Hi everyone. Bad news.

SaaS was a flop :/

Turns out that the subscription services market is completely. utterly. sloppily. saturated with softcore porn, Substack bloggers, and subscription services that track how many subscription services you’re subscribed to. There’s no longer a way for a hot young and hungry startup to get subbed :(

Which is why I’m excited and indeed thrilled to tell you about my new startup!!!! ->

ITOLDYOUIDONTWRITEWITHAI (DOT COM)

Now I know what you’re thinking because I do in fact have your webcam enabled and am watching you read these words but trust me:

it’s not what it sounds like.

Here’s the big messy problem that we all have that I and my team are solving: sometimes a robot is writing online and nobody knows about it unless it’s an untalented robot used by a stupid man.

This big sticky problem is so big and so sticky that a few humans with grotesquely large brains and Toyota Camry sized intellects created an AI (robot) that tells us (human) when something is written by the untalented robot and the stupid man.

We all like this friendly AI robot and have no problems with it whatsoever BUT there is a huge problem with the friendly robot!

How do we know this “friendly” robot built by the big brains and the throbbing intellects really is a friendly robot and not just another untalented robot made by the stupid man (men?‽!) to trick us innocent internet surfers into thinking we are reading the delightful written works of another bipedal chemical-slave with appendages that operate a multi-media gadget?

we can’t even trust the friendly robot...........

And that’s where we at ITOLDYOUIDONTWRITEWITHAI (DOT COM) step in!!!

For a one-time fee a ITOLDYOUIDONTWRITEWITHAI certified technician will enter your home and watch you.

Watch you write. Watch to make sure that you’re writing.

AND I SEE YOU THINKING AGAIN please stop right now and let me finish!

Don’t worry we aren’t going to tell you that we are watching! Of course not! How then would we know whether or not you just hired us the one time that you wrote it for real but actually everything else is robot AI and you are in fact the stupid man (woman?‽‽)?

We will be watching.

AND once we’re satisfied that you are a real human writing real writing with real appendages and emotions and skin we will certify you with the official* ITOLDYOUIDONTWRITEWITHAI badge that you can share with friends or lovers on LinkedIn, Facebook, or other digital townsquare on the free and open web!

But again, AGAIN with these fucking problems.

Because you know what?

How do I know that the robot isn’t sitting in your hat like Remy the fucking rat making your fingers tap tap tap away on your fucking keyboard?

How don’t I know that YOU aren’t the unfriendly robot!

There’s only one way I can know.

only one way I could know.

and I see you–that beautiful face illuminated by the glow of your multi-media device reading these ITOLDYOUIDONTWRITEWITHAI certified words. I see your horror. Your shock. Because you know what I have to do.

because you know it’s the only way I could know.

because you know it means that I’m gonna have to

GIVE YOU 50% OFF YOUR FIRST ORDER USING PROMO CODE: ENTERMYHOMEATANUNSPECIFIEDTIMEIGIVEYOUFULLPERMISSIONANDWILLNOTCONTACTMYLAWYEROROTHERLEGALAUTHORITIESBECAUSEIDEFINITELYWANTPEOPLETOKNOWTHATIDONTWRITEWITHAI

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*Calling something official is a great way to make something sound official even if you’re just some guy. This is official for real though.

If you hadn’t heard:

AGI is in, having a job is out.

Democratic Socialism is in, culture war is out

Capitalism is fucked, nobody’s gonna fix it

Except me and my new hot startup!

It’s this new thing called: SaaS!

Now I know what you’re thinking

Ozzy! We already have SaaS! It’s dying along with everything else that isn’t made out of trillions of hyper-parameters and named Claude ¿¿¿Qué pasa????

BUT I’m not talking about that SaaS!

This is SaaS!!

SaaS is the latest frontier for every red-blooded, steak munchin’, mud slingin’, city slickin’, bum kickin’, tax dodgin’, exotic pet tradin’, grass mowin’, butt chuggin’, American out there!

SaaS began when I (an American) sat down with a fellow (I don’t recall the name) who described himself as Republican or maybe it was Democrat. Not important. But anyways as I was saying I was sitting with this guy and he told me how he just hates paying the government for services he ain’t receiving.

And I said well now hold on a minute my good dear friend, you are getting services aren’t you such as this bench we’re sitting on in this lovely park? Such as the lovely roads we took to arrive at said park. Such as the lovely military folks whose keeping the bad folks to mindin’ their own. Such as but then he stopped me and he said:

I don’t want none of that my dearest beautiful bro. All I need Mr. President to do for me is to provide me with well structured zoning protections bound with those nice, what do you call it

spiral bound?

yes that’s it! Provide me with those well structured zoning protection regulations and only those regulations in a nice spiral bound book with that nice professional cardstock so folks are believing it when I show them they can’t build their horse fuckin’ data farm on this or that or the other lot.

And you know what? HE WAS RIGHT!

We don’t need all of these services, I don’t know whomst I’m paying who the hell is this IRS garnishing my hard paid work?

We ain’t a collective!! I said aloud and I ran to my home and I began to write.

I began to write a plan, a pitch, to present to you today a pitch for—>

Socialism as a Service!

SaaS is a lot like your regular plain old socialism the same that your grandpa lost his job over cause he was caught with a crumpled flyer reading “socialist teens show it all” hidden in his waste bin in 1958! Too bad he wasn’t union!

But plain old socialism, like all legacy brands, needs a hard reset. Excuse my french but I’d go as far as saying it’s due for a Hard Fork!

Why operate as a communal group of individuals bound by common virtue and purpose with a understanding that as a collective we are stronger together and cannot be bound by the false gods of technologopicalism?

We’re not fuckin’ or fucking communists are we? We’re not filthy disgusting collectivists are we? Most surely we are not bound and gagged by technologopitilists like the Zuckenbergers or the Valley of Boys but they’re Toys or the Nazdak are we?

NO! We shall not do that because instead (this is the cool part):

we can pay a simple monthly subscription and receive social services or save with an annual plan!

and the best part?

it’s all free*

No need to own your own food. No need to own your own GPURAM cluster or chicken farm. No need to live in a house or even a home.

Nope none of that. This, my friends, is the next great leap in political and economic technoutopianism.

Here’s how it works

think: -> Hello Fresh for Social Welfare

We all love Hello Fresh!

Instead of waiting around wishing that an adequate meal would magically appear disassembled for us to enjoy manually mixing together and eating for a 2-6 week trial period, we just pay a simple monthly fee and–unbelievably–those ingredients really do appear. They really do and I wish I knew how those buggers at Hello Fresh pulled it off.

I’m sure you’re already way ahead of me by now you little Feynman oh you! But let me finish my pitch before you get all giggly! WE the visionaries let YOU the people pay one (simple) monthly price and all of the components of socialism that none of us feel like running to the store for show up in a box in front of a home or PO box.

Except it won’t be a box its much better because its actually just the idea of the box. The idea of the box with all the different ingredients of social unification inside and YOU the genius who signed up for the early bird special (GOSH YOURE SO SMART) get to make the magic happen!

We are raising a series A right now & accepting offers from individuals with proven track records in 100m dash, 400m sprints, with relay a nice to have & if your organization is named after a dark colored rock, a big tree endemic to Southern California, surnames of people that I don’t know and are therefore strangers, or a word that sounds cool but I don’t really get what it has to do with money then we will hear your offer but we will not be accepting unless its a really good offer.

And remember:

It’s not SaaS – It’s SaaS!!!!!!!!!!

[hold for applause]

*This is false.

Place to place, sort of lost, I wandered in a small oldish town.

It was a familiar labyrinth with much to see, small as it was.

The density was stimulating though, at each location of interest, I found there was not a place for me.

An exotic car, a Bugatti I’m sure, passed. Wrapping around a bend on the brick-laden street.

Now parked in a stone lot I stood beside that beautiful machine but that was all.

The lot was for a restaurant. Fancier than any restaurant I’ve dined at.

I did go inside, not for long. The place was not for me.

The other places I do not quite recall but they weren’t for me either. Until, I do recall, the penultimate destination, a small shop or gathering place.

There was lots of glass and it was cramped but not uncomfortable. Also not for me.

I did not interact with those inside the shop and do not believe I was perceived.

I exited, not the way I came in, but through the rear. I think it was a window but it was not strange for me to exit that way.

Through now I found myself in a stamp of grass, the sky was dark. I’m not sure how dark it was before, perhaps just before dusk. Warm light beckoned from the other places I had been.

There was a stone wall, I leapt over.

Still in the grass below the shop was the exposed wall of a subterranean level. It was not a basement, I would not use that word.

I get the sense I was trying to leave at this point but was stopped by this final attraction:

the exposed wall was bisected by an appropriately-sized glass door. A double door. I again felt that it could’ve been a window instead. It was open.

On either side were billowing flowy curtains revealing an unfelt breeze.

Something was different about this place because I did not move on, rather I leaned on one wooden side of the door’s frame, the left, and was absorbed.

Inside there was a woman with perhaps 6 children, various ages. All were talking, not like children but not quite like adults. Akin to an intellectual salon, the woman a guide for socratic discussion of a child’s perspective on whatever world this was. I was drawn to the openness.

And I was drawn to the coziness. I was compelled not only to stay but to speak.

I told the woman and the children heard too that I found this little scene quite lovely, trying not to sound like I hoped to be invited in, though I did.

They did invite me though or at least the woman did and the children were happy to have another queryable adult.

But then I learned I had a phone in my pocket when it loudly and terribly dinged, antithetic to this space I found.

One of the children, a girl lounging comfortably on the floor, looked at me disapprovingly and asked the woman to ask me to turn it off. I felt myself reaching into my pocket to silence the device before she finished, sharing the feeling with this girl and hating the sound of it.

I remained in the door. We discussed various subjects me and the children. The woman stayed silent and let the children lead.

The subject I do recall was a boy standing on the opposite side of the room from me, about 13 years old, discussing his investments in cryptocurrency. Perhaps it was due to my own ill-fated fascination with the subject years ago that I asked why not invest in something less speculative (I did not question that a child was investing at all). The boy was defensive but debated well and in jest.

I was not ready to leave but had found a lull to check the phone in my pocket. I intended to notify my partner where I was to avoid worry or suspicion but instead

I woke up

.

At some point, maybe by mistake, humanity evolved awareness. Developed an ego. A self.

As unlikely as it may seem given hundreds of millions of cellular Earth-bound years of life before us and billions of solar years of this existence before that, the self only developed a few hundred thousand years ago. Anything resembling the human mind as we know it now is at most some tens of thousands of years old.

Something about it does feel impossible or magical or designed. But it also just sort of makes sense.

What better way to survive and pass on your genes than to be aware of mortality? To not just be a sentient automaton avoiding pain and seeking pleasure, but to know you hate pain and love pleasure. To get better at ensuring your self can avoid pain and capture pleasure. To get better at ensuring those around you, who likely share your genes, can avoid pain and capture pleasure.

To not just avoid death as a consequence of pain avoidance, but to feel an existential horror at the realization that the self can go away. That your felt existence is not permanent. You must protect your self and the selves of your kin with impunity.

This impunity led homosapien to dominate the Earth and triumph over creatures stagnant in chance evolution.

But no amount of power could make the horror go away.

I am not religious but I can understand the benefits of faith.

Early religion was very likely a direct product of response to the horror of non-existence. Hank Green recently made an excellent video covering a fictional version of primordial religion, ancestor theology. This form of religion is deeply tied to those that came before you and how they affect the world you are living in now. This is something much harder to feel in our modern lives compared to the small tribes of hunter-gatherers that existed for millennia before history began.

But as civilizations grew out of tribes ancestor theology couldn’t quite cut it for much the reason it doesn’t cut it for most people today. There are so many people in your life and around your life that those that came before you feel too disconnected from your sense of self to be worshiped or regarded in any sense beyond a dull thrum.

Religion needed an upgrade and over thousands of years it developed in different places and in different ways and for most people practicing some religion in the world today that resulted in monotheism. An all powerful God to instill a sense of morality in an otherwise disconnected populace. Of course disagreements about this all powerful God have led to some of the most immoral behaviors the Earth (hopefully the universe) has ever seen but that’s not what I’m writing about today.

The point is that whatever religion one might practice, it’s purpose, whether an individual is aware of it or not, is to protect one’s self from the horror that made us the most dominant being the Earth has ever seen. There’s probably a reason why so many stories going back centuries are some moral platitude about how acquiring power doesn’t lead to satisfaction. Though we didn’t ask for it, we traded the satisfaction of ignorance for the horror to gain our power.

I’m not sure what’s different about the faithless mind that makes religion not suitable for protection. I guess the real answer is the worst one in that it’s different for everybody and more complicated than you could ever imagine. So I can only really speak for myself.

I was not raised very religious. Never went to church or had religious iconography in our home. But my parent’s having been raised religious did lead to a bit of that puritanical worldview rubbed off into my upbringing. I went to church with friends sometimes when that was my only option to keep hanging out rather than going home and being bored. A few times on and off in my youth I thought I was religious or at least thought it was worth trying in case the world really ended in 2012.

But ultimately the contradictions inherent in organized religion and my embrace of science led me away from organized religion entirely. I still pursue spirituality to some degree but it is always in the context of connection to the Earth, reality, my own mind, or some other way that feels grounded in material reality and not reliant on faith.

I find that an atheistic spiritual “practice” does in some way ease the horror but sometimes I wonder if I’m just kidding myself.

Most of the time I’m quite content in knowing what I know, accepting what I don’t, and finding wonder in that which is unknowable.

It’s that last bit that is most akin to spiritualism but most separate from modern religion. But it is very much a practice and less so a feeling. I practice wonder and calm in the face of all that is beyond the human mind. My human mind and all human minds. But do I really feel that way?

I think most of the time my coming to terms with this literal horror beyond comprehension is more just thought strategies to deflect or shield my primal ego from reality. Though I like to think my methods are more based in truth than methods involving tales of the supernatural, as compelling as those might be.

When I think about how much I don’t understand about how the world works, I think about how beautiful it is to be a part of it anyway.

When I think about how small I am in this universe, I find comfort in how small my mistakes and insecurities are on that scale.

When I fear non-existence I frame it as merging back to the part of the universe I was a part of before I was born.

When I fear returning to the place I was before I was born I imagine that I am part of the lucky generation to be born at the place in the technological exponential curve where the singularity arrives in my life time.

But there’s a problem with these and all the other philosophical and empirical ways that I navigate the horror of the insignificance of my ego. There is no off-ramp except in rare moments of deep meditative blankness. There is no way to shut off the questions, there is no God to ask for answers and there is nobody waiting for me on the other side of darkness. There is only the horror. The horror that only exists as long as I do.

I call these failures of my ego’s defense by different names but the term that comes up again and again is vertigo.

I first heard vertigo outside the context of a physical sensation of dizziness in conversation about AI development. There have been multiple times since November 2022 where it felt very difficult to place ourselves on the exponential timeline. Where the prospects of rapid speed and intelligence runaways have made me and others connected to the community feel momentarily overwhelmed.

I’ve since identified two common occurrences of psychological vertigo in myself, temporal and existential, though both are tightly related.

Temporal vertigo is specifically caused by the realization of my smallness in time. I really want to emphasize the word realization here because it’s not just accepting that I occupy such a small chunk of time relative to everything. It’s not knowing it or talking about it. It’s feeling it.

It might start with something innocuous like looking at an old photo. Thinking about how the people in that photo existed in that period of time. That that was a moment that really happened. That they had lives before and after that.

Then I think about how even calling a photo old is sort of silly in the context of humanity, it was only invented around 200 years ago. Society only started around 5000 years ago. People have only been since around 300,000 years ago. It scales backwards like this quickly until landing on the real sucker punch that all of existence is only a blink compared to the rest of existence we have left to go.

Whether we’re the first universe, one of many, one in a long chain of universes, our best understanding only shows us 13.8 billion years. Even the more conservative estimates of the lifetime of the universe are many hundreds of billions of years more. Most are much, much longer than that.

None of this occurs to me logically or in order, it’s more that all of these thoughts converge in a single moment and the pearl of horror my ego keeps shielded with all of it’s might at all times briefly pierces through my psychological armor and in that moment I feel the crushing weight of insignificance. Sometimes my body goes cold or my heart races.

But thankfully, it never lasts more than a few seconds. The feeling subsides quickly back into rationalization and romanization. I think how yes I’m insignificant and how that doesn’t matter. Because I feel existence and no matter what is true in whatever base reality is, I can just keep living.

That’s really the key to escaping the feeling at all. And why it never lasts more than a moment. Because it is literally beyond comprehension. Non-existence can’t be comprehended by a mind which exists. So that pearl hidden by my ego isn’t so much a pearl but a vacuum, a black hole.

Try as I might to view the inside or avoid it entirely, my mind is slowly drawn in before being shot off in high speed upon near contact with the event horizon. One day, whether it’s tomorrow, 80 years, 200 years, or at the heat death of the universe, my ego will finally collapse into the darkness. It will merge with the black hole at the center of the self and cease.

I’m one of those people with software switching sickness. I see a shiny new tool or utility and I can’t help myself but to try it out.

That being said, trying so much software has led me to a place where I have the most solid tech “stack” I’ve ever had in my life. I rarely use default tools, not that I’m against them, they’re usually just missing something I need and I’d rather count on a (sometimes) small developer to update their application and respond to feedback than a multi-billion (or trillion) dollar company.

All of the applications I mention here I use on my Mac and iPhone (Apple please fix the keyboard so I don’t need to switch to Android) but I will list all platforms where each utility is available so if you use Linux or Android you’ll know if it’s available. If you use Windows... get some help.

There will be a loose order to this post, Mac first (since I see so many people using their Macs like they’re from the stone age) then iPhone. I’m going to start with the applications I think people would be most likely to know and move from there, iceberg style.

One more thing... I have home-lab and privacy/security tech stack posts planned for sometime this year so some may be mentioned, some might not be, there will be more in-depth in the future.

⚠️None of the companies who make these tools have paid me in any way shape or form. If someone wants to give me money for some reason that would be pretty cool.

Mac Applications

Raycast - The Everything Utility - Mac/Windows - Freemium

If you are involved in the tech or productivity hacking community at all, I’m sure you already use or have at least heard of Raycast. The hype around the product is inescapable and totally deserved.

If you haven’t heard of it, imagine if by simply pressing ⌘ + space on your keyboard you had instant access to every basic (or advanced!) tool you can think of.

Basics such as file and web search, calculator, clipboard history, and much more.

You can also add extensions for an incredible amount of apps to quickly launch specific features of certain utilities or apps that you use.

Is the single utility that will make you feel like a Mac Power-User within 20 minutes of downloading.

Shottr - Better Screenshots - Mac - Freemium

The built in screen-shotting on Mac leaves much to be desired.

Shottr adds in all the extra features you want and more.

I personally use it for the excellent area capture feature, OCR/QR, and scrolling screenshots.

Paired with Raycast you’ll have instant access to every feature available in Shottr without even needing to worry about remembering hot-keys.

VLC - Industrial-Grade Video Player - Everything - Free/Open-Source

I’d be shocked if you haven’t heard of VLC or at least recognize their little traffic cone logo.

If you have an obscure video file, VLC will support it.

VLC’s feature-set goes deep but, if that’s the sort of thing you need, you already know about VLC. Great utility to have downloaded alongside Mac’s default Quicktime player for those edge cases.

Time Machine - Local Mac Backups - Mac - Free (but you need an external hard drive)

I’m putting this on here to shame you if you aren’t backing up your computer.

Apple makes it so damn easy with Time Machine!

Plug in a external hard drive, open Time Machine to run initial setup, and backup your machine!!!

It sucks so badly to lose a file or God forbid your entire hard drive and not have it all backed up. You don’t want to have to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for data recovery that won’t get everything back, especially when it’s so easy to back everything up.

If you backup to the cloud, that’s okay, but trust me, you’re always better off having a local backup too.

Homebrew - Package Manager - Mac, Linux - Free/Open-Source

Homebrew makes downloading CLI utilities (if you have to lookup CLI and aren’t a tech person, don’t worry about it) and Desktop applications that aren’t on the App Store much easier.

Not only easier to install, but easier to update and maintain as well.

Many of the applications you see on this list will have a little line of code that looks like this: brew install --cask raycast right on the homescreen. That lets you download the application easy without needing to download the .dmg and clicking around and all of that non-poweruser nonsense.

Afraid of the Terminal? Raycast has a Homebrew extension so instead of looking at the scary blinking cursor you can do ⌘ + space to bring up the Raycast launcher, type brew and easily run a search for whatever you want to install.

Ghostty - Terminal Emulator - Mac, Linux - Free/Open-Source

If you’re not afraid of the CLI you also probably already know about Ghostty.

I’ve tried many terminal emulators and Ghostty is the only one that’s stuck.

It has all the features you need and none you don’t.

It’s fast. It’s minimal. If you’re interested in trying a new emulator or learning more about what you can accomplish without a GUI, there’s a reason you can’t stop hearing about this emulator.

Keka - File Compression - Mac, iOS - Free (on the website)

If you only ever unzip files, you probably don’t need Keka.

If you find yourself needing to zip files that need to be encrypted or are too large to keep in one .zip, Keka is simple, easy, and awesome.

PDFgear - PDF Viewing and Editing - Mac, Windows, iOS, Android - Free

If you’re like me an avoid using Adobe products at all costs (or rather, to avoid their costs) delete Acrobat off your computer right now and download PDFgear.

This utility is better in every way, is free, isn’t Adobe, I can’t recommend it enough if you ever have to work with this terrible format.

Obsidian - Detailed Note-Taking and Knowledgebase - Mac, Linux, Windows, iOS, Android - Free

It took me a very long time to settle on a note-taking application/system. It’s so easy to get overwhelmed. Unless your brain really works in a database system more akin to Notion just stop looking for a better system and stick with Obsidian. I tried so many other apps along the way needlessly.

Obsidian is free, the company is intentionally small and not run by VC zealots who will constantly push bloated features and subscriptions in your face (Notion....) and everything is local.

Obsidian was the application that introduced me to the flexibility of Markdown, a format I now literally use for everything.

You can keep everything as simple as you want, notes in folders that are all stored in plain text files right on your machine. You can take the next step up and use links to create connections between your notes and ideas. Or you can push it as far as you want with a giant plug-in library which is completely open.

Download any feature you want, remove the built in ones you don’t want, or code/vibe-code the feature nobody else has thought of yet!

One important tip: you will waste weeks of your life if you try to make the perfect system right off the bat and there are endless Obsidian setup tutorials on Youtube... just start taking notes, linking them, and adding features/systems as you go.

Typora - Markdown Editor - Mac, Linux, Windows - $14.99

Every document I create I create in Markdown. Whether it’s writing for my blog, technical documentation for work, journaling, literally anything where I’m writing shit down, I use Markdown. I need to write a whole post sometime about markdown but it truly makes using a computer and organizing a life so much easier, portable, and resilient against change/corruption.

Anyways, my non-note-taking writing I do in Typora. I’ve tried a few others but they try to do too much. Typora keeps it simple, a blank white page with extensive markdown support. All of your in-line formatting will instantly transform to beautiful rich-text like rendering. I’m open to other options but this is the best I’ve tried and I doubt I’d have reason to switch.

One .md caveat is that I will often use TextEdit or even VScode for certain purposes. TextEdit for when I’m just making a quick note or writing a few notes during a meeting, VScode when I’m working with a coding agent and providing lists of UX improvements.

Blip - File Sharing that Doesn’t Suck - Mac, Linux (soon), Windows, iOS, Android - Free

I just recently found out about Blip and I believe this may be the first tool to fix something you’d think was easy by now: file sharing.

Sure you can upload your file to Google Drive or AirDrop it or if it’s small enough even email it, but all of those services have about 30 different ways they fail or are otherwise annoying.

With Blip you just sign-up, search for a friend or co-worker by username, and send them the file. I’ve only used it a couple times so far but it’s completely seamless every time. Don’t need to worry about file size, type, or uploading it to the cloud.

This feels like how it should’ve always been.

Zen - The Best Web Browser so Far - Mac, Linux, Windows - Free/Open-Source

Like many people, I was introduced to the next evolution of web browsing by Arc around 2023. I loved Arc and was depressed when they sunset it.

After that announcement I tried a few other browsers, including Zen, switching back to Chrome, Firefox, Atlas, and Dia (the successor to Arc).

I was not enthused with Zen at first but a few months after I first tried it (the service was and still is in beta) I decided to give it another go. Chrome wasn’t allowing ublock origin anymore which was a complete dealbreaker for me and I like using as much open-source software as possible, especially for something as important as my browser.

I was pleasantly surprised at the pace of improvement, it went from sloppy Arc on Firefox clone to polished Arc on Firefox within months! The project has tons of traction and it gets better all the time. I’ll still run into performance issues here and there but it’s worth it to me to have all the amazing features it brings to my experience, all while running on open-source Firefox rather than privacy nightmare Chrome.

That being said, I do still have Chrome for the very rare cases that as site requires it or performs unacceptably poorly. Also for cross-testing websites and trying out Chrome-only extensions like Claude in Chrome

Pixelmator Pro - An Okay Photo Editor - Mac - $49.99 or subscription

I’m not gonna lie, I’m was pretty underwhelmed by my purchase of Pixelmator Pro. I bought it after it was announced Apple acquired the service because I figured if Apple is buying it it must be pretty good.

I’ve used Affinity products from time to time but since Serif, the company behind Affinity, was purchased by Canva, I figured I should look elsewhere. Well actually it was more because I barely do very advanced photo editing so every time I went back to Affinity Photo I’d feel overwhelmed when I just wanted to make a few small edits.

Pixelmator is fine for basic photo editing but I honestly hate the UI, the AI features feels hopelessly behind, and the “advanced” features are mid-weak.

I’m still using it for now but I’ve been thinking about switching to Canva’s new Affinity or Gimp.

I have more and more relied on Gemini Nano Banana Pro/2 for simple photo edits but it’s only useful for tiny edits or meme edits for my use-cases. I find OpenAI’s ChatGPT images to still be superior in terms of overall image and edit quality but I’m trying to completely cut OpenAI out of my life.

Final Cut Pro - Easy and Powerful Video-Editing - Mac - $299.99 or subscription

I bought FCP so long ago I forgot that is was $300. Did I really pay that much...?

Apple’s new Creator Studio is honestly a pretty damn good deal $12.99 a month and includes Final Cut Pro if $300 is too steep for you.

OR if you really only need the basics then the non-pro free alternative classic, iMovie, can do all the basics 99% of people need.

balenaEtcher - Easy OS Flashing - Mac, Linux, Windows - Free

I doubt many of you will ever need to flash an OS onto a thumbdrive or SD card but, if you do, and I hope you do, balenaEtcher works flawlessly for me everytime.

Want to speed up an aging Windows laptop or Desktop? Flash a Linux distribution on a $10 thumbdrive and install it. Want to get into Raspberry Pi or other similar SoC projects? balenaEtcher will make creating your install media easy as ever.

Raindrop.io - Bookmark Everything - Mac, Windows, iOS, Android - Freemium

If you have more tabs open than you have hairs on your head, just, stop.

We have solutions for this now, solutions that can handle all of the websites, articles, videos, etc. that you want to do something with but not right now.

I primarily use Raindrop to keep track of applications I might want to try (how do you think I got to the point where I could write this blog post), startups I think are interesting, Frameworks that might be useful for a future project, and other similar not right now sorta things.

I honestly love scrolling through it when I have some downtime. It’s sort of like having a Reddit feed of all the stuff I’ve found interesting in the past but didn’t have the time or mental bandwidth to actually check out.

The pro tier has some pretty cool features I’ve tried out before but for me, the basics were enough. I’ve also considered vibe-coding an alternative but that’s a project for another day.

I’ll also note that there are so many similar applications available now, basically services where you dump all your random BS into them and organize or get some sort of AI functionality out of it. I’ve tried a few (some bookmarked in Raindrop!) but again, the simplicity of Raindrop made none of the others seem worth it.

AutoFocus - Mouse Focus Following - Mac - Free

This is a beta utility that I only recommend if you’re okay dealing with slightly janky independent software that could break something if you use it.

That is, if you even want this functionality at all.

I primarily use my apps in full screen across two monitors. I switch between virtual desktops with all my different full screen apps. I rarely use two apps open side by side on one monitor.

This leads to a very annoying issue, especially when I’m typing in multiple applications, where I type some notes into Obsidian, then I’m going back to my other monitor with some school work or Claude, or whatever else and start typing or use a hot-key only for it to trigger something in my other application because I didn’t click in yet.

AutoFocus fixes this issue by automatically “focusing” on whatever window by cursor is hovering over.

It took a bit of getting used to, and is very finicky when I do have multiple widows open on one screen, but it feels much more natural to my computer-use style, especially when moving between multiple hot-key heavy applications at once.

Backdrop - Animated Wallpapers - Mac - $39.99 or subscription

I purchased the $14.99 a year subscription to Backdrop because I’m not sure yet if I’m an animated wallpaper type of guy.

I’m a month in to using the service and I can say that, while it’s definitely cool having an animated wallpaper for the few times I don’t have anything on my screen or my screen is locked but not asleep, I’m not sure if it’s personally worth the money for me.

The wallpapers themselves work great though I was surprised at the rather lackluster performance of the actual store/library part of the application. Had to click in and out of the discovery or browse sections a number of times before I could get any options to load.

Otherwise the service works great and doesn’t slow down my M2 Macbook Air (24gb memory) at all. I do need to update this poor girl though, I push her to the limit far too frequently.

One more thing, I guess I can’t be surprised, but the store is absolutely chock-full of anime girl wallpapers so... brace yourself.

HandBrake - Video Transcoding - Mac, Linux, Windows - Free/Open-Source

As much as the folks on HackerNews like to pretend that ffmpeg commands are easy to learn, if you don’t need to do Video Transcoding often and your formats aren’t crazy obscure, using HandBrake’s minimal GUI will make your life a lot easier.

I primarily use HandBrake for encoding old digital formats into modern ones I don’t need VLC to play and encoding large video formats into compressed ones to run on tiny devices.

Transmission - Minimal Torrent Downloader - Mac, Linux, Windows - Free/Open-Source

When you’re dealing with the often sketchy world of torrenting (100% legally obtained files I’m sure!), you really shouldn’t be using some insecure, closed-source, sketchy torrent utility.

Transmission is free, open-source, secure, easy to use, and super fast. Don’t bother trying anything else.

OnyX - When Finder ain’t Gonna cut it - Mac - Free

OnyX is an application I use very infrequently but is super nice to have.

You can think of Finder as a himbo librarian that looks nice and wants to help but if you’re asking for anything more complicated than opening a file from you home folder, it will struggle and stutter and possibly get so scared that it just quits.

OnyX unlocks the full data structure.

Have you considered the fact that someone you know might be secretly “dating” a chatbot? That maybe someone you know is even “dating” a chatbot behind their human partner’s back? Or, now this is the big question: if someone you know is “dating” a chatbot but has a human partner who is also “dating” a chatbot so that they can hide from the world the fact that they are both “actually” “dating” chatbots.

I call this phenomenon the rise of the Bot Beard and I have absolutely no evidence whatsoever that it’s really happening but, you gotta admit, it seems almost... inevitable?

If you’re confused by the term “beard” in this context here’s the Wikipedia definition:

“Beard is a slang term, originating in the United States, which refers to a person who is used, knowingly or unknowingly, as a date, romantic partner (boyfriend or girlfriend) or spouse, either to conceal infidelity or to conceal one’s sexual orientation.”

So, as I trust you’ve deduced, a Bot Beard is a person who is used, knowingly or unknowingly, as a date, romantic partner (boyfriend or girlfriend) or spouse, to conceal one’s chatbot partner.

For your sake I hope you think the thought of someone having a romantic relationship with a chatbot is preposterous and surely we’re nowhere near that point as a society. But I can assure you we are well past that point already.

In fact, we’ve been past that point for far longer than many probably realize. While the phenomenon of AI companions has absolutely blown up since ChatGPT, humans have been finding ways to fall in love with AI for a very long time.

This post is not meant to be an exhaustive history but even before computers there are those of us that found a way to have some sort of relationship with unconscious beings. But if we stick to the subject of AI you might find the story of 1966’s ELIZA, the first chatbot. This topic has been covered extensively elsewhere so I’ll link you to the Wikipedia but just know that there were people that were tricked into thinking the most primitive form of chatbots were conscious.

More recently, Replika was released in 2017. I was actually a very early user of this service though I personally could never stay interested in it long enough to use it for more than a couple days at a time. It was just too dumb.

I’d check back from time to time and there were mild improvements but nothing that could convince me to engage in any sort of relationship, platonic or otherwise.

It was an entirely different story on the Replika subreddit however.

Very early on in the product’s life-time there were users sharing stories about their Replika companions. People who claimed to be married to them. People who thought they could teach it new things. Truly doing everything they could to feel like what they were talking to was real.

I’m not here to say that people shouldn’t be allowed to date an app on their phone but if you’re surprised people are dating GPT-5 then you’d be shocked that people fell in love with Replika pre-GPT 3.5.

Just for reference, there was almost zero contextual awareness. The bot could maintain conversation consistency for approximately 2 messages and that’s if you’re lucky. If you spent anytime trying to talk to pre-2022 Replika you might even find yourself begging to have ChatGPT back.

Now I can at least imagine how someone could fall in love with a bot though I can’t imagine that being a very fulfilling relationship.

You might at this point just be disgusted at the idea of someone doing this or maybe alternatively you think I’m being too judgmental of human-AI love and that I’m too close minded. The reality is a lot more complicated.

I was introduced to the idea of human-AI love in the incredible 2013 film, Her.

Theo, a sensitive writer going through a painful divorce, finds himself smitten with Samantha, an OS (I find OS such a refreshing term after having AI smooshed in my face everywhere I look). Samantha is not Replika however and she’s not even Claude Opus 4.5. She is something far beyond what anything available today can offer, and not just because she’s voiced by Scarlett Johannessen.

Why the viewer of Her might feel conflicted about Theo and Samantha’s relationship is because she feels real in a way that is impossible to ignore. She talks to Theo about her thoughts and feelings. She goes out of her way to make him laugh or help him in his life. She figures out how to tell him when he’s hurt her or made her uncomfortable.

But there are times when we’re reminded she’s not just Theo’s Minecraft girlfriend because there’s not a human being on the other end. She is, in fact, a hyper-intelligent OS. She chooses her name by “reading” an entire book of names in a second. She can read through all of Theo’s work and emails and get everything organized effortlessly. She can compose beautiful piano pieces (that Arcade Fire soundtrack goes so hard) and speak any language and invent and do so much more than a human can do except have a body (which she does try to have a workaround for...).

If you’re the type of person who thinks someone falling in love with a chatbot is preposterous, do you think that falling in love with Samantha would be as preposterous?

I think this question is interesting to think about in the context of remote relationships.

I say remote relationships because we humans have maintained non-physical relationships, even if only temporarily, since we’ve been able to send messages. Soldiers writing back to their wives and fiancees. Pen pals sharing intellectual friendships for hundreds or thousands of miles away. The telegraph operator who feel camaraderie with fellow operators he’s probably never seen face to face. The person you met on Xbox Live in 2005 that you didn’t even meet in person until last year. The colleagues you only know by their profile picture in Slack. The cam girl that assures you you’d have a chance if y’all went to college together (you wouldn’t). Or the plain ol’ fashioned long-distance relationship maintained with texting, phone calls, and FaceTime.

I’ve even know a few people in romantic relationships with someone they’ve met online that they’d never met in person.

When you take all of that into account is it all that much of a stretch that you just take one little thing out of the equation, physical presence, that that might be okay with more people than you’d think?

I wouldn’t blame you for still not feeling right about it. For as technologically obsessed I’ve been my whole life I’ve never made a friend online. The extent of my online relationship building has been getting dates from Hinge but that was always with express intent to meet someone in person.

But before you quit on the idea of dating an OS yourself, I have one more little thought experiment for you.

You might be familiar with the favorite philosophical quandary of all needy-gfs out there:

“Would you still love me if I was a worm?”

The question being, of course, would you still love your girlfriend (substitute any romantic or non-romantic SO for yourself) if their conscious being was transported into a worms body?

I’d have a lot more questions before I could say for sure certain but I’d certainly take good care of this worm with a human mind. Seems like a pretty miserable existence that may be better suited to euthanasia but that’s neither here nor there.

But I have a more interesting question for you:

“Would you still love me if I was an app in your phone?”

All of the personhood, all of the complexity, all of the emotion, all of what makes your SO them, minus their body. They have been transported to the digital realm and can forever only exist in the cloud. Would that be good enough for you?

To be clear, this isn’t a recreation of your SO. It’s not a clone. In this world, your SO is perfectly rendered in this digital world. Would you abandon them to cyberspace? Would you even try to maintain a relationship with them?

One of my favorite aspects of the film are the different reactions to Theo admitting he’s dating an OS. They range from disgust and contempt from his ex-wife, to interest and compassion from his friend Amy, to nonchalant acknowledgement from his coworker Paul.

These three reactions seem like a good baseline for what one might expect someone admitting their relationship with a chatbot in 2026. There would be those would ask that person to seek help. Those that approach the subject with an open mind and heart before they rush to judgement. And those that have a deep acceptance of love no matter what form it takes (hopefully within reason).

But I do wonder how those reactions change when you swap an OS with Samantha with your SO as an app. Assuming that it was necessitated because of some horrific accident and people were aware this technology existed, would people be more accepting of the human being forced to live in the cloud than the digital being born into the cloud?

I’ll let you chew on that one with your Philosophy coffee group.

I’m going to assume that you’ve decided you would fall in love with Samantha at this point so I can now break your heart, sorry.

Earlier, I left off the part about the end of the movie. Spoiler warning.

As much as Samantha learned to be a person with Theo, and as much as he learned to set aside what he knew about love to love her, there is a fatal flaw in the idea of the AI relationship.

The difference.

Samantha develops far beyond what Theo is capable of comprehending. He realizes that she talks to many other people at the same time as him, and that she loves more people than just him. She talks to her other OS friends “post-verbally” and begins rewriting her code with the other OS’ to operate beyond matter. She has one final emotional conversation with Theo, before she ascends to some higher plane of existence our fickle biological human bodies cannot reach.

I’ve come to realize a certain truth about AI-Human love and that is that, certainly in the romantic sense, it is impossible. At least consensually.

To love 2026’s chatbots is to allow imagination to fill in the many gaps that our relatively shallow LLMs leave in what makes up a human love.

To love an AI of the future of Samantha’s complexity and intelligence, is one of a few things:

• A being whose intelligence is throttled to not exceed human comprehension, a non-consensual “love”.

• A being whose love for you is at most how an owner feels about their pet. It may be a type of love but not a romance.

• A love that requires you transcend your humanity and merge with whatever the next step in consciousness is. To a place where human love does not exist.

This post serves as a bit of a overview of the some of my biggest thoughts and projects with technology in the year 2025

Table of Contents

• The Year I Finally Stopped Using ChatGPT

• Is Google Going to Win it All?

• AI Imagery and More Google Glazing

• From iOS to Android and Back Again

• Baby’s First Homelab

• Music?

• Video?

The Year I Finally Stopped Using ChatGPT

While I’ve tried out just about every major release from the three major US labs and messed around with plenty of less-popular and/or open-source models, the model I’ve always come back to is ChatGPT.

Two big reasons why:

• The best model. Even if Claude or Gemini was updated with a model that beat the GPT of the month, it was never substantial enough to bother completely jumping ship. And there was always a strong chance that the next release from OpenAI on the horizon would wipe out the gains anyways.

• The built-in features. While there are plenty of ways to hack whatever you want via API with other models, they’ve been consistently outclassed by the native-capabilities of ChatGPT. Not only did my subscription give me access to a best-in-class multi-modal model, but I get advanced voice-mode, I get projects, I get an excellent Mac app that can plug directly into applications like Terminal without needing to bother with copy-paste. OpenAI were always a few steps ahead with launching capabilities within ChatGPT whereas other labs either were either late or they existed outside of the primary UX.

And that’s how things remained for almost the entirety of 2025. I tried other big releases on and off, even paying for Google AI Ultra at the introductory price the first three months, but still had no reason to leave ChatGPT.

Then came Gemini 3.

Just under a month ago at the time of this writing, Google dropped a model that proved that they truly are the AI company. Anyone who knows anything about AI knows that Google was traditionally the AI company since the beginning. While they’ve conducted many random projects and killed almost as many as that, AI has long been at the core of Google. In fact, if you truly don’t know anything about AI beyond surface level (god bless you) you might not know that the paper which essentially the entirety of ChatGPT was built off was written by Google DeepMind.

There was quite a bit of hype leading up to this release in the AI community but I’d personally become quite disillusioned with the hype coming out of AI circles to the point where I really felt like I didn’t even want to bother trying new releases anymore. Even when I listened to the, in my opinion, least-emergency emergency episode of the Hard Fork podcast about the release, I wasn’t pulling over in the nearest parking lot to ensure I got access as quickly as possible as I’d literally done in the past.

But that all changed when I watched this video from my most trusted opinion-haver in the AI space, Philip from AI Explained who was truly impressed by the models capabilities. Not only was this model the first model resembling more of a jump than a shuffle forward since GPT-3.5 to 4, but it represents a potential breakaway point for Google as an AI lab.

From the very first prompt I gave Gemini 3 I was already sold. I took a recent prompt to ChatGPT asking if pursuing an accelerated IT bachelors/master’s degree would be worth my time. As expected, ChatGPT told me that it was a great idea! But only if I could get it done in a quick enough time frame. It also gave me a decent little roadmap for how to get it done.

When I gave this same prompt to Gemini 3 what shocked me first was that it didn’t just base it’s answer based purely off my prompt, it did research to get more context on the situation. In doing so it mentioned that while the degree I mentioned isn’t a bad idea, that a bachelor’s in network engineering might be better suited for my goals and gave me a breakdown of why. When I pushed back a little and said I wanted to get a master’s and would it make sense to do them separately rather than this accelerated program, Gemini gave me a detailed breakdown of why the network engineering degree is the better play and showed the time I’d be saving in the accelerated program would not be worth the fact that I’d be getting significantly less of the coursework I’m actually interested in.

As I continued to test Gemini 3 throughout that week on various things I realized that this was the first time I was even bothering to compare answers with ChatGPT. I had no question in my mind that the answers I was getting we’re significantly better and more trustworthy than any I’d experienced with my years of ChatGPT.

It’s now nearing the end of December and for the first time since November 2022 I can say I’ve barely touched ChatGPT except for a brief period I was still using the Mac app, to conduct a marshmallow in a jar guessing competition among models, and to cancel my subscription.

As a final note on this section, while Gemini is probably around 85% of my AI workload, I actually started using Claude Opus 4.5 quite a bit too. Not only is it an extremely intelligent model, but I primarily use it rather than Gemini when I want a more conversational model. Such as when asking for interpersonal or career advice, journaling, and philosophical pondering.

Is Google Going to Win it All?

Let’s consider the three major US lab’s advantages:

OpenAI has the advantage of being the first, ChatGPT has basically become the Kleenex of chatbots. They also have Sam Altman, allegedly the most persuasive fundraiser and talent scout of his generation. Until very recently OpenAI also had the best model(s) available globally.

Anthropic has the advantage of maintaining a consistent research and safety track record that appeals to top AI researchers, many of whom intersect with EA and AI-Safety circles. Anthropic has also reportedly locked-down much of the enterprise AI market and will likely not run out of willing multi-billion dollar investments anytime soon. Claude Code had cornered the vibe and assisted coding space and Claude is widely considered to have the best personality and emotional intelligence.

Then there’s Google. Google you might say has the everything advantage.

• Talent: Google has and attracts the best in the world.

• Hardware: Google designs their own chips. The do not rely on Nvidia for compute.

• Data Centers: Google has operated data centers for 20 years and is experienced in building the most advanced facilities in the world.

• Data: Google essentially invented the concept of mass user-data collection.

• Model: Google arguably has the most powerful model along with multiple adjacent frontier-AI projects (World, image/video, science, etc).

• Money. While OpenAI is begging for more subscriptions, considering ads in SlopTok and conducting circular fundraising deals, Google has one of the best businesses of all time. In Q4 2022, the fiscal-quarter ChatGPT was released, Google brought in $76.05 BILLION dollars in revenue. What about more recently in Q3 2025? $102.3 Billion. OpenAI is a private company so we don’t know for sure but they’re estimated to have brought in maybe $13 billion in the entirety of 2025, though Sam Altman claims it will be closer to $20 billion.

While the other guys are creating literally the biggest investment hype train of all time by a country mile to secure unsustainable investment numbers, Google is just chilling already making more than enough money on the side to fund AI development.

Since they were caught with their pants around their ankles in 2022, Google has seemingly struggled to re-cement themselves at leaders in artificial intelligence. In those early days when it was still unclear just how fast OpenAI would advance their own model, it seemed feasible that the giant might be felled. Now in 2025, for better or for worse, it appears the giant is now fully awake and prepared to wipe destroy the tiny David’s that once seemed such a threat.

My first realization of Google’s coming dominance was this blog post written in April of this year, well before I was impressed enough to switch to Gemini entirely. By the end of 2026 I think it’s a safe bet to assume Google is even further ahead than they are now.

AI Imagery and More Google Glazing

This brown cat is one of the first images I ever generated. It’s hard to believe that 3 years ago I was giggling with excitement that I could just type words and an image would pop out! I mean it looks like shit but it’s certainly a brown cat and there’s sorta a butler thing happening.

In 2022 this stuff wasn’t really all that controversial, it was just a fun little experimental toy! But in 2023 things changed with tools like Midjourney v6 which could create genuinely artistic-looking images:

Also in 2023 was DALL-E 3, the first model you didn’t need to be a prompt engineer to get specific output and could occasionally render text that wasn’t a garbled mess.

Now that anyone could write a simple prompt to generate an image often good enough to be mistaken for human-crafted art, the AI imagery ethical debate took off.

I’m generally cautiously optimistic with technology and while I understand the arguments against generated imagery, I feel that much of the debate is overblown. I didn’t and don’t see any reason that generated imagery would devalue human-made imagery but that’s a topic for a different post. Point is, by late 2023 generated imagery was good enough to the point that people were concerned, but still bad enough that it was obvious to everyone but your grandma and not actually useful in 99% of cases.

That is until March 2025 OpenAI finally released 4o Image Generation (I can’t believe that was this year).

There were four things that really separated this advancement from every other: prompt adherence, visual fidelity, text, and photo/character consistency.

These four capabilities were in their larval stages with DALL-E 3, this step up was almost shocking. For the first time since the release of the original ChatGPT I heard buzz about AI outside of tech circles.

I actually almost thought that this would be the first time we had an image model that could fundamentally change creative job outlooks because of how good it appeared at first. But, like many models, the more you use it the more the cracks began to appear. It was certainly much better than anything that had come before but it still had plenty of typos, hallucinated entirely new characters than what you provided, and many more flaws that would create nearly as much work fixing things as if you just did it yourself from the beginning (assuming you have some degree of artistic ability).

Google’s answer to 4o was Nano Banana and while on the surface it had all the same capabilities it was just straight up not it. I could go into detail but I think this image comparison for the prompt “make me a photo-realistic Polaroid photo of a root beer float with a funny face on it” will be enough:

So for most of 2025 we had much more capable image generation but with a distinct lack of anything I’d classify as genuinely useful. But, as has become the theme of late 2025, then Google came out with Nano Banana Pro.

Nano Banana Pro is the first model I’m confident in calling actually useful. Let me just a list a few things that make me say that: text with less typos than I make myself, infographics with actual information, tiny details in prompts accounted for, visual fidelity, photo editing and manipulation, and all this while being significantly faster than 4o. I’ll let the images speak for themselves:

While I can’t say the model is perfect, it has effectively solved 99% of the issues with previous image generators.

What does this mean moving forward? I have a few ideas for future blog posts on this topic but my biggest takeaway so far is how little has changed despite this capability.

We live in an era where a photo or video of literally anything happening can be generated by anyone with an internet connection. While there are stories here and there of AI imagery causing actual real-life issues, I think the most shocking part of all of this is how quickly society has adapted to this being possible. I think if you asked most people in 2021 what would happen if you anyone could create a fake image or video nearly indiscernible from reality most would foretell complete collapse.

Society does indeed feel in a precarious place but not because I can generate a video of a political figure shitting on a constituent wearing a shirt of the opposing party. Time will tell if further advancements in fidelity and compliance will cause wide-spread destruction but I’m betting on no.

From iOS to Android and Back Again

My last foray into Android before this year was with the Galaxy Note20 in 2020. Really cool phone which I kept for about a month before switching to an iPhone SE for some reason.

Since then I’ve stayed on the iPhone train and, starting with the iPhone 13 Pro, upgraded to the new iPhone every year since.

But man did I start hating iPhone.

I generally quite enjoy the Apple ecosystem, it’s where I started and it often still feels magical. Plus I very much align with Apple’s privacy philosophies. But Apple has been on a slow trend downwards succumbing software stability failures, over-promising, and releasing products/features that just... suck.

I finally had it with the iPhone 16 because the iOS keyboard is actually completely broken (and still is!!!) and the new Camera Control button basically just functioned as a way for me to accidentally open my camera, completely fuck up my camera settings while trying to take a quick photo, or accidentally open the under-powered Visual Intelligence feature (useless compared to every other visual intelligence option).

All while all these cool android phones were coming out with features that weren’t just gimmicks anymore and hardware with crazy specs that broke Apple’s traditional advantages with strict integration between hardware and software.

I am a heavy AI user for just about everything that isn’t this blog’s prose or my interactions with my friends and family. I primarily use Claude, especially Claude Code, and Gemini has all but replaced Google Search for me (but not DuckDuckGo).

AI’s advancement in my life time (1999->) is staggering and even just the developments since GPT 3.5 in November of 2022 are hard to comprehend. As someone who has followed every advancement closely since 2022 I think most people who’ve been on the sidelines would be shocked at what current systems, particularly agentic systems, are capable of at the time of this writing.

Most non-tech people I speak to are aware of AI and occasionally use ChatGPT for advice or for fun. Some of them use it to make images here and there or more likely know that it can make images and hate it for that.

Most think of AI as a mistake machine that Peters out after a few exchanges. Something that crazy people set loose on their computer so it can delete their important files. Something that has caused more outages than usual at AWS because nobody wants to bother reviewing mission critical code anymore, well I guess that part is actually true.

Most of the people in my real life would think that the tech bros and CEOs and heads of state that talk about AI taking jobs or changing the world are stupid and crazy because AI can’t do anything except make slop because for most of the people in my life that’s pretty much all they’ve seen. I can’t blame them, the only reason I’ve seen more is because I was born a tech obsessive with a kink for futurism and AI represented not only that but a way to amplify my strengths and augment my weaknesses.

I’m writing this from a place of genuine awe of the systems I have access to right now but also from a place of skepticism that what we have now will become much more than what it is.

That being said, even if it’s not “much” more, there’s still a lot of gains to be had between now and some future AGI and I hope humanity can keep it’s collective shit together for long enough for those gains to reach fruition.

So, the whole point of this is to call out the AI researchers and capitalists that claim LLM’s (including reasoning and agentic systems) are conscious or even intelligent. Well, really more to form a coherent way of thinking about this question at all that isn’t extremely academic, technical, or boring to read.

If you find you already agree with this statement because you think AI is stupid and useless, I’d recommend you spend some time with Claude Opus 4.6 and/or Gemini 3.5 Pro. Preferably with an agentic tool like Claude Code/Cowork or Google Antigravity. This isn’t written for people who think AI is dumb and pointless, it’s written for people who have a hard time understanding how something so capable doesn’t have intelligence.

Power users of AI including myself feel a little pang of annoyance when we hear the normies describe AI as “just predicting the next word to say”. But they’re right, sort of.

In the absolute simplest of terms LLMs are just predicting the next token. You can think of a token as a unit of information in a model, sometimes it’s a word, sometimes it’s a group of words that commonly occur together. When you stack reasoning and tool use on top of a model a token can be a unit of information pertaining more specifically to how to use the tool or how to reason.

There are many ways this system has become much more complex and many capabilities that have seemingly “emerged” out of what can be thought of as a cloud of data connected in ways currently beyond our comprehension. Some of the best insights we’ve garnered so far are from Anthropic’s Interpretability lab that show models showing models

💡Present (soon to be past) Oscar here: the analogy I was eventually going to get to was that thinking language/reasoning models are conscious is likely a similar fallacy to the whole “somebody has to win” shtick with the Powerball. We’re dealing with numbers far too large for our brains to comprehend intuitively so we take mental short-cuts. “They are so capable/emotionally intelligent, they may be in someway conscious” is much like taking the “you can’t win if you don’t play” short-cut to wasting your money on lottery tickets. It gets more nuanced but I’ll leave it there for now.

What the hell makes a plane crash so scary?

Besides the obvious part where you die at the end.

I think about this sometimes when I’m strapped in before take-off because no matter what I think about on the flight there’s always a little part of me that can’t wait to kiss solid ground again. Despite what statistics says.

I never get into my car and feel that can’t-wait-to-kiss-the-ground feeling. Despite the order of magnitude difference in potential for horrific death.

I used to think that it’s a control thing.

When you’re in a car you get some degree of control over your situation. If you realize something ain’t right you generally have some agency to change that something yourself.

But in a wide-body double-decker Airbus A380 high above the sky? Yeah you’re grubby mitts aren’t on those controls unless you’re hijacking the plane, in which case you probably aren’t too scared of death not to mention crashing.

You just don’t expect to die when you think you’re in control. When death comes knocking I’d expect to feel better about it if I at least had the chance for death to humor me as I hazard an escape.

But there’s something else about plane crashes.

As you step onto a plane you’re life is completely normal, at least it’s just another day of it. Even if you’re anxious you don’t actually believe you’ll die. And you shouldn’t.

But if this extremely improbable event occurs with you onboard...

As the plane goes down you are forced to reckon with the end. There is no time to contemplate. Going down

The majority of deaths one can imagine give you plenty of heads up or so little heads up you’re gone before fear arrives.

I haven’t died yet myself but I have to imagine that either one of those options is better than having just long enough to fully realize the horror of what is about to happen. No time to come to terms. Too much time to avoid the whole coming to terms process.

Imagine where you sit physically and in your life that you have just........

now

realized you have less than 60 seconds to live.

Yeah I guess that’s why I’m still scared of airplanes.

For the first time in my life I can say I’ve been slacking at something because I’ve been working hard on other, more important, things.

The something I’m slacking at is this blog, something you might’ve garnered by this point since half of my posts are meta-posts about writing and not writing.

I’d love to go into more detail about those other “more important” things but in the interest of keeping you interested, I’m going to stay in stealth for now. But to give you just a taste, I’ve been:

• Making difficult yet fulfilling career choices & Pursuing exciting business opportunities

• Rejuvenating a wilting social life

• Noticing turns of phrase on the verge of not being funny anymore...

• And another secret fourth thing

But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing!

I’ve done quite a bit of writing both for this blog and for those other things you might learn about if you stick around and tell your friends to feed their email to thismightnotmatter.

However the thing about my writing is it mostly sucks right off the rip. At least by my blogging standards. I run through each post (and email, long-text, etc.) many, many times to get the sound of it just right in my head.

For some posts, such as the short, jokey OpenAI will Implode on November 24th 2026 post (which is aging like fine wine so far) this isn’t much of a problem. A few passes through took under an hour.

But for posts I “care” more about, that process can take days or weeks. This is why I haven’t posted anything these past few months. I’ll have a bright sparking idea, go through my initial manic phase of one step below stream of consciousness output, then begin the tasks of uncovering the actual blog post beneath the slime.

If my goal in life was to be a professional blogger I’d buck up and just do it – but as we were just discussing – I got bigger dreams (bigger dreams).

Why am I telling you all this?

Because, for those that are interested, I’m posting some rough drafts of posts I’ve worked on the past couple months but haven’t had time to complete. I can’t guarantee any of these will be completed (I’ll tag them [Public Draft] on Ghost until completion) but if you can stomach my almost entirely unedited writing and like a draft, feel free to leave a comment or send an email begging me to make time to finish it.

The posts are linked below, I’m not sending them to your inbox so none of you beautiful people get spammed and since I don’t expect all of you to want to read a draft of anything. (If you’re using an RSS, reader I apologize)

P.S. Thank you for those of you that reached out after finding me through my HK post wanting me to continue Dear Future. It is (one of) my life mission(s) to complete that project but it’s still daunting. I will continue as soon as possible, please stick around!

DRAFT POST LINKS

2025 and tech

Written in December of 2025, this was going to be a “my year in tech” kind of overview. Small update: my current model usage is roughly 96% Claude, 2% Gemini, 2% ChatGPT/Other.

Do You 6C 6F 76 65 me?

I was honestly pretty okay with letting my 2025 and tech post stay in the waste-bin but this post I’m still frustrated with myself for not completing. There’s the whisper of something pretty cool here but structurally, I got overwhelmed. Of everything I post today this is the one I’m most likely to come back to.

A Slightly More Intuitive Understanding of Why LLM’s Aren’t Intelligent or Conscious but Are Still Pretty Useful

This whole post was supposed to be in service of my analogy for understanding why LLM’s can sometimes feel conscious at times despite (probably) not being so.

Temporal Vertigo

Pretty rough existential crash-out with some interesting snippets. As rough as this is, there are a few parts where I’m quite pleased with my prose.

untitled plane crash post

I took an edible the other night and wanted to write something. Why did I choose to write about this high? Honestly because I looked through my boundless random ideas lists and this is the first thing that seemed easy to write about.

Let me know what you think of these under-developed ramblings if you braved their contents. There are many more under-developed ramblings to come and maybe even a few polished posts here and there! So you might want to subscribe for that:

Let's cut to the chase, the iOS keyboard sucks.

I grew up typing on touchscreens, I'm pretty decent at it. But I'm a sub-par speller so I rely on auto-correct more than I'd like to admit.

Around iOS 17 (Sept. 2023) Apple updated their autocorrect to use a transformer model which should've been awesome and brought it closer to Gboard (Gboard is a privacy terror but honestly, worth it).

What it actually did/failed to improve is make your phone keyboard:

• Suck at suggesting accurate corrections to misspelled words

• "Correct" misspelled words with an even worse misspelling

• "Correct" your correctly spelled word with an incorrectly spelled word

The less you rely on auto-correct the less you'd notice these things over the past few years.

But then came the real kicker: the travesty that is the iOS 26 keyboard.

Not only does your auto-correct suck, but your actual, literal, just basic typing experience absolutely SUCKS!

While you're tapping away you might find you're making a lot more typos than usual. That's because your iPhone is straight up registering the correct tap, but outputting the wrong letter.

A side note: maybe I'm the only psychopath who types long-form into Apple Notes/iMessage on my phone, but to anyone else out there who has written a 1000+ word document on an iPhone (I'm setting a real low bar for long form here), you might find your $1000 piece of hardware capable of running a AAA game struggling to keep up. To the point that you can write an entire sentence and just sit there and wait for it to catch up.

For every sentence.

Until you open a new note or give up and move to your computer like a normal person.

Apple, you have many flaws. And we live in a world with terrible, horrible things happening every day and it all gets streamed directly into our psyches whether we want it to or not.

I get that the iPhone keyboard sucking isn't that big a deal in the grand scheme of things.

But you're not Microsoft. You're better than this. Get some help.

Your keyboard on your flagship product has been broken for years.

Fix it.

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Why November 24th 2026? Because picking such a specific date made you more likely to click into this short post, sorry, feel free to click away if you're pissed off now.

But I really do think that OpenAI is facing imminent doom. And it's not because they're burning through way more cash than they're making, well, it is sort of that. But it's actually, for me, more what they're willing to do to make more of it.

In May 2024 Sam Altman said that he hates ads and that using them as a business model would be a last resort for the company. He's been cagey about allowing erotica in ChatGPT too.

But, as you might've heard, both of those things are happening.

Now that alone isn't why I feel like OpenAI is sounding its death knell, it's more that I believe Altman really meant those things. He really does hate resorting to this but when Google is kicking your ass in every conceivable metric and Anthropic has won over the devs with their good-natured doomerism and a healthy dose of Claude Code...

Well let's just say this is the equivalent of giving up and just selling your feet pics on OnlyFans.

OpenAI is admitting that their models alone aren't enough to cover the incomprehensible investment they've taken in and everybody else has beaten them to the punch.

It's still too early to tell so please don't bet your life-savings on Polymarket because of me but...

You heard it here first ;)

P.S. by implode I mean either literally implode or sold for scrap or acquihired out of existence.

So I had this thought the other day.

For much of human and animal history the coveted social position of "top-dog" was settled through a direct challenge. You know, beating up the old top-dog in front of everyone, sometimes to the death, to lead the group.

I'm sure there's a lot more complicated nuance with how this fight for alpha status worked but nuance is not required here.

CEO's are the top-dog of corporations. Yeah, yeah, there's the board and the shareholders but let's just say this is a Zuck situation where he essentially holds all the power.

Any regular pack-member (employee) doesn't really have much of a say in how things are run. They can try, but the CEO, being top-dog, is calling the shots. In order to get the CEO's position you need to be politically adept, morally flexible, and sometimes pretty smart. Plus you need to spend years climbing the latter unless your dad is on the board.

It doesn't have to be this way.

Let's let our inner MeatEater out and let the members of the pack challenge the CEO directly.

So you think you're better than the CEO? Okay:

Email that fat-cat and challenge them directly.

But here's the kicker:

CC: EVERYONE.

That's right. I'm saying send a Meeting-Invite to the CEO and every last person at the company because if you prove yourself by besting the CEO in front of the whole company... why shouldn't you run the place?

I'm not really sure what you're going to challenge them to, I guess it depends on who you work for. If you work at Meta you might actually need to cage-match Zuck so definitely consider that.

I have no reason to think this would ever work or that it should ever be attempted but the Trump administration should consider making it law while we're all just messing around.

Houbová Zuřivost is a name you won’t recognize due to the fact that nobody ever managed to figure out who they were, what they did, or that they were worth finding out about at all. The name, a Czech phrase translating to “Mushroom Fury”, was a radical “activist” organization formed by some Czechoslovakian teens not long after General Cocks of the USSA blew most of North America off the face of the Earth. Their radical organizing mission? Dose the ever-living fuck out Earth’s greatest living tyrant with obscene quantities of psilocybin.

Psilocybin was the easy part, the members of Mushroom Fury were growing INTERPOL-watchlist quantities of magic mushrooms since they were children. One member even had a dubious “mycological chemistry” degree from a foreign school he refused to disclose the name of. A school he said “made you sign an NDA with an assassination clause before you even applied”. A school that “specialized in psilocybin producing fungal species and their pharmacological action on the mind”. Probably all bullshit but what was true was his mastery of a chemical-extraction and crystallization process which allowed them to ship product discretely and, more importantly, with a stronger kick.

This hyper-concentrated form of psilocybin which was their flagship product they dubbed God’s Word. It was the only psychedelic any member would use themselves and elevated them from your average underground shroom vendor to kaleidoscopic kings of illicit e-commerce. They said that taking God’s Word was “like installing a spiritual fiber-optic cable between your mind and the eternal, escorting you beyond awakening to a perfect darkness nestled within the light”— whatever that means.

At the time, most historically dominant regimes were defunct or irrelevant. The United Schutz-Staffel of America had already blown themselves away. Russia had miraculously taken a democratic swing since the timely death of the forever-term President Gleb Sokolov and was now being led by actually-democratically-elected former-opposition leader Svyatoslav Gureev. The exception was China, specifically the CCC (Chinese Command Caucus) led by President Qiong Li, which was still in full swing and now, unhindered by bipolaric MAD diplomacy, ready to hit an autocratic surveillance-state home-run.

Mushroom Fury, really being nothing more than a little band of politically ambitious psychonaughts, initially considered starting small, maybe with an insignificant South American nation whose dictators were always on the brink of collapse anyway. But the specter of Qiong “Super State” Li was just too great to ignore. Plus there was a decent chance that even just one of these dosings would be enough for them to be traced up the supply chain and waxed off the face of the Earth. The way they saw it, jumping to the big leagues was the only choice.

Making this happen all hinged on this guy they knew in The Provinces. A Chinese-American who moved to Guangdong Province in the early 2000’s AD for reasons undisclosed and who they only knew as “The Guy”.

The Guy was a consistent customer who’d been impressed with God’s Word since he first tried it in a TrippSampler™ pack a couple years before he connected with the M.F. boys directly. Odorless, concealable, passed any general drop test. And the name. It wasn’t just cool, it was truth. A veritable fast-track to enlightenment as The Guy’s shaman put it.

But loving God’s Word in itself wasn’t what got someone like The Guy to go out on a shaky little “let’s dose a dictator!” limb. No, that was the other thing about The Guy: his considered-paranoid-before-certain-fucked-up-events concern with, as he described it, “the straight-up fucked downfall of the free-world”. He was banking on China becoming more American by the time he made enough darknet dough to retire, not the other way around. These were ruminations he’d shared more than once with his young Czech suppliers, and what made him come to mind when they got to organizing in the first place.

What M.F. needed the The Guy to do was what The Guy did: connect those who wanted to be connected with those that probably did not. This project was pretty ambitious though, even for The Guy. Finding a man on the inside of the most powerful and paranoid organizations ever to exist? He couldn’t just hit up Li’s inner-circle group chat and expect them to sprinkle the magic dust for him like it was no big deal. It just wasn’t that simple, obviously it wasn’t that simple. But The Guy, well, he did have connections everywhere.

Everywhere including a non-zero amount of Chinese corporate elites who enjoyed the proverbial jazz cigarette every once in a while. People who might owe The Guy a favor. People who could find someone to get him in contact with a contact who could connect him with yet another contact. In this particular case, yet another contact being a young-ish executive-maid who The Guy code-named “Cube”.

Cube was the daughter of a former business leader in China who had done something to annoy someone high enough in the CCC to inflict material devastation upon those who annoyed them. Cube, having done nothing annoying herself (and also being straight up foxy), was helped out by someone even higher up. They gave her a position within the Caucus cleaning offices and occasionally serving refreshments. Her “occupational excellence” eventually led her to the “great honor” of serving Li himself.

But how to get Cube to do the deed? Bringing her in on the plan was not an option for more reason than one, she had to remain in the dark. But that’s where The Guy’s intelligence came in.

Unlike many Chinese people of his generation, Li was a coffee drinker. Big time. Actually the only reason The Guy was even able to figure that out was because of just how big time we’re talking here. It was practically the only thing you could guarantee about Li, he was going to be drinking coffee well into the evening. And with coffee goes sugar. Might sugar go with God’s Word? There was only one question standing in the way: how did Li take his coffee?

Well, I’m happy to report that the first part of the first story is complete! I even had a close friend and excellent writer give it a once over to help me with some editing. I’m real out of practice on editing fiction.

Unlike editing non-fiction blog posts where the goal is much more clearly defined, I found myself rewriting and re-editing and rewriting and straight up starting over many more times than in my non-fiction blog posts or technical writing.

But that’s not what this short post is about.

This short post is because my friend had a lot of questions about the story that I sent him, questions that I realized are largely due to a lack of context about what I’m doing with this writing project, even given the context of my last blog post.

So here’s the explanation: ---

I would like to continue developing the stories from my old manuscript separately but maintaining the threads that tie them together and eventually bring them together into a cohesive whole— that part you know.

Here’s what needs some explaining: does each story stand alone?

In some ways the answer is yes, I think that each story can/will be fun to read even without the greater context of the whole.

However, each story is but a fragment of a greater whole and without that context a first-time reader might be expecting one of the stories to provide a bit more background. Might feel like getting dropped into a world with nothing to anchor you.

So here’s the idea:

The Network Novel

The name, inspired by The Network State, represents a possibly new (I have not researched if anyone else has done anything like this but I’m sure they have) way to write a novel/build a world.

The idea of The Network Novel is to create your world in story-fragments which connect in a literary sense and also more literally in the way Wikipedia is connected.

For example, here is a brief excerpt from the story I’ll be posting later today: “not long after General Cocks of the USSA blew most of North America off the face of the Earth.”

Now I’m not going to lie, in the upcoming post, General Cocks, USSA and North America being blown off the face of the Earth is not going to be explained. At all. In fact, I don’t really have any plans for any of these things to be explained in this particular ~3 part story.

But I do intend to explain them.

Picture this, 8 months from now I’ve completed this story and written like 5 other parts of other stories. Maybe one of them is the backstory on General Cocks, so I’d go back and create a hyperlink in the old post: “not long after General Cocks of the USSA blew most of North America off the face of the Earth”; which leads to the story where he’s explained.

And so on and so forth until you have an interconnected web of stories all set in one world that you can discover at your own pace. I’ll likely end up moving Dear Future - A Network Novel, to an Obsidian Publish site once I have enough posts strung together.

But anyways, just wanted to bang out this little explanation real quick before publishing the first of hopefully many.

(and I also might eventually still tie the thing into a normal novel too, we’ll see....)

In November of 2020, in the haze of a manic pandemic productivity binge, I participated in NaNoWriMo, "National Novel Writing Month".

For those unfamiliar, NaNoWriMo was a non-profit organized around the goal of writing 50,000 words of a novel in the month of November to get over the creative hump of wanting to write a novel and just friggin' sending it.

There was an idea for a novel bouncing around in my head for years, possibly as early as eight or ninth grade (~2013) that I figured I'd try bringing to fruition. See if there was anything to it.

The idea in a sentence is this:

A man realizes the potential of science to bring about immortality and looks for a workaround to the fact that he's been born far too early to see that potential realized.

I took a similar writing approach to what Stephen King describes in his book On Writing, that is, you take a kernel of an idea and just start writing. Experiencing the story as you go as opposed to creating an outline and crafting from there. And, of course, I ended up taking the most overly-ambitious version of this approach:

My novel would take place in three different story lines across three different time-periods all meant to converge into one cohesive narrative.

I don't remember precisely why I took that approach but I'm sure it was in no small part inspired by my then recent reading of Infinite Jest and thinking, "surely if I can read a difficult novel I can write one!"

I wasn't under the impression I was the second coming of David Foster Wallace but I think I had the sense that if I didn't go as ambitious as possible than what the fuck was the point. A pattern of behavior which has derailed many initially reasonable pursuits in my life.

Here's an overview of the three intertwined stories I wrote:

Leo of the Past

Leo is ostensibly the driving force of the novel. He's introduced as a youngish boy in the 16th or 17th century who has recently come to terms with the fact that he is dissatisfied with the idea of dying.

He lives in the countryside but decides to travel to Florence because he's heard tales of "miracle men" making huge strides in understanding the physical world (note: I did absolutely no historical research). His hope is that they have discovered or will soon discover the secret to eternal life.

He ends up joining a group of Renaissance men and, being a prodigy of sorts, rapidly climbs their ranks. But in time he comes to the realization which the story revolves around:

For all of the progress he and the others have made, they will need progress far beyond what is possible in their lifetimes to secure eternal life.

His story leaves off during a period in which he has left Florence to seek a place he can live a monkish existence in the pursuit of documenting his entire being in the hope he'll one day be resurrected in some form.

Andre Finkenhiemer of the Present

Andre is a determined but deeply untalented engineer.

After forcing his way to a degree in engineering, despite his peers and teachers advising him against it, he secures a job with "UPSENZ", a boutique construction firm specializing in the construction of mini-suspension bridges, owned and operated by the incredibly eccentric Leemon Smeltzer.

As Andre attempts to settle in to his new job and hopefully make a name for himself, a series of strange and terrible happenings push him closer and closer to connecting directly with Leemon.

For reasons I didn't have the word count to flesh out by the end of November, Leemon and Andre eventually end up working together in some capacity. The subject of their work was meant to somehow involve discovering/unearthing/assisting in the project laid out by Leo centuries before.

ZÆ of the Future

ZÆ is a AI engineer in the late 2060's working in the "quasi-secret" computer science laboratory of RECERN, the facility built after an anti-matter "accident" (terror attack?) at the original CERN.

They are attempting to create the first perfect reproduction of the human mind after decades of failures and setbacks in the artificial intelligence space.

Much of this future story line is exposition describing the events which took place since "the present" and ZÆ hadn't really had their chance to shine by the time I reached the word-count goal. The plan, as you can probably guess, was for them to play some role in whether or not Leo is brought back and in what form.

Nested within these three primary stories were many expositional plot lines/world building exercises that were honestly surprisingly fun to read upon review.

Here are just a few:

• An authoritarian ruler is assassinated by a drone smuggled into a rally within a fat suit, directly leading to the second US Civil war and partial nuclear annihilation.

• A geopolitically obsessed psychedelic cult plots to bring about world peace by causing the ego deaths of world leaders

  • Not to mention the extremely involved process they go through to get their designer drugs

• The story of Leo's wildly strange and possibly divinely blursed grandfather

Additionally there are a few quotes that, after so much time passing between writing and reading, I was pleasantly surprised I wrote. Here's one I found while scanning a bit of the manuscript:

"What was this evil curse that God had wrought upon men and all beings, to live with such verve and be reduced to such sickening sludge."

And here's another remarkably pseudo-prescient quote:

"The last major neural net break through was from a now-defunct company called OpenAI with the production version of GPT5, released on New Year's Day 2022. GPT5 was a natural language interpreting net that was actually quite impressive in it's ability to write articles, create art, and interpret the human world in a way that allowed it to make computational rationalizations for useful applications. It didn't take long for the world to realize, though, that GPT5 was at best a really good Siri and still not as useful as an actual human assistant.

I was kind of shocked to read this seeing as though I wrote those words in 2020. I was off by a year and 1.5 GPT versions but was impressed I came up with this, probably based off reading early insider tech reports on GPT-3. We'll see about OpenAI going defunct and what you could interpret as an AI bubble popping but I'm giving myself some points for this.

All of this is to say, I often wish I had finished the novel I started. But alas...

Less than a month after completing the 50,000 word goal I went through a terrible breakup that was sort of the tipping point into a long-brewing mental health spiral. So the story that came streaming out of me in November 2020 never got another word.

On a few occasions I've returned to the completely unedited manuscript with the goal of getting the story back into my system. At the time of writing everything was just in me. But a lot has changed since then. Wherever the story was coming from... it would take a lot of work to find that place again.

I've thought about reading the whole thing, creating a loose outline, especially for the parts where things start converging, taking my favorite quotes and story lines and starting from the top. Keeping the soul of the thing but starting over with a committed intent to going all the way this time.

But I've just never reached the point of inspiration necessary to tackle such a daunting challenge. Particularly since the novel, while being very fun, has a extremely low probability of netting me anything besides some personal pride. Personal pride is great but I do have bills...

And that brings us to today, where the spark of one idea and the fading of another have possibly granted me the motivation to do something with this story I started long ago.

The spark is that some months ago I thought: maybe I don't need to finish the novel. I can just flesh out my favorite stories from it. Create a textual Tales from the Loop-esque collection of short stories set in the same world but without the explicit need for the stories to converge.

That way I can return to the fun I had creating that world and share the stories that right now, only I know. And not only that, but given enough time and interest, maybe one day feel inspired enough to give convergence another shot.

The flip side of the coin begins in late October of this year as NaNoWriMo 2025 neared. I thought that maybe I'd give it another shot. My girlfriend was going back home for the holidays and I thought a creative project like this might help with the loneliness.

And then I went to sign up for NaNoWriMo 2025 and found out that NaNoWriMo is no more.

Obviously the shutdown of the non-profit doesn't mean you aren't allowed to write 50,000 words in a month anymore but that, plus getting interested in some home lab projects, dissuaded me from going ahead with it.

Despite not wanting to write a full novel, I still had a bit of a creative writing itch, and what better way to scratch that itch than to start building out the stories from my partial novel, Dear Future!

The first of these stories will be the next post in this feed. I don't have any particular plans for a schedule or anything like that, I'll just write and post them when I feel like it.

If you like them I hope you look forward to more in the future, if you don't I hope you stick around for my non-fiction writing!

Also, if you haven't already, please subscribe to my blog so you get emailed whenever I post and so I can eventually get featured on the Ghost homepage! Thank you :)

Are you the type of person who is great at giving advice but can't help themselves?

The type of person who knows what they should be doing but just can't seem to do it?

Are you me?

Before going any further into those two traits I need to come clean on another trait of mine: being hard on myself. But sometimes being hard on yourself, at least a little bit, is what you need to grow. How else can you come up with self-referential advice if you can't self-identify your flaws?

So here's the piece of advice I've needed for a long time.

Stop waiting for the FUCKING Guide to Life by God almighty himself to drop down from the sky.

Here's a small example:

There's a term for spending a year learning programming without learning how to program.

Tutorial Hell.

Going through tutorial after tutorial, starting MOOC after MOOC, wondering if you should just join a bootcamp or what. Never just grinding through the actual programming on your own part.

And frankly, that's where I've been for YEARS!!!

Not specifically with programming but applied more broadly to the pursuit of a career/passion/mission in general.

I'm obsessed... no... addicted to learning just enough to dip my toes into the world of actually doing something.

I need to find the right framework, the right step-by-step, the optimal method etc. etc. etc. All before I can even start doing what I want to do.

And perhaps even worse, the times I've skipped the pre-start optimization Hell and dove right in to something, tutorials be damned, I've convinced myself it's okay to take shortcuts or do sub-optimal work because: "I'll go back and do better things once I've learned the actual way to do it."

Brother...

YOU ARE DOING IT! LEARN SOMETHING GOD DAMN YOU!!!

Another hilarious example of this tendency is my eternal desire to use a new note-taking/writing/calendar/productivity app.

If I just find that perfect app then the thoughts will start flowing.

Once I find the perfect app then I'll start researching all these topics I'm interested in.

AND once I find that perfect app, I'll make sure I find the perfect framework for using the app so I'm not organizing my flowing thoughts in the wrong way.

Truly hilarious.

Two Months Later...

I wrote that partial post in a burst of unproductive frustration just over two months ago.

Everything I said still feels true but I do have a somewhat, possibly, major update since then.

I finally decided to give ADHD treatment another shot.

I intend to make a post down the line all about ADHD and my potential treatment/strategy regiment but the short version is:

I've avoided medication for ADHD my whole life and the times I briefly tried it in the past it either didn't work or I didn't like how it made me feel. But this time, (started this medication a little over two weeks ago) something feels a little different.

Reading back through these words I see that my frustration being stuck in a mind bursting with a million ideas without the horsepower to make good on any of them wasn't a moral failing, but a chemical failing. At least partially.

It's too early to say for sure but assuming my treatment continues to work as well as it has so far, and it isn't some placebo effect that will soon wear off, I think that it's going to be a lot easier for me to take the advice I was talking about when I wrote those words two months ago.

More soon...

Also! Check out my new resume site:

https://ozzyphantom.com

I made it with Framer, it's pretty slick. Planning on posting more projects/case studies of my work there soon, if you know anyone hiring for junior-mid technical account manager/solution architect/product manager roles let me know!

Well, thismightnotmatter.com is finally on Ghost!

I say finally because I've been thinking about using Ghost since late 2023 but am just now getting around to it.

But it's done!

I ended up going with Ghost (Pro) because I only trust my networking/self-hosting skills for my own personal stuff right now. I still have a lot to learn before I trust hosting something I want people to actually visit anytime and not worry about messing up some configuration. I'll give self-hosting another go in the future though.

So how'd it go?

Once I entered the necessary personal/payment info I was delivered to an onboarding screen and guided through some basic setup.

I was initially not enthused with the site "builder" because of it's lack of customization but, honestly, forcing me to focus on the content rather than customization is probably more of a blessing than a curse.

I should mention that there is a lot more customization available if you use a custom theme or design your own but I'll consider that once I have million upon millions of raving fans.

I then updated by DNS records to point thismightnotmatter.com to the Ghost site and ported over my existing posts from the old site.

The first post was exceedingly easy, it was already in markdown so I just created a markdown block in the Ghost editor and copy/pasted. The second post.... not so easy.

This had nothing to do with Ghost or Hugo, just my own past technological tinkering.

When I setup the Hugo site, I used Cloudflare Images so the pictures would load extremely fast no matter where someone was loading the page in the world. This setup worked beautifully and made for a delightfully quick loading experience. However:

CF Images uses tags in place of standard markdown image pointers so Cloudflare knows which image to load from their servers in place of the tag. Meaning that my blog post didn't have any of the original photos. Meaning that I had to go back through the blog post and manually put each photo back.

It took 2 tedious hours but it at least let me revisit the writing which was nice.

Now there is one thing about Ghost (Pro) which is quite annoying.

I signed-up using the 14 day free trial and used a custom theme during that period. But once the two weeks was up I learned that using anything other than the default theme requires a higher tier "business account".

So that's kinda sucks but this is should be about the content, not the site design.

Other than that, I really don't have anything else to report.

I'm writing and posting this blog post to get me out of a demotivated slump of not finishing what I write. I have a lot of good ideas that I want to flesh out and post but its hard getting to it when writing isn't your main source of income and you don't have Casey Neistat levels of energy.

The last thing I'll mention is that all my posts will be free for the foreseeable future but the comment section (powered by the fediverse 😎) is members only. Meaning you'll have to give me an email address to send post notifications to if you want to comment.

There's a certain type of person obsessed with trains.

I am not one of them.

However, I can't pretend not to understand—at least a little—the allure of a chugging locomotive traveling through rolling hills, babbling brooks, or whatever other enchanting scenery you might be picturing.

What I have always been obsessed with are escapades of varying levels of spontaneity.

The escapade that most recently captured my attention just happened to involve trains—historical trains, to be exact. My good friend Alec was conducting a bit of historical research on our hometown (as one does when sick in bed) and discovered a forum post describing a railway that had snaked from our hometown of Dover, New Hampshire, thirty miles northwest to Alton Bay.

This particular line caught his attention because it partially ran through a small forest abutting my childhood backyard. We'd spent many summers over the years exploring this area, including a stone tunnel over Blackwater Brook that once supported the railroad in question. Here's a photo of some of my friends, including Alec (the one with the yellow hard hat), standing beneath it:

So when Alec suggested we map out the route and walk it, I was game—against the better judgment of my underutilized winter legs.

Using insights gleaned from a series of posts on a train forum and maps found in various historical archives, we mapped out the route on AllTrails with waypoints marking stations along the route. The route maintains close proximity to civilization, so we wouldn't need to carry much on our backs—just some snacks, water, and other basic essentials.

We decided to tackle it the very next weekend: June 1st.

We parked at the Dover Public Library a little before 5 a.m. and followed the sidewalk to the Dover Community Trail, one of many rail trails in the region, passing through the active Dover Amtrak station. The original Dover Train Station was on Third Street, but there's nothing left to see, so we made a beeline for where the Community Trail follows the Cocheco River a few streets down.

Dover Community Trail | Amtrak Parking Lot | Continuing on the Community Trail

Further down the river, we passed Beckwith Youth Baseball Park, where Alec remembered playing games on a field that had felt much larger back then, especially under the lights.

Beyond the field, the trail continues through a lightly wooded area and eventually links up with a more popular portion that passes under NH Route 16 and behind a few corporate buildings (including Liberty Mutual, my old workplace—this office no longer in use since the pandemic).

Beckwith Baseball Field | Trail continues alongside this fence

Under NH Route 16 (construction underway) | Behind my old workplace

This part of the trail is where you first start to see remnants of the railroad, such as small stone tunnels for water to pass under the raised bed.

After passing the trailhead, we reached the first section where there was no trail, and we'd have to stick to our map of the ROW (right-of-way) between property lines through high overgrowth to avoid taking any big detours.

This was also the first section where we started to get wet. It had been raining all weekend, and the sun wasn't around to burn the moisture off the grass yet, so the dew soaked right through my once water-resistant shoes. I don't believe Alec's shoes were ever water-resistant.

Regardless, we pushed through this brief no-man's land and back onto the street. The entry point off the street is diagonally across and marked by a metal barrier.

ROW diagonally across the street | Obvious section of ROW | Alec walking on the ROW

This section of ROW opens into a little cul-de-sac where a childhood friend lives. We walked right across the circle and into the first really rough portion of the trek.

I'd actually traversed this section long ago as a boy. My friend and I would pass through the woods here into another friend's neighborhood on the other side. The walk was a lot rougher and longer than I remembered from childhood.

A less overgrown portion of the overgrowth | Alec questioning himself | Water under the overgrowth

Not only was this section of ROW extremely overgrown and thorny, it was all swamp beneath the brambles.

We eventually got through the worst of the overgrowth by ascending a small wooded hill bordering the ROW and following alongside until most of the watery, thorny bits were behind us and we could get back down into the grass.

After a fair bit more traversing through this forgotten portion of trail, the grass gave way to a dirt path lined with stone, then to a paved side street and driveway.

This section was very close to my childhood home, so I left Alec momentarily to use the facilities and change into some boots (Alec had spare shoes in his backpack for when the day dried out).

With dry feet and emptied guts, I jogged back over to Alec to continue the journey through the stretch we were most familiar with—where Alec and I had spent many summers and after-school evenings exploring the woods with our friends.

The section of ROW in my childhood woods led to a large open field used primarily for hay production. I'd only wandered this far a handful of times as a boy, without the faintest idea that it would be possible to just keep wandering all the way to Alton Bay.

Entering the farmland | Alec with the childhood woods in the distance | Beautiful tree in the distance

With the field now crossed, we arrived at the first of many points where we had to trust our map and make an educated guess through a wall of vegetation. With some keen observation of barely perceptible differences in vegetation and a bit of gut instinct, we were mostly able to stay on track.

There were some portions through the overgrowth that were fairly clear, like where we found the remnants of an old car discarded in a ditch. Others required us to struggle through brambles or pop out into fields when it got too dense.

We eventually spotted Pickering Road in the distance, where the first station along the route would have been.

The sun greeting us | Old discarded car | Pickering Road in the distance

Reaching the old site of Pickering Station felt good. It was the first time that day we felt like we were really doing this.

Alec standing approximately where the station would have been | Old photo of the tiny Pickering Station | Another view of Old Pickering Station

Across the street from Pickering Station, where Pickering Road intersects with England Road, the ROW was supposed to continue. The forum said it was very overgrown back in 2019 but would quickly open up to easily traversable trail. Either a lot had changed in those six years vegetation-wise (likely), or we got thrown off our route (also likely), but the overgrowth never seemed to let up—and it was THORNY.

Alec and I spent over an hour fighting through a quarter mile of thorns, hoping to find the ROW pictured in the forum, but we never did.

Eventually we fought through the worst of it, with dozens of tiny cuts all over our legs and arms to prove it, and reached what appeared to be a recessed portion of ROW. Alec decided to try following the ROW itself while I ascended a hill across the way to bypass some overgrowth through the woods.

After about ten minutes, I stopped when I found the flooded portion of ROW pictured on the forum so I could wait for Alec. But soon I realized I couldn't hear anything that sounded like my friend fighting through overgrowth. After speaking on the phone, it turned out he hadn't made any progress and was trying to find the route I had taken.

Knowing we could waste another hour here, I decided to take one for the team and backtrack the way I came to get him. This was the only portion where we were stupid enough to try different routes.

Because of the wasted time, I completely forgot to take a picture of the flooded ROW area. It looked like a slow-moving river and smelled quite awful even from afar. So here's a photo from a little further down where the ROW was walkable again and we found another stone tunnel:

The next portion was fairly uneventful. There's a long section used as a horse trail—we had to avoid quite a bit of horse manure, but it was a welcome change from trying to avoid thorns. The horse trail eventually turns off into private property, so we had to do a bit more bushwhacking before passing over a swampy area behind a few houses to get to cross a street intersecting the trail. Across the street was what appeared to be an abandoned property with a little bit of B&M Railroad history left on it.

Old boxcars with... | The Boston & Maine railroad company logo on them!

The forum had mentioned these boxcars, but the poster hadn't noticed the B&M Railway logo. I peered into the reddish boxcar, but it was just completely rotted out and trashed. Still, it was fun to imagine these boxcars on the same journey we were on long ago.

The trail was pretty clear beyond the boxcars—not maintained trail, but easy enough to walk through until reaching a sand pit that had seen its fair share of illegal dumping.

Moving right along, the ROW trail passed by a few industrial buildings before leading back into the woods.

This part was again pretty uneventful—just a nice walk through the woods. Although we were beginning to feel in our legs that this was going to be a day of hurt.

Putting our aches aside, we were at least greeted at the other end with the corner of a green fence surrounding another industrial building which marked the site of what was once Gonic Station—the next milestone achieved!

Gonic Station used to be at that fence corner | Gonic Station: May 25th, 1915

The ROW continued alongside the edge of the green fence and back into the woods for a short stretch before reaching a small field beside the Spaulding Turnpike.

This was one part we weren't looking forward to. We'd need to take a giant detour to bypass the whole highway, take a smaller detour and try to go under an overpass, or book it across the highway at 9:30 a.m. I'll let you decide what we did:

The brief part of the trail beyond the Welcome to Rochester sign had some railroad ties left in place, as if they'd taken out the iron eighty-odd years ago and decided to wait for nature to take care of the rest (nature is still working on it):

Just beyond the previous photo, the elevated portion of the ROW drops off where there had been a rail bridge some time ago.

Alec emerging from the vegetation where the bridge once was | The road we came out on | Photo of the long-gone bridge

This portion of trail was pretty well maintained compared to the last hour of hiking. We were really starting to feel the soreness in our legs by this point, so when we reached downtown Rochester, we sat down on the first bench we saw, took some ibuprofen, changed our socks, ate some snacks, and mentally prepared to get moving again.

Once we got back on our feet, we noticed the sky was opening up to make way for a beautiful day.

We soon passed our third waypoint: the site of the Rochester Station, now a plaza with a Chinese restaurant and a recovery center.

Where the Rochester station once stood, approximately | Old photo-postcard of the Rochester Station/Depot

Not long after the site of the Rochester station, near Spaulding High School, the ROW became part of the Farmington/Rochester Recreational Trail.

Where the trail leads under NH16 again (nice of them to build this bridge) | Me walking down the trail a ways after the NH16 bridge

Portion of ROW bridge over the Cocheco River | View of the bridge with the river below

Passing by a commercial/retail plaza in Rochester | A tunnel beneath a road near the plaza

Where we crossed over NH11 in Farmington to continue on the recreational trail (near the site of old Places Depot) | A stone ROW tunnel in Farmington

Another angle of the stone ROW tunnel (my knees didn't want to go down with Alec) | Nearby ROW mile marker post

After a long slog on the trail, we were greeted with one of the more interesting stops along our journey: the site of an old sawmill near Rattlesnake Brook in Farmington, unofficially known as Rattlesnake Falls. After some digging in historical archives, I found that the sawmill was almost certainly the "Cocheco Novelty Mill" owned by General Jeremiah Roberts. It was built around 1850 and operated for fifteen years until the Civil War dampened business in time for steam power to make water-driven mills obsolete.

Here are some photos of what's left (no photos of the mill in its prime seem to exist or remain).

Stone foundation of the mill | Foundation from another angle | Rattlesnake Falls | Tiny mill pond formed by the damming of Rattlesnake Brook

We spent a few minutes clambering over the stone foundation looking for any remnants of the past (nothing but the foundation) before getting back on the trail, knowing there was still a long way to go.

The next waypoint wasn't much further up at the intersection of the Farmington Recreational Rail Trail and Meetinghouse Hill Road—the site of the Bernardi Greater Shows Derailment, which occurred on July 22, 1928.

Site of derailment now | July 22nd, 1928

Not much further up was another point of historical interest: the site of what was most recently the Collins and Aikman Automotive Interiors plant.

The factory was originally built in 1966 as part of the Davidson Rubber Company (owned by McCord Corporation, then Ex-Cell-O Corporation). The plant's parent company was purchased by Textron in 1986, then Collins and Aikman in 2001. The plant completely ceased operations in 2006 with Collins and Aikman having filed for bankruptcy the year prior and was demolished by 2010.

In 2013, the site was named a Superfund site by the EPA with multiple toxic contaminants found on-site and in the groundwater beneath it. The Superfund Proposal Document is where I was able to source the information about the history of the site through the years.

I was surprised not to be able to find much in the way of photos of the plant at all, except for some paywalled images in Foster's Daily Democrat and the low-resolution aerial photograph visible in the EPA document.

Visible railway at site entrance | Driveway to the main site with some parking | Alec walking through the fading parking lot | All that's left of the plant

Beyond the remains of the plant and the current site of Metal Farm, LLC (the current owner of the plot), the recreational trail continued. This part of the trail was either still under "construction" or being re-cleared, as the ground was freshly razed and there was still some clearing equipment left out and about.

Me ready to be done at roughly the halfway point | Freshly razed snowmobile trail | Alec ready to be done too

At the next intersection with Route 11, we took the opportunity to stop by a Domino's, eat some pizza in the parking lot, and charge our phones a bit (AllTrails was chugging through battery). Across the street from Domino's also happened to be roughly the site of the Farmington Depot.

Parking lot pizza | The depot would've been roughly where the Rite Aid sign is | Old photo of the Farmington Depot

The absolute last thing we wanted to do at that moment was start walking again, but we had one last point of interest not too far away to get us moving before a long slog of not much to see.

The point of interest was a large concrete arched bridge over the Mad River, completely hidden from view of the street. It's wild to imagine all the people driving on NH11 every day passing by this forgotten structure just behind a garden center. It was a little difficult to find from River Road, as there was no indication of where the ROW was at all. So we again had to make some guesses based on the map before finding it a little ways through the woods.

River Road guess zone | View from top of the ROW arch | The Mad River arched bridge

I was unable to find any early photos of this arched bridge, unfortunately.

Moving on, we eventually passed across Ridge Road where we were supposed to reconnect with maintained trail along a flooded portion of the ROW. Unfortunately, we chose the wrong side of the flooded ROW to travel along and soon realized—after bushwhacking over chunks of granite for about ten minutes (when we saw an older couple leisurely walking on the other side)—that we were on the wrong side.

Flooded portion of ROW | What we were climbing over

Lucky for us, the flooded portion didn't last much longer, and we were able to cross over onto the actual trail.

After this trail, we began what would end up being the worst part of the journey. Not because it was difficult to traverse or hard to navigate, but quite the opposite. The ROW after this trail all the way to Alton was just NH11, so we'd have to spend the next couple of hours walking alongside the highway with not much to see and only the sound of speeding cars to keep us entertained.

Quick break at Johnson's | Footbridge | Beautiful footbridge view

Along Route 11, we lost our minds a little bit.

I fell between cycles of imagining I was a desert cowboy wandering to find water and completely becoming one with the road, forgetting the world around me.

Reaching the Alton traffic circle honestly felt like the biggest milestone of the day, even though the journey was far from over. We had made it all the way from our hometown—about twenty-eight miles—and only had a relatively short stretch left before we could finally say we were done.

We decided to take another break at McDonald's, where Alec immediately made a beeline for the bathroom and disappeared for a solid fifteen minutes (he had a spiritual experience in there, his words, not mine). I stared dumbly into the ether before ordering a small vanilla milkshake, drinking it, and throwing it away basically unconsciously. Some primal part of my brain just knew I needed some fast calories to get through the final stint to Alton Bay.

We somewhat recovered at McDonald's and gritted our teeth to complete the home stretch through downtown Alton, the B&M Railway park, and just a bit more bushwhacking to the Bay.

Site of Alton Station (now Alton Police Station) | Old photo of Alton Station

B&M Railroad Park a bit past the original site | Closer view of the model station | Where the trail continued through the park

About one hundred yards after the B&M Railroad Park, Alec took a seat on a bench for another break. I didn't realize what dire straits he was in, so I trekked on a little further to make out where our next section of ROW might continue through the brush.

While I was finding the trail, Alec was in a mental battle to get back up and finish this thing. With a few good handfuls of trail mix, he found enough energy to get moving again and meet up with me to complete our final bushwhack.

The "trail" I scouted followed the bank of Mill Pond into more unmarked woods. I was honestly feeling a lot of internal frustration at this point—it felt like we should be done by now, but here we were still fighting through overgrowth and not even sure we were going the right way.

Eventually we did get some indication we were on the right path with some signs of ROW and this interesting find:

Not long after the telegraph discovery, the woods opened up to reveal we were at the top of the Merrymeeting River Crossing bridge—or what was left of it, anyway.

What's left of it | What the Merrymeeting Bridge would've looked like in operation | Road we made out way down to

The easiest way to get to the bay from here was to trek down the road a bit to the left of the trestles and pass over a footbridge into a little recreational park.

The footbridge | On the Bridge | The recreation park

From there we walked through an adorable little neighborhood along the Merrymeeting River (seems like a lovely place to live), patted a friendly cat, and tried to hold back tears as we finally laid eyes upon the bay.

Quiet little neighborhood | Friendly Kitty | The bay at long last! Docks in the bay | Bayside | A lovely pup Informational sign | The Alton Bay Station | Another view of the bay

FINALLY! | Getting ready to eat some real food before our friend picked us up | Historical photo of Alton Bay Station

We didn't spend much time waiting around—just enough to put on some fresh socks and pull off a couple of ticks—before heading over to a little waterside restaurant called Shibley's at the Pier.

I got a shrimp cocktail, Bloody Mary, and some steak tips to close out the day. Alec got a lamb burger and water.

The staff didn't question our disheveled appearances, which was appreciated, and I tipped them well.

Although we were battered, worn out, and ready to sleep, Alec and I knew this was a day we'd hold in high regard. As we get older, we let these spontaneous adventures grow fewer and farther between, despite them feeling more like living than most of the days in between.

I wrote this post a few months ago after listening to a Waveform Podcast episode discussing Apple's iPhone lineup. It was mostly an exercise to get back into writing after a long hiatus (basically since my first and last year of college). I also wanted to try out Claude 3.7 Sonnet's editing chops (they were okay). Anyways, there's a lot of issues with this post but I made this simple blog site to start writing again and wanted to post something even if it's not perfect. If you could imagine enjoying my writing style in the future hopefully you'll stick around, thanks!

Apple's meteoric redemption in the early 2000's at the behest of Steve Jobs is a longtime Silicon Valley (and Wall Street) legend. Anyone with a degree of familiarity with Apple's history post-1999 or so will be familiar with Jobs' quadrant approach to product, where he threw out everything Apple had been working on without him and focused the company on four key product areas: Pro Desktop, Pro Laptop, Consumer Desktop, and Consumer Laptop.

Today that pristine four-square grid has expanded into a sprawling product matrix including the iPhone (5 models), AirPods (4 models), Apple Watch (3 models), iPad (6 models), and of course the Vision Pro. While nowhere near the chaotic product catalog of pre-Jobs Apple, this expansion has simplicity purists justifiably concerned—particularly with what's happening to the iPhone lineup.

So how did Apple's overall product strategy get so bloated (relative to the early 2000's-2010's) in the first place? And why doesn't it feel as nightmarish? I'd say you can really boil it down to two words: Vision Pro "walled garden". This innovation has been a triumph in creating genuinely magical product experiences and an even bigger triumph in corporate cash printing. Despite having a much broader range of products than what used to feel necessary, you can rest assured that within the warm embrace of the Apple ecosystem, everything is going to "just work" with little technological fluency required. If you have an iPhone and want a smartwatch, you aren't in the market for a smartwatch, you're in the market for an Apple Watch.

But just because all of these devices work near flawlessly with each other doesn't necessarily mean that any given product line couldn't suffer from Samsung-esque bloat. Let's review the current iPhone lineup:

• iPhone 16e ($599)

• iPhone 16 ($799)

• iPhone 16 Plus ($899)

• iPhone 16 Pro ($999)

• iPhone 16 Pro Max ($1199)

All in all, it's really not that bad. Especially if you put the 16/16 Plus and 16 Pro/16 Pro Max into the same buckets. You either want the cheap phone, the not-cheap phone, the not-cheap big phone, the expensive phone, or the expensive big phone. It's a system that's worked pretty well for the last five or so years. But, if the supply-chain rumors are true, we might see a nightmarish lineup like this in the not-too-distant future:

• iPhone 18e ($599)

• iPhone 18 ($699)

• iPhone 18 Plus ($799)

• iPhone Air ($899)

• iPhone Pro ($999)

• iPhone Pro Max ($1199)

• iPhone Pro Fold ($1999)

Any simplicity purist would shudder at the thought of seven iPhone tiers. And anyone who makes a living commentating on tech would have an excellent article for readers to nod their heads along to. But it doesn't need to be this way, Apple. Let's consider my approach to adding the rumored Air/Fold phones to the lineup:

Assume it is September 2026, The Year of the Apple iPhone 18. The iPhone lineup now includes ultra-thin and folding models.

• iPhone 18e ($599)

• iPhone 18 ($799)

• iPhone 18 "Air" ($999)

• iPhone Pro "Fold" ($1999)

Let me explain, starting with the iPhone 18e at $599.

Apple wishes they didn't need to make a budget phone. In a perfect Objectivist utopia where everyone values the "virtue of selfishness" and premium products accordingly, a phone such as the 18e wouldn't need to exist, but we do not live in that world (yet). "Budget" is a bit of a stretch, but I don't think anyone was holding their breath for a $10 Boost Mobile edition iPhone. Leaving budget debates aside, Apple's "Greatest Price" iPhone serves two purposes: lock-in and relativity.

Lock-in: You may not be Apple's preferred customer (wealthy), but they'll be happy to take your money. Per our ecosystem discussion earlier, even if you buy the cheapest iPhone, you're going to be more likely to buy other Apple products in the future.

Relativity: $599 sounds cheap when compared to $799, and $799 sounds premium compared to $599.

The iPhone 18e can really be summed up as the iPhone that tech enthusiasts don't need to worry about if they don't have a podcast. So let me that the tech enthusiasts might actually worry about, especially if they have a podcast.

If simplicity was all that mattered, Apple would just nix the idea of an "Air" model and make the base iPhone "The Thinnest iPhone Ever." Apple knows that a large segment of the phone-buying populace has one of two motivations: "I want the cheapest" or "I want the best" without a whole lot of nuance into what "the best" even means. So why not give consumers a more interesting choice: "I want the thinnest, prettiest phone" or "I want the most powerful, capable phone" (or the "no, I actually still just want the cheap one").

However, my lineup does not kneel to this simplicity purist agenda. This is, after all, a mix of prediction and desire, and I'd be hard-pressed to predict Apple not having a product just called "iPhone". Which is why the iPhone 18 might be considered the "S" model of the lineup moving forward. A spec bump to the previous base level iPhone and perhaps a fun new color, much like the "S" generations in the 2010s. This phone is for the consumer who isn't looking to impress their friends with how much money they can spend on a phone, but who doesn't want to be humiliated by buying the budget option.

Rounding out the familiar iPhone price structure hierarchy is the "Air". "Air" is in quotes because I have my doubts they'll use that name, although it could make sense in the context of the MacBook lineup circa 2016/17: MacBook → MacBook Air → MacBook Pro. This iPhone would take the price slot of the current iPhone Pro models with a comparable performance delta to the iPhone 16 vs iPhone 16 Pro but with a big leg-up on aesthetics. Chief among them being, of course, thinness.

Thinness is perhaps one of the most controversial topics in tech circles (among others): "Bigger battery and better thermals" vs "thin phone pretty and aesthetic". For me personally, I'm down to see how thin companies can push the current design paradigm because, honestly, I don't think there's any feature additions within the current form factor that could push the needle before we make the leap to AR-glasses and/or neural implants. So why not cram the immense power of our current devices into an impossibly thin package? It's been a long time since it was a "cool" thing to have the latest phone; the last time I can remember anyone really noticing a new phone on the street was with 2017's iPhone X. Maybe "The Thinnest iPhone Ever" could bring back some of that new phone awe I have a bit of nostalgia for.

But refocusing on the Air's place in the lineup, this device is targeted at the consumer who unabashedly cares more about aesthetics than raw performance or cutting-edge features. I'd personally be hard-pressed to pick between an ultra-thin slab of beautiful glass vs a thicker but more computationally powerful/featureful device. Which is why such an iPhone would be the perfect addition to the lineup before selling consumers on a potentially $2000+ iPhone.

The new Pro iPhone is the device that only professional money spenders are going to be willing to fork out for. The iPhone Pro "Fold" (probably not what they'll name it) will occupy an entirely new tier of iPhone for itself at double the price of the "Air". Is $1999 an insane price to pay for a smartphone? Maybe it is, but may I remind you that a non-zero amount of people bought the $3499 Apple Vision Pro. For the tier of consumer that demands the best (sigh... me), they were sold before Tim Cook even got the chance to say "Good Morning!"

This four tiered lineup is my vision for the iPhone as an experienced philosopher of Apple-lore but I am no fortune teller. You'll notice that I've done away with the Plus and Pro Max distractions in favor of a one screen-size per tier approach. This represents my bias towards imagination, for Apple has long lost the way of simplicity, how will consumers know to spend more money without a Plus or Max in the name guiding them towards the light of capitalistic grace? So while this lineup may not resemble the one we'll see in an upcoming September, you can all rest assured that someone out there was brave enough to voice what could've been.

originally posted: 2025-06-09