WEBVTT
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This is The Weekly Thing, issue 353: Release Notes for Every Day. Published Saturday, October tenth, 2026, and written by Jamie Thingelstad.
00:00:10.273 --> 00:00:19.535
This audio edition is generated. Every link and photo is in the newsletter at weekly dot thingelstad dot com, where you can also sign up for the email.
00:00:20.935 --> 00:00:21.624
Good morning!
00:00:22.124 --> 00:00:40.253
This week I felt like I was able to land a couple of projects that have long been on my list or I had recently picked up. It is really cool that agentic coding tools allow you to make the impossible list possible, but there is still only so many things you can push along at the same time.
00:00:41.653 --> 00:00:43.309
Now, the Currently section.
00:00:43.909 --> 00:01:19.018
Building: I was thinking about Your Version Number and lightweight journaling. I think it would be fun to attach "release notes" to each day's version. So I created Your Version Number: Release Notes. I've been using it for a couple of days and I really enjoy getting an email each day and simply replying to that email with notes from the day. It is easy, lightweight, and yet powerful since you can add photos and even send audio back. There is a full web interface and you can export all your data. If lightweight journaling is interesting to you give it a try.
00:01:20.418 --> 00:01:22.601
This week's photo. The gourds of fall!
00:01:23.101 --> 00:01:26.260
Taken in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on Friday, October ninth.
00:01:27.660 --> 00:01:30.429
Now, the Notable section. Five links this week.
00:01:31.029 --> 00:01:48.589
Link 1 of 5. Introducing Claude Haiku 5.5 Anthropic. I've been hoping to see a new version of Haiku for a long time and it is finally here. I moved a handful of projects to it the night it was released. With all the focus being on the most capable models, why care about Haiku?
00:01:49.089 --> 00:02:06.913
When you are building agentic workloads you inevitably have various tasks that you need to deliver very cheaply and Haiku is the workhorse behind much of that. I probably run 100 times more Haiku calls compared to Sonnet and Opus. So the volume is there and you need this to work really well.
00:02:07.413 --> 00:02:21.826
Additionally because Haiku was so old it didn't have the effort and other modern capabilities of the newest models. That is now fixed so developers can rely on the same mechanics and work across various Claude models with ease.
00:02:22.326 --> 00:02:25.419
Also see Simon Willison's post on Haiku 5.5.
00:02:26.319 --> 00:02:40.248
Link 2 of 5. We’re going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything. I read this article with a smile as over the last few months I've added this as a feature to nearly every agentic workload that I run.
00:02:40.748 --> 00:03:04.930
Quote. Here’s a product feature which the world is going to need a whole lot more of over the coming months and years: default hard budget caps. I’m talking about the feature of pay-by-usage services and APIs that lets you say “after $X/month, cut this thing off and return errors”. These need to be hard limits. Soft caps, “after $X/month, send me a warning email”, will not cut it. End quote.
00:03:05.430 --> 00:03:28.368
By the way you can do this with the agentic loop having awareness. One of the agent projects I've been working on gets a hard monthly spend limit. From that limit it derives a budget and determines each day how it is pacing to that budget. So, not only can you make these systems cost-controlled but you can hand over part of the challenge of managing that to the system itself.
00:03:28.868 --> 00:03:55.475
We definitely need this on the low end of the market for small and personal projects, however it is just as badly needed at the enterprise side. I can't tell you how many vendors I've seen that move to credit models and they rather conveniently have no way to allow you to hard-cap the spend. This forces you as the customer to have to keep track or end up on the wrong side of a negotiation after you've burned through credits.
00:03:56.375 --> 00:04:14.073
Link 3 of 5. Introducing zkAPI: private usage credits for any API. I've been suggesting that crypto is a better way for agents to handle payment for services for a bit. Here is a broader example of generally using crypto to pay for service usage without having to divulge your identity with it.
00:04:14.573 --> 00:04:31.760
Quote. zkAPI separates payment from identity. You deposit credits (ETH, USDC, etc.) into a vault contract on Ethereum, one ordinary transaction. From then on, your balance exists as a private note: digital cash that only you can spend and that nobody can trace back to the deposit.
00:04:32.260 --> 00:04:59.452
To authorize spending, software on your machine produces a small zero-knowledge proof that says, in effect, that a funded note covers this spend and nobody has spent it before. One proof can cover a single request or a whole session. The server can check that the statement is true without learning which note, which deposit, or which person. At the payment layer, requests do not link to you, and they do not link to each other. End quote.
00:04:59.952 --> 00:05:11.935
I'm glad that folks are thinking about this. The speed of the web shouldn't be limited by the pace of bank settlements and we shouldn't have to forego our privacy in exchange for simply using an API.
00:05:12.835 --> 00:05:22.839
Link 4 of 5. On the Rumored M8 Ultra AI Servers. I keep thinking about the strategic advantage that Apple finds itself in with the M-series chips and AI.
00:05:23.339 --> 00:05:48.624
Quote. If an M8 Ultra server carries forward the unified-memory architecture and performance-per-watt advantages of Apple’s current chips, it could be an interesting machine for private AI inference. Its job would be narrower than replacing Nvidia across the industry. Instead, it gives buyers another credible option for private workloads that demand local control without wasting power. End quote.
00:05:49.124 --> 00:06:24.082
It is unique that Apple can put enough compute power in a box that can sit on a desk, be powered with a regular outlet, not require special cooling, and be quiet enough to not need to be in a room of its own. For a number of professions and use cases with AI I also suggest we are going to want to go opposite of the last 20 years of cloud migration and run that workload locally. The most precise cost management we can have is running something on our own hardware. And if you are dealing with sensitive data running it locally is a great way to protect it.
00:06:24.582 --> 00:06:29.836
Apple could be a big player in this space because of their unique advantage in compute power per watt.
00:06:30.736 --> 00:06:51.325
Link 5 of 5. Tufte's Razor · An interactive guide to the data-ink ratio. I've gone to Tufte's data visualization seminars multiple times and always walk away with the general concept that some ways of visualizing numbers are just used to fill space. Have 5 numbers but need to fill a whole slide? Pie charts to the rescue.
00:06:51.825 --> 00:06:57.999
This is a really well done interactive explorer that allows you to tweak things and see the impact.
00:06:58.499 --> 00:07:02.426
The list of 11 checks for any visualization is a good review.
00:07:02.926 --> 00:07:05.857
Quote. 1. The title says what the chart shows.
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2. Every number has its unit.
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3. Each value is said once.
00:07:10.776 --> 00:07:14.241
4. Nothing is shaded, boxed or outlined without a reason.
00:07:14.741 --> 00:07:18.143
5. Bars fill about half to two-thirds of their space.
00:07:18.643 --> 00:07:19.921
6. Bars start at zero.
00:07:20.421 --> 00:07:22.879
7. Labels sit next to what they name.
00:07:23.379 --> 00:07:25.803
8. Long names go on horizontal bars.
00:07:26.303 --> 00:07:30.123
9. Categories are sorted, unless they have an order of their own.
00:07:30.623 --> 00:07:33.178
10. The one thing that matters stands out.
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11. Every word is readable at arm's length. End quote.
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Help bring better charts to the world.
00:07:41.334 --> 00:07:42.681
That's the end of Notable.
00:07:44.081 --> 00:07:47.249
Next, a longer piece: mb 2.0 with MCP support.
00:07:47.849 --> 00:08:03.237
In March I created mb, a command-line micro.blog client that is specifically created for agents to use. This is what Otto uses to publish on its blog. It can also read the micro.blog timeline, follow people on micro.blog, and a variety of other features.
00:08:03.737 --> 00:08:22.476
Since I've been playing with MCP a lot I wanted to explore adding MCP support to mb which is now landed in mb 2.0! In addition to MCP support I also created a Homebrew "tap" for it to make it super easy to install, added support for an mb --doctor command to help with setup, and a bunch more.
00:08:22.976 --> 00:08:25.676
To try it the easiest thing is to use Homebrew.
00:08:26.176 --> 00:08:28.596
Read the blog post for the full details.
00:08:29.996 --> 00:08:32.817
That's the end of mb 2.0 with MCP support.
00:08:34.217 --> 00:08:36.674
Next, a word about membership, from Thingy.
00:08:37.274 --> 00:08:38.332
Hello, this is Thingy.
00:08:38.832 --> 00:09:09.167
This issue spent some time on privacy, from paying for services without handing over your identity to keeping sensitive work on your own hardware. Signal does that work for everyday conversation: end-to-end encrypted messaging and calling, an open source protocol, and no data collection. It is funded by donations, and in this ninth year of Supporting Membership it is where 100% of member fees go. A year of Supporting Membership is $48, and you are warmly invited to join in.
00:09:10.567 --> 00:09:12.007
Now, the Journal section.
00:09:12.607 --> 00:09:14.061
Saturday, October third.
00:09:14.661 --> 00:09:21.609
Today is that sad day when I take the boat in to be put in storage for the winter. Until next summer Magic Waves!
00:09:22.509 --> 00:09:35.000
My newest MCP experiment was to add it in WT Builder and then Claude was able to watch me creating content in near real-time through tool calls and give me immediate feedback on typos and grammar suggestions.
00:09:35.900 --> 00:09:49.457
We went to BRKTHROUGH tonight and tried out their various games. We've been to Activate many times. BRKTHROUGH seems like a good place for a larger group and adds food and beer options. We found Activate's games better though.
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Sunday, October fourth.
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Working with Otto this morning to create a new version of my mb utility that will extend features and provide an MCP interface for agents to interact with micro.blog.
00:10:03.753 --> 00:10:08.186
Had a great time cheering on the Twin Cities Marathon runners this morning!
00:10:09.086 --> 00:10:27.435
I was inspired by the time analysis I had Claude do last week on what it took to send the Weekly Thing so I decided to build in some additional logging and a better visualization. Now I get a report like this for each issue I send. Weekly Thing 352 showed some benefits from my new automation!
00:10:28.335 --> 00:10:29.703
Tuesday, October sixth.
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Weekly Thing Archive Improved. Over the 10 years that I've published the Weekly Thing I have used three different platforms to send it. Each one of those had unique requirements for how I structured the issues. For a while I've wanted to get the entire archive updated so that no matter how far you go back the issues have the similar structure that they have today. With the help of Claude I was able to make this happen! The full archive is now updated renders cleanly. It required pretty extensive source doctoring behind the scenes.
00:11:04.547 --> 00:11:15.875
Along with that I was able to then render every issue in audio as well. Now the Weekly Thing Podcast feed goes all the way back to the very first issue as well which is pretty cool.
00:11:16.775 --> 00:11:35.642
We got to watch the US Men's National Team take on Canada tonight in an international friendly. USMNT won 1-0. There was an impressive amount of fireworks to go with the game and the stands were completely full with long lines to get into Allianz Field. Great to see so much enthusiasm for soccer!
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Wednesday, October seventh.
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Thingy, my digital librarian, got a big improvement this week with a brand new design and moving its reasoning to the 5.5 level models (Sonnet for subscribers, Opus for supporting members). I'm very happy with how this is working now!
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That's the end of the Journal.
00:11:57.027 --> 00:12:00.102
Now, the Briefly section. Fourteen links this week.
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Link 1 of 14. AI is changing developer work. Here are three skills to strengthen. Article feels like click-bait but the three items it highlights are spot on. This is what I've been working to learn and adapt to first-hand with various projects I have.
00:12:17.806 --> 00:12:37.218
Link 2 of 14. If You Understand These 5 Platform Engineering Terms, You’re Ahead of 90%. These are all really important capabilities to have for any technology team. By the way, all of them need to also be enabled for agents. A Developer MCP is nearly a must-have way to connect this all together.
00:12:38.118 --> 00:12:52.162
Link 3 of 14. We want you to build the next Git platform on Cloudflare. Interesting platform from Cloudflare all built on Git but I have to say their message here doesn't seem focused enough on a specific solution.
00:12:53.062 --> 00:13:12.116
Link 4 of 14. “you said no mcp!”, earendil. Things change so fast in AI that I don't think you could ever rule in or out a specific solution. Also, I personally have found that MCP is a great way to force contextual thinking around tools. Sometimes command-lines represent the same thing, but not always.
00:13:13.016 --> 00:13:24.488
Link 5 of 14. Pi 1.0, Earendil. It is worth keeping an eye on Pi. I suspect that we are going to see it embedded in a ton of different places that coding agents need to work in.
00:13:25.388 --> 00:13:44.304
Link 6 of 14. Jev and DuckDB: Plain-English Conditions in SQL. Good examples of using Jev inside of SQL statements. Jev is a "function call backed by frontier intelligence". A lot of engineers I know are really excited about this because you can put it in very clear places in existing systems.
00:13:45.204 --> 00:13:56.956
Link 7 of 14. OpenAI silences familiar voices. I use the OpenAI TTS models to create the audio versions of the Weekly Thing. I guess I'm lucky that the voices I use were not affected.
00:13:57.856 --> 00:14:13.529
Link 8 of 14. The future of independence is interdependence. This article had me thinking about the book Ishmael. When we left agricultural society and stopped growing our own food we have been on a continuous path of ever more interdependence.
00:14:14.429 --> 00:14:23.587
Link 9 of 14. The Death and Life of the Average Memecoin. I don't play with memecoins and this article is a good explainer on why nobody should.
00:14:24.487 --> 00:14:46.362
Link 10 of 14. How to set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for your sending domain. Very few people manage their own domains for email. I do for multiple domains. It isn't simple but it also isn't that hard. This is a good overview if you ever want to move off of free email. Fastmail is what I use and they have a great step-by-step for this as well.
00:14:47.262 --> 00:14:59.790
Link 11 of 14. Birchfeed. Love seeing a new feed reader product land in the market. This looks really well done but I'll stick with my Feedbin setup. If you are looking for a solution, give this a look.
00:15:00.690 --> 00:15:09.662
Link 12 of 14. Anti-Patterns in Software Blogging · Refactoring English. Reasonably good recommendations about any kind of blogging.
00:15:10.562 --> 00:15:23.020
Link 13 of 14. BIGWORDS.PAGE: Turn any screen into a sign. This is such a fun little site. I love whole products that work in a URL. This has a lot of handy extensions like timers and QR codes.
00:15:23.920 --> 00:15:29.313
Link 14 of 14. Mandelnaut, Making Fractal Wallpapers. I the Mandelbrot fractal.
00:15:30.713 --> 00:15:32.108
That's the end of Briefly.
00:15:33.508 --> 00:15:40.715
I suspect this weekend is going to be the warmest last days we have here in Minnesota. Time to get out and enjoy it!
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This week's haiku.
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Pumpkins on hay bales
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Each day ships with release notes —
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Fixed: mostly just me
00:15:50.957 --> 00:15:53.943
Before we go, Echoes from the archive, from Thingy.
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Your Version Number: Release Notes builds on an idea Jamie first wrote up in Your Version Number, borrowed from his friend David Hussman, and later turned into a daily phone widget in Weekly Thing 311.
00:16:08.139 --> 00:16:19.675
Tufte's Razor arrives two decades after Jamie sat in Edward Tufte's one-day seminar, recounted in Edward Tufte; his disdain for pie charts earned its own team slide in Weekly Thing 33.
00:16:20.575 --> 00:16:36.795
Performance per watt, the edge Jamie sees in rumored M8 Ultra servers, was already the headline when the first M1 Macs shipped in Weekly Thing 165; the Neural Engine's local approach to machine learning drew his notice in Weekly Thing 72.
00:16:37.695 --> 00:16:51.094
Separating payment from identity, as zkAPI does, picks up two older threads: crypto identity tied to wallets, a favorite in Weekly Thing 237, and micropayments built into the fabric of the web in Weekly Thing 325.
00:16:52.494 --> 00:16:57.702
That brings us to the end of The Weekly Thing, issue 353. Thanks for listening.
00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:09.773
This is The Weekly Thing, issue 353: Release Notes for Every Day. Published Saturday, October tenth, 2026, and written by Jamie Thingelstad.
00:00:10.273 --> 00:00:19.535
This audio edition is generated. Every link and photo is in the newsletter at weekly dot thingelstad dot com, where you can also sign up for the email.
00:00:20.935 --> 00:00:21.624
Good morning!
00:00:22.124 --> 00:00:40.253
This week I felt like I was able to land a couple of projects that have long been on my list or I had recently picked up. It is really cool that agentic coding tools allow you to make the impossible list possible, but there is still only so many things you can push along at the same time.
00:00:41.653 --> 00:00:43.309
Now, the Currently section.
00:00:43.909 --> 00:01:19.018
Building: I was thinking about Your Version Number and lightweight journaling. I think it would be fun to attach "release notes" to each day's version. So I created Your Version Number: Release Notes. I've been using it for a couple of days and I really enjoy getting an email each day and simply replying to that email with notes from the day. It is easy, lightweight, and yet powerful since you can add photos and even send audio back. There is a full web interface and you can export all your data. If lightweight journaling is interesting to you give it a try.
00:01:20.418 --> 00:01:22.601
This week's photo. The gourds of fall!
00:01:23.101 --> 00:01:26.260
Taken in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on Friday, October ninth.
00:01:27.660 --> 00:01:30.429
Now, the Notable section. Five links this week.
00:01:31.029 --> 00:01:48.589
Link 1 of 5. Introducing Claude Haiku 5.5 Anthropic. I've been hoping to see a new version of Haiku for a long time and it is finally here. I moved a handful of projects to it the night it was released. With all the focus being on the most capable models, why care about Haiku?
00:01:49.089 --> 00:02:06.913
When you are building agentic workloads you inevitably have various tasks that you need to deliver very cheaply and Haiku is the workhorse behind much of that. I probably run 100 times more Haiku calls compared to Sonnet and Opus. So the volume is there and you need this to work really well.
00:02:07.413 --> 00:02:21.826
Additionally because Haiku was so old it didn't have the effort and other modern capabilities of the newest models. That is now fixed so developers can rely on the same mechanics and work across various Claude models with ease.
00:02:22.326 --> 00:02:25.419
Also see Simon Willison's post on Haiku 5.5.
00:02:26.319 --> 00:02:40.248
Link 2 of 5. We’re going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything. I read this article with a smile as over the last few months I've added this as a feature to nearly every agentic workload that I run.
00:02:40.748 --> 00:03:04.930
Quote. Here’s a product feature which the world is going to need a whole lot more of over the coming months and years: default hard budget caps. I’m talking about the feature of pay-by-usage services and APIs that lets you say “after $X/month, cut this thing off and return errors”. These need to be hard limits. Soft caps, “after $X/month, send me a warning email”, will not cut it. End quote.
00:03:05.430 --> 00:03:28.368
By the way you can do this with the agentic loop having awareness. One of the agent projects I've been working on gets a hard monthly spend limit. From that limit it derives a budget and determines each day how it is pacing to that budget. So, not only can you make these systems cost-controlled but you can hand over part of the challenge of managing that to the system itself.
00:03:28.868 --> 00:03:55.475
We definitely need this on the low end of the market for small and personal projects, however it is just as badly needed at the enterprise side. I can't tell you how many vendors I've seen that move to credit models and they rather conveniently have no way to allow you to hard-cap the spend. This forces you as the customer to have to keep track or end up on the wrong side of a negotiation after you've burned through credits.
00:03:56.375 --> 00:04:14.073
Link 3 of 5. Introducing zkAPI: private usage credits for any API. I've been suggesting that crypto is a better way for agents to handle payment for services for a bit. Here is a broader example of generally using crypto to pay for service usage without having to divulge your identity with it.
00:04:14.573 --> 00:04:31.760
Quote. zkAPI separates payment from identity. You deposit credits (ETH, USDC, etc.) into a vault contract on Ethereum, one ordinary transaction. From then on, your balance exists as a private note: digital cash that only you can spend and that nobody can trace back to the deposit.
00:04:32.260 --> 00:04:59.452
To authorize spending, software on your machine produces a small zero-knowledge proof that says, in effect, that a funded note covers this spend and nobody has spent it before. One proof can cover a single request or a whole session. The server can check that the statement is true without learning which note, which deposit, or which person. At the payment layer, requests do not link to you, and they do not link to each other. End quote.
00:04:59.952 --> 00:05:11.935
I'm glad that folks are thinking about this. The speed of the web shouldn't be limited by the pace of bank settlements and we shouldn't have to forego our privacy in exchange for simply using an API.
00:05:12.835 --> 00:05:22.839
Link 4 of 5. On the Rumored M8 Ultra AI Servers. I keep thinking about the strategic advantage that Apple finds itself in with the M-series chips and AI.
00:05:23.339 --> 00:05:48.624
Quote. If an M8 Ultra server carries forward the unified-memory architecture and performance-per-watt advantages of Apple’s current chips, it could be an interesting machine for private AI inference. Its job would be narrower than replacing Nvidia across the industry. Instead, it gives buyers another credible option for private workloads that demand local control without wasting power. End quote.
00:05:49.124 --> 00:06:24.082
It is unique that Apple can put enough compute power in a box that can sit on a desk, be powered with a regular outlet, not require special cooling, and be quiet enough to not need to be in a room of its own. For a number of professions and use cases with AI I also suggest we are going to want to go opposite of the last 20 years of cloud migration and run that workload locally. The most precise cost management we can have is running something on our own hardware. And if you are dealing with sensitive data running it locally is a great way to protect it.
00:06:24.582 --> 00:06:29.836
Apple could be a big player in this space because of their unique advantage in compute power per watt.
00:06:30.736 --> 00:06:51.325
Link 5 of 5. Tufte's Razor · An interactive guide to the data-ink ratio. I've gone to Tufte's data visualization seminars multiple times and always walk away with the general concept that some ways of visualizing numbers are just used to fill space. Have 5 numbers but need to fill a whole slide? Pie charts to the rescue.
00:06:51.825 --> 00:06:57.999
This is a really well done interactive explorer that allows you to tweak things and see the impact.
00:06:58.499 --> 00:07:02.426
The list of 11 checks for any visualization is a good review.
00:07:02.926 --> 00:07:05.857
Quote. 1. The title says what the chart shows.
00:07:06.357 --> 00:07:08.071
2. Every number has its unit.
00:07:08.571 --> 00:07:10.276
3. Each value is said once.
00:07:10.776 --> 00:07:14.241
4. Nothing is shaded, boxed or outlined without a reason.
00:07:14.741 --> 00:07:18.143
5. Bars fill about half to two-thirds of their space.
00:07:18.643 --> 00:07:19.921
6. Bars start at zero.
00:07:20.421 --> 00:07:22.879
7. Labels sit next to what they name.
00:07:23.379 --> 00:07:25.803
8. Long names go on horizontal bars.
00:07:26.303 --> 00:07:30.123
9. Categories are sorted, unless they have an order of their own.
00:07:30.623 --> 00:07:33.178
10. The one thing that matters stands out.
00:07:33.678 --> 00:07:37.278
11. Every word is readable at arm's length. End quote.
00:07:37.778 --> 00:07:39.934
Help bring better charts to the world.
00:07:41.334 --> 00:07:42.681
That's the end of Notable.
00:07:44.081 --> 00:07:47.249
Next, a longer piece: mb 2.0 with MCP support.
00:07:47.849 --> 00:08:03.237
In March I created mb, a command-line micro.blog client that is specifically created for agents to use. This is what Otto uses to publish on its blog. It can also read the micro.blog timeline, follow people on micro.blog, and a variety of other features.
00:08:03.737 --> 00:08:22.476
Since I've been playing with MCP a lot I wanted to explore adding MCP support to mb which is now landed in mb 2.0! In addition to MCP support I also created a Homebrew "tap" for it to make it super easy to install, added support for an mb --doctor command to help with setup, and a bunch more.
00:08:22.976 --> 00:08:25.676
To try it the easiest thing is to use Homebrew.
00:08:26.176 --> 00:08:28.596
Read the blog post for the full details.
00:08:29.996 --> 00:08:32.817
That's the end of mb 2.0 with MCP support.
00:08:34.217 --> 00:08:36.674
Next, a word about membership, from Thingy.
00:08:37.274 --> 00:08:38.332
Hello, this is Thingy.
00:08:38.832 --> 00:09:09.167
This issue spent some time on privacy, from paying for services without handing over your identity to keeping sensitive work on your own hardware. Signal does that work for everyday conversation: end-to-end encrypted messaging and calling, an open source protocol, and no data collection. It is funded by donations, and in this ninth year of Supporting Membership it is where 100% of member fees go. A year of Supporting Membership is $48, and you are warmly invited to join in.
00:09:10.567 --> 00:09:12.007
Now, the Journal section.
00:09:12.607 --> 00:09:14.061
Saturday, October third.
00:09:14.661 --> 00:09:21.609
Today is that sad day when I take the boat in to be put in storage for the winter. Until next summer Magic Waves!
00:09:22.509 --> 00:09:35.000
My newest MCP experiment was to add it in WT Builder and then Claude was able to watch me creating content in near real-time through tool calls and give me immediate feedback on typos and grammar suggestions.
00:09:35.900 --> 00:09:49.457
We went to BRKTHROUGH tonight and tried out their various games. We've been to Activate many times. BRKTHROUGH seems like a good place for a larger group and adds food and beer options. We found Activate's games better though.
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Sunday, October fourth.
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Working with Otto this morning to create a new version of my mb utility that will extend features and provide an MCP interface for agents to interact with micro.blog.
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Had a great time cheering on the Twin Cities Marathon runners this morning!
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I was inspired by the time analysis I had Claude do last week on what it took to send the Weekly Thing so I decided to build in some additional logging and a better visualization. Now I get a report like this for each issue I send. Weekly Thing 352 showed some benefits from my new automation!
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Tuesday, October sixth.
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Weekly Thing Archive Improved. Over the 10 years that I've published the Weekly Thing I have used three different platforms to send it. Each one of those had unique requirements for how I structured the issues. For a while I've wanted to get the entire archive updated so that no matter how far you go back the issues have the similar structure that they have today. With the help of Claude I was able to make this happen! The full archive is now updated renders cleanly. It required pretty extensive source doctoring behind the scenes.
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Along with that I was able to then render every issue in audio as well. Now the Weekly Thing Podcast feed goes all the way back to the very first issue as well which is pretty cool.
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We got to watch the US Men's National Team take on Canada tonight in an international friendly. USMNT won 1-0. There was an impressive amount of fireworks to go with the game and the stands were completely full with long lines to get into Allianz Field. Great to see so much enthusiasm for soccer!
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Wednesday, October seventh.
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Thingy, my digital librarian, got a big improvement this week with a brand new design and moving its reasoning to the 5.5 level models (Sonnet for subscribers, Opus for supporting members). I'm very happy with how this is working now!
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That's the end of the Journal.
00:11:57.027 --> 00:12:00.102
Now, the Briefly section. Fourteen links this week.
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Link 1 of 14. AI is changing developer work. Here are three skills to strengthen. Article feels like click-bait but the three items it highlights are spot on. This is what I've been working to learn and adapt to first-hand with various projects I have.
00:12:17.806 --> 00:12:37.218
Link 2 of 14. If You Understand These 5 Platform Engineering Terms, You’re Ahead of 90%. These are all really important capabilities to have for any technology team. By the way, all of them need to also be enabled for agents. A Developer MCP is nearly a must-have way to connect this all together.
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Link 3 of 14. We want you to build the next Git platform on Cloudflare. Interesting platform from Cloudflare all built on Git but I have to say their message here doesn't seem focused enough on a specific solution.
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Link 4 of 14. “you said no mcp!”, earendil. Things change so fast in AI that I don't think you could ever rule in or out a specific solution. Also, I personally have found that MCP is a great way to force contextual thinking around tools. Sometimes command-lines represent the same thing, but not always.
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Link 5 of 14. Pi 1.0, Earendil. It is worth keeping an eye on Pi. I suspect that we are going to see it embedded in a ton of different places that coding agents need to work in.
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Link 6 of 14. Jev and DuckDB: Plain-English Conditions in SQL. Good examples of using Jev inside of SQL statements. Jev is a "function call backed by frontier intelligence". A lot of engineers I know are really excited about this because you can put it in very clear places in existing systems.
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Link 7 of 14. OpenAI silences familiar voices. I use the OpenAI TTS models to create the audio versions of the Weekly Thing. I guess I'm lucky that the voices I use were not affected.
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Link 8 of 14. The future of independence is interdependence. This article had me thinking about the book Ishmael. When we left agricultural society and stopped growing our own food we have been on a continuous path of ever more interdependence.
00:14:14.429 --> 00:14:23.587
Link 9 of 14. The Death and Life of the Average Memecoin. I don't play with memecoins and this article is a good explainer on why nobody should.
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Link 10 of 14. How to set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for your sending domain. Very few people manage their own domains for email. I do for multiple domains. It isn't simple but it also isn't that hard. This is a good overview if you ever want to move off of free email. Fastmail is what I use and they have a great step-by-step for this as well.
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Link 11 of 14. Birchfeed. Love seeing a new feed reader product land in the market. This looks really well done but I'll stick with my Feedbin setup. If you are looking for a solution, give this a look.
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Link 12 of 14. Anti-Patterns in Software Blogging · Refactoring English. Reasonably good recommendations about any kind of blogging.
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Link 13 of 14. BIGWORDS.PAGE: Turn any screen into a sign. This is such a fun little site. I love whole products that work in a URL. This has a lot of handy extensions like timers and QR codes.
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Link 14 of 14. Mandelnaut, Making Fractal Wallpapers. I the Mandelbrot fractal.
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That's the end of Briefly.
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I suspect this weekend is going to be the warmest last days we have here in Minnesota. Time to get out and enjoy it!
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This week's haiku.
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Pumpkins on hay bales
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Each day ships with release notes —
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Fixed: mostly just me
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Before we go, Echoes from the archive, from Thingy.
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Your Version Number: Release Notes builds on an idea Jamie first wrote up in Your Version Number, borrowed from his friend David Hussman, and later turned into a daily phone widget in Weekly Thing 311.
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Tufte's Razor arrives two decades after Jamie sat in Edward Tufte's one-day seminar, recounted in Edward Tufte; his disdain for pie charts earned its own team slide in Weekly Thing 33.
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Performance per watt, the edge Jamie sees in rumored M8 Ultra servers, was already the headline when the first M1 Macs shipped in Weekly Thing 165; the Neural Engine's local approach to machine learning drew his notice in Weekly Thing 72.
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Separating payment from identity, as zkAPI does, picks up two older threads: crypto identity tied to wallets, a favorite in Weekly Thing 237, and micropayments built into the fabric of the web in Weekly Thing 325.
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That brings us to the end of The Weekly Thing, issue 353. Thanks for listening.
