Things I Loved in 2025

• Astro the web framework: Astro powers this blog: What a wonderfully designed static (and more) site generator. I keep pushing the boundaries of what I’m doing using it, and thus far I haven’t found a single aspect of this platform that I disagree with or question. Just a brilliant, elegant, powerful design.

• Claude Code: My go-to coding assistant, followed closely behind by Google Gemini (the latter is my go-to general AI tool for heuristic winnowing, and the gemini CLI is a useful fallback when Claude falters on coding tasks). I find these tools incredibly useful in accelerating solutions. I think of myself as a pretty great software developer, with a wide gamut of knowledge of platforms and languages and tools and esoteric idioms built over decades of experience, and this is precisely why I find these tools so useful.

  No, I don’t think vibe coding is a credible reality right now. Yes it’s easy to create the illusion of a turnkey solution, but as with most things in life it’s the final 10% that bites you. Knowing what you’re doing is a very important requirement.

• AI in general: understanding that there are enormous ramifications on society, lots of downsides, and many in the field are grossly overselling the utility of some incomplete solutions¹, making it an easy target for detractors. But the pace of progress has vastly exceeded my expectations, and already there are enormous industries that have been supplanted or disrupted but we just can’t implement quickly enough so people don’t realize how far it has come.

• Obsidian: a wonderful note-taking app. I have vaults for recipes and cooking info, daily planning, AI research, specific projects, and just general knowledge tracking, and find it just astonishingly beneficial.

  I’ve gone through a lot of note-taking apps over the years, generally sticking only to the “platform” ones like OneNote, Apple Notes and Google Keep because I always have a fear about relatively uncommon tools like Obsidian going through the classic cycle where everything gets worse and worse and you find yourself with your content captured in a bad ecosystem.

  Obsidian doesn’t suffer that lock-in concern. It uses the file system as its database, notes are simple markdown files with frontmatter (a yaml block of properties and values) stored in the filesystem hierarchically. Referenced images and the like are stored in that filesystem, which you can replicate via any cloud system. The Obsidian app is available on all common computing platforms (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Linux — it’s Electron based), and if you’re using a replicated filesystem for your vaults you have that “cloud” availability on any of those platforms.

• To Do Lists: I’ve long leveraged but redoubled in 2025, now using Obsidian as the foundation (with the wonderful daily notes facility). The critical key to such lists is to only put things that you know you will try to avoid or put off. Often people start such lists and list out rote daily activities like eating breakfast or having a shower, which they dutifully check off as accomplishments². This massively undermines the value of such lists and leads to their abandonment as it starts to feel like illusory organization for little benefit.

• Cast Iron Cooking: I’ve tried to embrace cast iron for everyday cooking a number of times over my adult life, crossing decades, but somehow the mythical non-stick seasoned status eluded me. Maybe it’s that I’m cooking on natural gas now (appreciating and compensating for indoor pollution concerns), but suddenly everything cooks magically, and it’s a second wipe to clean again, even for problem foods like eggs. Finally I can abandon the Teflon cookware³ I’ve leaned on for so long, at least for most everyday cooking.

• Bidets: The biggest thing holding many people back is the boorish feature escalation “must haves” that occur in every discussion. A basic mechanical unit installed in minutes and costing less than $30 is 95% of the way to the benefits of the most expensive options.

Things I Disliked in 2025

• Cookie banners: Giving users control seems like a win, at least until every site is pestering users with modal cookie banners, and the most simply click “accept all” to get to the meat of the content. This is the sort of nuisance friction that gives a slight pause of hesitation before visiting new sites. “I’ll just install the app”.

  There has to be a better approach. For instance a browser-setting. We’re halfway there with a couple of the better browsers (Firefox and Safari) blocking third-party cookies, but let’s build on that and take the web back.

• Recipe sites: Some pockets of the web are positively user hostile and cancerous in the way they treat every random visitor, each adopting the bad habits of others in the domain, escalating to some eventual pinnacle of terrible. Probably the worst, beating out even piracy dens, has to be cooking and recipe sites. Every dark pattern, malicious redirect, full-screen onclick window.open, auto-play video with maxed out volume, and so on is common on cooking sites.

  I get that there has to be a business model for most of these sites that suffer real expenses and are making a go of it. But this ain’t it, boss. Treating the user like a captive victim is not the winning way. Even though I confess to using layered ad- and nuisance-blocking technologies, I hesitate searching for recipes online generally, and instead stick to a very few sites that I know and trust.

  This has happened generally with the wider web as well, and it’s a reason people would rather just ask an LLM than to search for content and deal with the roulette wheel of hostile, anti-user behaviour shown by many sites, and when you use anti-nuisance tools many sites redouble their hostility.

• LinkedIn: I went without an account on the site for probably two decades, but had to create one anew for a specific group’s comms. While I’m not going to build out connections there, I did think I’d make the most of it and check out some of the discussion groups to see if it was a worthwhile source of information on various industries.

  The various groups are absolutely full of endless spam (don’t accounts get banned when they do this?), or just people reposting the same content constantly. Loads of users (often in the retired/consulting capacity) posting endless hyper-partisan⁴ political commentary. Many begs amid all the peacocking of the tenuously employed, often by people with 500+ connections and thousands of followers (kind of demolishing those metrics as any indicator of anything).

  LinkedIn has a very abandoned-mall kind of feel to it, and it’s all very sad.

• AI Luddism: Luddites were arguably the good guys: The social contract had rapidly changed in a negative way, and many stakeholders were left in the cold. Luddites weren’t against progress or innovation, but were against the breaking impact of some changes on the social order.

  AI luddites arguably are coming from the same position⁵, but the rhetoric is far from convincing. Simply calling everything AI slop, angrily declaring everything AI, only seeing the downsides of AI, and so on, does absolutely nothing to stop the progress of the technology. No one is stopping projects or pulling funding because some community of furry artists dismiss AI.

Media I Enjoyed in 2025

(in no particular order as it comes to mind. Many of these I enjoyed for years before, but I reappreciated over the year)

Random Music

Natalie Merchant / Elderbrook / Kid Francescoli / Taylor Swift / Chappell Roan / Max Richter / First Aid Kit / Skinny Puppy / Chet Faker / French 79 / Noah Kahan / The 1975 / Orbital / M83 / Foy Vance

Random Video Channels

Physionic / Nutrition Made Simple / Veritasium / Derek Sarno / Dr. Layne Norton / James Hoffmann / Netherlands Bach Society / Girl With The Dogs / DR Koncerthuset / Not Just Bikes

Footnotes

1. The industry is filled with charlatans right now, many thinking they can essentially land-grab and claim a domain by massively overstating the applicability or suitability of a solution, hoping that it will eventually fill in and they can pretend their nonsense was actually prophetic ↩

2. Unless you really avoid eating breakfast or having a shower, in which case go ahead and to do it for that extra motivation ↩

3. I’m unconvinced of the dangers of Teflon, per se, but such pans tend to be great on first purchase, and rapidly devolve to extra-stick cookware in fairly short order. They’re basically disposable, even if you are extremely careful. I’ve also tried using top tier stainless steel pans, having seen many videos on how wonderful they are. My experience has been terrible for any situation where sticking might be a problem ↩

4. I despise partisans. If you choose a “team” and then go to great lengths to twist every single situation, choice, metric, or event to serve your team, your output of “opinions” is quite literally worse than worthless. One of the greatest problems in society today are partisans who have few actual values, they only care about their chosen team, for whom they’ve dedicated their entire personality. And this is a problem on all sides of the political spectrum

   Have actual values. Don’t flex them to fit whatever your “team” is pushing. ↩

5. Various plutocrats like Musk have been speculating about the wonderful coming society where everyone enjoys riches and luxury courtesy of all of this automation. It is quite incredible contrasting these ridiculous claims with literally the entire history of everything Musk has said or done.

   I do think AI is going to yield a lot of changes, and anyone relying upon the ruling plutocrat class to benevolently offer up largess for the negatively affected live a life of incredible delusion. If you aren’t putting in place a just and fair society now, you’re going to end up as Soylent Green. ↩

See Also

• A New Engine For This Blog

  I've posted online content for decades, across a variety of engines and venues. This is my latest iteration.