Ugh, Tommy keeps talking about AI

Hank Green's recent video The AI Question that No AI Person Asks had such a good thought about application of AI as "intelligence" vs "wisdom". It's under 9 minutes long, but you're a fast reader, and here's my favorite bits:

... power in the physics sense is the ability to basically manipulate atoms.

(Heat them up, move them around, put them here or there, etc.)

Music and tech, but mostly an interesting quote

A very cool quote from this interview with Benn Jordan and Rick Beato:

Why do you need to “break out” as a musician to be a successful musician? Being a successful musician is someone who makes music and is happy making music.

So good. And applies to so many things. It’s so easy to overload the word “success” with an amount of money, or a tangible kind of status-symbol. But, like, what if we didn’t? What if we remembered that “success” is the thing we get (maybe) as a result of all that stuff. The feelings. The free time. The state of being.

Sports news ⚽

E had her first soccer game this week. I caught a video of her celebrating herself for her first goal. We’ll be waking up a bit earlier on Saturdays for a few weeks. 😅

Computer news 🖥️

If you're been wanting to dip into "talking instead of typing", but your built-in dictation is bumming you out, here are my personal recommendations: 

Howdy!

• It recently hit me that E is getting old enough that it’s a matter of time before she can find and read my personal website. What kind of questions would she have? What kind of answers will she get, without asking?

• I’m so grateful for the replies last time! I didn’t hear any explicit yes/nos to “daily standups”. I had a couple back and forths but nothing that made sense to re-share here, this time. But I like when online things become offline-ish things! So thanks for that!

• I’ve been working on a “little” text-based, web based “mech battle” game. Lots of procedurally generated items, and an in-real-life component for collectible unlocks. Like Pokémon meets Borderlands. Some of the core aspects turned out bigger than I thought. I would have warned anyone else that that would be the case 😅😅. — I’ll be sure to mention it here when I can invite some friends to an “alpha test”.

• If you’re a subscriber to any usage-based AI services, you’ve probably seen the ubiquitous trend on their pricing pages. It goes something like this: “$2/mo for some usage. $20/mo for way more usage. $299/mo for even more usage!” — how is this okay? Why are we tolerating this kind of opaque — shady, even! — pricing? I know the industry is growing. And mostly it’s due to the constant change and unpredictability of underlying usage and input/output. But man, it seems weird.

• Did I mention that Claire Vo has a How I AI episode that is one of the best intros + tech-lite dives into OpenClaw/Clawdbot pros/cons and setup? I’ve been sending this link around a bit lately.

• I’m in pretty strong agreement with Benn Jordan about Flock cameras. (Hit this timestamp for one of my fave quotes from this recent video).

• Over the last year, I’ve been keeping up with a lot of the latest AI tools and toys. It moves too fast. At work I get to help guide how it should (and shouldn’t) be used. If it gives you an idea of how much and how fast this tech is changing, there are running jokes and regular mentions that “last week” was “ages ago”.

  • Have questions?

  • (I have a TODO to write down my thoughts about Suno. Being an artist-type and all, folks have asked).

• E is about to have spring break from kindergarten! Laura and I got to help chaperone the kindergarten field-trip to the zoo recently. It went way better than I expected! 😆

• I am a big fan of Obsidian for keeping my daily notes. (I keep daily notes, btw). They recently released a Command Line Interface. I shared some code for a couple wrappers I’ve already written for it.

Question

Does your work/team/family practice any kind of “daily status update” or “standup”? If yes/no, why?

Hello! 👋

It’s “Holy Monday” today. I’ve been making the joke that righteous anger is not only justified, but encouraged today. Let’s flip some tables, and prune some junk from our lives. 😅

(If I send this late and you don’t get it until Tuesday… well, join me next year!)

Easter is on the way!

AI

If you are still avoiding premium subcriptions for LLMs/AI, look for Google’s “AI Studio” and try using “Gemini 2.5 Pro”. It’s “experimental” so it’s free right now. Just with a slow rate limit.

Cool things I’ve done with it recently:

• Vibe-coded some changes to a landing page. Generated some fun SVGs with animations.

• Asked for some specific summaries of YouTube videos. (Unsurprisingly, it has great access to YouTube content).

• Used it as a model selection in Cline. (A free VS Code plugin).

It’s meeeee

I wrote a few drafts that never went out, since the last email I sent to this itty bitty list. But I was overthinking.

So, let’s just catch up from here 😬😅

(Editing Tommy: this turned into a lot of potential “draft” ideas and little substance. Better to publish than not, I think. Catching up is weird sometimes.)

Howdy friend 👋🏼!

Here's some overdue updates that I thought I would send in February!

Anticipation list for Feb/March

• 📚 🎹 I ordered Andrew Huang's new book Make Your Own Rules. It's here, and I just need to actually read it. 😅 Without looking inside, I'm sure I'd recommend it to any artist/creative types, or folks trying to "launch" stuff on social media or YouTube.
• 🎸 I got to see Cory Wong live , for the second time! 😄
• 💍👰 Our wedding anniversary is in March! It's a busy time, but it's our anniversary, so we can celebrate when we want. Which might be April. 😅

Howdy, howdy!

I love talking about "app ideas". Or just ideas. It's like a fun game for me. I even enjoy it when non-technical folks tell me about an idea they have for some app or website that they wish existed.

I enjoy asking questions and digging into it.

And those situations very often lead to one of two directions:

Happy New Year!

Some quick updates based on the last email:

my current “deep dive” interest is absorbing a lot of content to be up to date on digital marketing stuff

• SEO is changing in some interesting ways this year. Unfortunately, Google still favors a lot of trash/lazy content. More on that another time?

• Marketing is still marketing. Psychology of sales and pricing remains. 😆

• Apparently some folks' "secret sauce" is: buy cheap ads on Bing first, and A/B test. When one works, spend big on Google ads.

I read once that the open rate for emails with “this” in the subject line is always super high. So there you go!

Hope you’re well!

The girl

It’s been so incredibly long. There was even a draft that never got sent, with a lot about Elizabeth being 3 years old. 😅

Writing regularly sounded easy for a while.

I genuinely thought I'd start the craziest and best Dad blog of all time once we had a kid. Then she got here.

And with regards to Dad blogs -- I'd much rather spend the extra time playing with her than talking about playing with her. And seeing her squeal with delight when she gets to play with Legos (yeah, we pluralize it) is way better than being popular online.

For real though -- today, we played with real "big kid" type Legos, and she was so excited. 😍

Hello, friend!

I'm keeping it light again this time!

Here's just a few fun things from the internet:

• Jon Batiste performing What a Wonderful World. If you aren't familiar with Jon's music, this might be a great introduction. If you haven't heard it: It's not like you think it is!
• Epic Rap Battles Of History does: Harry Potter vs Luke Skywalker. This may be their finest episode. The writing and the puns are absolutely top notch.
• Cory Wong's YouTube series "How To Musician". It's an eight part series, and if you're a musician you must watch these! I linked here to Episode 4, which I think even non-musicians should watch. Cory goes deep into IDENTITY and it's just great.

Hello friend!

There’s so much craziness in tech, but I’d rather add value than just provide links… so I think I’m skipping the tech news this week? 🤷🏻‍♂️ Hope that’s okay!

Segue to music

You probably know I’m a fan of “unconventional _____” type music, among all the other genres I welcome into my home. Haha. For example, I have an “unconventional lullabies” playlist of songs I would sing to Elizabeth at bedtime when she was ~2-6 months old.

Welcome back friend!

Remember when we used to write (almost) weekly?

Whew! How the world has changed since March!

Elizabeth is about to turn ONE YEAR OLD!

Howdy, friend!

How is it March 15th already? This feels like the fastest year yet. 🐎

Elizabeth is 5 months old! When showing pictures to folks, I can only scroll back a week or so before I start saying "she hardly looks like this anymore!". She's still not crazy about tummy-time, but definitely prefers to (try to) sit up.

I think she figured out raspberries yesterday. That's the sound I woke up to today. 😆 So. Fun.

Howdy, friend! I hope you're doing so well! ("swell"!?)

I read once that email engagement rates go up if you use the word "this" in the subject line. So I used it twice in all caps. 😆

There's so much more I wanted to say this week, but I'm forcing myself to keep this one short and get back on schedule...

Heelllloooooo friend!

It’s February! And by the time you’re reading this, “the big game” has already happened! I hope your favorite team won. ;)

Speaking of sports, my friend Rod came over recently and helped me do a sort of “technical rehearsal” for a podcast I plan to start. More on that soon…?!

This email doesn’t contain any tech news, necessarily. But it have multiple video links!

Helloooooo, friend! I hope you're doing great this weekend!

FIRST, I want to say a huge thanks for the replies to the last email. And for the other compliments and nice things you said in other places, and IRL. It's always great to hear nice things. =)

Dad stuff 👶🏽

So, we made it through the first couple weeks of daycare, and our first run in with diaper rash. Ugh! Poor thing. Also TMI, so sorry! Haha!