Brad Barrish

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.

Jasmine Sun on the whole data center thing

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 22:02:14 -0700

This week I had a lot more time in the car to listen to podcasts. I’ve been following a lot of the discussion and reporting about data centers. Jasmine Sun is doing some of the best reporting on the topic you will find. I haven’t come across anyone else doing the depth of investigative reporting that she is doing. By all means read the article, but her conversation with Ezra Klein was great, but I particularly enjoyed her conversation with PJ Vogt.

I continue to use AI in my work and personal life and still find it exciting and ever more useful as time goes on. I use it mostly to build things for myself. That said, I really don’t like that AI companies have vacuumed up so much creative work for training without compensating creators. I also hate all the slop that makes up such a massive amount of content and traffic on the web. Every day I think about deleting my blog and just retreating to a dark forest.

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 16:32:56 -0700

I’ve really been enjoying the work that the DFOS team is doing. I created a space called Ohey Computer. If you want to check it out, this invite code is good for the first 10 people who use it.

Read it now, not later

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 21:26:54 -0700

One Read serves exactly one article per day, optimized for readability, without all the garbage that litters online reading experiences. If you read it, your streak grows. If you don’t, it’s gone. There’s no archive, no backlog, no “save for later.” Tomorrow brings a different article, and yesterday’s is unrecoverable.

I built this little web app for myself and thought there might be at least a few other people who might want to use it. It’s still a little rough around the edges, but good enough.

My read-it-later queue is a black hole that just makes me kinda hate myself for not getting through it all. Same goes for my hundreds of browser tabs. So I got rid of the queue and built something simple that gets me to read at least one entire article per day. If I miss a day, tough. It just serves me another one the next day. I’ll never know what it was. If break my streak, I begin again. No queues. No self-hatred. Well, at least not as much.

While One Read is a simple idea, it was born out of thinking a lot about how I want to spend my time. Reading is something I love to do and I’ve been doing a lot more of it especially longer form articles and of course books. I’ve also been trying to spend more time creating things, usually in the form of writing or coding things for myself.

There has never been a better time be a creator, regardless of the medium. There has also never been more content to consume, much of which is increasingly being generated by AI. Companies continue to aggressively manipulate us, vying for every second of our attention. When we’re mindlessly consuming, it erodes our attention, our ability to notice and to think critically. I think worst of all, it robs us of the ability to create.

Maybe committing to reading a single article every day can be the beginning of your journey to take back a bit of your time. You gotta to start somewhere.

Now for the nerdier stuff. From a technical standpoint, I wanted to keep things as simple as possible and the first decision I made was to not have a database at all. I already save links to Raindrop.io, so Raindrop is both the inbox and the state store. Saving a link to a collection called “One Read” is the feeder for the app. Each day, a small server picks one unserved link and tags it oneread-served, plus a tag with that day’s date in Raindrop. Those tags are the persistence layer. They make “no going back” a property of the data rather than a UI choice. They survive redeploys and they work across devices. There’s even an admin backdoor: delete the tags and an article re-enters the pool, which came in handy as I was testing.

The rest is deliberately small. A Node/Express server fetches the day’s article and extracts the readable text with defuddle, Steph Ango’s excellent parser, plus a normalization pass that strips out all the publisher junk extraction leaves behind and reduces every article to a small allowlist of clean tags. The frontend is a single HTML file, vanilla JavaScript, no framework, no build step. Type is set in Literata. The streak lives in localStorage. And the whole thing is hosted on Vercel’s free tier, so my costs are literally just the cost of the domain.

I built the initial version of this in a single day. I wrote almost none of the code by hand. I described the product to Claude Fable. I was detailed in my rules, the feel, the parser I wanted and we just iterated. It built, I reacted. The typeface changed a few times. The margins changed a bunch of times. One of the biggest lessons was just how difficult it is to extract only the article body from web pages. I still don’t know if I got all of that right, but it was good enough to ship, but not before asking Codex to take a look at the work Claude and I had done.

I asked Claude to write up its own architecture doc, including a section candidly listing its weaknesses, and I handed the codebase to Codex for review. Codex found several major issues. As I’ve been working with Claude and Codex a lot, this has become a common experience. In every case I can think of, Codex just excels at coding while Claude excels at designing and writing, broadly speaking. Claude can code, but the quality and rigor of its work is not as good as Codex. This seems to be a common experience for people much more experienced than I am.

Deployment was fun! I’d been running the app locally for myself, which worked perfectly. As soon as I put it on Vercel, it crashed instantly. Ultimately, the back-and-forth between Claude and Codex made the code better than either would have produced alone. I probably would not have even been able to launch this without their help. And even if I did, it would have taken me a hell of a lot longer.

Drop me a note and let me know what you think.

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.

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:08:36 -0500

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 23:22:14 -0500

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 19:32:22 -0500

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 23:40:32 -0500

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 21:42:39 -0500

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 11:49:09 -0500

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 13:25:54 -0500

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 19:45:29 -0500

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 19:23:18 -0500

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 18:19:28 -0500

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 14:40:17 -0500

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 13:54:39 -0500

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 13:54:28 -0500

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 15:51:53 -0500

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 15:41:45 -0500

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 13:42:08 -0500

“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