Twin Cities IndieWeb - BlogFlock

Excellent Bugonia Easter egg, Letterboxd... - Barry Hess

2026-02-20T16:24:36.000Z

Excellent Bugonia Easter egg, Letterboxd. (I’m not sure what I thought of the movie, but I like the font!)

I’ve got Peacock for the month (go Olympics!), and now I realize it just might have all of the Yorgos Lanthimos movies. Can one brain handle catching up on Bugonia, Kinds of Kindness, The Favourite, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer in just a few weeks?

Japan's largest toilet maker is an "undervalued and overlooked" AI play, according to a UK-based activist investor.

– Financial Times (via Mike O)

Excited to have learned of this new RSS reader, Current. The author, Terry Godier, shared a very detailed accounting of their thought process. I really appreciate when someone takes the time to do this sort of writing.

A few months ago I shared an idea with some similar aspects with Good Enough. Thankfully I hadn’t put any work into the idea yet. With the existence of Current, maybe I’ll never have to, and instead I can spend some of that time talking about Current.

We’ve been watching all of the curling at our house. I played softball for about twenty years, and the son of one of my old teammates is on the mens team. It’s been fun to see him cheering in the crowd.

How about that women’s figure skating final? Usually if you have a cheering interest in this sport, you’re sort of hoping for other skaters to fail. 😬 I don’t love that. It was so cool to see so many skaters come so close to nailing their routines. And to see Alysa Liu truly hit everything…what a rare treat!

Let me leave you with this cocktail. A blog post titled “I Make the Best Amaretto Sour in The World” better deliver, and does it ever. Not surprising since Jeffrey Morgenthaler is a legend in the cocktail world. I like almond and all, but I’ve never really thought, “I could use an Amaretto Sour right now.” Now I do think this thought.

1½ oz/45 ml amaretto
¾ oz/22.5 ml cask-proof bourbon
1 oz/30 ml lemon juice
1 tsp/5 ml 2:1 simple syrup
½ oz/15 ml egg white, lightly beaten (I used 1 oz chickpea aquafaba)

Combine ingredients in a cocktail shaker and shake without ice or (even better) use an immersion blender to combine and froth.
Shake well with cracked ice.
Strain over fresh ice in an old fashioned glass
Garnish with lemon peel and brandied cherries, if desired.

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Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-02-19T22:22:46.000Z

Beautiful street art in downtown Toronto.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-02-19T22:19:29.000Z

Had a great time doing a lunch AMA with TeamSPS in Brampton today. Also got to see some great demos.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-02-19T22:15:21.000Z

I’ve been preparing to setup OpenClaw. I decided my agents name will be Otto. Otto Thing.

Better Sleep in Ten Days - Barry Hess

2026-02-19T15:34:13.000Z

I’ve certainly said it before: I haven’t slept well for years. I believe it’s been five or six or seven years, but it’s all blurry now to the point that I could also be convinced my poor sleep has existed for all the years.

My cycle in recent history has been to distract myself away from sleep with YouTube or browsing the internet. (Here’s where I’d typically link to all the posts talking about my personal struggles with internet addiction. Then I realized you can just scroll back a few pages in my blog and read all about it. Seems that it’s become a sad theme of my blog.) Alongside this I feel anxiety, as we all do day-to-day. After behaving in this way for so long, I got to thinking: Is lack of sleep a contributor to or a symptom of my anxiety?

It is pretty clear that lack of sleep isn’t going to help one’s anxiety. And finding a way to get more sleep will probably allow one to better manage one’s anxiety. And finding a way to get more sleep will allow one to better understand if lack of sleep was a major contributor to one’s anxiety.

That all assumes you can figure out how to get more sleep in the midst of it all. Thankfully I did, at least for now.

I went into this experiment with a simple set of rules:

No screens after nine in the evening.
Only use the bed for one thing: sleep. (Well, two things, I suppose.)

What this meant for me is that after nine o’clock I was in a chair reading a book. (N. K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was my escort in this challenge. It’s felt good to get moving more quickly through my stack of books!)

That’s it. Something pop into your mind? Have a notebook by your reading chair or your bed. Tossing and turning in bed and not sleeping? Since your bed is only for sleeping, get out of bed and read or listen to some music. Or maybe something a bit more woo-woo, like handpans or singing bowls (a playlist). There is research that sounds in the human vocal range have a calming impact on both our physical and mental systems. Wordless vocal recordings could work well, too.

Ten days in, my challenge is finished. I’ve gotten seven or eight hours of sleep every night of the challenge. I’ve learned that my body naturally wants to wake up somewhere around seven-and-a-half hours of sleep. All great!

Further, while I’ve always had trouble going to sleep, my wife generally falls asleep instantly and will wake up in the middle of the night with her mind racing about something. Usually the mind-racing topic is something important, but not worthy of keeping her up at night. Sometimes she has wondered if, though I try to go to bed quietly, my late nights might trigger her waking in the middle of the night.

So I asked her this morning, “Are you sleeping better?” Actually, yes, during my ten-day experiment she has slept great all but one night. That night her mind was racing about an important topic that was definitely worthy of keeping her up at night. Otherwise, golden.

Here’s where things get tough. All of us have tendency to fall back into old habits. I enjoy sometimes staying up to play a video game, especially if it’s with one of my children or a friend. I enjoy lots of the distractions that kept me from sleeping. Yet it’s pretty obvious that an adult should decide, after a successful experiment, to keep rolling with this new behavior. Maybe it will help me to commit since it is improving both my and my wife’s relationship with sleep and anxiety.

The path forward is obvious, but us humans don’t always behave in obvious ways, yeah?

As to the question of which came first, the anxiety or the poor sleep, I still don’t know the answer. These two things surely work in a vicious cycle, and finding a way to break down either of them is beneficial. I do know that I feel less anxious than I have in a long while. I’ve coupled this experiment with resuming a morning habit of reading poetry along with five minutes of very basic guided meditation. That has probably helped as well, but I’m pretty confident that more sleep has got to be the change with the largest impact.

As always, this is just my experience. If you’re having similar troubles, I hope you can find a way to improving things for yourself.

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U2 – American Obituary (Lyric Video) - Patrick Rhone

2026-02-18T23:12:51.000Z

The worst can’t kill what’s best in us… But they can try.

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-02-18T13:44:45.000Z

New from The Man Who Never Sleeps — Do Less yet Achieve More.

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-02-17T22:42:39.000Z

Current | Terry Godier

I was not looking for a new RSS reader, and I have not downloaded and tried this one yet. Linking because I’m impressed with the thoughtfulness that was put into and the design with which it is presented. Good job.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-02-17T20:49:45.000Z

POAP 7566168 at I passed through Toronto Pearson International Airport (YYZ) in 2026.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-02-17T20:04:02.000Z

The Lex Fridman Podcast: 491 – OpenClaw: The Viral AI Agent that Broke the Internet – Peter Steinberger is great and I loved his early comment on playing:

“That’s how you learn. You do stuff, and you play.”

Absolutely.

Transcript

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-02-17T19:39:35.000Z

Just ordered a dedicated Mac Mini so I can setup an OpenClaw instance. Can’t wait to experiment with this!

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-02-17T17:22:35.000Z

POAP 7566021 at I passed through Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport (MSP) in 2026.

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-02-16T21:10:40.000Z

Make something that means something.

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-02-16T18:28:26.000Z

You don’t have to think outside of the box when you don’t put yourself in one in the first place.

On Fixing Accelerators - Garrick van Buren

2026-02-16T17:08:59.000Z

TLDR; Accelerators prepare founders for conversations investors don’t want to have until founders have done the work accelerators don’t teach.

Over the past 6 months, I’ve been asked by two different pre-seed accelerator programs to look at what’s working and what’s not. In both cases, I see significant mismatches between what the founders need, what the market is asking for, and the structure of the program.

However, this post isn’t about picking on these specific programs, as all these accelerator programs are modeled after the same Ur-program.

The model pioneered by YCombinator twenty years ago; a dozen startup teams (2-3 founders each) relocate to San Francisco for 12 weeks. Through immersion, camaraderie, and intensity, they emerge at Demo Day with a highly polished investor pitch. The price of this experience is typically 7% of your company.

Today, some programs are no equity, some are fully remote, and some that run 6 months or a year. Today, these programs exist in every moderately sized city from Minneapolis to Boulder to Columbus to Mobile.

These programs are typically run by venture capital firms, as such they’re reliant on investors believing this model will provide outsized returns. In a low interest rate environment, from say 2009-2022, this argument was easy to make as more traditional investment vehicles weren’t providing the target returns and money is cheap. The investment argument goes something like: “We’re going to invest a little bit of your money across a wide portfolio of startup ideas. Most will fail, but one will be so wildly successful you’ll thank us. Besides, where else are you going to get your returns from?”. Thus speculative investments like pre-revenue, pre-product, pre-seed tech startups are much more attractive.

This leads us to the first modern-day problem with the current accelerator model: Demo Day.

The original idea behind Demo Day was to get a bunch of seed-stage investors in a room, have a dozen freshly polished founders pitch, and trust it leads to follow-on investment. Win-win.

Unfortunately, since 2022 fewer and fewer investors are attending Demo Days and accelerator programs have noticed. The end-of-program event has shifted from investor pitches to trade show / science fair / showcase to the general public. I’ve attended both formats from multiple accelerators – as personable as the showcase events are, I still find them anticlimactic by comparison – even if they’re more honest about the chances of follow-on funding happening immediately.

According to 2023 Census.gov numbers, 30.4M businesses in the US with zero employees – whether it be 1-person business or a partnership of 2-3 people (like would be accepted into these accelerator programs). Also in 2023, there were 13,608 VC deals nationwide, with 2,040 of those in this Angel/Pre-Seed stage.

That means, 0.0067% of these businesses secure pre-seed funding, which by delightful coincidence is the same chances as a 3+1 PowerBall win.

It’s not just investors stepping back, ‘mentors’ are as well. Mentors are the volunteer network of the accelerator programs, their implied goals is to understand the startups’ value proposition, provide introductions and connections to help the startup, and support the startup in a complimentary way to the accelerator team.

Perhaps you can already spot the mismatches;

The accelerator program needs 12 startups to profitably run the program.
These 12 startups need to be roughly similar in their stage, roughly aligned to the investment hypothesis sold to investors.
The mentors may not have any subject matter expertise directly relevant to the startup team. One of the persistent founder complaints I heard in my research was how mentors’ advice just wasn’t relevant to the stage founders were at.
Programs promise follow on investment, but depending on the startups value proposition and investor hypothesis; that may take an additional 9-12 months post program
30% of these companies shutter each year (“this program accelerates everything” – I still remember one managing director telling a new cohort.)
The 1-company-to-return-the-portfolio mentality means ideas that could be very sustainable small businesses are pressured into incompatible growth trajectories.
Today’s early-stage investors want evidence of sales and sales velocity, not just an idea.

This last point aligns with the most consistent regret I heard from founder in my research, “I didn’t talk to enough customers.”

They also admitted, part of this is; not knowing how to define their customer, not knowing how to find them once defined, and not knowing how to have that conversation once they did.

Some businesses, for example a marketing service for restaurants, you could take an afternoon and walk into restaurant after restaurant, potential customer after potential customer. Customers in other domains are more widely distributed and more difficult to identify – say a the buyer for food manufacturing supply chain automation software.

Either way, another systematic mismatch.

This doesn’t surprise me – for as we’ve already established, these programs are tuned for investor pitches. Not customer discovery or sales conversations. Some startup founders have hired me to sit in on conversations with their prospects – every single time, my first note to them is, “Why are you pitching for the first 20 minutes of a 30 minute call?”

Oh. Right. Pitch practice.

Thankfully, a different model is emerging in 2026.

One tightly focused on a specific domain, and because of this focus – ready access executive buyers clamoring for new solutions.

No need for a Demo Day.

No need for volunteer mentors unfamiliar with the domain.

No need to fill cohorts with sub-optimal teams.

Just build something these executives will buy.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-02-16T02:22:15.000Z

We had a great time at Activate today playing all the various rooms. The new puzzle mode in the Mega Grid was pretty cool.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-02-15T23:06:17.000Z

My POAP2RSS project needed some form of an icon and the design was super bland so I had ChatGPT help me with an image and Claude Code revamped the design. Now it has some style. And I’m using beta feature from Tinylytics so RSS feed calls are now included in site analytics! 🎉

Weekly Thing 341 / Minions, MAX, ReMemory - Weekly Thing

2026-02-15T20:53:02.000Z

Good afternoon!?

Yeah, afternoon. There is late, and then there is really late. Oh well, I'll blame the fact that the weather is ridiculously nice today. Or that yesterday was Valentine's Day. Or that Tyler had a birthday this week. Or that things were super busy at SPS.

Or I'll just say "wow, I got the email out to y'all!"

👏👏👏

Now onto the links and have a great rest of your Sunday!

A rare for Minnesota February day with a powerful and direct sun bringing warmth to the day.

February 14, 2026
Minneapolis, MN

Notable

You can discuss any of these links at the Weekly Thing 341 tag in r/WeeklyThing.

My AI Adoption Journey – Mitchell Hashimoto

Hashimoto shares his journey from chatting with AI to adopting fully agentic processes.

My experience adopting any meaningful tool is that I've necessarily gone through three phases: (1) a period of inefficiency (2) a period of adequacy, then finally (3) a period of workflow and life-altering discovery.

When folks are describing stuff as "life-altering" it is worth taking note.

How AI Goes to Work – On my Om

Om observing how AI is changing how people engage with software.

There was no need to remake the platform (Excel) or write any custom code. I didn’t have to learn yet another tool. I didn’t need to change Excel. I didn’t learn a new interface. AI showed up inside the tool I was already using. It allowed me to just adopt it. And adapt to it. Without much friction.

Agents that are expert in the software and bridge the gap of what you want to do, your understanding of the softwares abilities, and the data you have are going to transform a lot of things.

Claude is a space to think | Anthropic Anthropic

I’m not a fan of advertising in AI solutions and think that is a mistake for ChatGPT. They also have now given Anthropic something to really tout as a differentiator, which is yet another mistake. Related, Anthropics ads here, here, here, and here are brilliant.

ReMemory - Split a secret among people you trust

This looks great and is an example of a small utility that deserves more attention.

ReMemory encrypts your files and splits the key among people you trust using Shamir's Secret Sharing. You decide how many must come together to unlock them — three of five friends, two of two partners, whatever fits. No single person can access anything alone.

Why do I like this? We all have a number of digital secrets and we need much better ways to manage them. This is a good social example. Two things I could see this for right away.

Crypto passphrase to one of my accounts for digital assets.
Master password for 1Password to gain access to all of my secrets.

You could imagine taking one of these and splitting it into 5 chunks and requiring any 3 to be present to reconstitute it. Then distributing this to your family so that if something happens to you they can access these critical secrets, but only if 3 of them agree to come together on it. No 1 person has all that info.

Omni Roadmap 2026 - The Omni Group

Omni is a thought leading Mac developer, and I’m a constant user of OmniFocus, so I’m always interested in their annual roadmap updates. I love the addition of Omni Links. I don't think that they are pushing hard enough with AI thought. OmniFocus is an app that would benefit from AI agentic capabilities in so many ways. I get the strong sense that Case (CEO) is pretty standoffish with AI. He's also a huge privacy advocate which was something I appreciated. OmniFocus is a rare app of its kind that encrypts all data. But I think they need to push harder with more AI capabilities and not take a backseat with Apple Intelligence. Minimally there should be built-in MCP capabilities to allow users to bring their own AI.

Dot: The Menu Bar Calendar That's Become My Main Calendar - MacStories

I wish there was more innovation in calendar apps. The unique thing about these apps is they literally know the future — they know what you are planning. Yet there is little put into bringing intelligence from these. This app has interesting innovation in display and is always ready via the menu bar.

Minions: Stripe’s one-shot, end-to-end coding agents | Stripe Dot Dev Blog

Super interesting read about how Stripe is building agentic capabilities for their development teams.

There was no need to remake the platform (Excel) or write any custom code. I didn’t have to learn yet another tool. I didn’t need to change Excel. I didn’t learn a new interface. AI showed up inside the tool I was already using. It allowed me to just adopt it. And adapt to it. Without much friction.

Doing this, and creating it specifically for your environment, is how you unlock agentic advantage.

I Started Programming When I Was 7. I'm 50 Now, and the Thing I Loved Has Changed

As agentic development techniques improve we are seeing a rapid, actually blisteringly fast, adaptation of a super critical craft — creating software.

I'm not typing the code anymore. I'm reviewing it, directing it, correcting it. And I'm good at that -- 42 years of accumulated judgment about what works and what doesn't, what's elegant versus what's expedient, how systems compose and where they fracture. That's valuable. I know it's valuable. But it's a different kind of work, and it doesn't feel the same.

This post describes what many, particularly those that are most focused on the beauty of this craft, feel. It has changed radically in just a year.

I saw someone on LinkedIn recently -- early twenties, a few years into their career -- lamenting that with AI they "didn't really know what was going on anymore." And I thought: mate, you were already so far up the abstraction chain you didn't even realise you were teetering on top of a wobbly Jenga tower.

I loved this line about "abstraction chain". I comment on this routinely. Every person that builds anything in technology is working on many, many layers of abstraction. We haven't worked "close to the machine" for decades. This is vastly superior. However it is also worth noting that with every layer of abstraction the craft fundamentally changes, the skills needed evolve, and the part we don't tend to consider enough is the risks and challenges are way different. Frankly, most developers today wouldn't even know how to code a linked list or manage their own memory as a language like C requires. Mostly that is a good thing, but it also causes software to be less performant and the failure cases to be entirely mystical.

I started programming when I was seven because a machine did exactly what I told it to, felt like something I could explore and ultimately know, and that felt like magic. I'm fifty now, and the magic is different, and I'm learning to sit with that.

This whole post is about agentic development and everyone (literally everyone) is talking about this. But I will be plain, this type of reinvention will happen to any profession that involves managing, moving, and manipulating information. That isn't to be scary, but to make sure that folks don't look at this transformation and assume that is just something because it is close to technology. Not at all.

picoclaw

Inspired by OpenClaw but made to run on incredibly tiny hardware.

PicoClaw is an ultra-lightweight personal AI Assistant inspired by nanobot, refactored from the ground up in Go through a self-bootstrapping process, where the AI agent itself drove the entire architectural migration and code optimization.

Runs on $10 hardware with <10MB RAM: That's 99% less memory than OpenClaw and 98% cheaper than a Mac mini!

And it seems built by an Agent itself.

What They Copied - PRNDL by Jordan Golson

If you appreciate design this whole article, and the 18 min video, are just amazing. This is a overview of the new Ferrari Luce which was designed by none other than Jony Ive and LoveFrom. Jony Ive of Apple "lore" and designer of the iPhone and the inspiration for so many of the products you use today.

This article highlights how tactile and specific these interfaces are. Specifically how the creator of the touch interface specifically did not make this car a touch interface.

Ive knows this. "The reason we developed touch -- the big idea was to develop a general-purpose interface that could be a calculator, that could be a typewriter, could be a camera, rather than having physical buttons," he told me. "To use touch in a car is something I would never dream of doing, because it requires that you look at what you're doing."

As a Tesla driver for years this stands out as Tesla's design principle has been the exact opposite of this. Tesla has been working for years to remove nearly every button, knob, and stalk they possibly can from cars and move everything to the touch screen where you can innovate and change much faster. Oh, and it is way cheaper to make with fewer buttons and knobs. Every one of those costs money.

This new Ferrari is an absolute thing of beauty.

OpenClaw Is Changing My Life | Reorx’s Forge

These folks going deep with OpenClaw are showing possible paths that sound pretty wild.

This is the biggest shift OpenClaw has brought—it completely transformed my workflow. Whether it’s personal or commercial projects, I can step back and look at things from a management perspective. It’s like having a programmer who’s always on standby, ready to hop into meetings, discuss ideas, take on tasks, report back, and adjust course at any time. It can even juggle multiple roles, like having several programmers working on different projects simultaneously. Meanwhile, I can be the tech lead keeping tabs on specific project progress, or the project manager steering the overall schedule and direction.

I’m about ready to buy a dedicated Mac mini to run one of these.

AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it | Siddhant Khare

I for sure feel what Khare is writing about in this post. AI is a ridiculous unlock to do things that would otherwise not have been possible. With that though our ability to do more fills with more things that we wished we could do. No matter what, there is still only so much time and energy in the day. The fact that Claude is there at 2am while you cannot sleep can be a problem. The fact that you can have five projects going on with different agents is neat, but you still are coordinating them!

The "just one more prompt" trap is real.

Journal

Feb 6, 2026 at 7:26 PM

Mason Jennings show at The Dakota tonight. Lovely. 🎶

Feb 9, 2026 at 5:00 PM

Bought Revenue Architecture by Jacco van der Kooij on a strong recommendation and it looks really great. It has formulas! 🤔

Feb 10, 2026 at 11:23 AM

POAP 7563511 at SPS MAX Introduction.

Feb 11, 2026 at 9:11 PM

I hit 10k in Clash Royale! Go POAP KINGS!

Feb 12, 2026 at 7:00 PM

Tyler wanted to do an escape room on his birthday so we went to Lock & Key Escape and completed the Quest for Excalibur! It was a fun room, not too challenging, with some delightful surprises along the way! Room 87!

Enjoying the Weekly Thing?

Briefly

This makes me happy on two counts — that Ethereum is scaling well and that ENS, one of the most meaningful apps on it, will stay on Layer 1. → ENS is staying on Ethereum | ENS Blog

Marketing collab with Clash Royale. Gaming culture continues merging more into other areas. → Lil Wayne X Clash Royal Music Video - YouTube

This performance of Nessun dorma was incredible and nearly brought me to tears. I listen to this performed by Pavarotti when I make my lasagna. Bocelli's version here is next level. 🥲 → Andrea Bocelli's sweeping vocals overtake Opening Ceremony | Winter Olympics 2026 | NBC Sports - YouTube

Just some of the ways that Agents are going to change shopping experiences, marketing, and payment handling. → The Agentic Commerce Revolution – O’Reilly

Wonderful local musician. 🎶 → Humbird - February (Official Video) - YouTube

I’m so excited to see MAX now getting introduced to customers. This has been one of the most exciting new products I've been lucky to be part of. → SPS Commerce Introduces MAX - SPS Commerce

Snowflake on how they see agentic impacting retail. → AI In Shopping: Implications and a Roadmap for Consumer Goods Leaders

I’m no fan of Ring cameras. I use UniFi devices that record video in our home for this same purpose. Deploying Ring devices is literally building a surveillance network for anyone that is willing to pay Ring a few bucks. → With Ring, American Consumers Built a Surveillance Dragnet

A haiku to leave you with…

Tiny claws extend,
Picoclaw grips dreams of code —
Future clicks hello.

Would you like to discuss the topics in the Weekly Thing further? Check out the Weekly Thing on Reddit. 👋

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Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-02-15T02:57:53.000Z

Valentines Day dinner at home…

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-02-14T14:22:46.000Z

Today is the day you can go to the grocery store early and watch bewildered men stare at the Valentine’s card selection. You got this guys! 😂