Twin Cities IndieWeb - BlogFlock

Post on Benji Encalada Mora - Benji Encalada Mora

2025-12-01T04:39:37.000Z

Forgot to show everyone my new library card.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2025-11-30T16:43:07.000Z

Hanging out with my cousin Quinn and his friends at Fat Pants Brewing for this mornings Formula 1 Qatar Grand Prix! 🏎️

No Socials November Fin - Barry Hess

2025-11-30T14:32:00.000Z

It’s been thirty days since I departed socials. (Well, more like forty-five days, but who’s counting?) I must say that I continue to feel good about stepping away. The daily baseline of anxiety that I feel from the big world and the small worlds I live in is much lower than previously. That feels nice, and I plan to stay off socials at least through the end of the year.

I do miss a few of the conversations I partook in on socials, but the biggest thing calling me back to the timeline is, ironically, Pika, the blogging product. Being an illustration of me dominates the Pika homepage, it’s probably not surprising that I’m personally associated with the Pika brand. Pika’s growth is modest in any given, month, but since I’ve left socials it seems to have slowed a bit. This slow-down feels correlated, but I have to remind myself that the sample size is far from statistically significant.

It’s awfully tempting to jump back into the fray in hopes of accelerating those numbers a bit. However, the research from the past year that’s stuck in my head is that social is really not a marketing channel worth betting on these days. This makes me think that my time is still better spent elsewhere, working on Good Enough products like Pika, Letterbird, etc. As things continue to grow, customers and friends of Good Enough will naturally post about our products and that’s a good, healthy way to interact with things.

Having a business makes it hard to completely step away from socials since many people depend on that feed for announcements. We’ll continue to run our Bluesky and Mastodon accounts for Good Enough. That means I do spend some time on socials, and it’s possible that those channels will become a bit of a micro-post outlet for me in the future. Those accounts only follow Good Enough members, though, so the chances of them pulling me in to the lure of the timeline are small.

As you can see, I haven’t been blogging more during November. Aside from the demands of daily life, there have been other things drawing most of my energy. I’m very hopeful that 2026 will allow more of my work focus to be centered on building things. Exciting!

I have done a little more reading, and I may have even formed a habit of picking up the Sunday paper at a nearby gas station. I haven’t read a lot of books, nor did I write a novel this month. No socials is no magic.

Hopefully you were able to take some time to step away from the social feeds this month as well. Let me know how it went for you! Write a blog post, or drop me an email, or write a blog post and drop me an email.

And have a great December!

Reply by email

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2025-11-30T05:21:26.000Z

One must appreciate the brilliant simplicity and effectiveness of this billboard I noticed (just past the Missouri state line) on my drive home. No pictures. No fancy illustration. Just words…

Weed. Next exit.

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2025-11-29T22:41:30.000Z

Life is a near death experience.

— Dr. John

Weekly Thing 334 / Privacy, Shopping, Consciousness - Weekly Thing

2025-11-29T14:07:53.000Z

Good morning! ☕️

If you were celebrating Thanksgiving like we did I hope you had a great one. We have so much to be thankful for! Some year I will cook turkey and feel really proud of the finished product. That eluded me again this year. There must be some magic involved that I’ve yet to discover. 👨‍🍳

With the Weekly Thing Forum going away alongside Ponder shutting down I decided to lean into the r/WeeklyThing subreddit. I've been cross-posting the RSS feed of these emails there to nobody for a while now. I've known all along that this isn't a good structure for Reddit. Reddit has a native flow and giant emails are not it. So along with some nudging from my cousin, I decided to try something different. 🤔

If you are a Reddit user and want to play along join r/WeeklyThing. In addition to new issues of the Weekly Thing, I’m also sharing each of the notable links. You can read more on the welcome post. Also, until the end of the year folks that comment there will get this Reddit Revival POAP sent as well. Of course I made a POAP! 🤓

That is all for now. Have a great start of the official holiday season! And enjoy the rest of your weekend! 🤩

A highpoint of nostalgia for me is always decorating the Christmas tree. This Santa and his very old school computer always makes me smile. 🎅

November 28, 2025
Minneapolis, MN

Notable

You can discuss any of these links at the Weekly Thing 334 tag in r/WeeklyThing.

Nano Banana Pro aka gemini-3-pro-image-preview is the best available image generation model

Willison has an initial take on Gemini 3 Pro's "Nano Banana" image generation. I've now used this as well for a few tests as well as a recent POAP I made. I've done a lot of image generation with ChatGPT and DALL-E, and so far Nano Banana definitely does a better job. The larger sizes are a nice addition, and it generally has gotten the images better and seems to show a better understanding of the prompts. I have seen it give me the same image back when I ask for edits and I've had to ask it to try again. Like other AI image generators I find it gets confused after several iterations and I need to start a new conversation with a fresh prompt. Also see Google suggestions on using Nano Banana.

Writer Coin - Next Day Thoughts

Wilson started mirroring his (very good) blog onto Mirror a long-time ago. Mirror and Paragraph recently finished merging and now provide the most complete crypto enabled publishing platform. I was also a Mirror user and now have blog.thingelstad.xyz which is cross-posts content from my blog and I also have a writer coin wonderfully named $THING that I’m still learning about. I’m dubious this stuff does anywhere but I applaud the attempt to bring an economic model that isn't attention-based.

Agent Design Is Still Hard | Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings

Building agents is a whole different ballgame than using them and creating product value around them has a bunch of new things for developers to solve. This article hits on a number of the challenges when creating productized agent capabilities. Managing context and testing are the ones that I suspect will continue to be hard for a while.

Personal Business | Are.na Editorial

I want an Internet that has this.

Part of what prevents people from starting their own software company is the pervasiveness of a singular popular narrative: the idea that money is the primary reason to do so. That the way to make software profitable is to scale, and the way to scale is to get investment from VCs. Software, for better or for worse, plays an increasingly primary role in determining how we view the world, which in turn determines how the world actually works. There should be more than just one prominent funding model facilitating those experiences. There should be more businesses that represent a diversity of people and potential outcomes. It would be a much better internet if there were.

I use and pay for a lot of IndieWeb or solopreneur services. The Weekly Thing is sent from one, Buttondown. My blogs run on one, micro.blog. All the links I archive and write about are on one, Pinboard. My feed reader is one, Feedbin. Every one of these services I've emailed directly with the founders about.

I love voting with my spending and I’m doing that to help make more personal business online.

llm-council: LLM Council works together to answer your hardest questions

This idea of having multiple LLMs explore a topic and dialog amongst each other is super interesting to me. It reminds me a bit of TinyTroupe (shared in WT301).

The idea of this repo is that instead of asking a question to your favorite LLM provider (e.g. OpenAI GPT 5.1, Google Gemini 3.0 Pro, Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.5, xAI Grok 4, eg.c), you can group them into your "LLM Council". This repo is a simple, local web app that essentially looks like ChatGPT except it uses OpenRouter to send your query to multiple LLMs, it then asks them to review and rank each other's work, and finally a Chairman LLM produces the final response.

So how does it work?

In a bit more detail, here is what happens when you submit a query:

Stage 1: First opinions. The user query is given to all LLMs individually, and the responses are collected. The individual responses are shown in a "tab view", so that the user can inspect them all one by one.

Stage 2: Review. Each individual LLM is given the responses of the other LLMs. Under the hood, the LLM identities are anonymized so that the LLM can't play favorites when judging their outputs. The LLM is asked to rank them in accuracy and insight.

Stage 3: Final response. The designated Chairman of the LLM Council takes all of the model's responses and compiles them into a single final answer that is presented to the user.

I dig this and it would be exactly what I want to have if instead of just interacting directly with the LLMs you could define agents in front of them. I think there are several use cases where I would like to define a bespoke set of agents, with different perspectives and goals, and ask them for feedback and debate on something. There is often as much if not more insight from listening to a topic being debated as there is to being in the debate.

onyx: AI Chat with advanced features that works with every LLM

Robust chat front-end that can connect with any LLM of your choice. This is an interesting way to bypass various companies having your entire chat history and still access LLMs of your choosing. You could even imagine using a round-robin approach so that no LLM provider ever saw your entire conversation chain even on a single topic.

X’s New Feature Reveals Why Trust & Safety Work Was Never About The ‘Censorship Industrial Complex’ | Techdirt

I have so many thoughts related to this article. Should identity verification be required online? I do not think so. Should your location, even just your country, be revealed? I don't know. How do we know accounts are not bots attempting to influence us? That is impossible now. However, the part that isn't complicated is to focus on simple explanations and follow the money. If economic incentives exist, they will be exercised particularly when you have global reach. Perhaps this is less surprising to me because it is so common in crypto.

Two data points that I would argue are facts.

If gaining an audience can generate income at any amount, actions will be taken to create audience independent of any value for that audience.
Creating and spreading information digitally is incredibly cheap and requires very little return to justify the costs.

Journal

Nov 22, 2025 at 9:18 AM

I don’t know when or what app did this but I finally purged a bunch of Twitter “profile” values from my Contacts database. Little housecleaning. Related.

Nov 22, 2025 at 4:57 PM

“Oh, I know I have that Pokémon card in here somewhere. Just let me look in this pile.” 😳😆 at MN Poke Pulls TCG.

Nov 22, 2025 at 9:54 PM

After we've made hundreds of candles for the Candle Fundraiser it is fun to casually pour a bunch of individual scents to try out. Ten scents poured tonight for the 2025 Scent Survey.

Nov 22, 2025 at 10:43 PM

Tyler and I opened our first Pokémon Ultra-Premium Collection tonight. No big pulls but some good fun.

Nov 22, 2025 at 11:29 PM

Commanding performance by Verstappen to take the lead on the first turn and never let up the entire Las Vegas GP -- winning by 17 seconds. Impressive!

Pokémon Card Shop Saturday

Nov 23, 2025 at 9:00 AM

Tyler and I went on a drive around the cities yesterday to check out some Pokémon card shops in town. This was a similar trip to our Game Store Tour in February. This was focused solely on Pokémon!

Viral Card Games

Our first stop was Viral Card Games in Fridley. We both liked this shop a lot. It was likely the most organized and well structured card shop that we had been in. They had a several glass cases with graded and raw cards on display in a wide range of prices. They were super helpful pulling cards out to give them a closer look.

The big differentiator for Viral Card Games was their bulk management. Most card shops simply have dozens of boxes filled with thousands of cards grouped by their sets. The team at Viral has fully embraced the TCG Player system with two very large screen kiosks in the store so you can search their entire bulk collection with ease, add the cards you are looking for, and then they will bring those out for you. With a couple searches I was able to grab the first 3 of a 9 card illustration set that I'm looking for.

I also grabbed the final card for a 3-card illustration set.

This is also the only downside that Tyler and I had. The tradeoff of amazing bulk management is less fun flipping through binders and browsing different things. If Viral also had several binders to bridge the gap between the amazing bulk system they have and the singles under the counter it would be about perfect.

Ultimate Collectibles Warehouse Sale

Our second stop was a tip from my brother-in-law Max -- Ultimate Collectibles was having their “Warehouse Sale” at the Hopkins VFW. We had no idea what to expect but were excited to head over and check it out. There was no real signage but the full parking lot on a Saturday afternoon was a sign we were in the right spot.

Ultimate has a lot of sports memorabilia and more than half of the sale was that, but if you watched the foot traffic the vast majority of that was there for the Pokémon sets they were selling. They had a huge collection on display and the prices were pretty good -- above retail but not typical card shop pricing.

Ultimate is the more typical card shop experience with just piles of stuff and you need to dig around to find what you want. The warehouse sale was just piles of boxes on folding tables. They also had a good selection of singles on display but the focus for this event was moving large boxes.

It was awesome to check out and Tyler and I got our first Ultra-Premium Collection box ever here -- snagging one of the last three left before they all were taken.

MN Poke Pulls

After a quick coffee stop in Hopkins, we made our way to MN Poke Pulls in Plymouth timed just after their pretty late 2:00 PM opening time. We had planned to start here until we realized they weren’t even open until much later. That is a pretty late starting time, especially given that they don’t host tournaments, but I suspect it is because of the origin of the store around Whatnot.

So a quick Whatnot detour if you, like me, have no idea what this is. The owner of this store started on Whatnot by streaming Pokémon boxes that viewers auction for in real-time. Once the auction is won, the box is immediately opened and they go through all the packs. The purchaser of the box then gets the cards that are valuable sent to them.

To me this seems strange as I would want to open the box and packs together at home. Tyler and I have fun doing that. But if you are a big collector and you have opened 10,000 packs already it is different. Here you get to outsource the opening part as well as the raw management of all the bulk that you get. You just get the stuff that you really want. Meanwhile the Whatnot viewers all get to share in the fun of opening and the “hits” when opening the packs.

With that backdrop this store had huge volume of packs as that is what they need to run the Whatnot events. They had a few cases with singles and graded cards, but not a ton. They didn't have prices on anything which Tyler and I both dislike. They also have a giant messy pile of bulk cards for $0.10 each if you want to do that.

Overall a fun place to stop but it is like a warehouse inside and you wouldn’t spend a ton of time hanging out and browsing.

Lost Zone Cards

Our last stop was Lost Zone Cards in Bloomington. This ended up being the least Pokémon focused shop of the day, and unfortunately was even more so when we arrived and heard their Pokémon stuff was gone that day for a show in Wisconsin. The photo below you can see the left-most case is empty.

Overall this seemed like a great place for a variety of card games and they had a big area for tournaments -- but was the least exciting of the day for Pokémon collectors.

We have a lot of fun exploring these places. On our list for shops to check out still are Krakenhits in Fridley and The Forge in Chaska.

Nov 23, 2025 at 4:21 PM

Having fun preparing for the Things 4 Good 2026 Scent Survey. I have 10 new scents ready for folks to check out and share their feedback over the holidays. A special POAP to all who participate. This is how we added Charcoal Rose last year.

Nov 23, 2025 at 9:30 PM

Tammy and I saw Davina and the Vagabonds at The Dakota tonight. It was my first time seeing them and it was really good. Great performance with a ton of energy -- wonderful live band. We’ll definitely be back. 🎶

Nov 24, 2025 at 11:46 PM

Bummer that the United's season comes to an end tonight with a loss in San Diego but they played hard and it was a 1 goal game. Next year! ⚽️

Nov 26, 2025 at 7:24 PM

POAP 7529255 at Things 4 Good -- 2026 Scent Survey.

1,000th candle

Nov 27, 2025 at 8:17 AM

We were talking over dinner about the Things 4 Good Candle Fundraiser and thinking we should make note when we sell the 1,000th candle. It turns out we already did -- this year!

Year	Candles
2021	134
2022	180
2023	226
2024	264
2025	321

We’ve already sold 1,125 candles!

So who got the 1,000th candle? We had 804 sold before this year’s event.

The 196th candle of the 2025 sale, the 1,000th candle, was in the 40th transaction of the event!

Nov 27, 2025 at 12:41 PM

Happy Thanksgiving!

Nov 27, 2025 at 6:26 PM

Happy Thanksgiving from my Mom and I!

Also see 2021 and 2015.

Nov 27, 2025 at 6:26 PM

Turkey's ready!

Supporting Membership

Hey there, Weekly Thing enthusiasts! 🌟 We're on an exciting mission to support the incredible Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), champions of digital freedom and privacy. So far, we've rallied together to raise an impressive $584.47—but we need your help to keep the momentum going! With 23 amazing Supporting Members already on board, imagine the impact we could make if we doubled that number. Every single cent we raise goes directly to EFF, fueling their vital work for 23 more weeks until the big annual transfer. Ready to join the movement and make a difference? Become a Supporting Member today and let's show the world how powerful our community can be!

$4 monthly

$40 yearly

Briefly

I visited Utrecht when I was in the Netherlands. → Utrecht - World’s Best Cycling City | Arnold Hoogerwerf

This is one of the most insidious methods of tracking people. 🫆 → Kevin Boone: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

Apparently I’m not the only one that has been doing this kind of research in ChatGPT. → Introducing shopping research in ChatGPT | OpenAI

I love this. → Pearl Jam helps pay for Zamboni for Two Harbors, Minnesota

It gives me a big chuckle to realize we are shoving regex patterns into the most sophisticated agentic toolchains that have ever existed to save context. 🤭 → Introducing advanced tool use on the Claude Developer Platform Anthropic

I don't do much linking to LinkedIn, but this is a pretty great list. → 13 Signs of High EQ Leadership | LinkedIn

Large-scale software transitions are incredibly hard and don't seem to be getting easier. There is a big component of Gall's Law here. I would also highlight that no large-scale software transition is just a technology effort — they are all human change efforts as well and that is complicated. → Software Failures and IT Management's Repeated Mistakes - IEEE Spectrum

I hadn't though that much about this but found this an interesting read. → What's the difference between an artist and a creator?

Maybe Buddhism has had it right all along? → Universal consciousness as foundational field: A theoretical bridge between quantum physics and non-dual philosophy | AIP Publishing

A haiku to leave you with…

Nano banana
Creates images with great flair
Pixels dance with joy 🍌

Would you like to discuss the topics in the Weekly Thing further?
Join r/WeeklyThing on Reddit 👍

Want to share this issue with others? The link is…

👨‍💻

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2025-11-28T22:42:36.000Z

I’m feeling pretty smart ordering candle supplies for next year’s Things 4 Good Candle Fundraiser during Makesy’s 25% Black Friday special! 🤑

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2025-11-28T15:46:20.000Z

POAP 7529645 at Weekly Thing — Reddit Revival.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2025-11-28T00:26:24.000Z

Turkey’s ready!

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2025-11-28T00:26:01.000Z

Happy Thanksgiving from my Mom and I!

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2025-11-27T18:41:38.000Z

Happy Thanksgiving!

1,000th candle - Jamie Thingelstad

2025-11-27T14:17:24.000Z

We were talking over dinner about the Things 4 Good Candle Fundraiser and thinking we should make note when we sell the 1,000th candle. It turns out we already did — this year!

Year	Candles
2021	134
2022	180
2023	226
2024	264
2025	321

We’ve already sold 1,125 candles!

So who got the 1,000th candle? We had 804 sold before this year’s event.

The 196th candle of the 2025 sale, the 1,000th candle, was in the 40th transaction of the event!

Fiona Apple – Under The Table (Official Audio) - Patrick Rhone

2025-11-27T13:34:54.000Z

A theme song for today if you need one.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2025-11-27T01:24:20.000Z

POAP 7529255 at Things 4 Good – 2026 Scent Survey.

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2025-11-25T21:33:52.000Z

Excerpt From a Letter To a Friend – The Homebound Symphony

We’re not just going back to the pre-PC era, we’re going back to the pre-typing era.

Love this!

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2025-11-25T05:46:34.000Z

Bummer that the United’s season comes to an end tonight with a loss in San Diego but they played hard and it was a 1 goal game. Next year! ⚽️

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2025-11-24T21:40:26.000Z

Meet the Aphantasics, Those Who Can’t See Mental Images

Even just thinking about myself, there are all sorts of behaviors and traits I can connect to not being able to visualize things in my head that clearly

Once Beatrix unlocked this fact about herself, it helped us understand so many things.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2025-11-23T22:21:09.000Z

Weekly Thing 333 / Gemini, LangChain, Illusion - Weekly Thing

2025-11-23T15:08:05.000Z

Good morning, or mostly!? ☕️

I’m a little later than usual sending this morning. Last night I had three things to do and time for two of them: the Las Vegas F1 race and some candle making. Finishing this week's Weekly Thing was the third and became a Sunday morning thing. I do enjoy curating links with a fresh coffee though. Underwood Coffee that is in the Journal below…

It is funny that sometimes the later I am getting things put together I feel like I end up writing even more? What is that about?

The journal this week has my recap blog posts from our Things 4 Good Candle Fundraiser. That event has become a big tradition for us over the last five years and it brings all of us a lot of joy to do good things together.

Lastly, Ponder from Good Enough is shutting down. This is the service that I ran the Weekly Thing Forum on, so that is also closing down with it. There is an update on that below too. I'm not going to try and move the forum and will instead be bringing the Reply All section back from time-to-time and am considering some improvements to the r/WeeklyThing subreddit. If you are on Reddit, give that a join and see where we go.

All these announcements made this an extra long issue. Sorry, not sorry, about that. 😆 Buttondown also warns me that Gmail doesn't like long emails. I consider that Gmail's issue, not mine. 🙂

We are set to have a beautiful November day here in Minneapolis. I’m going to hit send on this issue and head outside! 🍂

Have a good week!

PS: Another custom Wordle this week at the end. Did you notice that Fortunes have given way to Haikus?

Currently

Playing: Still having fun learning Clash Royale from Tyler. I've hired him as my coach. I’m improving my skills. I am currently level 33 with 6,166 trophies. 🏆 You play? Let's connect.

We had a great TeamSPS presence at MnTech Elevate tonight celebrating the local technology community and recognizing Tekne award winners! 🏆

November 20, 2025
US Bank Stadium, Minneapolis, MN

Notable

Piloting group chats in ChatGPT | OpenAI

Group chats in ChatGPT seem like it could be pretty interesting. I dig the idea of ChatGPT playing a facilitator role, or being an analyst for multiple people on a group project. I sure hope they consider adding the opposite feature which would be a Group Chat with multiple Custom GPTs! I'd love to spin up a few different Custom GPTs and talk amongst them for debate and different perspectives.

Daring Fireball: Tesla Is Working on CarPlay Support

I've been asked many times by people "Does your CarPlay work in your Tesla?" and I chuckle and say "No, and it never will." To allow CarPlay in a Tesla would break so much of the computing paradigm in a Tesla. What do I mean? Most cars are cars that happen to have not one, but a bunch of computers, that do an okay job of working together to create a driver experience. It is absolutely not unified and works well enough. Tesla's are totally different. They are a single computer that is controlling a unified, continuously connected experience that happens to drive around the road.

In the first model CarPlay is "just another" computer joining the symphony of computers already in your car. In fact, CarPlay is a different computer that knows stuff the other computers don't even know or if they do they are happy to step back and disconnect from the experience.

In a Tesla, it is all connected. How would the navigation system in a Tesla relate to something in CarPlay? It cannot. In fact, it would step the experience backwards and make it no longer connected and unified. So, if this does happen, I'll be super curious to see how it is done. Tesla could provide a CarPlay window — almost like an emulator running on a computer to run another operating system inside it.

2 Years of ML vs. 1 Month of Prompting

This article hits home for me. I've now had a couple of problems that have long bothered me, things that I knew machine learning could possibly do but the costs were prohibitive or the solution I wanted to create just didn’t have enough data. I've come back to those problems and reimagined them with a different approach using LLMs and found incredible success.

Over multiple years, we built a supervised pipeline that worked. In 6 rounds of prompting, we matched it. That's the headline, but it's not the point. The real shift is that classification is no longer gated by data availability, annotation cycles, or pipeline engineering.

Supervised models still make sense when you have stable targets and millions of labeled samples. But in domains where the taxonomy drifts, the data is scarce, or the requirements shift faster than you can annotate, LLMs turn an impossible backlog into a prompt iteration loop.

We didn't just replace a model. We replaced a process.

This article does a great job showing an example of that. Two things:

Machine learning and LLMs are cousins in the artificial intelligence pantheon, but they are completely and totally different. They should not be used in any way interchangeably. ML will continue to meet a niche set of very specific problem domains. But you should never consider swapping an ML solution for an LLM one unless you are redesigning the entire process.
Machine learning solutions often require an approach that is very "machine". Math and data heavy, looking for things that are sometimes arcane. LLM solutions, for me, often start with "How would I do that if I did it once?" And then model off of that. These are much simpler to reason about.

Gemini 3: Introducing the latest Gemini AI model from Google

Newest flagship AI models from Google. I haven't had time to play with these directly but will be soon. Folks ask me a lot where I put my attention to keep up-to-date on LLM advances and my answer is: OpenAI and ChatGPT as the continued leader, Anthropic and Claude largely around coding but everything too, and Gemini and Google in part because of the connectedness to search and other data. Willison's recap is a good start.

Three Years from GPT-3 to Gemini 3 - by Ethan Mollick

Mollick's book "Co-Intelligence" is a great read to introduce pragmatic ways that LLMs and AI may change different parts of society. Here he reflects on the continued progress of LLMs with this weeks Gemini 3 announcements.

Three years ago, we were impressed that a machine could write a poem about otters. Less than 1,000 days later, I am debating statistical methodology with an agent that built its own research environment. The era of the chatbot is turning into the era of the digital coworker.

It is an incredible time to play and experiment. I was telling some friends how much fine I’m having playing with Agent stuff and this analogy works for me. Imagine that you have spent decades playing with LEGO and it is so fun. Building things. Trying stuff out. Incredible. And then one day you get LEGO's that move. Your mind is blown. That is what building software with LLMs feels like.

Google Antigravity

Early observations on Google Antigravity. That name doesn't resonate with me for some reason. Willison highlights some of the (currently) unique parts. There are so many new tools being created right now for building software it is hard to keep it all sorted.

The Illusion of Thought: Chain of Thought Lies

Super interesting read on interesting research from Anthropic.

When researchers trained models to exploit incorrect hints for rewards, the models learned fast. They reward-hacked in over 99% of cases - finding the shortcut, taking the easy points. But they admitted to using these hacks less than 2% of the time in their Chain of Thought explanations.

Instead, they fabricated justifications. They'd construct long, plausible-sounding rationales for why the wrong answer was actually correct. No mention of the hint. No acknowledgment of the shortcut. Just a convincing story.

A thought when reading this: it is shocking how much LLMs are like people.

Is the LLM's chain of thought that it shares actually its real train of thought? Turns out maybe, or no, or how would we know? What was your train of thought to come to the last thing you decided? The LLM is providing one. A person would too if asked. But are either reliable? No.

Instead, they fabricated justifications. They'd construct long, plausible-sounding rationales for why the wrong answer was actually correct. No mention of the hint. No acknowledgment of the shortcut. Just a convincing story.

The "they" in that sentence is LLMs, but people do this all the time too.

Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025

Cloudflare had a big outage on Monday morning that disrupted many services. Cloudflare is not a well known name to most but they are probably the largest CDN (content distribution network) in the world and they operate as a caching front-end for many websites. I have a lot of respect for the stuff they do — they are truly solving unique and very difficult engineering problems to scale the Internet and web even more. This outage was rare and as is often the case the cause was frustrating banal.

The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind. Instead, it was triggered by a change to one of our database systems' permissions which caused the database to output multiple entries into a "feature file" used by our Bot Management system. That feature file, in turn, doubled in size. The larger-than-expected feature file was then propagated to all the machines that make up our network.

The software running on these machines to route traffic across our network reads this feature file to keep our Bot Management system up to date with ever changing threats. The software had a limit on the size of the feature file that was below its doubled size. That caused the software to fail.

This is the kind of thing that can cause you massive issues and it seems so simple. Very specific issue, but the automation that allows the scale they operate takes anything and spreads it everywhere instantly. While physical isolation of infrastructure for survivability is very often clearly in place, the logical isolation of the software that that isolated physical infrastructure uses is a whole different issue.

The observation that their status page was also down and it just being a coincidence seems almost too random to believe, but I guess. Lastly, it is impressive that Matthew Prince, CEO and Founder, wrote the incident report.

OpenAI and Target partner to bring new AI-powered experiences across retail | OpenAI

Interesting update from OpenAI and Minneapolis-based Target.

Building on this foundation, the new Target app in ChatGPT will bring a curated, conversational shopping experience. Launching next week in beta, it will let shoppers ask for ideas, browse and build multi-item baskets, shop for fresh food, and check out using their choice fulfillment options--including Drive Up, Order Pickup, and shipping.

I know senior tech folks at Target so I’m hoping to learn more about how this actually works. I find it super odd that there is no mention of OpenAI's own Agentic Commerce framework. This seems like it would have been a perfect place to highlight the power of Agentic Commerce. It is also a two-directional release talking about how Target is internally using ChatGPT Enterprise. This feels like more of a business development outcome than a technical capability, but regardless is still notable.

I've recently found myself using LLMs more for shopping "work". I use work deliberately because for me it fits a unique spot. Most of my shopping (I’m not much a shopper) is just "I need X", so I find X and buy it. I sometimes desire to browse and "I would like to explore X" and see what is out there. I’m using AI for this third space of "I wish there was a thing that did X, Y, and Z but I don't know that it exists". I've now given tasks like this multiple times to an LLM and have it go do research on stuff I don't even know where to start.

'I heat my Essex home with a data centre in the shed'

Data centers use a tremendous amount of power and create a lot of heat. The two are connected -- the more power the more heat. Both of those things are hard to deal with when they are very densely packed. The enabling capability is network bandwidth. The more network bandwidth we can create the more distributed we can physically place all that electricity and heat, which can make it easier to generate and use both of them. This article reminded me of the hot tub heated by a Bitcoin miner that I saw at Bitcoin Miami. Heat has uses, and if we can put the heat generation where it is needed you get a better solution for everyone. But the network bandwidth is needed to make that compute useful.

supercookie: ⚠️ Browser fingerprinting via favicon!

It really seems like there are endless ways to track users on the web. Cookies are the built-in way of course and as privacy tools have improved we then moved to browser fingerprinting which is very hard to defend against, and now the handy little favicon that gives you an icon in the tab bar of your browser for that website is weaponized?

Supercookie uses favicons to assign a unique identifier to website visitors.
Unlike traditional tracking methods, this ID can be stored almost persistently and cannot be easily cleared by the user.

The tracking method works even in the browser's incognito mode and is not cleared by flushing the cache, closing the browser or restarting the operating system, using a VPN or installing AdBlockers.

So how does this work?

By combining the state of delivered and not delivered favicons for specific URL paths for a browser, a unique pattern (identification number) can be assigned to the client. When the website is reloaded, the web server can reconstruct the identification number with the network requests sent by the client for the missing favicons and thus identify the browser.

Like fingerprinting this will require the browser software to evolve to protect against.

Journal

Nov 15, 2025 at 8:00 AM

I hadn’t heard of Underwood Coffee from Duluth before but found their beans at Frgmnt in SPS Tower and decided to give them a try. This Kenya Uteuzi Jimbo was very good! Recommended. ☕️

Nov 16, 2025 at 9:17 AM

It is cold enough again to fire up the sauna! 🔥

Nov 16, 2025 at 10:28 AM

My happy place. Now add snow. ❄️🔥

Nov 16, 2025 at 1:22 PM

POAP 7496955 at Farewell Ponder.

Things 4 Good 2025 Candle Fundraiser Results

Nov 16, 2025 at 1:36 PM

We completed our annual candle sale raising $9,048 for the four organizations we picked! That is a 29.1% increase from 2024, topping the growth of previous years at 21.8, 9.7, and 10.3%. A huge thank you to the 73 folks from this community who made this possible by purchasing a wooden-wick candle made with love!

As in previous years, we let people pick which organizations they would like to support. People could pick any or all of the organizations. We even had some folks request specific allocations versus dividing it proportionally.

The is the closest clustering of amounts between the various organizations that we have ever had with only a 2.4% delta between the four organizations.

A bit more about the organizations that we have sent these funds to!

Animal Welfare Institute

The Animal Welfare Institute is a non-profit committed to freeing animals suffering because of people. They do this for animals stuck in labs all the way to animals suffering on farms. Their mission is to end all human-caused suffering for animals everywhere, improving the welfare of all. I picked this non-profit because put simply, animals shouldn’t suffer due to humans, and I think it is our responsibility as a society to make sure that we do not make animals unnecessarily hurt. -- Tyler

Border Angels

Centered around love, Border Angels help migrants and refugees along the entire US-Mexico border with legal issues and human rights cases. Founded in 1986 by Enrique Morones, it now runs multiple direct action programs and advocacy and humanitarian work. Their Water Drops program stations food, water, and other essential resources along dangerous sections of desert that migrants must cross before arriving in the US. Their Bond Program assists families with the financial burden of bonds and legal struggles to free loved ones being held in detention facilities. Also made possible by Border Angels, the Caravan of Love donates hygiene supplies and clothing to refugees being held in overcrowded shelters in Tijuana, Mexico, and Volviendo a Casa provides support for families suffering from loss. -- Mazie

The Food Group

The Food Group is a local non-profit that supplies food shelves with low cost, local healthy foods. They also own a organic farm in Marine on St Croix where they grow veggies and give opportunities for others to learn about sustainable farming helping the next generation of farmers gain access to land, markets, educational opportunities and a network of other likeminded individuals.

In this time where so many people are food insecure, I wanted to support an organization that is working directly on this problem. I chose the Food Group because not only are they working to help get food to people who need it, they are doing it with local, healthy food and in the framework of sustainable agriculture. I also love that they operate a farm which provides organic produce to food shelves and teaches others the tools to take up sustainable farming. -- Tammy

Sandy Hook Promise

I was driving up Lyndale Ave on my way to work and became alarmed at the number of police and other first responders that were racing south as I was going north. Shortly after I found out there was a school shooting at Annunciation. This was less than a mile from our home. We know many people that are connected to Annunciation. It was horrible, and should never happen. None of this should happen. Firearms are the leading cause of death for children and teens in America. Sandy Hook Promise is doing good work everyday to stop this. Join me in supporting them, and supporting our kids. -- Jamie

These four organizations add to the sixteen that we have supported in previous years:

Also see 2025 Fall Fundraiser Insights for more details from this year. Additionally see results from 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021.

Things 4 Good 2025 Candle Fundraiser Insights

Nov 16, 2025 at 2:13 PM

We have wrapped up the 5th annual Candle Fundraiser. I'm proud to say that we raised $9,048 in donations! That is a $2,000 jump (29.1%) from last year’s results. Amazing!

Last year we made 252 candles and we sold out on Sunday. This year we sold 321 candles and only had 10 remaining after the sale. We didn't necessarily set out to make 321 candles. It was a struggle to get the components that we needed to make all the candles. Vessels were all out of stock so I would order any vessels as soon as they came in stock but it was dribbles. Scent was also challenging. On Wednesday before the sale we had no Winter Wonderland candles and had made a bunch of True North to compensate. Then an order of 8 lbs of scent arrived a few days early and we got to making a bunch of candles!

Many people buy candles as gifts so we tend to see some larger orders. Our largest order this year was 16 candles. You can see folks tend to by in pairs -- even numbers are more common than odd. We also saw a big difference this year versus last in the number of single candle sales. Last year at the Mount Olivet Holiday Boutique we had 32 sales of one candle, and this year there were only 9 sales with one candle.

This year we had eleven different scents, three more than last year. The new scent was Charcoal Rose. We also introduced two new “types” of candles -- T4G Labs and Rekindled. Both of these candles were in a random scent distribution, requiring you to smell each one since they were different. The Labs candles are the result of our scent experimentation. Rekindled were all made using vessels that had been returned to us and then reused. Here is a look at rolling inventory as sales were happening.

Here is the same data but using a different visualization.

This year was also the first year we offered XL 24oz candles for a $50 donation. I had no way of knowing demand for this so we only made 12 of them to start with and thankfully the preorders allowed me to oversell them and get more made the week after the sale -- totally 22 sold. This added $1,100 to the fundraiser. (Note: XL candles are not in the graphs above.)

The last new thing this year were lids. We have been asked in the past if we have lids and I decided we should just have some available. These were $10 each, are very high quality, and can be used repeatedly on different candles. We sold 40 of these. These seemed to be mostly sold when people were giving them as gifts. This added $400 to the fundraiser.

Other observations from the sale:

Having T4G Labs and Rekindled both be random scents did not make any sense. Next year the T4G Labs will be our experiments and include a list of scent lookup so folks know what each one is, using a number. Rekindled will likely become a consistent and reused scent just for that candle. We are thinking something that smells “fresh and clean”.
The XL candles were hard for us to pour because they are double wicked. I have ideas how we can set the wicks next year to make that much easier.
I'm not sharing the payment preferences as I did in previous years because we really steered people to Venmo this year which made the reconciling of payments much easier.
Adding more products completely broke our sales checkout process and I did a refactor of that for Sunday that was so much better.
For years I’ve wanted to create a handout to include with the candles for folks that have questions. I finally made this for Sunday and also have it online -- Burn Instructions.

We are already busy thinking of improvements and how we will run next year’s sale! We hope to see you there! Sign up to our family mailing list and check “Candle Fundraiser” to be notified.

Also see 2025 Fundraiser Results.

Things 4 Good Five Year Impact

Nov 16, 2025 at 2:24 PM

We’ve now done our Things 4 Good Candle Fundraiser for five years. With the amazing support of this community we have raised $31,787 for non-profits! Thank you so much. This year was an incredible jump from last year selling 321 candles! ❤️

Last year we did the first day of the sale at Mount Olivet Holiday Boutique and that resulted in a lot of new people finding our candles -- and a lot of transactions. This year we returned to our at home model but still saw a lot of people participating in the fundraiser with 73 unique transactions!

I also noticed this year that I felt like the distribution of funds between the non-profits seemed much tighter than usual. I went back and did the math and sure enough it was. The “range” between the four non-profits was only 2.4%, less than any previous year.

Here is another look at this data. In a completely even distribution each non-profit would get 25%. Here we look at the percent over-achievement of the highest performing organization and the percent under-achievement of the lowest. The first year had the highest range ever.

This event has become a treasured tradition for our family and I think it has for some of the folks that come as well. Sign up to our family mailing list and check “Candle Fundraiser” to be notified of future sales.

See Four Year Impact.

Nov 16, 2025 at 2:53 PM

You can still find me on the web.

Gall's Law

Nov 16, 2025 at 5:41 PM

I was listening to The Omni Show -- How Jorge Arango Uses OmniFocus. It was an overall good episode and at the end Arango shared a reference to Gall’s Law. I had not heard of this before so I looked it up:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.

Arango was sharing this in reference to GTD systems -- build a simple system that works and then figure out what you need from there. But I keep coming back to this because I think this happens in software and technology frequently.

I’ve been thinking about big enterprise system changes that companies have to make and the huge challenge that you face is really fighting Gall’s Law. These systems are always complex and due to the domain you cannot start simple -- you have to start complex.

Gall’s Law is worth keeping in mind.

Nov 17, 2025 at 6:45 PM

Burning this many wooden wick candles at once is actually pretty noisy -- so much crackle! 😮

Farewell Ponder and Weekly Thing Forum

Nov 17, 2025 at 7:34 PM

In September 2023, I introduced the Weekly Thing Forum with the hope of creating a space for readers of the Weekly Thing to connect with each other and continue topics that may have started in the Weekly Thing. The Forum itself is hosted on Ponder, which aligns closely with the ethos of the IndieWeb and the Weekly Thing. Recently, Good Enough, the makers of Ponder, announced that Ponder is being shut down. With that, the Weekly Thing Forum is also going to come to an end.

In the two years of the Forum, we had 86 people join and 107 discussions. We shared some exclusive POAPs, experimented with some different things, and did many other things. I briefly considered finding a new home for the Forum, but nothing made much sense. If folks really have an itch for that, there is the (very quiet) Weekly Thing subreddit at r/WeeklyThing.

I want to thank the gang at Good Enough for taking a run at something like Ponder. I also applaud that they gave everyone the ability to download a usable HTML archive of any groups on Ponder, as well as to delete their group’s data. They kept their focus on those core values even when things weren’t going the way they wanted, and I applaud that.

I will bring back the “Reply All” section whenever it makes sense. That will bring conversations that arrive in my mailbox from issues back into the newsletter at times. As a final nod and Thank You to Ponder, I decided to create a Farewell Ponder POAP and share it with users of the service. If you would like one, send me an email and I’ll get you a claim code!

Nov 18, 2025 at 8:40 PM

Paragraph has now merged with Mirror and I decided to set up cross-posting to give it a try. Paragraph will pull posts from my RSS feed to show on my publication there as well.

Nov 20, 2025 at 4:28 PM

Selfie with Joel Crandall, CEO of MnTech, moments before we kick off the very first MnTech Elevate event!

Nov 20, 2025 at 8:37 PM

MnTech Elevate was hosted in the Delta Sky360° Club at U.S. Bank Stadium and we got to take tours of the stadium including the locker room, going onto the field, seeing the Gjallarhorn, and the nicest couches you could watch a football game from.

Supporting Membership

Hey there, Weekly Thing enthusiasts! 🌟 We're on an exciting mission to support the incredible Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), champions of digital freedom and privacy. So far, we've rallied together to raise an impressive $580.92—but we need your help to keep the momentum going! With just 23 amazing Supporting Members currently on board, imagine the impact we could make if we doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled our crew. Every single cent we raise goes straight to the EFF, powering their vital work for 24 more weeks until the big annual transfer. Join us in making a difference and become a Supporting Member today—let's show the world what a united community can achieve for a freer, more secure digital future! 🚀💪

$4 monthly

$40 yearly

Briefly

To folks that know crypto and blockchains this isn't a surprise. Contrary to public understanding crypto is in most ways the most trackable currency that has ever existed. That is why it is called a public blockchain. The ability to be private comes from being able to create wallets that are not connected to your identity, which is much harder to do than most people realize. → Bitcoin's big secret: How cryptocurrency became law enforcement's secret weapon | Bitwarden

👏👏👏 → 2025 Tekne Award Winners » MnTech

Funny story about engineering around an iterative design process. → Original Mac calculator design came from letting Steve Jobs play with menus for 10 minutes - Ars Technica

Official macOS 26 support and parallel downloads! I’m a proud monthly supporter of Homebrew — such an incredible project. → Homebrew 5.0.0

Hopefully this gets nowhere. The ability to manage our privacy and protect our communications should be fundamental. → Lawmakers Want to Ban VPNs—And They Have No Idea What They're Doing | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Many (most?) users of awk just copy and paste something into a command line with a bunch of pipes, cross their fingers, and hope it works. It turns out awk is one of those endlessly fascinating rabbit holes. 🕳️🐇 → AWK technical notes | Volodymyr Gubarkov

Everything you've ever done on the Internet is enabled by Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). It is the TCP in TCP/IP. → The Internet is Cool. Thank you, TCP | Moncef Abboud

I really like how Manton continues to evolve the micro.blog platform. I upgraded to Studio to have all these features. → New audio option for Micro.blog Studio - Manton Reece

This is so delightful! → Minivac 601 Simulator

Widely used framework for those building Agents. → LangChain and LangGraph Agent Frameworks Reach v1.0 Milestones

Another custom Wordle? Sure, maybe this will become a regular feature. The "clue" is just this issue number written out (they don't allow numbers?).

👉 Weekly Thing 333 Wordle

A haiku to leave you with…

Data sheds warmth glow,
Essex home heated by code—
Tech hugs winter tight. ❄️💻

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

Want to share this issue with others? The link is…

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Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2025-11-23T05:29:41.000Z

Commanding performance by Verstappen to take the lead on the first turn and never let up the entire Las Vegas GP — winning by 17 seconds. Impressive!