systems promise coherence, but they deliver abstracted confusion. The more I wrote into my vault, the less I felt. A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it  -  and move on. But the insight was never lived  -  it was just stored. Like food vacuum-sealed and never eaten, while any nutritional value slips away.

Human memory is not an archive. It is associative, embodied, contextual, emotional. We don’t think in folders. We don’t retrieve meaning through backlinks. Our minds are improvisational.

This mirrors a deeper psychological error: the belief that by naming a goal, you are closer to achieving it, that by storing a thought, you have understood it, that by filing a fact, you have earned the skill to deploy it

I don’t think I want a map of everything I’ve ever read. I want a mind free to read what it needs. I want memory that forgets gracefully. I want ideas that resurface because they mattered, not just because an index card was forced to the forefront by some complex system of levers and pulleys.

The secrets revealed in SpaceX’s IPO filing

SpaceX bought $131 million of Cybertrucks from Tesla in 2025 at the “manufacturer’s suggested retail price.”

In 2025, SpaceX also purchased $506 million worth of Megapack energy storage products from Tesla. l

Musk’s xAI has paid Tesla about $731 million since the beginning of 2024 through February 2026.

Netizen

[On the internet in 1993…] There was no advertising, and no talk of money. I met someone who said he wanted to make money online, and I tried to explain to him that that’s not what the internet is about. It’s a free helpful place where everyone contributes and benefits from others’ contributions.

How an Open-Source Marketing Lab works

[A self-regulating label doesn't make you trustworthy: it means that you can be tested, which favours those who implement the protocol.]

[The goal is to make good actors provable as opposed to punishing bas actors.]

Welcome to the feudal states of AI

constant trade from local control to centralisation, from regulation to acceleration, from protection to adaptation, from ownership to access and from public oversight to industry governance. Future citizens are reduced to data sources that are constantly monitored and require continuous retraining.

Are you writing a book on software engineering?

You're focused on the output (the book). I'm focused on the outcome (understanding). AI is great for output but that is not what is needed or wanted.

Your Startup Is Probably Dead On Arrival

[Moving software from interface to outcome means a pricing shift from seats to results (per closed ticket, sale, etc…).]

Barbells

A barbell strategy is when you put most of your money into extremely safe assets, and invest a small portion in high-risk, high-reward bets. A common split is 90% treasury bills, cash, short-term bonds, and 10% options, venture bets, and volatile stocks. You avoid the middle entirely.

much of incumbent tech is looking like the kind of middle-risk investment that a barbell strategy tries to avoid.

I’m also budgeting for conference travel, since the downside of living in a low-burn locale is missing out on the network effects of a city like San Francisco or New York. Conferences create condensed versions of this network effect. So, 90% building, 10% high-intensity networking. Another barbell.

A Visual Guide to Simple, Compound and Continuous Interest Rates

[5% annual percentage rate (APR) compounded monthly returns 5.12%. 5% annual percentage yield (APY) returns 5%.]

[Mortgage payments might be due at the end of the month, but paying at the beginning will accumulate less interest.]

Control

[AI companies are so overexposed to debt and market correction that their success relies on everyone using it. When it isn't working for everyone, the next best thing is making usage mandatory. They can require it by crippling local computing power and supply to force people through cloud services.] Want storage? That'll be another $20/mo. Want graphics for games? Another $20. You want to perform data science and fit ML Models?! You're going to need the Professional plan, starting at $200/mo. It's a rent-seeker's dream.

Why fight to get one of the few remaining laptops in inventory with onboard horsepower when you can get an OpenAI Terminal just for subscribing? Sure, all it does is provide you with a single interface, a blinking chat box through which your entire digital experience is mediated, but plans start at only $20/month! Isn't that easier? Look how shiny it is. Just relax. Don't resist. It hurts more when you fight it.

The Ma of a New Machine

[LLM chatbots generate "deep cognitive work"-level complexity with an interface for reaction and intuition.] It spits complex text at you, you skim it quickly, and you immediately type a reaction to keep the momentum going.

We’ve been looking at this problem entirely from the technology’s point of view. The LLM is driving us, pushing a specific interaction model and veering us towards making mistakes. We are not computers; going fast isn’t our superpower.