Cool Things - March 11, 2026

C’mon brain. Find a gear!

From Laptop

• AI hasn’t created a new problem for publishing – it has simply clarified an old one – ‘Publishers who built on search were renting an audience, not owning one.’ See also ‘If you are not paying for something, you are the product.’
• Katy Hessel’s books – I need to acquire some of these. Specifically ‘The Story of Art without Men’. Its amusing how much my art background is ‘western’ and male. Even though it is almost an even split gender-wise on my walls.
• Meta Workers Say They’re Seeing Disturbing Things Through Users’ Smart Glasses – A) don’t buy ‘smart’ glasses, B) be aware of them if you insist on A. But really, just don’t do A. If you thought the horrors the moderators went through with image uploads, live video is so so much worse.
• How I Dropped Our Production Database and Now Pay 10% More for AWS – You can skip down to ‘What I Did to Prevent This in the Future’ for a good set of steps. Also, yes. Sometimes paying for the full AWS is worth it.

From Phone

• Geezer Magazine – ‘the print-only magazine by, for, and about Gen Xers.’. Hopefully my local magazine peddler has this.
• Impulse – product that a friend of mine works on that lets ‘choreographers to explore large-scale movement and spatial composition beyond the limits of traditional rehearsal.’
• CFNY: The Spirit of Radio – I feel like this has been linked already, but CFNY is foundational to a lot of people my age / geography in terms of music
• Brilliant – a history of artificial light. 100% the level of nerdy I operate at
• “Staff Engineer’s Path” Resource List – even if you don’t buy the book (and you probably should?) the links associated with it are great.
• The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero – Spoiler, as with everything, it is about tradeoffs.
• The art of the perfect kitchen scissor – Subscription wall
• Investigating 15s HTTP response time in AWS ECS – AWS networking is complicated. Also an accidental reason to just use Fargate.
• Biological Twist: How Owls Spin Heads Around