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I don’t usually do straight book reviews on my blog, but I made an exception for Simon Armitage’s marvelous new version of Gilgamesh.

Jake Adelstein (author of Tokyo Vice) on his blog Tokyo Paladin: For decades, Japan’s Oreos weren’t made by Nabisco at all. They were produced domestically by Yamazaki Biscuits, under a licensing arrangement with what eventually became Mondelez International. This was, b...

Marcin Wichary at Unsung: I’m angry. (Clearly.) We should all be angry in face of stuff like this. This is how people get fed up with software — because it feels unstable and deteriorates on its own without needing to. I know I brought up that an existing power user bas...

I'm back in Spain, and I get the best weather I could hope for.

Sam Sabin, writing for Axios one year ago: Anthropic expects AI-powered virtual employees to begin roaming corporate networks in the next year, the company’s top security leader told Axios in an interview this week. [...] Virtual employees could be the next AI innovation...

Seth Kaplan:

If we remove phones without rebuilding the social architecture that once gave childhood meaning, agency, and joy, we risk leaving kids with less stimulation but not more formation.

2022: Markdown is just enough HTML.

It's just dawning on me how thoroughly the AI apps are building on Markdown. People love Markdown because it's simple and its virtually impossible to screw it up, unlike HTML which got a lot of crazy-ass features in the 90s when Micosoft was trying to run the world, and then...

A cartoon by Dan Morgan that illustrates the role Markdown plays in AI. Text is central to how AI works, and the text we use in AI is Markdown all the way.

It's very nice to not be working on CSS. I hate CSS. I now have a slave that does the CSS for me.

I didn't invent RSS, I adopted it.

TEXAS! (by Erin Newman-Mitchell)

Two months ago, revisiting Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s year-prior prediction that AI would soon be writing 90+ percent of all programming code, I wrote: But where I think Amodei’s remarks, quoted above, are facile is that it hasn’t played out as simply that lines of cod...

Press release last week:

SightMD, a leading ophthalmology practice in the greater New England area, today announced a historic milestone in surgical innovation. Dr. Eric Rosenberg, DO, MSE, has become the first surgeon in the world to successfully perform cataract surgery using the Apple Vision Pro, powered by ScopeXR, a groundbreaking mixed reality surgical platform co-developed by Dr. Rosenberg.

The initial procedure was successfully completed in October 2025, and since that time, Dr. Rosenberg and his team have performed hundreds of additional cases using the platform, demonstrating both its scalability and real-world clinical impact.

Not being ready for mass-market popularity is such a different thing from not being ready for niche practical use cases. Would be a weird thing indeed if Apple “gave up” on this platform.

Bryan Hoch, reporting for MLB.com:

A colorful personality who engaged and entertained fans with a distinct conversational style, Sterling called 5,426 regular-season Yankees games and 225 more in the postseason from 1989 until his retirement in 2024. After initially stepping away from the microphone in April of that year, Sterling returned to call selected games late in the ’24 season, including each contest of the World Series.

At the time of his initial retirement, Sterling said that he considered himself to be “a very blessed human being,” noting that he had lived out a childhood dream of broadcasting on the radio for more than 64 years.

“It’s your medium. You do what you want,” Sterling once said. “You have to paint the picture, which I love doing.”

That’s baseball, Suzyn.

As is always the case, this started with a simple question: Will AI change how networks work? Will it impact the speeds we need at home and on our phones? My assumption was that AI would accelerate this — personal AI agents querying the cloud all day, your house talking constantly to a model (or …

Every so often, I would notice that our upstream bandwidth consumption was going up. Average upload usage is growing 21.7% year over year, more than twice the rate of downstream growth. The network is finally tilting toward something symmetrical, after thirty years of being optimized to deliver television to couches. Every new piece of data …

Francis Young on the inscribed stones of the Dark Ages. 

How AI Swarms Are Disrupting Democracy: I’m wondering whether the emergence of these swarms will finally prompt people to ask whether social media platforms are appropriate sources of information. Probably not, but I’m grasping at straws here. 

In the age of AI, Markdown is even more the default choice for text, something I heartily approve of. And that's why I think now is a good time to sneak some new open non-silo'd technologies in there, like for example, WordPress. Open source is not the only reason WordPress is valuable, it also supports all the standards of the web. It means WordPress can tie together text on the web in a way nothing else can, and it works really well with Markdown.