Notes for July 17, 2026

The Vampire Problem: The Paradoxical Psychology of Why It Is So Hard to Change via The Marginalian

The problem is pressing, because many of life’s big personal decisions are like this: they involve the choice to undergo a dramatically new experience that will change your life in important ways, and an essential part of your deliberation concerns what your future life will be like if you decide to undergo the change. But as it turns out, like the choice to become a vampire, many of these big decisions involve choices to have experiences that teach us things we cannot know about from any other source but the experience itself.

On Loving a Senior Dog via Notes by JCProbably

Cocoa isn’t just my dog. She’s my soul dog. The only way I’ve ever been able to explain it is that it feels like, in another lifetime, we were one soul that somehow found its way back together again in this one.

Maybe that’s why everything just feels extra heavy lately. The thought of mortality doesn’t just feel like a heartbreak. It feels like imagining a part of my soul being torn away.

But she’s still here.

I’m trying not to grieve tomorrow while we’re still living today. I’ll keep helping her heal, maintain her quality of life, celebrating the good days, and loving her through every moment we still get to share.

I feel this so much. We have a few cats and a little rat terrier at home, but my 18 year old cat Pepper is the most important one in the whole world to me. I have anxiety about how old she's getting, but she's been through so much with me and she just keeps on going. I definitely baby her more than the other animals. I'll sneak her extra treats sometimes when no one's looking, and she has toys that are just hers, that she treats like little trophies. I, too, have to shake it off and tell myself pretty regularly that we've had nearly two decades together already and I need to appreciate her while she's here instead of looking too far into the future.

I'm still new here. Just found out about the ATStore! You can browse different apps on ATProto, which is nice because before I knew about it, I was just googling random shit and going off Bluesky posts to find new stuff here.

Last night I found possibly my favorite RSS reader yet on it: Glean.at. It feels sorta like Miniflux in a way; the simplicity of it and all. But it also integrates Leaflet posts and adds the social aspect of trending stories, similar content you might like, and it has a neat AI summarizer for the top news of the day. You log in with your Bluesky handle and then you can import your OPMLs and all that good stuff.

People, Not Posts via Real Housewives of San Francisco

Blink-182 Team Up With Pac-Man For Arcade Collaboration via Retro Dodo

This seems like a weird collab but then again Mark hasn't taken off that 7-11 Pac-Man shirt for like three years...

A tiny keypad for chatting with chatbots via Boing Boing

Codex Micro is a keypad by Work Louder, for OpenAI, that's designed for use specifically with LLM-related tasks such as chatting to chatbots and marshalling your agents. It has 16 RGB keyswitches (clicky or silent) in a 4×4 grid and 32 keycaps for various functions; the corner switches are fancy rotary ones and it comes with dials and knobs for them.

I admit I'm probably turning into a grumpy old man a little more every day, but who actually needs this?

Rant incoming: I feel like we're at a point in the evolution of tech where everything useful has already been invented. Though I can't help but think of my dad back when smartphones first came out. He was still rocking an old HP tower running Windows XP and he'd always say shit like "I don't need a computer in my pocket I just need my PHONE to be a PHONE!"

Meanwhile these days he's just as addicted to social media and TikTok brainrot as any other boomer. He uses speech-to-text because he never quite learned how to type on a qwerty keyboard efficiently and of course he still needs to text and drive somehow. He uses Google Lens or whatever it's called to do AI searches of random shit, and he's still blown away by the fact that you can use Shazam to figure out what song is playing on the radio in a matter of seconds.

A lot of boomers thought smartphones would be a total flop because it was such a wildly new idea; to be eternally connected to broadband and chronically online via tiny pocket-sized computer.

15 years later or so, we're all addicted to these things. Even I didn't think touchscreens would ever take off because typing on a slide-out keyboard with physical buttons is so much better, but here we are.

Any time I see a new piece of hardware for AI, I can't help thinking of the Humane AI Pin. For a (very) premium price, you can have a clip-on microphone and camera that can do all the things an AI assistant can do on your phone, only shittier.

And maybe I am just set in my old ways; I still wear a digital Casio watch because I think smartwatches are too much. But as much as I hate the implications, I won't be totally delusional and say AI is a total failure or just a trend that'll disappear in a couple years. It's clearly here to stay, and will continue to be crammed into every facet of our lives from here on out.

I just don't think we need a whole hardware industry for it, but I guess there's a market for it. I will never be okay with smart glasses though. That's a hill I'll die on.

1Password lets Claude log you into websites without ever seeing your passwords via TNW

Even without seeing your passwords, this still creeps me out. Like I wouldn't even trust a close friend with my Yubi Key... nothing is sacred anymore 🤪