Weekly Thing 323 / Context, Dithering, Liquid Glass
Good morning! 🫡
This recent blog post from Seth Godin deserves to be quoted in full.
There are people and organizations that are working overtime to redirect and manipulate your attention.
The question is: Are they more aware and careful in how you spend your attention than you are?
The act of focusing on what we focus on pays enormous dividends.
Redirecting and manipulating your attention is the goal of social media. That is what their algorithms are designed for. That is what the ads they serve try to do. That is what their user experience is optimized for. That is the whole thing. 🤔
Folks have been starting to play the 612 POAP Challenge! I got our family out collecting as well. I love that I could create this whole game on POAP! And since given the underlying technology others could even build off of it. Plus it is a fun way to get outside with friends and explore Minneapolis. 🗺️
I also realized that this event needed a dedicated mailing list. Particularly since this event mostly takes place when the Weekly Thing is on summer break. So…
Come and join the fun. Read more on 612 POAP Challenge as well. I love the vibe of this event so of course I had to register poapchallenge.com. 🤩
Yesterday we celebrated Mazie turning twenty years old. For some reason this is landing with me as a bigger milestone than I expected. She said it was more momentous as well. v2.0.0! Major version number change, but mostly only major in how awesome she is, and I’m now Dad to a twenty year old.
Lastly, Happy Father's Day to all the Dads out there. I hope you have a great one. I’m planning on starting out with some time in the hot tub.
Right after I send you this email. ☺️
The Peace Bridge, from inside, crossing the Bow River.
June 07, 2025
Calgary, Alberta, Canada 🇨🇦
Notable
MCP Is RSS for AI: More Use Cases for Model Context Protocol - The New Stack
I really want this to be the case, we'll see if it actually happens. I love the idea that every website could have an MCP endpoint. A truly open and accessible web. MCP does have a similar vibe to RSS. Simple, easy, quick. Perhaps this is a path to a truly more decentralized web with agents helping people navigate and assemble things together. I’m hoping.
Cap — Modern, lightning-quick PoW captcha
Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, or CAPTCHA, those little tests you get at times to find an image or decipher a number, have largely been circumvented by either dark patterns involving relaying the tests to other humans or AI. This library takes a different approach using a proof-of-work scheme and is even easier on the end user. All of these methods are a form of proof of humanity, which is a deceptively hard problem and getting harder with more advanced technology.
Are We Too Concerned About Social Media? - Cal Newport
Newport's answer on this isn't surprising, and is in agreement with my own. I like his analogy.
As I argued, we can think of the content that cuts through modern attention economy apps as ultra-processed content. This digital fare is made by breaking down hundreds of millions of social posts and reactions into vectors of numbers, which are then processed algorithmically to isolate the most engaging possible snippets. This then creates a feedback loop in which users chase what seems to be working from an engagement perspective, shifting the system's inputs toward increasingly unnatural directions.
The resulting content might resemble normal media, but in reality, it's a fun house-mirror distortion. As with its ultra-processed edible counterparts, this content is hyper-palatable, meaning we use apps like TikTok or Instagram way more than we know is useful or healthy, and because of the unnatural way in which it's constructed, it leaves us, over time, feeling increasingly (psychologically) unwell.
Social media is the refinement of many anti-patterns.
Breaking down why Apple TVs are privacy advocates’ go-to streaming device - Ars Technica
Apple TV's are the only way I watch TV and streaming services. I've even gone further and making sure that the TV's we have are not even on WiFi, which means they don't get firmware updates, but I suspect those firmware updates are mostly just to track us more. I’m sure some would argue this assumes Apple doesn't do bad things with our data. I would suggest that I'd rather only have one company in the mix, not dozens as you do if you have multiple apps on a standard Smart TV. I also believe that Apple believes that it is in their monetary interest to keep data private, so that they can monetize health and messaging services.
Model Context Protocol (MCP) Tools for Mac - Michael Tsai
Good index of various MCP tools and apps for macOS. HyperContext looks really interesting. Most notable to me was seeing Ken Case of Omni on that list. If OmniFocus had a built-in MCP server that would be amazing!
MCP Best Practices | Peter Steinberger
Building an MCP server? Here are some best practices to consider.
Your Manager Is Not Your Best Friend | Stay SaaSy
Particularly focused article on commiserating as a manager. Some would call this venting.
But commiseration, especially with your direct reports, is organizational poison. It erodes the fabric of an organization and builds factions. It leads to feelings of superiority and creates a low-trust environment -- even if what you're complaining about is made up! Worst of all, it doesn't give other teams an opportunity to improve.
It is a good read and spot on. And nobody, truly nobody, is perfect here. I know I've slipped into this spot at times. But being aware and thinking through the follow-on issues is a good reminder of what to be careful about as a leader.
I Read All Of Cloudflare's Claude-Generated Commits | Max Mitchell
Mitchell looks at the commit history of this repository to see how the developer used AI to create it.
Kenton included the prompt used to generate code in every commit, which made this exploration possible. As we begin to lean more heavily on AI tools within development, this practice will become increasingly important. Sometimes, the original prompt is more valuable (and easier) to review than the resulting code—especially when an engineer declares an incorrect assumption that the model blindly follows.
This to me is further validation that we are not seeing the death of software engineering, but instead we are seeing a very new and novel way of creating software and working with different tools and capabilities.
This OAuth library represents something larger than a technical milestone—it's evidence of a new creative dynamic emerging. One where artificial intelligence handles mechanical implementation while humans provide direction, context, and judgment.
Super interesting.
visionOS 26: The MacStories Overview - MacStories
Okay, the Widget features in this look wild and I'll have to see them in real usage but the idea of putting Widgets in your physical spaces and having them pinned there for a long time is a great AR use case. Apple is doing with the Vision Pro exactly what I had hoped, and what we saw with watchOS. Adding features, trying things, see what works. I’m also more sold then ever that their goal here is to make visionOS work on a future hardware device that doesn't exist, and that the Vision Pro is just the best way to simulate that for now. It kind of reminds me of Microsoft building MS-DOS on a PDP 11 because there was no PC at the time.
macOS Tahoe: The MacStories Overview - MacStories
WWDC announcements on next version of macOS Tahoe, or 26, or Tahoe? They switched to year numbers for everything other than macOS. The new design is here and a lot of small refinements but nothing game changing. The changes to Spotlight bring capability I've had for a long time with LaunchBar to the masses. The Shortcuts improvements look great and will make accessible stuff I've been doing with custom API callouts.
iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and Liquid Glass: The MacStories Overview - MacStories
MacStories always has the best breakdowns of the newest WWDC and Apple OS updates. The Liquid Glass design change looks really good in my opinion. I’m looking forward to having it on all my devices. It is also interesting how close Sebastian de With got to the new design. The iPadOS changes with full windowing is interesting and I think the right direction, but also I think a dead end of tablets and laptops merging. Also good write-ups on tvOS 26 and watchOS 26.
My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts · The Fly Blog
Ptacek bringing perspective to LLM use in software development.
All progress on LLMs could halt today, and LLMs would remain the 2nd most important thing to happen over the course of my career.
Getting more specific, this is the tooling.
People coding with LLMs today use agents. Agents get to poke around your codebase on their own. They author files directly. They run tools. They compile code, run tests, and iterate on the results. They also:
- pull in arbitrary code from the tree, or from other trees online, into their context windows,
- run standard Unix tools to navigate the tree and extract information,
- interact with Git,
- run existing tooling, like linters, formatters, and model checkers, and
- make essentially arbitrary tool calls (that you set up) through MCP.
His last but made me chuckle cause there he has a point. "but i’m tired of hearing about it". The best antidote to that is to play with it and explore.
Telegram is indistinguishable from an FSB honeypot | Songs on the Security of Networks
I used Telegram for a bit due to the broad usage in Ukraine and then to explore it as a platform. I even had a Weekly Thing channel on it for a few weeks. I didn’t like a number of things about the service and ultimately decided to stop using it. This article goes deeper on many issues with it.
IStories found evidence that all network communication to and from Telegram's infrastructure go through a company linked to the Russian FSB. This would provide the kind of network visibility that combined with
auth_key_idwould allow it to identify traffic coming from specific users, globally.In other words, what for years seemed like a protocol design oddity is now looking more like a deliberate decision to facilitate global surveillance of all Telegram users by the Russian state, while obscuring Telegram's infrastructure provider's role and providing some measure of plausible deniability for Telegram itself.
The Internet can seem like a different place without country boundaries, but those packets, servers, and bits have to physically be some place.
God is hungry for Context: First thoughts on o3 pro
I haven't done any serious work with the newest reasoning models, and frankly have found them a bit cumbersome to engage with. This post highlights how you really do need to engage with them very differently, and what they are really good at.
But then I took a different approach. My co-founder Alexis and I took the the time to assemble a history of all of our past planning meetings at Raindrop, all of our goals, even record voice memos: and then asked o3-pro to come up with a plan.
We were blown away; it spit out the exact kind of concrete plan and analysis I've always wanted an LLM to create -- complete with target metrics, timelines, what to prioritize, and strict instructions on what to absolutely cut.
Definitely deep research capabilities.
MidWord! The world's favorite word guessing game
Word guessing game that is much harder than I expected, and makes me want to do some quick analysis of the dictionary and what words are at various positions in the list. Unix to the rescue! wc -l /usr/share/dict/words tells me there are 235,976 words. Then sed -n '117988p' /usr/share/dict/words tells me the first word to start with is "mediation".
The Periodic Table of Emoji, presented by Shady Characters
I an unabashed fan of emoji and think it is super interesting to see how they are culturally adopted.
The table is shaped by three things: the categories the emoji are placed in; the relative popularity of each emoji, which is used to order the categories; and the “sentiment” of each emoji, which is used to order the emoji within each category.
Lovely. ☺️
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Journal
Visited Yoho National Park in British Columbia this morning.
Happy National Donut Day from the Canadian Rockies. 🍩🏔️
Tammy and I wrapped up an awesome Banff & Lake Louise photo workshop led by the incredibly talented Chase Guttman this afternoon. Great locations and photos -- and learning photography skills at the same time. Has me thinking about the next workshop… 📷
We visited Q.Lab Coffee this afternoon. I was impressed with their coffee program and had to try a “Gold Label” pour over. Delicious. Had a cappuccino as well. ☕️
Downtown Calgary.
The Banana Pie at Bridgette Bar in Calgary. Tasty but also over-the-top sweet. Also over-the-top tall! 
We found Escape City in Calgary tonight and completed the Mindmaster Industries room. The story of the room was great and even though it was just the two of us we moved through it well. The room was well executed and the puzzles were just right. Room 70! 🧩
When you are trying to get that amazing photo of a perfect landscape and someone is standing right in your shot…
PPR: Professional Picture Ruiners (Acronym). -- Chase Guttman
😂
Enjoying an Espresso and Cappuccino at Monogram Coffee in downtown Calgary while sending this morning's Weekly Thing.
It seems we have a fox that has taken up residence under our shed at the lake. 🦊
I completed the final set of achievement tokens for the 612 POAP Challenge tonight! I also setup a specific 612 POAP Challenge Mailing List. A few folks have collected tokens. I completed the Architecture Aficionado category! Now to spread the word…
I dig the design of this new Coinbase One card. On the waitlist! 4% rewards in Bitcoin -- awesome!
Briefly
Directory of RSS feeds curated by and for people. → powRSS
Index of indie web sites. → url.town
Lovely "small javascript library that lets you code video games even without programming experience." Great way to have kids learn to code. Think this will be a summer challenge! → Odyc.js
Super simple tool to merge RSS feeds into one feed. Great example of the benefit of open standards. → rssrssrss - Combine Multiple RSS Feeds into One
Such Macintosh and Hypercard vibes. → Atkinson Dithering
I know OpenAI has grown fast, but $10B ARR was surprising to me. → OpenAI hits $10 billion in annualized revenue fueled by ChatGPT growth
I keep waiting for one of the streaming services to do something truly unique with sports. You could create a completely different way to experience the game bringing data and video together in a unique way. I'd love to see that happen with F1. → Will Apple Stream Live F1 (Racing)? – On my Om
Floppy disks? What? → US air traffic control still runs on Windows 95 and floppy disks - Ars Technica
Wild example of LLMs finding issues in production systems. → It's The End Of Observability As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) | Honeycomb
An inventory management system for your home? For the OCD folks out there. → I've massively improved my home organization with this free and open-source tool
Cool browser extension to insert into prices on websites in Bitcoin alongside US dollars. → Opportunity Cost – See Prices in Bitcoin Instantly
Updated video on the 20 year anniversary of Steve Jobs Stanford commencement speech. A great opportunity to watch this again. → Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish | Steve Jobs Archive
Databricks is on a roll and this is a big deal to get in the hands of developers. → Introducing Databricks Free Edition | Databricks Blog
Fortune
Here is your fortune…
May your context be plentiful and your AI witty. 🤖
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