I use 529s as a reminder that I like going on walks through the city. Especially with remote control, why not go for a walk now?

I've been working on Thanks, Computer - thanks.computer the past few months. It's a revival of Thanks, Jetpack, for any of you that remember that. :) ...more to come, but feel free to try it out. It's the backend that powers DripLit dripl.it

AI is for the curious. It's a tool that lets you wade into domains where you're clueless. Last night I used @AnthropicAI to see if the data showed any difference between the rates of disease in the parts of Japan that have 50hz electricity vs 60hz. github.com/mankins/50Hz-vs-6… [spoiler: nothing] My grandmother passed of Alzheimer's. I remember the family whispering about electricity as a kid. I wondered but never knew. I heard of a MIT report on 40hz and it reminded me. I am not a scientist, and am sure my exploration is wrong in many ways. I defer to actual experts who would know the countless reasons not to bother looking. It would have saved me an hour, but I do not know any of these researchers. The interesting part wasn't the conclusion, but getting to explore a field and problem space I knew nothing about. AI let me navigate Japanese as well as the domain-specific jargon, and do that while designing an experimental environment that would isolate variables and be actually testable. In my day-to-day doing web/ai platform engineering, that's just not something I do. To me the excitement of AI is not that it will do my job for me, but that it will help me understand different parts of the world quicker than I otherwise would be able to. With this new understanding, I can then synthesize, create, and combine to make art, tools, and build knowledge.

A new way to "read instead". This time over email, one "drip" at a time via DripLit → dripl.it 💧📕

My friend Claude throws in words like this exploring in Chinese sometimes. It's a bit odd, but I like learning the words. In context: > dispatching deeper code探索 to subagents

I've been going back through early AI and cybernetics papers lately, looking for better metaphors to describe some current work that doesn't have a solid modern vocabulary. There's so much rich work that helps describe the systems we're building today. I love the feel of this image from Selfridge's Pandemonium. His concept of demons firing in parallel was close to what I was looking for. What other papers have you rediscovered as relevant? gwern.net/doc/ai/nn/1959-sel…

Can we still have a fossil-free internet by 2030? It's looking harder: fossilfree.greenweb.org/2026

Where did my Whole Earth Catalog go? Did I lend it to you? If you want to understand why I got into "computers", watch this. nytimes.com/2026/04/24/opini…

DIDs are cool, but we didn't use them. inamoon.com/blog/dids-vs-sub… ⚠️ includes Ted Nelson's "Transclusion" and a reference to a 112 org founded by Irving Berlin. You've been warned!

I'm much more comfortable making tools for creators than being one. Tips from any founders on how they made this transition?

Built for people, not bots is the right intent. Preservation matters. But the web's problem isn't just how content is accessed, it's that the people that create it (or infrastructure providers like ia) aren't rewarded on use. If we can fix the incentives, we can align the web for the long term.

Nice way inbox surprise this morning: two app store rejections on two different apps! They seem quite subjective, especially as the app has passed previously... try try again

Everything takes so long... I'm waiting on Apple to approve a TestFlight beta build. Shouldn't these things be quicker than a week?

A friend noticed that many of her artist friends were newly doing projects that involved code [assisted by ai]. As a coder I have found that I too am stretching my comfort zone, doing more visual projects. Creativity is still required, but we just have more tools for expression.

It's been 25 years since I first came to Singapore. I look forward to talk about the @xrplf at @rippleswell tomorrow. If you're in town, come say hi 👋