Brad Barrish

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 16:48:34 -0700

I’ve been consolidating a bunch of digital files into a comprehensive personal archive. Today I came upon a sheet of print-your-own stickers from the early days of the dot-com bust. San Francisco was absolutely covered in advertisements from dot-com boom. Shit was already starting to go sideways.

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 22:39:33 -0700

Got a new iPhone 18 Pro today. Went for a 512 GB in Glacier, which looks nice. I don’t have a case for it yet. I wish I trusted myself enough to go caseless, but I don’t. They really do feel so much better without a case.

I traded in my iPhone 16 Pro to Apple and got $510 for it, which seemed like a decent price. I can’t be bothered with anything more complicated. I was almost certain I was going to pre-order the Duo, but I can’t imagine compromising on the cameras, which are way more important than having a foldable phone. And it’s fucking expensive, even with the wife’s employee discount.

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 07:53:53 -0700

Love this animated ascii art.

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 18:44:49 -0700

I would absolutely not recommend using ChatGPT, Claude or any other cloud-based AI as a diary. They are not private and depending what you put in them, it could very well be reviewed by a human and reported to law enforcement. Case in point.

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 09:03:14 -0700

Reading about Ben Thompson’s Mac getting hacked, which he uses exclusively for agentic AI stuff, is pretty scary. I’ll definitely be making some improvements to my own setup based on this. He also expressed some of the same concerns as I have about Apple locking things down even further. And he’s absolutely right about it being pretty much impossible to run a Mac headless. Good luck if the power goes out and you aren’t physically able to access it.

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 21:50:53 -0700

Go put on Susumu Yokota’s Sakura (2025 Remaster) when you have a chance.

Hotness

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 15:36:05 -0700

In case you haven’t heard, it’s quite hot in Los Angeles, but that’s October in LA for you. I went to the farmers market, as I do nearly every Sunday and even at 9am it was insanely hot. I’m sitting in my car in Santa Monica at the moment and it says it’s 101 degrees. My watch say 95, so it’s probably somewhere in the middle.

I distinctly remember going to pumpkin patches in October when the kids were younger and it was always dreadfully hot.

And if the heat weren’t enough, the mosquitoes are completely out of control. I picked up buckets at home depot so I can build some mosquito traps for around our house. A neighbor I was talking to yesterday did the same.

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 16:34:07 -0700

Good lord. This Low performance of “When I Go Deaf” from 2013 absolutely wrecked me. I miss them as a band and still can’t believe Mimi is gone. Low is just one of those bands for me… (h/t Sippy)

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 21:57:11 -0700

My new Apple Watch Ultra 4 got delivered today. I got the natural color with the translucent gray Ocean Band. I had the same setup with my Ultra 1, only it had a white Ocean Band. I traded in my Ultra 1, so that will be heading back to Apple. The Ultra 4 looks exactly the same, though the color is a bit different. I love how it looks and am excited to check out the latest Apple Health stuff.

I’ve been going back and forth on the iPhone Duo. I love taking photos with my iPhone and the Duo’s cameras aren’t nearly as good as the ones on the Pro. I’ve had a Pro since they started making them. I love the idea of the Duo, but it might just not be the phone for me.

Steve Albini worked with Cheap trick on a re-recording of In Color?!

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 17:31:50 -0700

I found out about this unreleased Steve Albini version of Cheap Trick’s In Color from a Threads post and have had it on repeat ever since. Anyone who knows anything about Albini knows he was a massive fan of Cheap Trick. The short story is the band apparently thought the original mix of In Color was a little too polished so they ended up re-recording the album with Albini over the course of a few days. He discussed this in his Tape Op interview in 2012.

A fairly big project for them was rerecording the entire In Color album. At the time, that struck me as a mistake; like a capitulation of “we did our best stuff a long time ago.” It seemed like a mistake, up until they started working on it. Then it seemed like the best idea ever. It was so invigorating and it was so much fun. It was so satisfying to hear them blowing those songs out full- bore.

So far they haven’t released it. I think it was more about them exorcising their demons about that record. I think they felt for years like they’d been carrying that record around and that record didn’t represent them. They just wanted a shot to do it their way. And, once they did, I think it soothed their ennui. I don’t think they feel the need to exploit that; it’s just something they wanted to do.

He also discusses it in a Stereogum interview from 2024.

Now, I’ve never confirmed any of this with the band, but my intuition based on what was going on around the band at the time was that they were in the middle of extricating themselves from a managerial relationship and also from a record label relationship. And that album, the In Color album, had most of their hit titles on it. And so by remaking that album, they created a version of it that they owned entirely and that then they could use, they could license and keep all the money from. And that was a tactic that was later used by Taylor Swift and other people. They were pretty early and pretty on the ball doing that.

That seemed like such a crazy idea. And it almost seemed like a kind of a tacit admission that their later material wasn’t as good. I thought it was a bad idea, and I said, so. Then from the minute they started, I just could not have enjoyed myself more sitting there listening to it, and I’m so glad they did it. If you’ve ever seen them play live, that’s what they sound like. They’re an energetic hard rock band, and their studio record version didn’t, didn’t really bring that across that much.

Wow! I really hope the band officially releases this at some point.

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 21:57:08 -0700

I used Bearable to track a lot of my biometrics and symptoms for about 5 years. I stopped using it consistently in 2025. I fell out of the habit and grew kind of tired of it. Part of it was my own fault for trying to track too many things. This has happened to me many times before. I’ve been suffering from a lot of headaches and migraines lately, so I’ve been trying to get back into the habit of tracking things again. I have an appointment at UCLA next month, so I figured it would be good to get back into tracking things. I wear an Apple Watch and Oura ring, but it doesn’t capture everything and I can’t quickly add tags or notes to my data in Apple Health and I don’t like Oura’s interface for this, mostly because I don’t have a way to look back at it.

I exported all of my data from Bearable and had ChatGPT create a Base in Obsidian, which was pretty simple since the data was already in a CSV. Then I created a template using the Templater community plugin for Obsidian and had ChatGPT create a template to fill in some things that I wanted to track. I then generated an Oura API token worked on a little helper script to pull my data from Oura into the template for the current day in addition to collecting several data points, which I fill in manually. I’m really happy with how it turned out.

I do this sort of thing at least a few times a week. It is so fun to be able to go from an idea, even a complex one, to a finished product for myself in a few hours. I feel like I say it all the time, but AI really does democratize working with machines in a way that only trained developers could do. It’s incredibly exciting and so weird. It continues to thrill me and also really freak me out. I definitely have mixed feelings about it. That said, I don’t think it’s going to kill us all. I’ve learned not to bring it up with most people, though I do wish I could have nuanced conversations about it with people in my life.

Sat, 12 Sep 2026 12:06:51 -0700

My absolute favorite RSS reader, Unread, got a big 5.0 update. Congrats, John!

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 09:17:38 -0700

This selection of Los Alamos Rolodex buiness cards brings me so much joy. I mean look at these beautiful business cards!

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 22:37:32 -0700

As I struggle to know whether it’s even worth having a website on which I regularly publish, I made a few small improvements to this one over the weekend. If you read via RSS, you won’t notice anything. If you visit in a browser, you’ll now see a blogroll along the right. The list will get added to over time, but I started with a bunch of my favorites. I also tweaked the header a bit by adding a personal logo beside my name and I dropped the link to my mom’s obituary as one of the main links. I plan to move it to a more permanent place on the web at some point. I also added a now page, which is a bit sparse, but it’s something I’d been meaning to add.

Beginning down a long road of extracting myself from Google

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 22:30:06 -0700

For an individual, I pay Google a lot of money every month. I pay for YouTube Premium (for the family), YouTube TV, NFL games, Google One for extra space on my OG Gmail account and Google Workspace for my personal domain. I’ve finally come to the point where I’m going to begin moving away from Google services. It will take a while, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while.

Google Photos will probably be the most difficult service to move away from, but Immich looks like a promising replacement. Fastmail is likely where I’ll end up for email, calendar and contacts and I’ll likely start that process soon. Since I have multiple personal domains, that will be a helpful migration. Docs and Sheets might well be impossible, or at least the trade-offs might be too great. I’m not entirely sure what I’ll do there yet.

I don’t plan to cancel YouTube Premium. The value is irreplaceable and nothing really comes close. I don’t think you can watch NFL games anywhere else, so that will have to stay as well.

Google Maps is relatively easy to replace with Apple Maps. I guess Mapquest is making a comeback too, which is kinda nuts.

If you have advice on the topic, I’d love to hear about it, especially as it relates to Google Docs and Sheets.

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 18:38:03 -0700

The Hugging Face Incident is, in a distorted and dangerous way, an illustration of what the AI companies are trying to achieve. They want long-running AI agents to work without human intervention, solving problems and organizing as needed, with our human job limited to giving instructions and evaluate output.

From Ethan Mollick’s post, Agency and Agents

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 11:49:51 -0700

The 2026 Tiny Awards are underway. Go vote! Great see some familiar names on the selection committee too. Go visit all of their sites after you’re done checking out the nominees.

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 23:31:41 -0700

The almost-total “blood moon” as seen from Los Angeles, CA

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 23:29:04 -0700

I’m back on Twitter, y’all.

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 16:34:07 -0700

I’ve always loved this photo of Dolly by Andy Warhol. It’s difficult to imagine a world without Dolly setting the impossibly high bar for what kindness looks like, especially in these trying times. She is undeniable. May she rest in peace.

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 09:04:45 -0700

I saw the incredible Jeff Parker and the the IVtet (thank you, Greg!), which included drummer Jay Bellerose, bassist Anna Butterss, and saxophonist Josh Johnson. It was the first of three nights at the Lodge Room in the Highland Park neighborhood in LA. It was one of those rare shows where you hear all of these sounds and you have absolutely no idea where it’s all coming from. Jeff and Josh both use pedals a lot, but I focus so much on Jay, who is certainly one of the greatest living drummers.

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 23:27:14 -0700

Phoebe Bridgers in the BBC Live Lounge covering Lithium by Nirvana. Absolutely stunning. Wow.

Transcript

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 20:24:38 -0700

I don’t believe for a minute that Amazon is the only company that has been buying rare books to scan them and, in the process, destroy them. They’re just the latest to get caught.

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 20:18:58 -0700

I was sorry to read about the sudden passing of Stephen Wolfram’s wife, Elise Cawley. He wrote a beautiful post about her that was really touching. May she live on through all those who loved her and were loved by her.

Unimportant Gmail now avoids filter limits

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 21:52:41 -0700

Welp, after running the script for a while, I hit a limit. Apparently Gmail has a limit on the number of filters you can create. Every time I applied my Unimportant label to a new sender, the script would notice that sender and create a Gmail filter for it. One sender, one filter. It worked well, but once I hit the 1000 filter limit, it stopped being able to create new ones.

I worked with ChatGPT on a fix. I’ve been using it more for coding work lately. We ended up making the filters more dense without changing the overall behavior. Instead of creating one Gmail filter per sender, the script now groups multiple senders into a single Gmail query filter, which is something I used to do manually. Here’s what that looks like:

{from:a@example.com from:b@example.com from:c@example.com}

It still matches exact senders, but it uses a single filter instead of three. Consolidating filters reduced the total count dramatically while keeping the same basic workflow and ChatGPT handled the consolidation over the course of a few hours.

I also tightened up the operational side. The script now understands grouped from: query filters when it checks whether a sender is already covered, so rerunning it should not create duplicate coverage. I had some dupes that were left over from the manual work I was doing before I worked on the script. I also documented the setup a bit more thoroughly so it covers how to run it on a schedule, how to verify it, what files should never be committed, and details rollbacks.

Software still needs to be maintained. Go figure. Small automations are still systems.