Happy Lunar New Year, friends. I have a new essay out this month for Every about taste. I kept seeing this word thrown around in online AI discourse, and it seemed to mean a different thing every time I saw it. So this was me trying to parse the different definitions.
In the essay, I only touch briefly on the role of status in cultural taste, and that’s because David Marx already wrote a whole book on the subject—that I read as part of my research. It was my first introduction to Marx’s writing and I highly, highly recommend it as a follow-up.
As I pitch ideas for future pieces, I’m noticing that my favorite ideas tend to start with a question I want to explore, for which I do not have a clear answer. I might have a hunch about the answer, or a hunch about where I might find it. But the actual answer? Always more complicated and surprising than I expect. Part of the fun.
Two: Some of you new Sunday readers found me through that same taste essay—welcome! Once a month, on the second Tuesday of that month, I host a Digital Mending Circle, in which we take on
the kinds of oft-neglected maintenance tasks that accrue around our digital lives. Instead of darning socks and patching jeans, we update personal websites, delete unused accounts, work on side projects, or even just catch up on email.
During last week’s mending circle, I installed OpenClaw (I fretted just now over what site to link to here, because I definitely do not recommend installing it without knowing the security risks).
What does a suspect AI agent that runs off a Mac Mini and a Claude Code account have to do with maintenance? Well, these AI tools are starting to automate a lot of those same exact activities we do at our mending circles. So what I want to understand is: What does maintenance look like when you have an AI assistant running 24/7?
… which may be the question for next month’s essay.
Our next mending circle is Tuesday, March 10 from 7:30–9:00PM Eastern. Reply to this email to get the Zoom link.
Third: I was finally able, this weekend, to push out a round of planned updates to my iOS quick notes app, Bebop. Updates that I simply wouldn’t have/didn’t have time for prior to the latest AI coding models.
My preferred development environment of choice these days is Conductor, which legitimately feels like it serves new different mode of making software. The sidebar, instead of holding a list of files and folders like its predecessors, holds a list of projects/repositories, because when you set coding agents to work on a problem and they run for minutes or longer, you can plug away at other projects while you wait.
I have never been more scattered and productive at the same time. I used to think those two words were antonyms. Now, not so much.
Jack