Twin Cities IndieWeb - BlogFlock

Videos appear to show agent taking gun before Minneapolis shooting - Patrick Rhone

2026-01-26T01:28:48.000Z

Watching major media finally get it is fascinating. You can almost see the lightbulbs going off in their heads in real time.

Make This Make Sense - Barry Hess

2026-01-25T15:14:00.000Z

Some quotes I’ve read as I’m trying to make sense of things.

I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.

– Benjamin Franklin

No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

– The Third Amendment to the United States Constitution

51
The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them,
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.

Who has done his day’s work? who will soonest be through with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?

Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?

52
The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

– Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

We each contain a universe within us. How can we allow a universe to be snuffed out so blithely?

You contain multitudes. Don’t let the eyes in your head nor the vision in your soul be blinded by ideology. It’s not too late. Find the right thing, the human right thing, within your multitudes. Shout it from the window now before you find yourself under their boot-soles.

I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!

– Howard Beale, Network

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Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-01-25T01:39:28.000Z

Neighborhood vigil.

What Poise Looks Like When Everything Is Not Fine - Patrick Rhone

2026-01-24T15:40:29.000Z

I update Mike Vardy on what is happing here in my beloved Minnesota.

Only at the Library - Barry Hess

2026-01-24T14:33:00.000Z

Literally. I don’t think I could buy these books if I wanted to (for any sort of reasonable price).

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Weekly Thing 338 / Authority, Humanizer, Left - Weekly Thing

2026-01-24T13:48:16.000Z

Hello there! 👏

I’m finishing up this email as it is -17 °F and waiting for the sun to rise. Yesterday it was -22 °F at this time so it is warming. This is the kind of cold that even hardy Minnesotan's take note of. 🥶

The Federal presence in Minnesota continues to be an ever present cause of anxiety. I feel like I hear police or ambulance sirens several times a day over the last two weeks. Please join me in supporting the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota who has been working with immigrants and refugees in Minnesota for 50 years and the Immigrant Rapid Response Fund (administered by the Women's Foundation of Minnesota) which is routing support to dozens of organizations that are helping people with immigration-related emergencies. 🫶

I mentioned last week that Mazie is off to Barcelona for the semester. She's having a great time and has been sharing her experiences on her blog! It all makes a Dad proud. 😁

Yearly Thing 2025

For a couple of years now I’ve been wondering if there was a book version of the Weekly Thing. I had in my mind the idea of an almanac. Something that captured some period of time and put information in a different format. This year this idea surfaced again and unlike the last couple of times I could not shake it. It seemed this thing needed to happen! And here it is, the Yearly Thing 2025: Agents, Attention, Artifacts.

The Yearly Thing 2025 places all 324 links that I commented on across 31 issues of the Weekly Thing in 2025 into one volume. It is organized into 10 topic focused chapters:

The AI Revolution
The Craft of Software
Privacy, Security and Encryption
Cryptocurrency and Web3
The Apple Ecosystem
The Open Web and Blogging
Attention, Algorithms and Digital Life
Leadership and Building Products
Health, Connection and Society
Tools, Productivity and Delights

There is also an Introduction, Weekly Thing Index, and an Afterword.

This repackaging of the Weekly Thing gives an opportunity to see topics in a different light. The eBook version maintains all the hyperlinks so you can go to articles and navigate as you like. The printed book references the issue each item was in, which you can then easily scan a QR code to go to via the Weekly Thing Index if you wish to.

I hope this is a way for people to go back to topics and reflect on them more. Make some notes in the margin on the print. All while supporting the Weekly Thing Supporting Membership program — with all proceeds from the sale of the Yearly Thing 2025 supporting great digital non-profits.

The paperback is available for $30 on Lulu.
The eBook is available for $20 on Gumroad. The eBook will give you an archive that you will find formats for Apple Books, Kindle, Nook, Android, etc.
Purchasers of the printed book that would like the eBook as well can contact me and I will get you the eBook files.
Anyone that purchases the Yearly Thing 2025 in the first 2 months will receive a special Yearly Thing 2025 POAP to collect!

This may be the first of many Yearly Things that you can collect over time. 🤔

PS: Unfortunately I don't know who purchases the paperback on Lulu. If you do, please send me an email letting me know and I will send you the POAP claim code!

Paperback on Lulu

eBook on Gumroad

Straw Poll

I’m bringing the straw poll section back! Since we are getting to the end of January I’m curious to hear how your New Year's resolution is going.

Snow sculptor at World Snow Celebration inspecting his work.

January 17, 2026
Stillwater, MN

Notable

You can discuss any of these links at the Weekly Thing 338 tag in r/WeeklyThing.

Our approach to advertising and expanding access to ChatGPT | OpenAI

Remember how ads first came to search results and the search companies had all of this highfalutin talk about not impacting results, keeping clear separation, don't be evil and all that ridiculousness. I was hopeful that we wouldn't recreate the original sin of the web with AI. We know better now right? Sadly no, and I’m a fool for thinking it wouldn't have.

This is all positioned as lowering the barrier and bringing AI to more people. Okay, I can’t argue that isn't the case. ChatGPT Go at $8/month is going to give more people access. However, this just isn't the whole story.

ChatGPT is adding ads for the same reason Netflix just did — it unlocks the top end of your revenue. If I have 1,000 users paying $20 a month that is it. It takes effort and product benefits to upsell them. But if I have 1,000 users paying $8 a month plus ads? My maximum revenue is now based on how I monetize them. And just like that we've started the enshittification train.

Hypergrowth doesn't merge well with "a reasonable fee paid for defined value". So, yeah, I shouldn't be surprised we are here. But I can still be bothered and a bit sad by it.

We already know that search results are skewed by advertising. How will we possibly ever know that AI interactions are not?

Miniroll - Your blogroll, anywhere

Blogrolls are "old school" web and were the way original bloggers linked to other sites they read and wanted to connect with. They still exist, and are awesome and beautiful. I keep a blogroll. Mine is just a page of writing and blogrolls can be made much more powerful and even pull RSS feeds for the sites and show the last article. I started playing with it and made a small blogroll on Miniroll. This is a cool service to make a more powerful blogroll to add to your site. Hannah wrote about creating Miniroll on his blog.

humanizer/SKILL.md at main

People tend to feel like they can identify AI writing — by looking for — lots of emdashes — amongst other things. This is an interesting Claude Skill that teaches an AI to write unlike an AI. I love how it uses Wikipedia's Signs of AI Writing to create the Skill. Seeing this and reviewing it brought me right back to The Most Human Human, which is all about the Turing Test and how some actual people fail to convey their human-ness.

Left – Widgets for Time Left

Little app I discovered via MacSparky and grabbed for myself. I’m a fan of visualization of time, and this has a bunch of really interesting ones. I was surprised that one of the whole tabs in this app is "You" where it gets your birthday and some info and give you a "Left" for you. It is a bit like my Four Thousand Weeks as Rings gauge, but this moves in seconds! It says I have 287.32335 months left right now. 🤔

How countries can end the capability overhang | OpenAI

I missed this offering when it was announced. This update is obviously timed for the World Economic Forum going on right now.

Today at our OpenAI event alongside the World Economic Forum, we announced that we’re expanding this work in 2026 with new initiatives focused on education, health, AI skills training and certifications, disaster response and preparedness, cybersecurity, and start-up accelerators. They give nations a range of options for how to work with us to address their needs and priorities.

Is this more marketing than real stuff? Diving into the PDF report on page 12 there is a brief rundown of what 11 different countries are doing. Honestly it seems smart when you read the various efforts.

Velocity Is the New Authority. Here’s Why – On my Om

This is an incredible essay from Om Malik reflecting on our modern information ecosystem. I have banged on about algorithmic manipulation of content at length, that algorithms cannot be designed without a purpose, etc. Malik does an amazing job framing this up in a much more cogent view than I ever could. I wanted to quote the whole thing, and honestly maybe you should just go read the whole thing.

Authority used to be the organizing principle of information, and thus the media. You earned attention by being right, by being first in discovery, or by being big enough to be the default. That world is gone. The new and current organizing principle of information is velocity.

What matters now is how fast something moves through the network: how quickly it is clicked, shared, quoted, replied to, remixed, and replaced. In a system tuned for speed, authority is ornamental. The network rewards motion first and judgment later, if ever. Perhaps that's why you feel you can't discern between truths, half-truths, and lies.

The bold is my addition. This sets the tone for how the algorithms that sit in front of our timelines are operating. They are looking for engagement and driving velocity off of that.

That's why we get all our information as memes. The meme has become the metastory, the layer where meaning is carried. You don't need to read the thing; you just need the gist, compressed and passed along in a sentence, an image, or a joke. It has taken the role of the headline. The machine accelerates this dynamic. It demands constant material; stop feeding it and the whole structure shakes. The point of the internet now is mostly to hook attention and push it toward commerce, to keep the engine running. Anyone can get their cut.

Velocity has taken over.

Algorithms on YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter do not optimize for truth or depth. They optimize for motion. A piece that moves fast is considered "good." A piece that hesitates disappears.

It is all memes all the way down.

The algorithm doesn't care whether something is true; it cares whether it moves. Day-one content becomes advertising wearing the mask of criticism.

I hope that reading this gives you a perspective, a different edge, to look at what you are seeing on your algorithmic fed feed. I feel like focusing on systems that are non-algorithmic, like RSS feeds and newsletters, is a way around that. Honestly what I do right here in these emails is nearly 100% against every single growth hack that anyone would ever tell you. You're sending a 3,000 words email? That is a horrible idea.

I think what we need to counter this velocity meme train is perspective, and control, and even a bit of meditation on a regular basis.

Claude's new constitution Anthropic

Anthropic has been a leading voice, and an open one, on how they build their models. This new "constitution" is part of how they "program" (is teach a better word?) it.

Our previous Constitution was composed of a list of standalone principles. We've come to believe that a different approach is necessary. We think that in order to be good actors in the world, AI models like Claude need to understand why we want them to behave in certain ways, and we need to explain this to them rather than merely specify what we want them to do. If we want models to exercise good judgment across a wide range of novel situations, they need to be able to generalize--to apply broad principles rather than mechanically following specific rules.

And who are the "programmers"?

While writing the constitution, we sought feedback from various external experts (as well as asking for input from prior iterations of Claude). We'll likely continue to do so for future versions of the document, from experts in law, philosophy, theology, psychology, and a wide range of other disciplines. Over time, we hope that an external community can arise to critique documents like this, encouraging us and others to be increasingly thoughtful.

Super interesting approach and structure. You can read the full Constitution for the complete picture. Truly wild stuff.

Supporting Membership

Hey there, Weekly Thing enthusiasts! 🌟 We're on an exciting mission to support the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), champions of digital freedom, and we need your awesome energy to make it happen! So far, we've rallied together to raise an impressive $696.52, but with your help, we can soar even higher. With 15 weeks to go until we send every cent to the EFF, and just 23 incredible Supporting Members leading the charge, now is the perfect time to join the movement. By becoming a Supporting Member, you're not just contributing funds—you're becoming a vital part of a community dedicated to protecting our online rights. Let's make a splash and show the EFF just how much we care—jump in and support today!

$4 monthly

$40 yearly

Journal

Jan 16, 2026 at 8:00 PM

Tammy and I had a delicious evening at Rio 1854 -- the Surf & Turf for two was amazing. Recommended!

Jan 17, 2026 at 9:24 AM

Delicious Gingerbread Latte and breakfast at Mon Petit Cheri in Stillwater.

Jan 17, 2026 at 9:30 AM

Stillwater.

World Snow Celebration

Jan 17, 2026 at 10:30 AM

It was a very cold morning but we made it out to see the World Snow Celebration and the snow sculptures. Teams were working towards the deadline of completing their sculptures. They were amazing. We also did the Peoples Choice votes. I voted for Team Falcon of Mongolia and Tammy went for Team Warm Your Cold Brits.

Jan 17, 2026 at 3:00 PM

Tammy and I saw Marty Supreme at the Edina 4 theatre this afternoon. Fantastic performance from Timothée Chalamet. The story is “loosely based” on the life of Marty Reisman.

Jan 17, 2026 at 10:00 PM

We watched Knives Out tonight, again. Tyler hadn’t seen it and now that there are two sequels we’re going to watch those together. I didn’t remember that much after seven years so was still fun to watch again. 🍿

Jan 19, 2026 at 4:00 PM

Tyler and I made our way out to Chaska to check out The Forge. This was on our list of card shops to explore. Unfortunately the Pokemon inventory was nearly non-existent. They had a ton of other gaming stuff though. They only had a couple dozen cards but I did find two to add to my binder.

Amazon Spending

Jan 20, 2026 at 9:09 PM

Peter Rukavina posted a graph of his Amazon spending and I couldn’t resist taking a look at my data. You can easily request this from Amazon in the “Privacy Center”. A quick pivot table later and I had this graph. I’m omitting the actual scale on purpose -- the shape does enough to tell the story.

I’m not that clear on what happened in 2015 that drove a big jump that stayed that way. My family comments that I purchase a lot from Amazon and I thought they were overstating it, but maybe not.

Honestly I was truly surprised at the frequency and amounts.

Briefly

Yadda, yadda about access. Really about raising ceiling of average revenue per user. → Introducing ChatGPT Go, now available worldwide | OpenAI

Love that Marlinspike is bringing his privacy ethos to the world of AI. 🧠 → Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike wants to do for AI what he did for messaging - Ars Technica

This is why I love the web. If only it were a blog post, but this will do. 🍅 → I spent 8 months testing every brand of canned tomato with a controlled pasta sauce recipe. Full rankings inside. : r/Cooking

Good guideline on making sure your AGENTS.md file is focused and making your project better. → A Complete Guide To AGENTS.md

Paid post but you can read enough to be interesting. I’m doing a ton of non-code projects with Claude Code. It is amazing. → Claude Code for writers

Interesting insights from deep usage of the "worst AI coding assistants" that we will have in the future. → 10 things I learned from burning myself out with AI coding agents - Ars Technica

First major version in 10 years, and "the final release". → jQuery 4.0.0 | Official jQuery Blog

This one had me at "indexable arrays, which may be thought of as functions whose domains are isomorphic to contiguous subsets of the integers". 🤓 → Are arrays functions?

This is hilarious, horrible, and you could probably make an EDM song with it. → Busy Simulator

Scary and incredible recount of former Minnesota United head coach Adrian Heath being kindapped! → The extraordinary story of a soccer coach, a kidnapping and a Saudi job that didn’t exist - The Athletic

Lessons shared. → I'm 34. Here's 34 things I wish I knew at 21 | elliot.my

Reflections on what the open web really means. I would add to the commentary that I think we need to consider zoning on the web. It should be clear when I’m in a non-commercial public area, versus a commercial or industrial zone. Ideally domain names would have had some meaning here, but that didn’t really pan out. → The conditionally open web • Cory Dransfeldt

I don't know that this project is even done or launched and it took me a minute to figure out what it was doing but now I see it is bridging blog RSS feeds to the Fediverse. → RSS.Social

A haiku to leave you with…

Tomato taste test,
Sauce secrets in each tin hide
Pasta dreams collide.

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 Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-01-23T21:29:04.000Z

I Am the Payroll Accountant for Professional Protestors in Minnesota, and I Am Swamped – McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

Because even in the worst of times, humor is how we keep our sanity.

It was kind of a big day yesterday... - Barry Hess

2026-01-23T14:31:00.000Z

It was kind of a big day yesterday. Our family was booked to BTS’s previous tour in 2020, and the world went south. When tickets were secured, we all breathed a sigh of relief. (Especially my daughters. 😆) This time we’re going to make a trip out of it.

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Twisted Sister – We’re Not Gonna Take it - Patrick Rhone

2026-01-22T19:42:24.000Z

We’re right!
We’re free!
We’ll fight!
You’ll see!

Stick in my head on loop. No reason.

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-01-22T17:19:04.000Z

I don’t know what to write here | Bethany H

Our kids are seeing things happen that at a “normal” time, any one of which would become a national scandal, but today doesn’t reach a level of atrocity to break through the baseline level of daily atrocity. If you are a praying person, please pray for all of us.

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-01-22T16:13:21.000Z

What Is the Scale of the Resistance in Minnesota?

This mirrors what I’ve been hearing elsewhere on social media and from friends. The Trump regime’s secret police force has invaded the Twin Cities to kidnap, torture, terrorize, and murder its residents — and Minnesotans aren’t having it.

In a State - Barry Hess

2026-01-22T14:18:00.000Z

All the things are happening. All the things are going on.

I’m privileged in almost all of the ways. I’m fortunate in almost all of the ways. Yet it may surprise you to know that I’m also directly impacted in some ways. And injustice makes my system furious. This all hits me right in my center.

Sleep, already elusive, is now like a gift given by an abuser. My concerns fester, remaining unknowable by me until they pop out days later. Unknown, but profoundly impacting me physically, emotionally.

Stepping away from all the news and views for a reset seems the right path to get me off this wild ride. “Please place your own mask on first before assisting children or other passengers.” Back to basics. Back to daily, knowable challenges. Back to sleep. Back to better choices. Back to stable blood pressure without medication.

But what if, after closing my eyes and breathing deeply from the oxygen supply, I open my eyes only to find the plane disassembled around me?

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Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-01-22T04:17:18.000Z

ICE Detains a 5 year old and uses him as bait. – Instagram

Once again: This is America. This is happening. This is a child. This could be your child. It certainly is your taxpayer dollars being used to detain and disappear kids.

Do not look away.

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-01-21T21:36:27.000Z

“Can I just go home?” on Instagram

After he was unable to produce documentation proving his citizenship, agents informed him that he was under arrest and forcibly detained him. As he was being taken away, the young man asked, “Can I just go home?” An agent responded, “No, you are not going home,” before taking him into one of their vehicles.

This is America. This is happening. This is a child. This could be your child. Do not look away.

A friend had a dream about making bare-handed catches in left field,... - Barry Hess

2026-01-21T21:01:15.000Z

A friend had a dream about making bare-handed catches in left field, and I immediately linked him to this:

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Talking Heads – Life During Wartime - Patrick Rhone

2026-01-21T16:33:40.000Z

Stuck in my head on loop.

No reason, I’m sure. ;-|

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-01-21T15:10:51.000Z

Moral false dichotomies – Manu

Assuming something about someone else, based on your own worldview and without asking questions, is intellectually lazy.

Yep.

Amazon Spending - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-01-21T03:09:42.000Z

I’m not that clear on what happened in 2015 that drove a big jump that stayed that way. My family comments that I purchase a lot from Amazon and I thought they were overstating it, but maybe not.

Honestly I was truly surprised at the frequency and amounts.

Someone somewhere shared this lesser known, pre the Fleetwood Mac Fleetwood Mac song... - Barry Hess

2026-01-21T01:02:16.000Z

Someone somewhere shared this lesser known, pre the Fleetwood Mac Fleetwood Mac song and…so good!

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My 2026 Position on LLMs - Garrick van Buren

2026-01-20T21:57:34.000Z

Claude and I talk regularly.

I’ve reached the end of multiple context windows with Claude.

I credit Claude with helping me articulate the long running thread through my career and personal interests (e.g “Find what we forgot”) and clarifying the current positioning of my business (e.g. “When technology breaks your revenue model – call me.”). Once every couple of days I’ll paste an email draft into Claude and say, “I’m having a difficult time saying what I’d like to say succinctly.” and I’ll often take the suggestions.

Additionally, I have a long running chat in Gemini where it scores and ranks companies I offer it against the characteristics of my best clients.

I have the same 4,000 characters of instructions in both Gemini and Claude.

I don’t use ChatGPT anymore.

I would characterize my current usage as:

Rubber ducking
Summarizing qualitative patterns
English-to-English translations
Ensuring I’m being comprehensive / appreciating conventional wisdom.
Raising the minimum quality of communication

Overall, I’d characterize this as “Help me minimize common mistakes”. Claude calls it “Sharpening“.

The more I work with Claude, the more it feels like the Mirror of Erised, simply reflecting back whatever you give it in a more narcissistic package.

There’s still nothing new here and I’m still of the position that “AI is amazing about the thing I know nothing about….but it’s absolute garbage at the stuff I’m expert in.”

An Increasingly Worse Response

I don’t pay for Claude, which is to me is a sign it’s not yet become an indispensable co-worker. The reports I’ve read of Claude CoWork and other ‘agentic assistants’ mainly make me wonder why the human operator even bothered with automating the task in the first place.

The greatest value of CoPilot and Claude Code seem to lay in an assumption that all software must start from scratch in Node. As soon as you say, maybe I don’t need to start from scratch, suddenly an entire world of options opens up. Admittedly, they’re not distinct applications that can be discretely monetized. On the flip side, someone else is maintaining the system, has already fixed and squashed thousands bugs you’ve yet to even experience.

But creating software hasn’t been hard for more than 25 years. There have always been piles of frameworks and environments to accelerate the creation of software; Hypercard, VisualBasic, Ruby on Rails, WordPress, etc, etc.

The challenge is in maintaining it, hardening it, justifying why it should continue to exist – that’s the perennial problem.

And that’s the first question I ask, should we create this custom software at all? Or perhaps we frame the problem differently and solve it in a different way altogether; we can minimize our overall maintenance costs while still getting the same output…or completely eliminate problem.

You’re Not Going to Need It

Recently I upgraded all my Google Homes to Gemini…and now the voice is even more tediously verbose. When I set a timer, I want confirmation not a conversation.

I picked up a copy of Bots when it first came out and was enamored by the promise of software applications appearing so human and useful. This promise, like software maintenance itself has held constant over the past 30 years. Perennially unsolved.