Andrew Haglund

My first Mac was an iBook G4. I saved up all summer long doing my summer job to buy that thing. I waffled between the Mac mini at $500 and the iBook which sat around $1,000. I had an HP display, keyboard, and mouse so I seriously considered living the BYODKM dream and going with the mini to save some dough.

While hemming and hawing my dad said something like, yeah but this one you can take with you, which solidified my choice to get the 12” iBook. Paying roughly double stung but was absolutely the right call. I loved that thing’s pre-MagSafe plug, plastic shell, and the included silver iPod mini. I ended up using that HP setup with my iBook so I got a taste for the laptop-desktop lifestyle the Mac mini would have offered.

Now, 20 years later, you can get a $600 Mac mini or a $600 MacBook Neo. It brings its own DKM! While the M4 in the mini outperforms the Neo, there’s only one you can take with you.

I hope this new lower priced laptop helps a whole new generation fall in love with the Mac. My fascination with computers took hold with that iBook and never let go.

I return to Into the Aether because they continually pull at my heartstrings, the very core of me. From this week’s episode, Dice of Fate:

Smash for 3DS is weirdly the lost Smash game because the 1st game is like its own series, it plays so differently from the rest. I think the 64 one is awesome, but it’s very different and a lot slower. Melee, obviously, is Melee and hasn’t really left the conversation at all. And then Brawl was like the Star Wars prequels of the Smash games where it’s still in the conversation because people hate it so much. It highlighted what Melee did so well.

I played so much Brawl. Brawl was out towards the end of high school and beginning of college for me, so most of my college experience is probably playing Brawl with Dominic Nero in his dorm room, just like chatting about whatever while slipping as King Dedede. It’s a fun game, but it’s interesting to see people now yearn for Subspace Emissary when it was dunked on when it came out. Everyone was like, “this is such a slog to get the characters.” And now it’s like, “without Subspace Emissary you can’t call it Smash Ultimate.”

Aside from the part about Dom, I resonate with this so much. I’m a Smash kid through and through. I was hooked from the first time I saw Samus’ charge beam on the N64. High school and college was filled with nights of mix of Brawl and Melee.

Not to brag but I was famous (infamous?) for kicking everyone’s ass as Lucas with a sideways Wii Remote while everyone else demanded a “real” controller (Gamecube, natch). You can’t stop greatness.

This post by Paul Ford covers so many aspects of AI coding. From job loss, devaluing the skills of humans, to recognizing the sheer wonder of what these supercomputers can accomplish. I find a twinge of hope in that we can use this this to solve problems that previously went unsolved:

I think of the friend at an immigration nonprofit who needs to click countless times, in mounting frustration, to generate critical reports. Or the small-business owners trying to operate everything with email and losing orders as a result. Or my doctor, whose time with patients is eaten up by having to tap furiously into the hospital’s electronic health record system.

After decades of stories like those, I believe there are millions, maybe billions, of software products that don’t exist but should: Dashboards, reports, apps, project trackers and countless others. People want these things to do their jobs, or to help others, but they can’t find the budget. They make do with spreadsheets and to-do lists.

One aspect not touched on in this article but is incredibly important, and one that so many people (myself included) have neglected to keep in mind recently: the foundation, the very core, of this technology is theft. Every line of code, every word, and every image used to train these models — and ultimately create a new class of billionaires with ultra concentrated wealth and power — were made by people. The creative and life fulfilling work of humans.

Unfortunately no one at the top cares about ethics and it’s impossible to think about how we could ever put the toothpaste back in the tube. I can only hope:

• These AI companies realize they need to look out for the communities where they are building data centers to make their use of resources sustainable.
• They also need to invest heavily to secure their own sources of computing components (ex. RAM) without fucking up all other industries.
• I also desperately hope we can get our act together to establish regulations and protect workers. Profit-hungry execs continue slashing jobs left and right.

There are many issues with AI but it’s hard to not be interested by all this. It’s an insane time to be alive and I have no idea what’s going to happen in the next five years let alone 10.

Despite my serious qualms with everything, I must admit I gave the jackals $20 last month to build a few apps with Claude Code. One app aims to help people in my community connect in-person and so that’s one way I justify using these services.

(I also have issues with the oil industry and what they’re doing to our planet but I also occasionally drive nearly 200 miles to see my parents. This shit’s messy and no one is perfect.)

I’ve been pretty bad at balancing side projects and giving myself downtime in my off hours. After Christmas I got in a good habit of unwinding with a video game, but lately I’ve been tinkering with Claude Code. Simon Willison (via Manton Reece) perfectly captures how I’ve felt the last week:

I’m frequently finding myself with work on two or three projects running parallel. I can get so much done, but after just an hour or two my mental energy for the day feels almost entirely depleted. … they’re finding building yet another feature with “just one more prompt” irresistible.

I made a big investment this past month and gave Anthropic $20 to use Claude Code. In that time I made a daily step tracker for my dad, a local events aggregator for my wife, refined a coffee-strength logging app, and an app for monitoring hourly energy rates.

Some of these ideas scratch my own itch and some will hopefully be useful to the people I love. The thing is, I have had been collecting and thinking about ideas for apps for years but I never had the time to make them.

I learned how to code to build MapKeep and it was a lot of work. I had some help here and there from LLMs but I pretty much made that app one keystroke at a time.

Claude Code is something else: I feel like I have a superpower. Design skills combined with just enough technical know-how to be dangerous. Now when I have an idea for an app I open Drafts and just start dictating my thoughts on how the app should work and eventually that becomes my prompt.

My one-month subscription with Claude is lapsing soon and I’m gonna take a break for a bit. I want to come back fresh when I have a few more ideas ready to go and between then I want to kick the tires with Codex or try try some locally-hosted solutions with my Mac mini. It is certainly addictive and I must shut off the firehose.

It’s an exciting new world and I’m ready for software to get more personal.

(I almost spent more time dealing with submitting one app in App Store Connect than I did building it. I need to start thinking of Mac app ideas so I can distribute directly.)