Espresso Shots 4-19-26

It's that time again for my weekly update, which includes a short collection of noteworthy finds, posts that inspire, as well as a few reflections from the past week or two. I'll aim to land these in your inbox by the weekend, in time to pair with your morning coffee (or your preferred cup of inspiration).

The Latest Drippings ☕️

• AI Use Appears to Have a 'Boiling Frog' Effect on Human Cognition. Another week goes by, and once again, I can't seem to get away from it. The rate of change in this area is frightening and exciting all at once, and, as usual, way too many folks are using these tools they don't even understand. Or worse, they think they do. But this latest study suggests that 'extensive AI use can distort and dampen users thinking and independence, and as experts work to understand the impacts of widely-used chatbots on people as they unfold in real-time, they’re warning that outsourcing cognitive tasks to AI tools could put humans in a boiling frog conundrum — in which an unwitting, bit-by-bit erosion of our cognitive muscles leads to formidable challenges in the long-term.' All I know is that when I leverage AI by 'conducting the orchestra', to offload well-defined tasks that are just time-consuming, the results are not all that bad. It's going to be interesting to look back on this moment.
• Short Attention Span Theater. Reflecting again on attention, I think Michael is correct in this post. People seem to develop an illusion of clarity when consuming 'bite-sized format' information. They 'don’t just fragment attention, they quietly replace understanding with the feeling of having learned something.'
• Resurrecting a 1992 MUD with Agentic AI. One of the more interesting uses of AI is reconstructing old, forgotten projects and code to modern systems. 'In 1992, I was nineteen years old and building an online multiplayer game on a ‘486 PC with 16 megabytes of RAM. The game was called Legends of Future Past—a text-based fantasy world where thousands of players would eventually explore, fight, craft, and tell stories together across a sprawling realm called Andor. The game ran for seven years before we shut the servers down on December 31, 1999. For twenty-seven years, it was dead. This weekend, I brought it back.' A really wonderful read on what software development was, and what it is today.
• A Project Will Save You. I loved the perspective that this post has: 'That impulse to go to the garage and just start something is what differentiates us humans from machines. We need to feel we are making our way through the world, not just existing in it. We need to feel a sense of autonomy and progress that orientates us in time and space.' I know there's a lot of FUD out there these days that amplify anxiety, but investing time in things that are irreplaceable, is a superpower. I've also experienced this firsthand when we decided to move to an island: 'The number one piece of advice in this emerging economy is simple: invest in your relationships, not companies. Leverage the people you know and the place you live in. It is the surest kind of resilience and sustainability.'
• Why (and How) I Wrote This Book. I'm looking forward to David Epstein's new book, Inside the Box. Diving a bit deeper into the process he used to create this one, I found it particularly interesting. 'Obstacles, whether self-imposed or not, can be opportunities to clarify priorities and launch productive exploration. The one-page outline was forced on both of us. I had to prioritize ideas ruthlessly. And I had to experiment with a new structure that could make it all work.' Constraint equals freedom.
• The First Rule of Fight Club. Food for thought. 'The Narrator ends up going to extraordinary lengths to change the world. It never occurs to him for an instant to change himself. And that’s where people get stuck. That’s where businesses get stuck too. Fight Club is a great work of art. A truly great critique on a really massive problem. It just never addresses the actual problem. Which, of course, is us.'
• So I Wrote a Script That Takes Monthly Screenshots of Google and Apple Maps. I became aware of Justin O’Beirne's blog during the COVID-19 lockdown, where he writes about cartography. For over a year, he took daily screenshots of both Google and Apple Maps, and animated the slight changes they kept making to them. The result is somewhat fascinating to read through.
• The Making of the IA Notebook. I have been in love with the IA Notebook since pre-ordering it. As I wrote when I first received it, 'I received this absolutely gorgeous notebook last week. It's a work of art; I'm almost afraid to write in it.' In fact, I ordered a second one so that I could keep one pristine. IA has recently posted a making-of video of the 'Japan Stationery of the year' award winner.
• From Early Nirvana to Phish, a Chicago Fan's Secret Recordings of 10,000 Shows Are Now Online. This is a treasure trove of wonderful music. Described as an 'internet treasure trove for music lovers, especially for fans of indie and punk rock during the 1980s through the early 2000s, when the scene blossomed and became mainstream. The collection features early-in-their-career performances from alternative and experimental artists like R.E.M., The Cure, The Pixies, The Replacements, Depeche Mode, Stereolab, Sonic Youth and Björk.' Listen to those early concerts at the Aadam Jacobs Collection.
• Batman: The Killing Joke – Avant-Garde Edition. When you look back at your life, you can always pick out a few transformative experiences. Maybe it was an embarrassing or exciting moment, a trip, or a book/film/song that just changed things. I don't remember how I became aware of Alan Moore's Batman: The Killing Joke when it was published in March of 1988, but that comic was one of those catalyst moments for me. In fact, I still have several copies of the first edition, sitting in sealed comic bags with backings. Now 38 years later, Argent Comics is releasing only FORTY-SEVEN copies of the 'world's first giclée-printed comic book.' And holy shit, this thing looks absolutely gorgeous.
• MD UI: A Typeface for Interfacing. Speaking of beautiful, check out this typeface. 'The brief for IO was simple: legibility above all else. Rather than readability, which refers to how comfortable a typeface is to read overall, legibility refers to how easily a single character can be identified in isolation.'
• If You Thought the Speed of Writing Code Was Your Problem - You Have Bigger Problems. The Theory of Constraints has some interesting advice that I think (any) leader should think about. '*Every system has exactly one constraint. One bottleneck. The throughput of your entire system is determined by the throughput of that bottleneck. Nothing else matters until you fix the bottleneck. That's the part most people get. Here's the part they don't, and it's the part that should scare you: When you optimize a step that is not the bottleneck, you don't get a faster system. You get a more broken one.' A big 2026 takeaway for me is how acutely aware I've been noticing how many things are systems.
• What If.... More reading on why fixing systems is way more important than focusing on short-term goals. 'Organizations are living systems (not machines). Living systems have a way of organizing themselves (Starlings as an example — don’t seem to have a boss or a planning committee). If we learned more about how living systems organize themselves, what would that teach us about organizing human endeavor?.'
• Optimism Is Not a Personality Flaw. Closing out this week with, as usual, an insightful post from Joan Westenberg. 'Pessimism is more accurate in the short term - almost always, I'll give it that. Things do go wrong in roughly the ways people predict they will. But optimism is more productive over decades. Optimism is the thing that generates attempts, and without attempts nothing changes... I would rather be wrong about what we're capable of than right about why we shouldn't bother trying.' A good reminder in these times to be a rebel and focus on optimism.
• The History of McPizza and McDonald's Pizza. I'm not sure if I remember this, but I thought it was an interesting story 'of how the world’s largest fast food chain spent the better part of fifteen years trying to make pizza work, and why it mostly did not.' A good reminder to focus on what you're good at: 'The problem was time. A pizza took roughly 11 minutes to prepare. That number became the defining fact of McDonald’s pizza's existence, referenced in nearly every account of its rise and fall. In a restaurant built around the premise that food arrives in seconds, 11 minutes was not just slow, it was a philosophical contradiction. Customers ordering burgers would sit watching their food go cold while waiting for a friend's pizza to finish baking. People ordering at the drive through were asked to pull forward and wait in the parking lot.'

Amor Fati ✌🏻