I don’t own a MacBook Neo, but I like that it’s an option. This is Apple at its best: a lightweight, playful computer that’s great value for the money and which will make its buyers fall in love the ecosystem, possibly even becoming lifelong converts. I would’ve loved to have a Neo back in college when budget was distantly more important than system specs. We had our own version of it in the form of the “CrackBook” (plastic MacBook circa 2006). It had its problems, but was cheap, and I got years of use out of mine.

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I don’t know about you, but my tolerance for logging into domain-specific web apps to push buttons is, to vastly understate it, waning. I want to do all of my work from whatever AI agent I like best

With any luck, the increasingly unnavigable web portals of our day-to-day services will be one of the first casualties of the LLM age.

I continue to think about Postgres queues a lot, and as much as I wish the problem I’d discussed was resolved by SKIP LOCKED and more contemporary Postgres advances, the fact of the matter is that the underlying root cause of dead tuple accumulation due to Postgres’ MVCC model was never fixed, and can still very much lead to major knock-on impact even today.

The Planet Scale proposed fix is a form of supervisor that terminates queries that are degrading database health and reschedules them for a more appropriate time. SKIP LOCKED helps, REINDEX CONCURRENTLY helps, years of B-tree optimizations help, but to guarantee real production stability, a component of this shape is probably wise.

This is the story again and again when it comes to modern Apple, which operates on mantra-based methodology: more icons, more whitespace, wider margins, more transparency, less character. Make it flat and boring!

Ironically, despite our technology today being superior in every way, UI design was better understood back in the 90s.

I’ve tried a couple alternatives, but they all upsell too hard. I’m not against paying for software on principle, but paying for a browser extension whose only job is to block a couple URLs is a step too far, especially when it’s a subscription.

The main thing I use Web Site Blocker for is to block Reddit. Not during certain hours, not over a certain time threshold, but to ban it fully and permanently. There used to be some utility to this website, but it’s evolved into the most malignant cesspool of partisan extremism and propaganda imaginable. I used to need it available to click the occasional programming link, but these days LLMs provide superior answers in every case. It’s not worth wasting one more second of consciousness on this thing.

APIs were meant to make the web programmable and interoperable. A combination of revenue chasing, security concerns, and abuse reversed the trend for a decade as walls went up instead of down. Today, LLMs are changing the equation. People want agents that act on their behalf, and the services that ship APIs will have a decisive edge over those that don’t.