Becky gave me a $100 gift card to Steam for Christmas, so for the first time in a decade I endeavored to hunt for some hidden gems in the Steam Winter Sale. I haven't even booted it up yet, but this trailer immediately convinced me to instabuy Ball x Pit.
I'm sure the game is great, but I wish more trailers were this stupid and irreverent. Gaming is a silly hobby and the best favorite game marketing isn't afraid to embrace that fact.
For a terrifying time, check out what Claude Code produced when asked to "draw a nightmare." reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1pxudjr
Video of this episode is up on YouTube:
During the end-of-year podcasting doldrums, I'm pleased to bring you this Feature Release, in which I eschew my tradition of eschewing traditions and present a second annual sorting of the puns. As 2025 (a.k.a. Season 2) of Breaking Change comes to a close, Aaron Patterson once again joins the show to execute our latest iteration of the punsort algorithm.
Following along at home? Here's a spoiler-free link to the original Season 2 rankings.
Ready to be spoiled? Visit /puns for the final pun rankings of 2025.
If you agree, disagree, or are indifferent about where things landed, feel free to get it off your chest at podcast@searls.co.
This perfectly encapsulates the coding agent paradox. Agents make coding boring and formulaic. That some see a tragedy where others see a triumph exposed a disagreement over what coders want out of coding that didn't matter until now reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/s/VDTxoeiBIh
If you look closely, you'll spot that the Instagram algorithm has successfully identified my absolute number-one-with-a-bullet favorite topic. How on earth did it figure that out? My phone must be listening to me.
Who is this for? STEM majors realizing they're better off running Uber Eats?
Followed Ruby type systems for years. Spent a month of my life porting my meta-programming-heavy library Mocktail to Sorbet, only to realize zero tooling lift. No idea if it works, but I gotta say T-Ruby's pitch is the first that makes intuitive sense type-ruby.github.io
TIL if you want Safari to render 120fps, you need to go to Settings -> Advanced -> WebKit Feature Flags and TURN OFF "Prefer Page Rendering Updates near 60 fps". You can test it here—big difference! testufo.com/
Merry Christmas! I made a little present for any of my fellow Japanese learners out there. 🎁
Today I'm pleased to share this ChatGPT-powered Shortcut for Apple platforms I've been working on with you.
Here are its headlining features of the Ingest Japanese shortcut:
<ruby> and <rt> tags (copyable as an HTML file)It also exposes these utilities:
Shortcuts directory (see Shortcuts/ingest-japanese/word-list.csv)Additionally, the Ingest Image companion shortcut uses ChatGPT to extract the image and analyze the surrounding context by either:
In either case, it will extract the selected or primary text it finds and forward it (as well as any additional circumstantial context present in the image) to Ingest Japanese so you can study it.
You can install and follow these shortcuts on RoutineHub. You can read more about them here:
I hope you check it out and find them useful in your studies!
Voters don't intuit that bond yields affect currency valuations affect foreign tourism, but Japanese populists now depend on low yields to depress the yen to maintain the supply of obnoxious foreign tourists to buoy their agenda. robinjbrooks.substack.com/p/japanese-denial-on-debt
I'm working on an inadvisably complex Apple Shortcuts widget for studying Japanese language, and just realized two things that may save you some time in the future:
Because Shortcuts exposes such a gobsmackingly-frustrating UI for actually building programs, it's easy to assume that you're hobbled by the conventions of something like BASIC, but there are some surprisingly modern conveniences lying under the surface!
This is a copy of the Searls of Wisdom newsletter delivered to subscribers on December 20, 2025.
Hey everybody, we've almost survived another year! Just ten days to go—I hope we all make it!
Looking back on the home stretch of 2025, this is all I have to report since our last issue:
The day of my surgery, Becky insisted on taking a picture of me after I was told to put on a hairnet but before the drugs kicked in. I was very anxious going into the operation and she was very supportive throughout.
As 2025 winds down, the Searls of Wisdom LT (which stands for "Leadership Team", an acronym I'll be using from now on to amortize the time it took to write this parenthetical) has decided to evolve how it approaches our monthly newsletter operations. Change is hard for many of us, so in lieu of a normal essay about how my feelings inspired certain thoughts that led to valuable insights, I'm just going to explain what you can expect from this newsletter going forward before wishing you better luck next year and sending you on your way.
Some time in June, my brother called me from the U.S. while I was riding a Shinkansen bullet train, at which point I realized I'd never actually taken a call while moving faster than 150 mph before. I remember a certain unease—unsure what the proper etiquette was—so I stepped into the hall between train cars to take it.
Argument isn't airtight, but this is the best link I currently have to send non-tech people who are worried about AI killing their job: maxberry.ca/p/how-to-not-be-replaced-by-ai
Andy Waite thought to have Sonnet 4.5 analyze the POSSE Party codebase. Good habit to get into for anyone looking at sizing up a new project: reddit.com/r/rails/comments/1psbh26/claudes_architectural_analysis_of_posse_party_by/
Mike McQuaid recently blogged that he's joined the POSSE Party. He reached out a couple times to say he was scraping my own site to figure out how I accomplished certain things (like the iMessage previews for my takes section, but in general it must have been straightforward enough, because he didn't need me at all to get up and running. Kind of cool to see that he can teach his 20 year old blog new tricks.
In his LinkedIn post sharing it:
In practice, this looks like building your own version of a single-serving social network on your own site and exposing RSS/Atom feeds to other services to consume. Justin recently released POSSE Party which makes this easier by cross-posting to various social networks. I've complained for a while about (anti)social networking so I'm always up for new ways to use social networking less.
Naturally, he does a better job than me summarizing what the hell POSSE Party is for. When I'm too close to a project, it's hard to zoom out and talk about it like a normal fucking person.
