Brad Barrish

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).

Sun, 17 May 2026 19:41:51 -0700

Michael Chabon put together an absolutely stellar playlist of jangle music on Apple Music I’ve been enjoying this weekend.

Micro.blog Publisher is live in the Obsidian Community

Fri, 15 May 2026 22:52:57 -0700

Earlier this month, I mentioned that I started posting directly from Obsidian. I’ve been posting more frequently, or at least it feels that way! I think part of the reason is that I’m no longer looking at Micro.blog. Consumption eats creation.

My Micro.blog Publisher plugin is now live in the new Obsidian Community, which feels pretty cool. It’s a tiny thing, but it shipped and I use it every day. For someone that has so many incomplete projects and ideas everywhere, it feels like an accomplishment.

A great interview with Maria Popova

Fri, 15 May 2026 14:21:41 -0700

David Perell interviewed Maria Popova on his How I Write podcast. I’ve been reading Maria’s blog, The Marginalian (f.k.a. Brain Pickings) for many years and it’s one of the greatest the web has to offer. I might have to re-listen and watch on YouTube. It was a great interview.

One of my favorite parts of the conversation was when AI came up, though I was maybe a little disappointed (not surprised) that she had never so much as played with it.

AI will never have feeling. AI will have the simulacrum of feeling. AI will never write the great American poem, the great French poem, because it hasn’t suffered. I mean, AI has not the capacity to suffer. Because even if you try to make it suffer, meaning write a command that is to execute failure, it’ll already be succeeding at executing failure. It will never know what it’s like to collide with its own impossibility. So AI can only ever succeed.

She goes on to dismiss the idea of the tortured genius.

I don’t subscribe to the tortured genius myth. I don’t think it’s necessary to suffer in order to create. But I do think that out of what we have suffered and do suffer comes that restlessness to find meaning, to find beauty, to find wonder, to give voice and shape to what we feel that can be so lonely.

There are so many great moments in this interview.

Mon, 11 May 2026 12:48:01 -0700

TIL Brad Mehldau has a Substack (h/t Marginal Revolution). He also penned quite the takedown of New York Time Music Critic, Jon Caramanica. Woo boy!

Sun, 10 May 2026 07:50:26 -0700

While I’m not currently concerned about hantavirus, I am glad there seems to be a good tracker out there.

Fri, 08 May 2026 21:37:21 -0700

Someone made a desktop Wall of Sound and now I’m contemplating spending $150 on it, which I would probably have done without much thought had I not just spent $19 on a beautiful screensaver of a clock.

Fri, 08 May 2026 21:17:56 -0700

I decided to put together a quick playlist on YouTube of some great songs I’ve been enjoying this week. Too much great music and not enough time!

Thu, 07 May 2026 18:32:21 -0700

Ian penned a great post for tetragammaton. His observation that LLCs essentially create a precedent for AIs to be granted personhood was particularly astute.

Companies can own property, sign contracts, sue, be sued, spend money, and shape elections. But companies cannot be killed nor can they go to jail. They have many of the rights of people. They are not people.

Is it any wonder that we have a loneliness epidemic? Addictive apps and lack of agency over our own attention has created a perfect opening for AI companionship. While I try to maintain a generally optimistic view of the future, I am not optimistic about humanity’s ability to resist AI companionship. Those who can afford to, literally and figuratively, will truly live the richest lives.

Thu, 07 May 2026 18:14:46 -0700

I wish I could just stay completely off Instagram and Threads. The main reason I open Threads (on the web only) is to read Kevin Nealon’s posts 🤣

Sun, 03 May 2026 20:59:49 -0700

Holy shit. The people are trying to buy Spirit Airlines. Please let this happen.

Sun, 03 May 2026 20:50:35 -0700

Some Japanese guy put himself in a bunch of movies using AI. I can’t decide if I hate this or love it. Kinda wholesome?

Sun, 03 May 2026 10:42:51 -0700

I had some abstract awareness of clout-as-a-service, but this post was… something else. (h/t clone.fyi)

Posting from Obsidian

Fri, 01 May 2026 22:58:23 -0700

After some trial and error, I finally have a working version of a personal plug-in that I created for myself that allows me to post directly to my blog without logging into Micro.blog. This post is the first post using the plug-in! The only reason I ever log into Micro.blog is to post. Yes, I know there are native apps, but I prefer to keep things simple and post from where I write.

There are a few other similar plug-ins out there, but only one that seems to be regulalrly updated. And nothing that was simple like mine. I just wanted an Obsidian-native publishing tool with explicit syndication control. So, I spent a few hours with Claude Code and Codex and made something for myself! Been doing that a lot lately. In case it’s useful to someone else, you can grab it from GitHub and give it a whirl. Feel free to submit a PR if there’s anything you’d like to see added and I’m happy to consider it. I did submit it to Obsidian for inclusion in the Community Plug-ins directory.

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 08:34:37 -0700

I enjoyed reading Anil Dash’s post about why Nasa’s Artemis II photos are on Flickr. It was a nice trip down memory lane and a reminder of what a pioneering idea and company Flickr was. I’m glad it’s still around and that SmugMug owns it.

If Obsidian is too complex for you, try Bear or iA Writer

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 21:59:17 -0700

I love Obsidian, but I’ll admit that it can be a bit much for non-nerds, especially if they’re looking to switch from Apple Notes. I made the (minor) mistake of migrating a friend from Apple Notes to Obsidian recently and that lasted less than a day. And really, I couldn’t blame them and I felt bad I had steered them wrong.

The whole thing sent me down this rabbit hole of revisiting a couple of apps I had used in the past—Bear and iA Writer, both of which are exceptionally well-designed and simple to use. Opening them up after so many years was refreshing. They differ a bit in that, similar to Obsidian, iA Writer keeps all notes as individual files and Bear has a database. Practically speaking, this matters if you’re going to use them with AI, but Bear’s recent release is pretty great news for using it with Claude. So, all of this to say that if you are in Apple’s ecosystem, you keep digital notes and you want to use your notes with AI, I recommend checking out Bear and iA Writer.

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 20:35:48 -0700

RIP Craig Venter

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 09:14:32 -0700

Great photo from Patrick.

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 20:56:02 -0700

Saw Project Hail Mary today. Thought it was good but it could have been shorter and the ending was dumb.