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I continue to set new records in how long-overdue something can be. Nevertheless, I refuse to let this summery meditation slip away.

Unlike search engines, AI platforms are built on precision and summaries. They’re unlikely to be a major source of traffic or advertising revenue. What about getting paid for the summaries OpenAI serves in response to prompts? These prompts will vary widely, as will the responses, breaking the traditional mass-media revenue model. As I explained in my “future of browser” article, information itself is being atomized, which will likely upend the web and media as we know them…. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity… won’t need the media for long.

What does it mean to not “need the media” anymore? Chatbots know nothing of the observable universe—they are fed media, during and after training. OpenAI et. al. do not experience events as they happen. Reporters are on-site witnesses and produce original analyses that comprise both the news we consume and the content AI is fed.

The internet was originally envisioned as a place for connection, collaboration, and discovery. But over time, it has been distorted by business models that prioritize engagement metrics over meaningful interaction. Discovery has long been the open web’s greatest challenge, with search engines turning it into an SEO game and social platforms creating algorithmic echo chambers. AI platforms are making discovery almost irrelevant.

This is because the greatest challenge has always, in fact, been monetization. Before the internet, you could sell people the paper your news was printed on to fund its production. When the internet first arrived, it was a toy and money wasn’t a factor. When real people came online, money made everything bigger and better but also introduced ads, engagement, and the rest of that garbage fire because we’ve all agreed that web pages are free.

If ChatGPT takes over the internet and we say that news companies can’t make money through their existing channels anymore, they will need to find yet another way to pay their staff. I hesitate to say that we are running out of business models, but we are certainly burning through them at an alarming rate. More importantly they all seem to suck.

You stay still, but your AI agent goes out and fetches, distills, and synthesizes the content and renders it in whatever format you want — audio, video, or text. This is the future.

Not if there is no content to synthesize, because they have been driven to bankruptcy. Mass media is an invention, not a necessary constant. If AI obsoletes the news by providing people with a mouthpiece that they prefer, without providing a backstop for the companies that produce its sources, it will run out of material to synthesize.

I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to hear Marc Tarpenning, cofounder of Tesla, speak at the beginning of this quarter. It was the most exciting and impactful talk I’ve attended at Stanford thus far. This is really saying something.

A funky list of two for my own use mostly.

I was walking around the other day, listening to the sounds of the night, when I had a thought about AirPods. This is not the first time this has happened: previously, I have wondered about the percentage of sound I hear that comes filtered through Apple’s transparency software, a number that is likely shockingly high. On this particular occasion, I thought it merited a blog post, mostly because I invented a word and that made me feel like Matt Webb. The thought was: AirPods are bad because the music invades thoughtspace.

…I am nostalgic for the days when software was released when it was ready. I like to imagine that if stores like CompUSA still existed, Ghostty 1.0 would be boxed, shrink-wrapped, and on the shelf ready for purchase (but also free and open-source).

It’s a delicate balance. I could actually summon a hundred anecdotes on the subject: “ship early and often,” the whole build-in-public movement, the concept of an MVP, etc.

All of this is well and good, but it has taken some of the magic out of release day. Shipping before we’re done means that we don’t have a moment to point to where everything changed. No more “iPod, phone, internet communicator.”

Reading yesterday’s Register Spill post I got hooked on this sentence:

Is [the success of frequent and significant rewrites by the founders of Zed] because they have been working on text editors for over a decade and know the domain well and how things should work and how they currently work is just a detail?

I love the idea of seeing something for how it should be with its current workings as “just a detail.”

I would also note that the behavior I am calling for — more innovation and competition, not just from Google’s competitors, but Google itself — is the exact opposite of what the European Union is pushing for, which is product stasis. I think the E.U. is mistaken for the exact same reasons I think Judge Mehta is right.

Though I have more complex thoughts as to the actual anti-trust case against Google itself, I do endorse this framing of the European thinking on Big Tech regulation.

There are many, many git forges to pick from. I’m going to make another one—but before I do, I’m going to do a little thinking out loud, and outline the what and why of this side project I’m embarking upon.

This quarter was a radical departure from the previous two. It was profoundly different and, at times, extremely difficult. Having now come up for air on the other side, and looking at the great joys that I did experience, I feel pretty positively about the whole affair. And the change never stops, as I leave behind the great change of this year for a whole new world: summer.

In this quarter, Stanford became my default. As such, my memory of my time at Stanford has begun to take the blurry and general form I associate with “real life.”

I would like to become the kind of person who consistently produces discrete works.

Life changes slowly and then all at once. I started at Stanford University on September 19th, 2023, an “all at once” day that began the rest of my life. It is no small thing to leave the home you’ve known all your life for a place as strange as Stanford. I am profoundly grateful for the opportunity to do so and for the people who have made that possible. It turns out to be a wonderful kind of strange.

I have been collecting fun little writings in Photos with the intent of distributing them here. Now I can delete them. This will lift a great weight from my shoulders.

Today, I’m going to talk about this video.

Everybody has to entertain themselves somehow on fifteen hour flights. Some people watch movies. I watch people watch movies and make a list of them to post on my blog.

I recently had the opportunity to meet former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett. This was very fun and rather unexpected!

Just before the start of Rosh Hashanah, I found myself standing over a kitchen sink. To my left, two pomegranates sat next to a large stainless steel knife atop a cutting board. Ahead of me, resting in the sink, was a bowl brimming with water.

In 2015, Ben Thompson first proposed Aggregation Theory in an article by the same name. He argues, in short, that the internet “has fundamentally changed the plane of competition,” in that in our era, “the most important factor determining success is the user experience.” Why is it then, that YouTube and Reddit and Twitter all… suck?

My recent post on the Great Alpine Migration Tragedy of 2021 garnered some serious attention! I got a number of emails, a whole host of feedback on Lobste.rs, and over 100 points on Hacker News! As I understand it, that means I’m now a top internet celebrity (and eligible for the 10 KB Club). Still, I must remain humble even as I catapult toward digital infamy and thus I am here to respond to feedback, answer questions, and talk about what I’ve done to prevent something like this from happening again.

After moving my server to Hetzner, I built up a large collection of self-hosted services I use on a daily basis: from fun things like an RSS reader and an IRC bouncer, to critical services like my email. I ran them all with docker-compose from a Debian VPS. For the last couple months, however, I’ve been meaning to move away from Debian and towards something more minimal and clean. Over this last weekend, I decided to move to Alpine Linux.

A little more than a month ago, I noticed that my computer charger had slightly yellowed at the ends. Though I’m unsure how, it seemed like it had sustained some sort of heat damage. I went over to Wirecutter to pick one out, ordered it off Amazon, and… it never came.

I was doing my daily HN and Lobster trawling, when I stumbled on a post by boringcactus which sounded somewhat familiar. About half way through I realized it was a truly epic shitpost and genuinely burst out laughing.

Lately, there’s been renewed interest in clean, simple technology built to help us focus. Protocols like Gemini strip away the chaos of the web. Hardware hackers fit screens in mirrors and build beautiful minimalist displays to read the news, display data neatly in a picture frame, or provide a daily summary. Hidden amongst these many awesome projects is the reMarkable 2.

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I’m on a roll! A second blog post in less than a month! Crazy. Anyway, as you may have noticed – depending on whether or not you read this via RSS or on the main site – I changed the site styles. I got rid of dark mode, added styles for code and keyboard blocks, and changed the look of links to a new cool design. Update: I brought back dark mode. Light mode gave me anxiety.

I recently found myself debugging a mobile game I’m working on (sneak peak) with a friend over Jitsi. I had no trouble sharing my Godot window, Xcode console, or IRC bouncer. But how were they going to view the output on my phone?

Since I began working on self-hosting, I’ve been using a DigitalOcean (affiliate link) VPS running Debian 10. However, after investigating the alternatives in the space, I’ll be moving to Hetzner Cloud when my DigitalOcean credits run out in six months. Here’s why.

I’ve been using the macOS Big Sur Beta for a couple of months now. So far it’s pretty fantastic, and a surprisingly smooth experience over all. One brand new feature in this update is the introduction of the Control Center. A close relation of its iOS counterpart, they differ in one key way: Control Center on macOS actually turns off services.

Those of you who read my last “I Wrote This” post will know that I was having some trouble with my website. My site was coded using Sapper, a Svelte-based web-app framework I had been using for some time. I had chosen to use Sapper because it allowed me to stay as close to the web-metal as possible, while still letting me do some fancy things like use components, scoped CSS, and server routes. However, after diving deeper into website tests and statistics, I started noticing that my “static” site had a lot more moving parts than I thought. The HTML was crammed full of inline scripts and blob://s, tanking performance, wreaking havoc on my CSP, and breaking the site for people with scripts disabled. I decided to move the site to Zola, a ludicrously simple static site generator made in Rust. Feel free to check out the source code here.

Post-WWDC2020, I decided to rewrite the backend of txtodo in SwiftUI using the new App and Scene structure. Rebuilding the app from scratch may have not been the best choice, but during that process I have massively simplified the app’s data structure, despaghettified some messy UI code, and spent two full days trying to solve a problem that didn’t exist. This is the story of that last bit.

It appears I’m not that great at keeping a weekly schedule. Right after I published my last post, I started a class on text adventures and have been living and breathing in Inform7 ever since. I’ve also spent some time working on this site – though I’ve got even bigger changes coming in the future – learning a few new languages, and listening to a whole lot of music. I think something happened in cybersec too? Oh also I learned how to drive.

Ever since Keybase was acquired by Zoom, a company with a very bad history with security/privacy, people wanted an alternative. There have been a few different alternatives proposed: this is the best mine.

Little known fact about Keybase: it has two onion addresses.

Hi! So, I just started this series and I already missed a week. Oh well. This week was a crazy week for Apple and their operating systems, as they announced iOS 14 and macOS 11 Big Sur at this year’s WWDC. I’ve also started working on a new game project, another little side project, and finding a good alternative to Keybase now that it’s owned by Zoom.

So, I’m FIGBERT – I wrote this. nailed that intro. I’m a highschooler working in the tech world, currently stuck at home like pretty much everybody else who’s not trying to die. I plan on using this blog to writing mainly on my experiences in the tech world, either in focused articles centered around one topic or more summary-style roundups like this, the “I Wrote This” series.