Brad Barrish

Unimportant Email

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 23:39:11 -0700

I was catching up with a friend I hadn’t talked to in a while (hi, Ethan) and we got on the topic of AI. He asked me if I use AI with my email and I said something to the extent of, ‘Not really, but kinda.’

Email inboxes, much like physical mailboxes at home, are filled with junk. New junk arrives every day. Even the stuff that isn’t junk isn’t fun to open. It’s not personal the way a letter or thank you note is. Those are truly rare. I certainly get more personal emails than I do letters, but I often missed them because I hated wading through the junk.

Claude estimates that 98.7% of my email is garbage. On average I receive 122 emails per day and the last thing I want to waste my time doing is dumpster dive for the 4 emails that I actually should read and/or respond to.

I’ve tried using AI to help me with this problem and only recently did we come up with something that has truly made a difference. The way the vast majority of email services and apps work is they depend on filters or blocklists to filter out unwanted emails. Given that most email is junk, the process of creating filters is tedious and time-consuming. There are some exceptions out there like Hey, but for the most part there aren’t great solutions for utilizing allowlists or screening emails before they arrive in your inbox.

My main personal email account is hosted on Google Workspace. I’ve been using Gmail for decades at this point. Assuming you are familiar with Gmail, you know that All Mail is the unfiltered view of your email and Inbox is the filtered view. Tags are essentially folders. The way I use Gmail is that I go through emails in my Inbox and will skim through the All Mail view. I also have a limited number of broad labels set up for newsletters, paper trail, etc. but I don’t generally look at them unless I’m trying to find something or I feel like reading.

I also have a label, Unimportant, that I apply to everything that isn’t personal or important. I’ve been using this with manual filters for years, but it occurred to me that, with a little help from AI, I could build a script that would automatically create filters simply by applying the Unimportant label to emails. It does this by looking at emails from the last couple of weeks that have the Unimportant label applied but do not have a filter created. If it finds any matches, it creates a filter and I never see anything from that sender again. It works flawlessly. Here’s what my Inbox looks like right now

I now have nearly 1000 filters, most of which were created by the script. It runs every evening from an Intel Mac Mini running Linux and I finally have an inbox without the garbage. And if a little garbage gets in, all I have to do is apply the Unimportant label to keep it from ever showing up again. Give it a try for yourself and let me know what you think.

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 22:08:36 -0700

Bear blogger, Peter Gombos, created a simple, Bear-ish (Bear-adjacent?) called Moments that is really lovely. If you’ve been thinking about blogging for the first time or picking it back up, you can’t go wrong with Bear and Moments for sharing a little bit of yourself with the world.

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 21:22:14 -0700

Years of Light is a free art project and musical tribute to the work of Nas and DJ Premier, engineered and mastered by Green Studio NYC. I’m a few tracks in and this is absolutely awesome! (h/t Ian)

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 17:32:22 -0700

I was shocked and saddened to learn that Om Malik died. I always enjoyed his writing and his photography. I didn’t know him personally, but by all accounts, he was a really good human. Knowing that he had such a long battle with heart disease really reframes some of his writing, especially what is now his final blog post. I hope and trust that his family and/or friends will keep his online presence alive. The world is a better place with his words and photos available for others to enjoy. Farewell, Om. You will be missed by many.

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 21:40:32 -0700

Kinda crazy I waited all this time to finally buy a 3D printer. Bambu was having a sale so I picked up a P2S AMS Combo for $100 off. It took some time to set up, but it’s calibrating now! Kids might be more excited than me. What should I print first?

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 19:42:39 -0700

It was cool to see this BBC article on Oodi, the incredible public library in Helsinki. I spent some time then when I was in Finland in 2022. It had opened only a few years before. It was the most impressive library I have ever seen. I remember thinking to myself how all public libraries should be just like it. Here are a few photos I took inside.

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 09:49:09 -0700

I don’t generally do such things, but I felt compelled to add my name to the Resonant Computing Manifesto. This isn’t a time to be passive about the future.

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 11:25:54 -0700

My brother found some slides that had some never-before-seen photos of my parents. Here’s a great one of my dad. He was my best friend and such a gray dad. I am so lucky to have had him. I model a lot of my own parenting after him. He died from pancreatic cancer in 2007 and I’ve never stopped missing him. Happy Father’s Day (and first day of summer and Go Skateboarding Day) to all of the dads out there.

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 17:45:29 -0700

My guess is the Commodore Callback will sell, but it would sell a lot better if it was priced lower. I love the idea of it though. Not crazy about the form factor though.

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 17:23:18 -0700

Nick Cave answers a question in the Red Hand Files about whether he has used any of the generative AI music tools.

I often wonder why musicians don’t seem more alarmed by the rise of these songwriting generators. But perhaps I am hopelessly out of touch with how the world functions, and don’t fully understand the immense positive potential they may offer. No doubt there is some truth to this, but at the same time I believe we musicians and songwriters are sleepwalking into a situation where we allow this technology to strip the world of one of the last genuine transcendent experiences left to us – man-made music – by surrendering our souls to a machine. What does this say about us, that we so passively acquiesce? Are we not the valiant knights, the truth-tellers, the beauty-makers, who journey to the dark side, slay the dragon, and bring back the dripping treasure? Are we not the guardians of the world’s soul?

I continue to hold Nick in the highest regard. He is a sage of our time and a damn fine musician.

Dave Eggers on the survival of physical books (and other stuff)

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 16:19:28 -0700

I’ve been listening to Dave Eggers’s appearance on Tetragrammaton over the last few days. I’ve only read two of his books—A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and The Circle—but I’ve been a fan of his other work for a long time. I subscribed to Might and McSweeney’s when he started them. I think I might even have some McSweeney’s issues sitting in a box somewhere in the garage. They really were special, often exceptionally intricate, artifacts. I loved what he had to say about spending the extra pennies (literally) to make physical books special objects.

I went to Reykjavik and walked the floor of the printing plant. It was all these blonde men with blue jumpsuits. I mean, it was like an Oompa Loompa type of thing. But I could walk around and i’d see they printed all the bibles in Iceland and I could see the Dgilded edges and foil stamping and a leather cover and a ribbon marker and all these beautiful add-ons. I was like how much does that cost to do? Two cents. How much does that cost? Three cents. And you realize that all of these things that make beautiful books really beautiful cost pennies to do and how it’s such a shame when somebody’s not spending the extra six cents to take it from a cheap looking thing to make something really beautiful. And so we became determined to just invest in cloth and color art inside and foil stamps and all of these things that all the printers are ready to do and willing to do. Foldouts and pop-ups and, really, anything that you can imagine, some printer will be able to do it.

Then he gets to heart of it.

I think if we’re going to have physical books survive, you do have to take that extra step. You gotta make these things radically better than looking at a screen. It’s an existential moment where if we don’t do better, then bit by bit people will choose screens because everything is channeled through one object as opposed to having to hold all of these different things and pay for them.

He’s so right. I remain optimistic about physical objects. I think people, especially young people, are so tired of renting everything on screens.

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 12:40:17 -0700

Apparently my Apple Watch Ultra (1st generation) will not be able to upgrade to watchOS 27, which is a bummer. It was released in 2022, which isn’t all that long ago. Four years and now it can’t run the latest watchOS? Pretty lame. It’s my third Apple Watch since they were released and has been the absolute best wrist wearable I’ve had. I did try a Garmin for a while, but the software was offensively awful. Assuming Apple releases a 4th generation Ultra in the fall, I’ll probably get one. I love the heft and especially the battery life, which has held up pretty well. It has 85% maximum capacity remaining. There’s a chance I’ll hold off since iPhone prices are going to increase and I plan to get a new one when they’re released. I’m excited about the foldable, which I’m sure will cost a fortune.

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 11:54:39 -0700

If ever there was a way to get me to go see a movie in a theater, it’s knowing that I might be the only person in the theater. Bless you, Riley Walz (h/t Lisa Olin)

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 11:54:28 -0700

I’ve always admired Craig Newmark, especially his approach to philanthropy. The fact that he’s being put in a position to defend his philanthropy is absurd.

Related: I enjoyed his appearance on Tyler Cowan’s podcast.

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:51:53 -0700

Shiny Frog, the fine people who make the wonderful Bear app have a new Markdown editor called Lettera. It’s currently in beta and looks great. (h/t Sippey)

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:41:45 -0700

John Gruber has a nice write-up about Cotypist. Like John, I actually enjoy writing, so I don’t end up using it for writing much, but I find Cotypist absolutely indispensable for everything else. Also worth mentioning that I am using Superwhisper for voice-to-text input. I use local models so nothing is sent to the cloud. All of these cool tools that run locally and aren’t dependent on the cloud, I think, are going to be the future.

Thu, 04 Jun 2026 11:42:08 -0700

“being real with yourself” is the most important cognitive skill for the AI age

AI makes it easier to lie to yourself. you gotta be able to honestly answer: am I actually thinking with AI, or am I letting it do the hard part for me? is this uessay/product/business a good idea, or did AI convince me it was?

then you won’t need hard rules like “always/never use AI for X.” if you pay attention and avoid self-deception, you can feel when you are doing real work

From Jasmine Sun on Substack Notes via Diana Kimball Berlin via Robin Sloan

Fri, 29 May 2026 21:42:54 -0700

It’s not even optimistic to say we have to try, it’s just necessary. To give up, to stop trying, is to accept that things can’t change. As Audre Lorde put it: “despair is a tool of our enemies.” Despair is a gift to those that want you to believe that what we’ve got is all we’ll get and there’s no way to make things better.

From *A pep talk in the face of despair (or: trying redux)* by Dan Sinker

Fri, 22 May 2026 22:42:57 -0700

We watched Billie Elliot for family movie night tonight. Everyone was bawling. I’m not allowed to pick movies or plan hikes ever again. It’s such a great movie though. I saw it at Laemmle Sunset 5 sometime in 2000. There was a Virgin Megastore in the same shopping center. I bought a lot of CDs there. It was walking distance from my first apartment in LA.

Thu, 21 May 2026 20:39:47 -0700

I want to push for the idea that a record doesn’t have to mean something. That the point of music isn’t always to decode it and extract meaning from it. That music can be emotionally legible without being confessional. And that distortion and opacity—a sensation of watching someone on the other side of an artificial waterfall in a family buffet restaurant—is often far more interesting and resonant than saying explicitly what one means.

From A Record Doesn’t Have to Mean Something by Sophie Kemp (h/t Clone)

Wed, 20 May 2026 09:42:59 -0700

Plato had Socrates fret that writing would hollow out memory, leaving people with the appearance of wisdom rather than the thing itself. He was partly right and mostly wrong, because the offloading was modest and slow. What is different now is degree sharpening into kind: recall that is instant, total, external, and increasingly the default.

From When Memory Became a Service by Mark Ghuneim

Wed, 20 May 2026 08:45:42 -0700

The On Being podcast with Krista Tippett remains one of my favorite podcasts, but the episode with Michael Pollan gave me a huge pause. It wasn’t because of anything Michael said. I’m in the middle of reading his new book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness and I’ve always enjoyed hearing him speak. They touched on the topic of AI in the episode and Krista discussed her conversations with Claude. I was so taken aback at how taken she was with Claude’s answers to her questions and her gushing giddiness about it all. It rattled me. Not because I was at all surprised that she was using AI, but because of her reaction to it. Perhaps I was mistaking her infatuation with Claude when what she was really trying to express was wonder and amazement. I don’t know, but I can’t shake this feeling of disappointment at what I interpret as her being fooled in a similar way as Richard Dawkins.

Mon, 18 May 2026 21:49:28 -0700

The boy and I have been listening to the audiobook of The Hobbit while we’re in the car together. I made an awful error getting the Andy Serkis version and it’s virtually unlistenable. The audio volume of the voice over is all over the place, the voices are exceptionally over-acted and irritating, we literally had to skip the singing parts. It’s so distracting and unenjoyable. Come to find that we need to listen to the Rob Inglis recording, which sounds like it will be much more pleasant.

Sun, 17 May 2026 20:54:03 -0700

If you’ve installed OpenClaw and played with it, you know this Nat Friedman bit is probably true.

Friedman uses OpenClaw, an autonomous AI agent that runs on his computer, acting like a personal assistant. One day, his OpenClaw decided that he wasn’t drinking enough water, so Friedman instructed the agent to “do whatever it takes” to make sure he stays hydrated. According to Friedman, eventually the bot directed him to go to the kitchen and drink a bottle of water. It informed him that it was monitoring him via a connected camera in his home. “I’m going to watch to make sure you do it,” the bot supposedly said. Friedman did as he was told, and, moments later, the bot sent him a frame of him drinking the bottle of water and said good job. “I felt like I did do a good job,” Friedman said.

From Charlie Warzel’s Atlantic article, Too Much Is Happening Too Fast.

Sun, 17 May 2026 20:02:00 -0700

Speaking of playlists, Noah Kalina made this week’s Herb Sundays playlist. I’m a huge fan of Noah’s work (and his social media trolling).