From Up On Poppy Hill
Read review: From Up On Poppy Hill
Challengers
One of the things that may be apocryphal—because I’ve never bothered to actually look it up, just kept it kicking around in my head—is David Foster Wallace’s...
Syriana
It’s easy to dismiss Syriana for a variety of reasons. It follows two films that are, on the whole, better and more interesting—Traffic and Michael Clayton....
wip
Paul's excellent review of GPT-5 has stuck in my head ever since I read it, in particular this passage:
Zero to One
Zero to One, not unlike other books in its zeigeist/self-caricature orbit (sapiens, Infinite Jest, and so on) is often so much treated like a referendum on...
October 2025
How are you doing? Are you doing well? October's been very fun, as evinced by the length of things I am remiss in writing about: EntryThingy 2.0, Long Live...
October, 2025
How are you doing? Are you doing well? October's been very fun, as evinced by the length of things I am remiss in writing about: EntryThingy 2.0, Long Live...
Eucharist
Lucy, watching with a curiosity bordering on frenzy as I slowly fry her a single egg in the French style (which is to say drowning in butter); her wary gaze...
Picnic
Picnic is an app that can be described in one sentence: Every day, you see all of the photos you took on that day in previous years, and you decide which...
Breakneck
I, like so many other people in the Tyler Cowen / Stripe Press extended universe, have deeply enjoyed Dan Wang's annual letters over the past years. And I...
Cheetah II
I wrote about Cheetah two weeks ago and appreciated the multiple people who quietly whispered in my ear after publication that it was, in fact, a Cursor...
Vercel's abstractions
use workflow is cool. I admire Vercel for many things, but in particular for what I will phrase charitably as a steadfast refusal to shackle themselves to...
Business as authorship
When Buttondown was a smaller company, the goal was to, quote unquote, stick around. That mostly meant making: enough money; providing enough value; and...
Someone built it; someone has to build it
This afternoon I stumbled upon this ticket from Tom Forbes about a faster bulk update mechanism in Django. Django's ORM workings can be complex, but the...
Paul's excellent review of GPT-5 has stuck in my head ever since I read it, in particular this passage: ChatGPT 5 is an incrementally better, higher-quality...
Cheetah
My usage of LLM tooling has plateaued — a word I use deliberately. I feel like I've developed a pretty solid sense over the past three months of what these...
Adding imports to the Django shell
I was excited to finally remove django-extensions from my pyproject.toml file when 5.2 dropped because they added support for automatic model import....
September 2025
The last of summer's grip finally loosened its hold this September, and Richmond began its annual transformation into something gentler and more...
September, 2025
The last of summer's grip finally loosened its hold this September, and Richmond began its annual transformation into something gentler and more...
Hidden coupons
Much of our work at Buttondown revolves around resolving amorphous bits of state and cleaning it up to our ends, particularly state from exogenous sources....