Brad Barrish

Ian penned a great post for tetragammaton. His observation that LLCs essentially create a precedent for AIs to be granted personhood was particularly astute.

Companies can own property, sign contracts, sue, be sued, spend money, and shape elections. But companies cannot be killed nor can they go to jail. They have many of the rights of people. They are not people.

Is it any wonder that we have a loneliness epidemic? Addictive apps and lack of agency over our own attention has created a perfect opening for AI companionship. While I try to maintain a generally optimistic view of the future, I am not optimistic about humanity’s ability to resist AI companionship. Those who can afford to, literally and figuratively, will truly live the richest lives.

I wish I could just stay completely off Instagram and Threads. The main reason I open Threads (on the web only) is to read Kevin Nealon’s posts 🤣

Holy shit. The people are trying to buy Spirit Airlines. Please let this happen.

Some Japanese guy put himself in a bunch of movies using AI. I can’t decide if I hate this or love it. Kinda wholesome?

I had some abstract awareness of clout-as-a-service, but this post was… something else. (h/t clone.fyi)

After some trial and error, I finally have a working version of a personal plug-in that I created for myself that allows me to post directly to my blog without logging into Micro.blog. This post is the first post using the plug-in! The only reason I ever log into Micro.blog is to post. Yes, I know there are native apps, but I prefer to keep things simple and post from where I write.

There are a few other similar plug-ins out there, but only one that seems to be regulalrly updated. And nothing that was simple like mine. I just wanted an Obsidian-native publishing tool with explicit syndication control. So, I spent a few hours with Claude Code and Codex and made something for myself! Been doing that a lot lately. In case it’s useful to someone else, you can grab it from GitHub and give it a whirl. Feel free to submit a PR if there’s anything you’d like to see added and I’m happy to consider it. I did submit it to Obsidian for inclusion in the Community Plug-ins directory.

I enjoyed reading Anil Dash’s post about why Nasa’s Artemis II photos are on Flickr. It was a nice trip down memory lane and a reminder of what a pioneering idea and company Flickr was. I’m glad it’s still around and that SmugMug owns it.

I love Obsidian, but I’ll admit that it can be a bit much for non-nerds, especially if they’re looking to switch from Apple Notes. I made the (minor) mistake of migrating a friend from Apple Notes to Obsidian recently and that lasted less than a day. And really, I couldn’t blame them and I felt bad I had steered them wrong.

The whole thing sent me down this rabbit hole of revisiting a couple of apps I had used in the past—Bear and iA Writer, both of which are exceptionally well-designed and simple to use. Opening them up after so many years was refreshing. They differ a bit in that, similar to Obsidian, iA Writer keeps all notes as individual files and Bear has a database. Practically speaking, this matters if you’re going to use them with AI, but Bear’s recent release is pretty great news for using it with Claude. So, all of this to say that if you are in Apple’s ecosystem, you keep digital notes and you want to use your notes with AI, I recommend checking out Bear and iA Writer.

RIP Craig Venter

Great photo from Patrick.