Brian Meeker

Put the toothpaste with the toothbrushes and the antibiotic ointment with the bandaids.
Things you use together go together.

Group your code by feature. What changes together goes together.
Not shape.

Today's newsletter contains this quote which is an absolute thing of beauty

"By comparison, the Cincinnati Reds is a great business, with a net monthly income of $29 million, all to provide a service that upsets and humiliates millions of people from Ohio every year for the pleasure of America."

Instead, Google is *starting* from the premise that it wants you to use an LLM, then the feature (generating a message based on summary and tone). The actual use case is added after-the-fact, begrudgingly, because real human beings looked at the feature and shrugged.

That's why it's shit.

Screenshot showing a grid of days all filled in for 200 straight days of journaling

200 straight days of journaling. It’s mostly typed morning pages. I keep meaning to get back into long hand journaling on a regular basis, but I haven’t been able to make that part of the habit stick.

Release ElixirLS 0.29.0 · elixir-lsp/elixir-ls v0.29.0: 4 August 2025 Highlights Added Call hierarchy provider implementing LSP textDocument/prepareCallHierarchy, callHierarchy/incomingCalls and callHierarchy/outgoingCalls ElixirLS now bundles...

Saw the same thing this morning. The Zed extension assumes that the zip file includes the version number, but the 0.29.0 release didn’t do that. The file is just named “elixir-ls.zip”. github.com/elixir-lsp/e...

A view of a man's arm showing his blue mechanical arm sleeve tattoo. He's flexing his bicep.

Finally organized my notes for my next tattoo. Have a consult in a couple of weeks to get started on my left arm sleeve. Going for a nature arm to complement my mechanical arm sleeve. I'm already very easy to find in crowds, but I'm going to be even more colorful once this is done.

David’s expertise goes farther back in time than mine, but I can tell you that a very common joke among gilded age/progressive historians is that there is *always* a masculinity crisis happening.

I have learned in the past 24 hours that many people in tech have no idea there is an entire social science around access to education & access to opportunity. You may not follow every half baked post I make but I'm saying nothing remotely controversial. Access is a thing with social features!!

Elixir and @gleam.run have both landed in the top 3 most admired languages in the 2025 @stackoverflow.com.web.brid.gy Developer Survey. 👏

According to devs worldwide, Gleam is turning heads while Elixir continues to impress.

Mountains Of Madness, by Puteraeon 9 track album

Haven't given this serious thought yet, but the new Puteraeon is likely to end up on my end of the year #metal list. Haven't listened to any of their older albums, but my understanding is that it's a huge jump for them. The art alone justifies a vinyl purchase. puteraeon.bandcamp.com/album/mounta...

Starting to accept the fact that I can’t consistently be productive with music on anymore. For years, I could work with various forms of metal as long as I couldn’t understand the lyrics.

The good news is that @mynoise.bsky.social is still awesome after all these years. I’ve been floating all day.

Nothing like insomnia to get you up and working at five in the morning

AI "Artists" getting upset when you say their slop sucks is funny, because you can be like "why do you even care, it's not like you actually made it" and get them more wet and red.

what this is, above all else, is the biggest green light we’ve ever seen for Dem primary challenges

the Dem base is deeply, deeply angry at the party for not doing more to oppose Trump and the door is wide open for anyone who is serious about doing more on that front

We're in the Orbanization of our media system now. It's happening.

CNN's Brian Stelter drew this assessment from Gábor Scheiring, "who experienced Viktor Orbán's autocratic power plays in Hungary firsthand as a member of the Hungarian parliament." view.newsletters.cnn.com/messages/175...

YouTube video by Kardavox Academy Death Metal Dinner Prep - Tired Dad Edition

Tired Dad Core is my new favorite genre. youtu.be/VN3r85TWpH8?...

Seriously though. Kardashev is fantastic and you should listen to them, even when not cooking.

while the current official number is hotly debated, there are actually far more tags in HTML than the ~150 commonly cited! that number merely represents the ones we’ve discovered and domesticated — there are potentially thousands more in the creeping unexplored corners of the deep web & dark net

stack overflow considered harmful.

caravelle here makes an excellent point: stack overflow’s rules halted the spread of craft.

if you can’t write 2 paragraphs of background before your answer, you can’t spread actual knowledge, understanding, or cultural history.

so, when I was doing trust and safety work, way back in 2023, there was already data from pre-LLM chatbots that men use AI to practice abusive behavior and construct authoritarian identities that they then inflict on human women (and children)

Finally tried Cuphead last night with my brother. We got trashed repeatedly and loved every minute of it. Never felt like the game was cheating us. It’s just hard.

Very different games, but it felt like Celeste in that respect. Difficult, but fair. It feels like an accomplishment when you succeed.

Reached room 46 last night in Blue Prince. Now I need to decide how completionist I'm going. I'm surrounded by puzzles I don't know the answers to yet.

AGI is easy if you consistently cut scope and just label whatever you ends up shipping as AGI.

When the late night DB upgrade goes awry, but you eventually get it working. 😅

Never underestimate the power of having someone like this on your team. These skills often fall under the nebulous term of "glue". If you want to build productive, long-term teams, you need people like this.

Chalk drawing of Derpy and Sussie from K-Pop Demon Hunters

My child drew this the other day and told me I need to watch that movie.

I cancelled my Office 365 renewal last week. The cancellation page gives the option to continue your subscription without AI at a lower price. I’m not sure if there is any other way to get that option though.

Yeah. I think it’s at least an order of magnitude more. If these tools can really do what they promise, that’s worth at least $2K/month in value to a company, right? Right?

Trans Rights Metal Tee - Starbucks Workers United Merch Store Our most popular design! Queer and trans rights are labor rights, and labor rights are METAL. Meet you in the pit 🤘 "SBWU Trans Rights" logo on front; "Trans Rights are Labor Rights" graphic on back. ...

Hot damn, @sbworkersunited.org has some cool shirts right now

Blue Prince warns you very early that you should probably be taking notes. It never warns you that you might need to spend time organizing those notes though. I never thought I would be at the point where I was considering organizing puzzle notes for a video game in Obsidian. 😅

Oban Pro v1.6 is out! Thanks to everybody that helped refine the release candidates.

A refresher on what landed:

🗂️ Sub-Workflows
🌊 Cascading workflows
🪴 Grafting sub-workflows
🖼️ Workflow context
🧰 Overhauled partitioning
🧨 Global burst mode
🍋 Preserve queue updates