4 posts
theamericanscholar.org
Jess Love acquires a binder of 92 DVDs from a neighbour’s porch and talks herself into a moral framework around physical media, parenting, and opting out of streaming. The real subject is the reminiscence bump: why the technologies of your formative years feel not just familiar but correct, and how nostalgia oscillates between protective instinct and self-delusion.
anildash.com
Anil Dash on how the open web is being eroded. At the end he talks about building “good AI” and alternative infrastructures. I wonder what concrete coordination, funding models and incentive structures would enable those projects to scale and compete with Big Tech before the open web’s critical institutions collapse?
A personal publishing system built to scratch a very specific itch: I wanted a Tumblr-style blog with editorial design sensibilities, and nothing that existed was quite right.
Showrunner is a headless CMS backed by Supabase and served through Next.js. It supports the post types I actually use—text, links, quotes, photos, albums—and pulls in activity from Letterboxd, Goodreads, Backloggd, and Pinboard to create a unified timeline of everything I’m reading, watching, playing, and bookmarking.
The design takes cues from Frank Chimero and Max MacWright: warm off-white backgrounds, a serif body column, restrained typography. Dark mode, naturally. The kind of site that looks like it was made by a person rather than a platform.
Some details worth noting:
The whole thing was built collaboratively with Claude Code—architecture decisions, implementation, the editorial restyle, all of it. That process deserves its own post at some point.
The name is borrowed from television production. The showrunner is the person responsible for the creative direction of a series. Felt appropriate for a system whose entire purpose is giving one person control over how their work appears on the web.
www.newyorker.com
Researchers at the company are trying to understand their A.I. system’s mind—examining its neurons, running it through psychology experiments, and putting it on the therapy couch.