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This year I switched to Original Medicare for 2026 after being on super duper insurance industry enhanced Medicare for the first five years. I should've known that it's super duper for them but not so great for the insured person or the taxpayer, that is -- me. They have set...

I still use Google. And I like the AI response they put at the top of the page, even though I get that it's bad for the web. Maybe there's a position for a web-only search engine. One where my writing has a chance of being seen by interested parties, rather than being conver...

On the last day of 2025, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri posted a 20-slide memo on Instagram. It covered AI, fake content, reality distortion, and how the platform will change. Read it as a press release, and it’s heavy with buzzwords. Read it as a set of clues about what’s next, and it tells a different story. (Click to read the memo) For a former reporter who covered …

Liked The Staircase on Netflix. I had watched it before but had forgotten all the different conflicting stories. It is a bit irritating, but I think that's an important part of the story.

Loving my Keurig coffee maker. I've been stocking up on all kinds of pods. Favorite so far is hazelnut flavored, not real -- really tasty. I never thought I'd want to try out all these different kinds of coffee. I wonder if I'm getting an espresso machine next.

And just like that, we’re in a new year.  It’s a rainy morning around these parts. A good day to grab a cup of coffee, reflect on the year that was and the year to come, and consider how best to live in the now, since we can’t turn back the clock or predict the future. The now is the only truth.  The past twelve months have been challenging intellectually and creatively. I found myself doing less and …

A note to Josh Marshall, David Frum, Jay Rosen and Heather Cox Richardson, just a few of the political pundits I read. Now you all have seen up close the "move fast and break things" philosophy of Silicon Valley. They do this with investors' money. This was a preview of how they will govern, after Trump, when Silicon Valley is fully running the world. We need to get some tech background in your writing. The history of tech is very much the history of politics as we go forward. We had a merger, and you can and should incorporate our history in your understanding of US history.

All the Scripting News OPML's for 2025 in one GitHub folder. That's an example of user-owned storage. It's going to be repo's like that tie the world together, if we ever manage to get it together. There's a bit of hope. Paul Frazee of Bluesky pushed a piece last night about user-owned storage. He bound it to his invention, AT Proto, which has very few instances. That's why we need an API above all of this, so he can have his AT Proto stores and I can use RSS and Markdown and someone else who may not even be born yet can use whatever they love. The protocol that connects our services won't know or care how we're storing stuff behind the API. A great prototype for such an API is imho the WordPress wpcom API.

I'm enjoying the break between years, always get a lot of thinking and writing done in this period. Not much more to say but that's all for 2025. Bring on the next year.

A look back at Apple’s 2025, with special guest Rene Ritchie.

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For the Pacific Wave Appreciation Society and anyone who likes watching waves: it’s King Tides Eve, and the sunrise high tide gave a little preview of what’s to come. (photo + video)

Happy New Year to all. 👋🏻 🌊 🌲 🏔️

Indiana, December 2025.

Matthew Walther, in an opinion piece last week for The New York Times (gift link): MAGA’s internal culture has always rewarded theatrical confrontation over achievement. Boorishness commands attention, and boors mistake attention for leverage. Pseudo-martyrdom becomes an...

After posting a link to the Computer History Museum’s release of the Photoshop 1.0 source code last week, I spent some time paging through the original Photoshop manuals. I found a screenshot of the dialog box where you entered your serial number, and posted it to Mastodon, ...

If you've had trouble unsubscribing from the nightly email, I fixed a big problem there this morning, so please try again. If the problem persists, here's a place to report.

Emily Delaney, at McSweeney’s:

Okay, now you’re getting upset. You’re getting upset despite the fact that we have strict rules against getting upset at this Hertz location. But tell me, honestly, when you reserved a rental car through Hertz, you thought… what? That we were going to set aside a special little car just for you? Seriously? Oh my god.

(Via Kottke.)

Jason Pargin is — well, to my tastes — a master of the TikTok video format. This one is so good, and ends with a mic-drop closing line.

Ruffin Prevost, writing at The New York Times: As everyone filed out, I repeated, in English, some of the priest’s comments to my guide, Keiko Hatada, who taught English for 30 years and has led custom tours of Tokyo for the past decade. I wanted to make sure I had under...