Bits and bobs (2026.08)
If you are still posting on X, you should stop today. Quitting the site yesterday would have been better, but doing it today is better than doing it tomorrow. The moral and political case for quitting X is so obvious that it scarcely bears repeating, but I’ll briefly recap it anyway. The guy who owns X—the person to whom you are personally donating if you pay for a blue checkmark—is Elon Musk, an out and out white supremacist who uses X to spread Nazi ideas like Great Replacement theory. He is a major backer, in both money and propaganda, of the global far right. During his brief tenure inside Trump’s Administration, he spearheaded the destruction of USAID, which, according to recent estimates, may result in 14 million deaths between 2025 and 2030.
Federico Viticci, not on his own MacStories, but in a cowardly Craft note:
MacStories is precious to us. It’s not just how we earn a living; it’s one of a small number of independent websites that still cover apps, Apple, and a growing list of topics, including videogame hardware and the automation and productivity side of AI. Readers shouldn’t have to think or care about the business side of MacStories, but we have to, which is why we returned to X.
Once upon a time, Federico and i swapped articles to help grow our respective blogs1. How times have changed! You can’t say “returning to X does not represent a change in our values, what MacStories or we stand for, or an endorsement of Elon Musk” and “we abhor Musk’s politics, his rhetoric, his careless disregard for others, and the direction he has taken X” in the same paragraph with a straight face. The truth is: you want more money and you don’t care how you get it.
We who are publishing on the web aren’t (only) losing our readers to LLMs and antisocial networks. We’re losing them to our inability to have a clear and consistent voice. If we don’t know where we stand, why should they care about what we have to say? We’re not given readers; we choose them. When you decide to choose readers coming from a platform full of neo-Nazis, racists, incels and paedophiles, your values have definitely changed. The rest is posturing.
Muji Spring Limited Blend. I knew Japan had a vibrant coffee scene, but i never imagined you could buy specialty coffee at Muji. Made with beans from Brazil, Ethiopia, Kenya and El Salvador, this Spring blend doesn’t taste like anywhere in particular, but it’s light and juicy nonetheless. Most importantly, it was my first time using drip bags. These single-serve pre-packaged paper filters are sealed inside nitrogen-flushed packets to preserve freshness and sit directly on top of your mug for easy pour-over brewing. I’m not a fan of their plastic (over-)packaging, but i can’t deny that they’re more convenient than a V60 and far better than instant coffee. It might be the perfect format to sample expensive single origins and exotic blends.
Robson is part of a larger cohort of writers who are practicing what could be called an anti-AI writing style. Across journalism, criticism, creative writing, and especially among compulsive LinkedIn posters, writers are converging on a set of choices that implicitly resist the trappings of AI-generated prose.
I’d find that fascinating if it weren’t so sad. Text generation isn’t writing. You and only you are breathing, seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, tasting, walking, sweating, fucking, thinking and, ultimately, writing. “Computers compute”, as Riccardo Mori so eloquently put it. Treating a piece of dumb code as a digital god is bad; living in fear of it is even worse. If you want to use em rules, have at it! That’s your nature-given right as a writer. Don’t ever let a machine take that away from you.
A few weeks ago the apartment we’d been renting for the past nine years flooded. The floors and ceilings were damaged but the books, thank goodness, were all safe. By the time you read this we will have downsized, moving to a new place where no weird mold is growing (a plus!) but that is also a little bit smaller. Which means that I’ve had to confront my book collection, which has grown exponentially over the years with stacks piled on the floor in very particular orders and bookshelves that are crammed. In pruning my books I learned some important lessons about editing for the advanced collector, the kind who derives joy from too many kinds of books to use the Kondo Method effectively.
I last weeded my library five years ago and i’m ready for another round. The ninth lesson is the most important one: “there will always be more books”.