You just know that somebody in marketing at Volkswagen has spent the last week doing nothing but trying to figure out how to cut an ad that takes a victory lap for no longer being the car maker people most associate with Nazis.

Every time someone orders Chilean sea bass, I'm the guy at the table who reminds them that its actual name is Patagonian toothfish.

I'm super fun at parties. Inquire within.

No, sir, it's not OK to refer to your wife as your high school sweetheart when what you mean is that she was one of your students.

Being childless and also petless means that I'm not sure how to best identify myself to others in terms of my life's biggest time and money sink.

"I'm a smarthome dad," maybe?

I subscribed to a paper newspaper after quitting social media last month, and the difference is remarkable. It feels amazing to finally have some fiber in my information diet.

I was really stressed out today and nothing I did made me feel any better until I said "at least I'm not Ilya Sutskever," and the tension in my shoulders immediately released.

I have found myself inefficiently navigating to the GitHub web UI from the terminal, so I wrote a silly little script to quickly open the current directory's github remote in a browser (without relying on gh or hub, etc) gist.github.com/searls/7a54ba1efc3733f7e2ce9c0000718e7d

I am very grateful to Andrew Coleman for suffering all my Docker FUD and general impatience with DevOps to nevertheless automate a pretty kickass automated Docker image workflow for my new feed2gram gem blog.testdouble.com/posts/2023-11-15-from-github-actions-to-docker-daemon/

tl;dr I made a gem a year ago that is very good and could have a tremendous positive impact on how Rails developers write tests, but that will only happen if YOU (or someone you share this with) steps up to maintain it. Read more here: blog.testdouble.com/posts/2023-11-13-the-future-of-rails-test-data-management/

I don't do this often, but I'm ready to make an endorsement: Buttondown is good software. I've been publishing my Searls of Wisdom newsletter for 6 months now and it all just works. Plus, Justin Duke has been SUPER responsive to every question I've had.

If you're thinking about decoupling how you keep in touch from social platforms, take a look. Referral link for $9 off: buttondown.email/refer/searls

Music services still recommend music by answering, "what do other people who listen to the stuff you listen to also listen to?" This Balkanizes our libraries, because it fails to cross cultural and regional boundaries.

Suppose two tracks, one in Japanese and one in English, are great for extremely similar reasons pertaining to how they actually sound. Spotify and Apple Music would would never recommend one for the other. It seems like high time that algorithms drew from analyses of music's intrinsic qualities: sound, BPM, lyrical sentiment, etc.

TIL that Yelp now includes the health inspection reports of all the restaurants in my area, so I guess I'm never going out to eat again.

It really crosses people's wires at cocktail parties when I tell them that I believe Covid was a conspiracy by the Chinese to force the West to finally adopt the use of QR codes.

My Onkyo receiver just turned itself off. I turned it back on and it ran a diagnostic on each of its amps, before landing at a message that says "Check Sp[eaker?] Wire."

Neat.

Instead of my usual tradition of making predictable predictions before Apple Events, I'm going to go on the record saying I'd pay $10,000 for a 12" MacBook Pro that weighed 2 pounds or less.

Won't happen, but should. Especially with the Vision Pro, developers are going to want as small a Mac as possible to screen share from when they travel.

This weekend, I decided to grow my POSSE by creating what essentially amounts to feed2toot for Instagram. It's called feed2gram — check it out! 📸 github.com/searls/feed2gram

I don't know why it took me so long to think to do this, but I finally started a playlist of some of my favorite TV theme songs and title tracks. Too bad how many aren't available on streaming services at all. Apple Music: music.apple.com/us/playlist/theme-songs/pl.u-e2RvqtVKP3B

Raycast's AI assistant is such a low-friction operation (command-space, type a thing, then hit tab), I've gotten in the habit of asking for keyboard shortcuts.

It's so much faster and clearer than Googling that I do this several times per day and have gotten way faster at using the apps I depend on. raycast.com/pro

My name is Justin and I'm a Timeline Addict. Give me a pull-to-refresh UI and I'll pull it all day long in the hopes of one more like or reply. I've tried moderating, but at the end of the day… the juice just ain't worth the squeeze.

Instead of posting to Twitter-like services, I'm going to post to my blog and syndicate elsewhere. Want me to see your reply? Email me! ✉️ justin@searls.co

Are Truth Social users called Truthers? 🫠