Sporadic notes, thoughts, and scraps shared for remembering later
Quick, raw, take:
Pecorino romano cheese (or good Parmigiano Reggiano) plus aged prosciutto (and maybe with some seasonal fresh fruit or veg) = best simple pleasure in the world.
Especially with the crunch of good tarallini (or even just roasted almonds).
I tried to copy a suggestion for an AI prompt from LinkedIn on my iPhone to share with myself via email.
LinkedIn wouldn’t let me copy the text.
So I took a screenshot — and then used Apple’s built in OCR technology to copy the text I wanted.
LinkedIn prevented me from making use of the value its network provides. Once again, then, I turned to one of Apple’s best (and most underrated) features to do what I wanted. A perfect example of how one company’s loud use of AI misses the mark while another’s “boring” implementation does what people need.
(Every time I use “Live Text” I feel like I’m living in the future. Silly, I know. But also reliably true.)
I subscribed to the RSS feeds for Steven Johnson and Tim Wu, amongst others, as generated by their Medium accounts. Or rather, their former Medium accounts.
At some point, the accounts of Johnson and Wu (at least) were taken over by people clearly not them.
Ironically, it took me a bit to notice as both have plausible reasons for the noise the feeds introduced. I could imagine Johnson experimenting with short stories, or Wu trying to broaden his ideas by publishing in Chinese.
Much like Meetup was, on more focused attention, it was clear their accounts were hijacked.
I don’t know if it was because they were hacked or the original authors let them go dormant, but it’s again a reminder of what people will do to gain an audience. (Or maybe it was the fault of Matter’s aggregator that confused them, but still.)
fwiw, Wu’s Wikipedia linked “official site” has been removed and Johnson’s official site has vanished, too.
Shortly after NASA released the Artemis II photos, I vibecoded a little tool to allow me see a new image of the Moon (or Earth) every day.
John D. Boswell decided to make a short film of them instead.
I’m glad he did.
Twenty plus years ago, I was deep in the world of web standards. The work felt important, but was a very niche calling.
The effort itself was the definition of grassroots. A bunch of like-minded people getting together to make the place they congregated better. In hindsight, it’s hard to see the influence we had because those ideas championed are now a ubiquitous part of the modern landscape.
Reading that history, reflected back to the world in a whole new context was both oddly dissonant and inspiring.
The story told, while true, is burnished with the language of a legend. Still, if this story-myth can help energize a new generation to make their — our — world a better place, too, then I know Zeldman will be pleased.
Another AI- and typography post (and again, another day, another coincidental pair post!), this time in defence, from Brian Phillips, of my second-favourite punctation:
The em dash is a tool that lets writers expand their ideas without making them inaccessible. It’s almost always easy to follow in use, and the rules that govern it aren’t as ironclad as the rules that govern parentheses or semicolons; you’re able to deploy the em dash in more discretionary ways. It lets you break up sentences into parts that rub up against each other, challenge each other, give each other new inflections, or change each other’s meanings in ways that resemble the flow of human thought.
Phillips spends many words explaining how grand piece of punctuation’s apparent favour by AI is side effect of better writers everywhere using it. for much longer. We had, he suggests, just become less familiar with it in the past decades because brevity in written communication was favoured over complexity.
It all makes sense, but I still hesitate for knee jerk reactions to include it any my more professional writing.
But maybe, just maybe, it’s time to reset my habit and embrace the em dash once again.
The anti-AI design aesthetics is the vibe of the moment. The choice is most apparent in in announced practical effects in movies or the use of watercolour-coded illustrations. For a typographic take on the style, take a look at this from, Overview:
Overview: Human by Zandland, 2026
The feel calls back to 1337 (and hints at contemporary algospeak) but also aspires to be physical artifacts from the turn of the century.
This intentional analogue glitchiness isn’t for every brand, or for that matter most digital interfaces, but it’ll be fun to watch as it gets smoothed and adopted in the next couple of years.