1. The Let Down

In what should have been a welcome upgrade, iOS 26 and MacOS Tahoe over-prioritized style at substance’s great expense. For the first time in over a score[a] I reverted. Hard.

It’s not just the watered-down skeumorphism that nobody asked for: Apple’s “liquid glass” overhaul leaks memory, reduces battery life, and wastes screen real estate on distracting and immutable visual effects. As someone who spends his career and life interacting with Cupertino-designed screens—whether this is a good use of a life isn’t the point right now—the degradation is noticeable, undesirable, and painful.

While it’s not all bad, [b] it does encapsulate the term enshittification[c] quite well. Big tech companies have been slowly boiling the frog.

It might be time to jump.[d]

2. The Anything But

I am far from alone in my frustrations, and between the confluence of functional codegen and accelerating enshittification[e] there is renewed interest and investment in alternatives.

And, with the industry moving away from desktop apps and towards webapps—and soon, AI-centric user interfaces—the verenable operating system needs a rethink. Mobile and desktop both.

Over the past six months, I’ve noticed more engineers and engineering leaders daily-driving Linux[f] over MacOS and Windows. I expect this trend continues as open source operating environments rapidly approach parity with their commercial counterparts… who aren’t doing themselves any favors.[g]

Last time Linux was my daily driver I was an undergraduate pursuing a computer science degree. Like the major itself, one had to enjoy a sustained slow-drip of seemingly disconnected informational nuggets that one day (maybe) pay huge dividends in aggregate deployable knowledge. Similarly, unless you were highly-motivated to go open source, Linux offered limited advantage over commercial offerings in exchange for the pain.

Last month I installed Linux[h] on a 5 year old, $300 refurbished Lenovo X1 Nano. It weighs 1.99 lbs and runs quicker and boots faster and looks better than my 10×-more-costly MacBook Pro M4 Max on MacOS Tahoe.

Thanks to the efforts of those dedicated software engineers,[i] we’re approaching the point where learning the nuances of a do-it-yourself operating environment is less frustrating than working around the limitations of commercial offerings. To boot—pun!—LLMs now make the complex configuration files that allow users to get exactly what they want out of their experience accessible and easy without risk of a quarterly earnings goals moving their cheese.

Good work, team. Thank you, and keep it up.

(Mobile phones are soon to be fair game, too.)

The Usuals

• Upcoming Travel
• Vocational Notes
• Avocational Notes
• Content Consumption (Abbreviated)
  • Television/Movies
  • Books
  • Games
• Sundry Notes

Upcoming Travel

Between the government shutdown, air traffic controllers calling in sick, and some other stuff going on… it’ll likely be a bit before we get on a plane. Expect we’ll spend a few weeks on Block Island sometime over the winter.

Vocational Notes

• Current foci include:
  1. Environmental Impact and Sustainability
  2. AI-enabled Workflows
  3. Anti-social Networking and Mass Customization
  4. Fractional work continues with ~8hours/week capacity available.
• The idea list continues to grow. While the speed with which I can codegen increases, the time-to-execute budget remains constant. Actively soliciting collaborators.
• Looking to support another non-profit following Literacy Trust’s wind-down.

Avocational Notes

• Lifting 3-4 times per week. It has been a cardio summer. Lifting resumes this week this winter (whoops).
• Have had limited Go-Karting time this fall but it is still the best. If anyone is into motorsports and lives in Manhattan, do reach out…
• Still having a blast with LLM-powered codegen and TUIs—textual user interfaces. (I’m so over GUIs.)

Content Consumption (Abbreviated)

Television/Movies

• Taskmaster - Your time starts now.
• Formula 1 - And no, I haven’t seen the F1 movie. Thankfully, actual racing is more fun to watch.

Books

• Babel: An Arcane History - R.F. Kuang. Finished this recently and highly recommend.

Games

• VimGolf - Related to my efforts to regain fluency in the command line (and vi which clearly won the command line text editor[j] war).
• Chess
  • Elo ~1100 (Daily). Write me if you want my chess.com username.
  • I’m steadily getting better worse.
• LinkedIn Mini Games recently added a leaderboard and it is humbling how good some people are. (Queens is the best game, IMHO.)

Sundry Notes

One. Apple recently bought the US broadcast rights to Formula 1. I am concerned.

Two. My work increasingly involves telling a fleet of agentic LLMs (like OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code) what to do. These agents (at least the better ones) do their work best in the command line. Thus, the command line is where I spend most of my time managing features and quality while writing almost none of the code myself.

When building software my role is 99% tastemaker, 1% typist. The bulk of the engineering lift happens in an a compute cluster somewhere domestically and, notably, no longer on my local machine. That work I orchestrate in yet another computer that can outlast my laptop’s battery life and/or network connection (and/or attention). Consequently, not only am I on the command line, I’m connected to a remote machine in a terminal-friendly text editor like vim more often than I am a GUI like vscode. [k] Yes, it’s exactly like that movie Inception.

Presently, my main workflow is to ssh from wherever I am (home, office, or on my mobile phone) into a $600 base-model Apple M4 Mac Mini that sits in my office. Once on the Mac, I run tmux to an attached virtual (containered) Debian Linux server, and let the commercial LLMs inside of those virtual computers go wild. As the models improve and local inference becomes more economical, I bet I can do this all on my own wholly-owned silicon… which means managing yet another layer down.

Given that these LLMs work best on, well, language (n.b., stuff that’s written down), it behooves one to get faster at editing and manipulating code and getting my Operating System to work with me instead of against me.

So I’m now relearning vim and having a blast.

Hat tip to nownownow.com.

Notes:

1. 20 years is a long time.
2. Apple’s hardware teams are still killing it.
3. When services become progressively worse for user in pursuit for profits. This talk from Cory Doctorow, who coined the term, explains it well… as well as what to do about it.
4. Not just out of Apple’s boiling pot. Last month Microsoft dropped support for Windows 10 turning 400 million computers into security timebombs. Meta continues to shovel AI slop and ragebait into social feeds to increase engagement to sell more advertising, while Google continues to kneecap search results to do the same: more time on-site means more ad investory. Technology should move humanity forward, not backward.
5. Annoyingly, Microsoft Windows and MacOS/iOS both now deliver advertisements directly in the Operating System’s core workflows-Windows being the far more egregious of the two as it’s an OS you pay ~$100 for the privilege of commercial advertising in the Start menu.
6. Not just Omarchy, either.
7. 20 years ago came Ubuntu, a free and (relatively) user-friendly alternative to MacOS and Windows. Created by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu is a distribution of the Linux operating system, which was created as a Free and Open Source alternative to the very expensive and difficult-to-use Unix. Until Ubuntu came along, running Linux was an exercise best left to enthusiasts, not end users. Since its release, Linux adoption increased and is now the primary operating system on 6% of laptops and desktops.
   
   Because Linux is free-as-in-beer, it enjoys incredibly high market share in the space I occupy vocationally: technology (and technology-enabled) startups and scale-ups. Every-yes, every-engineer I meet and work with runs some flavor of Linux somewhere in production. It is so common that Windows now comes with Linux installed, or trivially-installable called WSL.
   
   WSL, or Windows Subsystem for Linux, is a bit of kernal hackery allowing Windows-based software engineers to use the same tooling locally as they do in production servers. Even though Linux represents such a large part of their workday, historically engineers still ran Windows and MacOS on their desktops.
8. Arch, by the way
9. Not me.
10. I was fluent in emacs when I was in college, but it’s not as universally installed as vi is.
11. As I also like to let my LLMs run amok (dangerously skipping confirmations) I prefer to keep them in their own little jailcells called “containers”, which I also out of paranoia tend to run on a server rather than my laptop as to not have it accidentally erase my daily working environment, or introduce new and exciting security holes.

In early June, Althea and I traveled to Europe (London and Portugal). I took 1,200 photos but only managed to edit one of them. It’s been a low-output summer for me.

On the input side, well…

Between work and tinkering, I have gone deep on what’s popularly called “Agentic AI”, especially on its use in software engineering. I have about 3 half-baked dispatches I’m trying to finish[a] with one I’m targeted for Labor Day that goes into greater detail.

In the meantime, some general observations:

• Talented software engineers are getting really good at orchestrating fleets of coding agents. Watch this space.
  
  
• Properietary foundational LLMs (e.g., Claude Sonnet 4, ChatGPT 5, et al) yield less marginal utility every release. While I have no insider knowledge here, I’d be shocked if Anthropic wasn’t training a foundational software engineering model that eschews most general knowledge in favor of high-quality programming knowledge. When that’s out (or someone else beats them to it) everything we do today will look extremely hacky and computationally wasteful by comparison.
  
  
• Speed to delivery is increasing, but not nearly at the rate as advertised by talking heads and AI companies (who are in the business of selling you on their future). In essence: computer code exists because it’s the most efficient way for humans to express complex, specific logic that a machine can run reliably. Human languages, like English, are exceedingly long-winded and imprecise… and while AI-enabled tools and agents can make software development more accessible to more people, it does not—and can not—reduce the burden of having to express oneself with precision or novelty. It turns out figuring out what to build against what works continues to be difficult. Dave Farley nails it here.
  
  
• Similarly, live experimentation is now cheaper. This is a good thing.
  
  
• Consequently, “AI Slop” is now everywhere. This is NOT a good thing. Our lizard brains are unable to parse the deluge. (Put in LLM terms, our own brains’ context windows cannot keep up, and reading summaries from a compact command is a chore. Our brains like to think about stuff and get into the flow, not swivel-chair all day.)

Also, I may have fibbed about the low-output summer.

In truth, I’ve been building a few software tools—some solo, some with collaborators—that should be ready in the fall.

Here’s one project that, except to untangle some design and UX mistakes, I built without writing a single line of code by hand: HANEWA. My codegen process has garnered some interest from colleagues, so a write-up will follow.

The Usuals

• Upcoming Travel
• Vocational Notes
• Avocational Notes
• Content Consumption (Abbreviated)
  • Television/Movies
  • Books
  • Games
• Sundry Notes

Upcoming Travel

• Hudson Valley, NY (although if it’s weekend trip under 2 hours away from home, is it really considered travel?)

Vocational Notes

• Fractional continues to suit; I have about ~5hours/week capacity remaining. Current foci:
  1. Environmental Impact and Sustainability
  2. AI-enabled Workflows
  3. Anti-social Networking and Mass Customization
• Team, Assemble! still needs a product/technical lead. (Maybe this is you?)
• Like many founder-types, the idea list is becoming longer than the time-to-execute budget. Working on a solve for this that trades money for execution time and will list opportunities there. (Domain names have been purchased, this relates to number 3.)
• Looking to support another non-profit following Literacy Trust’s wind down. Currently thinking about what that should look like and actively soliciting ideas.

Avocational Notes

• Lifting 3-4 times per week. It has been a cardio summer. Lifting resumes this week.
• Electric Go-Karting is still the best. If anyone is into motorsports and lives in Manhattan, do reach out…
• Abandoning this small project until hands-on coding work settles down. (Even with generative AI, I can only stomach coding so many hours in one day.)

Content Consumption (Abbreviated)

Television/Movies

• KPop Demon Hunters - As previously stated: Perfection.
• Andor - Currently in Season 1. (No Spoilers, Please!)
• Formula 1 - And no, I haven’t seen the F1 movie.

Books

• Babel: An Arcane History - R.F. Kuang. I’m halfway through, but this is such a compelling read that even if it falls apart in the back half I’ll be still glad I found it. H/T Island Bound.

Games

• Chess
  • Elo ~1100 (Daily). Write me if you want my chess.com username.
  • I’m steadily getting better worse.
• Dorf Romantik - I cannot play this before bedtime as everything starts to look like a hexagon that need to be properly places (like the Tetris/tetromino phenomenon) and my legs get restless.
• Blippo+ - The Play Date is such a gem.

Sundry Notes

Earlier this summer I learned of a city named Utrecht. Notably, the road networks were designed so that it’s easier and faster to walk and bike than it is to drive.

As a New Yorker and cycling advocate, it’s proof of what’s possible when you build for micromobility. Not only because it’s clear how much more agency and freedom of movement children have (unburdened by having to always ask for a ride from an adult), but of how much nicer it is to live in a place where car is not the default.

People are generally supportive.

Alas, invariably someone will proffer:

“But these delivery guys / Citibike bros on their e-Bikes. They go too fast and reckless… one nearly killed me the other day!”

Unfailingly, similar anecdotes become the conversation in the way that shark attacks make for better headlines than heart disease.[b]

The thing is: in the US, more people drive cars than ride bikes. And because driving is more familiar, people are more willing to forgive drivers—and tend to forget any incidents—where they were “nearly killed”, which affects how they think about micromobility policies at their own safety and our collective peril.

A friend calls this “car brain” because when you look at the data, it’s not even close.

This chart shows what happens to pedestrians in NYC vehicular collisions since 2012 (when the city started tracking this stuff in earnest). It does not include the fates of any persons involved except pedestrians.[c]

Bicycle ridership has gone up 60% over the last 5 years. Collisions per bicycle mile involving pedestrians have overall declined, down by nearly half since a high in 2022.

Are e-bikes more dangerous to pedestrians than pedal bikes? Absolutely:

…but they still do not harm pedestrians as much as traditional bikes, or—oh, right!—cars do… which account for 90% of pedestrian casualties and 50× the fatalities.

In short, the shark discussion about e-bikes detracts from the larger heart-disease issue: we need to invest in better public transportation and reduce the amount of large, vehicular traffic into the city.

If you don’t believe my analysis, here’s another take.

Hat tip to nownownow.com.

Notes:

1. While generative AI and LLMs could be helpful here, I refuse to use them here except to proof-read my missives. Future LLMs will need someone who can still write without spellcheck and autocomplete. (Maybe.)
2. In the US, sharks kill ~1 person each year. Heart disease? ~1,000,000.
3. It’s not that I don’t care about what happens to everyone else, but the charge is often levied at the dangers riders pose to pedestrians, not the other way around.

Navel-gazy, yes. But also practical.

I don’t want this to feel like a blog, but some blog-like features are becoming emergent. After all, the idea of a /now page is to record:

“… what you’d tell a friend you hadn’t seen in a year”
— nownownow.com/about

And I’m getting to the age where not seeing some friends for at least a year is, in fact, a regular occurrence.

There are things I’m thinking about (like the below note on Congestion Pricing) that might one day warrant a dispatch essay; but, that’s a place I prefer to leave mostly-complete thoughts and not active, in-flight observations. (“Hot takes” one might say.) Alas, I have enough spinning plates on my, uh, plate and an ever-growing bucket list of more plates worthy of spinning.

So anyway: /now now has a table of contents so the content reads more like an indexed data update rather than a slowly morphing narrative; and because the industrial complex has conditioned us and our LLMs to think and read in bulleted lists for maximum comprehension, why fight it?

Up top I’ll probably continue to include a note just like this. Less meta-note, and more note-note, which at least for this update you can find under Sundry Notes.

Next time may look different, but today (and in the /now) I’m liking this structure.

– Michael E. Gruen

The Usuals

• Upcoming Travel
• Vocational Notes
• Avocational Notes
• Sundry Notes
• Content Consumption (Abbreviated)
  • Television
  • Books
  • Games

Upcoming Travel

• Block Island - my guide now has updated information!
• UK (late Spring)
• Portugal (late Spring)
• Berkshires (late Summer)

Vocational Notes

• Fractional work seems to suit me well; have about ~10hours/week capacity remaining. Current foci:
  • Environmental Impact and Sustainability
  • AI-enabled Workflows
  • Anti-social networking
• Team, Assemble! launched!
  • demo and write-up
  • Still looking for product/technical lead to take myself out of the loop. (Maybe this is you?)
  • Active TODO: write up a dispatch on this process. Many learnings.
• Actively looking to partner with and hire some full-time folks to help build against projects not listed here.

Avocational Notes

• Lifting 3-4 times per week.
• Electric Go-Karting continues to be a fun hobby.
• Stalled work again on a small project; will be picking this back up once I get some key hires done for the other revenue-generating projects, hopefully by mid-summer.

Sundry Notes

In this household, we live an evidence-based lifestyle: congestion pricing in NYC is clearly working.

• Reduced Travel Times
• Reduced Accidents and Injuries
• Increased Public Transit Ridership – justifies increased spending
• Consumer Spending (in Congestion Zone) increased – note: despite international tourism being down

Also, I wonder if there’s any value in structuring this /now a bit more formally and federating it into a distributed, open-source social network that operates outside of the commercial ones you may have heard about. The nownownow.com page kinda does that, but lacks any guiding format. Maybe I can help there.

Content Consumption (Abbreviated)

Television

• Severance - The Work Is Mysterious and Important
• Mythic Quest - The best part of this show are the one-offs
• Formula 1 - The 2025 season is shaping up to be great
• All Creatures Great & Small - 2020 remake of a classic; cozy, summer viewing.

AppleTV+ is still killing it.

Books

• The Death and Life of August Sweeney - Samuel Ashworth (n.b., I know the author, so I’m hardly impartial.)
• Careless People - Sarah Wynn-Williams (n.b., If you work in tech leadership this should be required reading.)

Games

• Chess
  • Elo ~1150 (Daily). Write me if you want my chess.com username.
  • I’m steadily getting better, but lack the will (and talent) to become a GM.
• Cyberpunk 2077
• Aviassembly - A cozy KSP
• Kubb - Getting lawn game season-ready

Hat tip to nownownow.com.

Previous version of this page had too many emojis. Removed.

Vocational Notes

• Actively performing technical advisory and fractional roles. Medium capacity (10 hours/week for ongoing retainers, burst-able to 30+ with notice). Current foci:
  • Environmental Impact and Sustainability
  • AI-enabled Workflows
  • Anti-social networking
• Official Team, Assemble! launch very imminent 🟡
  • demo and write-up
  • Looking for product/technical lead to take myself out of the loop. (Maybe this is you?)
  • Active TODO: write up a dispatch on this process. Many learnings.
• Revisiting the Contact Management Tool as, on further reflections, there’s a lot to think about here.
  • Bought domain names, so you know it’s serious.

Avocational Notes

• Lifting 3-4 times per week (with the exception of the last three weeks)
• Karting has been a welcome new hobby.
• Stalled work on a small project, picking back up now that January is behind us.

Content Consumption (Abbreviated)

Television

• Clarkson’s Farm, Season 3 - Good
• Pantheon - Very Good
• Silo - Also Very Good

AppleTV+ is killing it, have to say.

Books

• Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) - Jerome K. Jerome - Good beach read
• Please send recommendations (not liking Goodreads offerings)

Games

• Chess
  • Elo ~1100 (Daily). Write me if you want my chess.com username.
• Helldivers II – Never has Managed Democracy needed so much help.
• Hollow Knight – Started off as a relaxing game, but not so much as save points have become scarce.

Hat tip to nownownow.com.