Weekly Thing 336 / Culture, Retention, Transmission
After 30 years, Crucial exits consumer RAM. Anthropic shares how AI is reshaping work. Exploring the indieweb and calm tech. Perl’s cultural decline. The enduring value of RSS. A decade of Let’s Encrypt. Childhood creativity in “67.” Reflecting on why we need to die.
Good morning! ☕️
I hope your weekend is getting off to a great start. We've had what feels like an unusually cold start to our winter. There is already plenty of snow and we are getting below zero temperatures. It is a little bracing! 🥶
This is my last Weekly Thing of 2025. I know, I know. What will you do without a too-long email landing in your mailbox every weekend? Have no worries, I'll be back after January 15th with more links and many other things.
In the meantime, if you want to share some links of your own the new version of our forum, r/WeeklyThing on Reddit, has a good number of folks joining and a bit of dialog starting. And a special POAP through the end of the year. 🤩
Have a great Christmas 🎄 and a wonderful New Year! 🍾 Be back in 2026!
Currently
Installing: I downloaded Vellum and have been playing around with it to see how difficult it is to create a book. I've got a little project in mind to tinker with. 😏
The St. Olaf wind turbine's silhouette as the last light of the day fades behind it.
December 07, 2025
Northfield, MN
Notable
You can discuss any of these links at the Weekly Thing 336 tag in r/WeeklyThing.
After nearly 30 years, Crucial will stop selling RAM to consumers - Ars Technica
I've bought a number of Crucial memory sticks over the years. The massive demand for memory for AI means no more consumer product.
The fault lies squarely at the feet of AI mania in the tech industry. The construction of new AI infrastructure has created unprecedented demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM), the specialized DRAM used in AI accelerators from Nvidia and AMD. Memory manufacturers have been reallocating production capacity away from consumer products toward these more profitable enterprise components, and Micron has presold its entire HBM output through 2026.
Frankly this sucks. The same thing has happened in the GPU market. The margins and revenue are higher selling to large data centers and huge buyers. But the impact to the DIY market to build your own computers is terrible.
How AI Is Transforming Work at Anthropic | Anthropic
We are all learning how agentic AI can help people in their work. This data from Anthropic is interesting and meshes well with my experiences. I also like the callout on work that would never have been done.
27% of Claude-assisted work consists of tasks that wouldn't have been done otherwise, such as scaling projects, making nice-to-have tools (e.g. interactive data dashboards), and exploratory work that wouldn't be cost-effective if done manually.
I don't know how we'll metric that. The reality is we are doing more, and it isn't a waste. This means we get to explore more ideas, more possibilities. That will result in a more comprehensive and thorough plan and direction, but it is more expensive than the previous one.
We've always seen this. PowerPoint lets you make fancy slides, so now you feel compelled to make fancier, and more expensive in terms of time, slides.
Discovering the indieweb with calm tech
What a lovely idea this is! The challenge that everyone likes to highlight with the web is discoverability. This "Blog Quest" plugin is a super interesting way of solving that:
Blog Quest is a web browser extension that helps you discover and subscribe to blogs. Blog Quest checks each page for auto-discoverable RSS and Atom feeds (using
rel="alternate"links) and quietly collects them in the background. When you're ready to explore the collected feeds, open the extension's drop-down window.
I wish this was available for Safari — I would add it in a minute. I love the idea of accumulating feeds with passive browsing.
Perl's decline was cultural
I was there having these same experiences with these languages. Strickland does a great job in this post generally describing the cultures of these various languages, starting with Perl, then Ruby, PHP, and Python. All of these languages are still used and will be for as long as I can imagine. But of them only Python has continued to ascend and is now one of the most popular languages. Strickland's suggestion is this is as much about the culture of these languages than anything else.
When I sketch out this landscape, I remain firmly convinced that most of Perl's impedance to continued growth were cultural. Perl's huge moment of relevance in the 90s was because it cross-pollinated two diverging user cultures. Traditional UNIX / database / data-centre maintenance and admin users, and enthusiastic early web builders and scalers. It had a cultural shock phase from extremely rapid growth, the centre couldn't hold, and things slowly fell apart.
My first websites were dynamic using cgi-bin and mod-perl. I wrote a ton of Perl for BigCharts back in the day. This article hits it right — those early web users were almost all also Unix admins.
Thinking of the culture of programming languages is an interesting thing, and something that groups should be intentional about.
PS: I love that this includes the mess of PHP as well. I've always called that "the people's language". The fact that WordPress and MediaWiki are built on PHP guarantees it a place on the web nearly forever.
Why RSS matters
If you've been reading the Weekly Thing for a while you know nearly everything in here I get via an RSS feed. RSS and a feed reader is my jam. If a site doesn't publish RSS, I’m not reading it. It just is how it is. And RSS can do so much more.
If we want an internet where publishers retain autonomy and readers retain agency, we need to treat RSS not as legacy plumbing but as strategic infrastructure. That means three things:
- Protect and optimize our existing RSS infrastructure.
- Build and support better, more sophisticated RSS-powered applications.
- Consider the intersections between RSS and the wider social web.
The issue to me for RSS and why companies choose to not support it is the same stuff that makes it amazing. It is open. No company can control it. They cannot wrestle it down behind a paywall. They can’t force you to engage with it in a certain way. It shares much of that with email. These mediums give the user power, and sadly for many services they don't like that.
Nearly all social media sites supported RSS when they launched. And they all shut it off after they get enough users. Because they have the power then. Cue enshittification.
10 Years of Let's Encrypt Certificates - Let's Encrypt
Let's Encrypt may be the most important project on the web in the last decade. This recent milestone is mind blowing.
Just at the end of September 2025, we issued more than ten million certificates in a day for the first time.
This might seem like technical gibberish but this is what makes your web connection secure. Before Let's Encrypt this stuff was so hard, expensive, and effectively off limits to non-commercial users.
Now we have an ever more secure web, open to all, and funded by a non-profit. I love this project and what it has done for the world. I've been a proud supporter since they launched. If you use the web, you should send them a few bucks. Really. 🔐
What '67' Reveals About Childhood Creativity - Atlas Obscura
Interesting history on young adult meme's and the role they play.
The Opies went on, "And through these quaint ready-made formulas the ridiculousness of life is underlined, the absurdity of the adult world and their teachers proclaimed, danger and death mocked, and the curiosity of language itself is savoured."
The ridiculousness and pointlessness of "67" is perhaps _why _it has succeeded so extravagantly as a meme, breaking out of the classroom to become Word of the Year: it perfectly encapsulates everything the Opies understood that kids need out of their private jokes.
So is "67" a sign that screens and algorithms are "ruining childhood" with "brainrot?" Far from it--this trend actually shows that _despite _a screen-mediated culture kids are actually managing to generate new entries in the playground canon.
6 — 7.
Why We Need to Die
The finitude of life is what makes life, life.
What I'm realizing is that both of these are the same thing. Being fully yourself requires accepting limits - who you are, how much time you have. You can't be everything to everyone, and you can't be forever. The constraint is part of what makes you, you. Choices that cost nothing aren't really choices.
The fact that there is a "last time" of something is what makes it special.
Supporting Membership
Hey there, Weekly Thing enthusiasts! 🌟 We're on an exciting mission to support the incredible Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), champions of digital freedom and privacy. So far, we've rallied together to raise an impressive $633.41, but we need your help to keep the momentum going! With 22 amazing Supporting Members already on board, imagine the impact we could make if we doubled that number. Every single cent we raise goes directly to EFF, fueling their vital work for 21 more weeks until we send the full amount at year's end. Join our vibrant community of changemakers today and be a part of something truly special—let's show the world just how powerful we can be when we come together for a cause! 🚀💪
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Journal
Clash Royale check-in:
- Just got my first card to Level 15 -- Witch!
- Heroic Mini P.E.K.K.A. is incredible.
- Currently playing a “Hog Deck”, I guess?
Stats: 71 days; 7,271 trophies; level 39; arena 19; In-app purchases: 😬. Connect.
Coach: Tyler
I love the words play and tinker.
It is very important for me to have projects that I can play and tinker with.
Thankfully I have more than enough of them. 😆
Excited for this year's New Standards Holiday Show! 🎄🎅
Another great New Standards Holiday Show in the books!
Add to List Shortcut
Dec 7, 2025 at 8:19 AM
OmniFocus is my trusted system for tracking all of my commitments, as well as my “someday, maybes” and a number of other lists that I have. A while back I started using a set of “Idea Lists” that work really well for me to capture things like books to consider, shows to watch, restaurants to visit, gift ideas, and whatever else. These lists are a form of a “someday, maybe” because they are not actionable, but they are very specific to a thing where someday buckets are broader.
I want to make it as simple as possible to get things into these lists so I made one of my most simple and frequently used Shortcuts -- “Add to List”. I find this super helpful and thought I would share. It relies on you have a Folder in OmniFocus where you keep these kind of lists. The magic is that it makes it super easy to capture into the right list and stay in the flow of what you are working on. For me, having it display a menu of lists and being integrated into the share sheet removes a lot of friction.
You can add the Add to List shortcut.
I created a Connect page on my site that is simply an index of my profiles on various platforms.
We tried out Loon Liquor in Northfield today for lunch. The pizza was really good and the distillery was really great to hang out in. If you are in Northfield give this place a go. They mill their own flour!
We went to our 3rd St. Olaf Christmas Festival tonight. Mazie is in St. Olaf Chapel Choir with the red robes. This is such a great event made even better when your daughter is in it!
This morning’s moment in Waking Up was wonderfully simple.
You have one job, and it consists of two parts. Be a good person, and pay attention.
Two things.
Great dinner at Salut celebrating my friend Jim's birthday and a final visit before Salut closes at the end of the year.
MnTech Outlook 2026
Dec 11, 2025 at 7:00 PM
Interesting comments on big goals for their organizations and the community this morning at MnTech Outlook 2026.
Some observations:
- No surprise that AI and transformation was top of everyone’s list.
- Pratt: “we are going to have a reduction in our white collar workforce”
- Tomes shared his personal experiences vibe coding. Playing and directly engaging with new tech is critical.
- Bahner: we still need coding cause somebody has to read and verify the code. I agree we need talented developers but I don’t think this is why. Nobody can read machine language or assembly. Abstraction matters. Is agentic developmetn just a new abstraction?
Thanks to Renee Edwards (Optum), Eric Pratt (Senator), Angie Schulke (Star Tribune), Kristin Bahner (Representative), and Tarek Tomes (State of Minnesota) for sharing with everyone.
Briefly
Interesting take on a new text editor for your terminal. The multi-pane interface via curses is interesting. Avoiding having to teach successive generations all the complexity of vim or emacs is a good goal. → Fresh - The Terminal Text Editor
Thought provoking read specifically about product management functions and how that changes with AI. I’m a big believer in directly playing with the technology, building and tinkering is a must. I wholeheartedly would agree that everyone should do that, not just product managers. → So What's Going to Happen to Product Management Anyway?
Anthropic now has Claude doing interviews. Makes sense. → Introducing Anthropic Interviewer | Anthropic
Such iconic design. → Frank Gehry's most iconic work in pictures
The crazy thing is that social media doesn't even hide the status game. Your follower count and likes of all your posts are just right there. It is a pure status game, with nothing else for it. → Avoiding the toxic status loop | Seth's Blog
I love these! Mark this as another thing to see the next time in Iceland. Kudos Iceland! 🇮🇸 → The Land of Giants Transmission Towers
I’m a sucker for smart devices and such, but a camera in your toilet? No. Just no. → Engineer proves that Kohler’s smart toilet cameras aren’t very private - Ars Technica
New industry group focusing on interoperability along with AI-enablement of retail operations. → Commerce Operations Foundation - A Common Language for Modern Commerce Operations
Main components of how HubSpot totally flipped their focus and in the process made big improvements to core operating metrics — focused on customer outcomes. → How HubSpot "Fixed" Retention | Brian Halligan | LinkedIn
Massive transformations. → The state of enterprise AI | OpenAI
I liked having my Aura ring and even consider getting one again. But a ring with a button that you press and such seems really awkward. Love the experiment, but feels doomed. → Meet Pebble Index 01 - External Memory For Your Brain | rePebble Blog
Well designed app. → Alyx: A Fun, Flexible Way to Track Caffeine Intake - MacStories
A notch better… feels like CPU upgrades. → Introducing GPT-5.2 | OpenAI
A haiku to leave you with…
RSS feeds the mind
Let's Encrypt guards web's embrace
Status loops undone 👊
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