My favorite (and least favorite) movies of 2026 so far
We're just over halfway through 2026, and by my count, I've see 15 2026 releases so
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Netflix can't keep viewers for season 2, even of their good shows
Lucas Shaw: Netflix Viewers Are Abandoning Shows After One Season
One Piece, one of Netflix’s most-watched shows of 2023, lost more than 30% of its audience for the second season. Season two of Beef suffered a drop of more than 70%. The Night Agent shed 50% of its audience for the second season
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Xbox had a terrible strategy, and now they're laying off 3,200 people and ditching 5 studios
From Asha Sharma's letter to Xbox employees earlier this week (via IGN):
To grow, we bet on Game Pass, multi-platform, and a broader portfolio of content. While those businesses have created meaningful value, they did not grow at the pace we expected. As that happened, our core business weakened, and we added
Ghosty Posty for Obsidian gets edits, visibility, and delivery options
Ghosty Posty is my Obsidian plugin that lets you writing Obsidian and publish direct to your Ghost blog. In my
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What "reasonable concerns" around trans people really means
Parker Molloy wrote what I think is a must read article that has too many quotes I'd like to make, so just go read it: Reasonable Concerns.
Terry Schilling runs the American Principles Project, one of the outfits that spent years writing and bankrolling bills like the ones the court just upheld. In
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Code is easy, writing is hard (for a robot)
Robin Sloan: Fable is very good
Yet even the funkiest JavaScript function carries within it many fewer choices than a paragraph of prose. (How’s that for a sentence?) Fable can’t match my writing style yet — honestly, I think that’s beyond the reach of these models, because it’s just
Quick Reads keeps getting updates!
First off, Quick Reads is finally available on the App Store! Despite being only in TestFlight until today, the iOS app was still the most common way people used the service. I'm glad there's less friction than there used to be. If you've been using the app and like
micro-apps
Micro app 18: Claude Code Obsidian sync
Here's a weird one…I had a situation where I wanted to be reminded what happened in a
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+ Weird nerds
Maybe we were the weird nerds all along.
More Birchtree 2 and More Birchtree tiers
Quick Reads now does newsletters and RSS
Since its launch, the number one feature request I've gotten for Quick Reads has been the ability to
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Sony is leaving physical games behind in 2028
Sony had a double-whammy of press releases yesterday. First, they announced that they were ditching physical game discs in 2028:
As consumer preferences and the broader entertainment industry continue to shift away from physical discs to digital, physical game disc production for all new games releasing on PlayStation consoles will be discontinued starting January
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A blown up iPhone, not the next Mac
Federico Viticci: Headless Macs and Hamstrung iPads
In a funny twist of fate, Apple spent years trying to make iPadOS catch up to macOS on the surface, only for macOS’ underlying nature to unlock a new generation of apps that are rewriting the rules of modern software. No amount of windowing and menu bars can
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An update from the study that said devs were actually slower with coding agents
METR: We are Changing our Developer Productivity Experiment Design
Based on conversations with study participants, we believe it is likely that developers are more sped up from AI tools now — in early 2026 — compared to our estimates from early 2025. However, because of the selection effects in our experiment, our data is only very weak
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+ Why changing your productivity system is good, actually
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May 2026 was the worst sales month for Xbox consoles *ever*
Mat Piscatella: Hardware - PlayStation hardware unit sales fell to…
PlayStation hardware unit sales fell to their lowest May total since May 2000, while Xbox hardware unit sales were the lowest ever recorded for a May month.
The data goes back to 1995, and May was the worst month for hardware unit sales for Sony in
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Xbox prices jump again, and Microsoft warns they my again next year
Joe Skrebels on XBOX Wire, Micirosft's official Xbox (ahem…XBOX) blog (emphasis mine): Updated XBOX Console Prices
Last October, we increased XBOX console price by $20-$70 in the U.S. We hoped another price increase would not be necessary, and we have spent the last several months working with suppliers on options.
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Notion Mail is shutting down September 22
Notion on X:
We’re winding down the Notion Mail inbox across web, desktop, and iOS on September 22.
It's a bit of a bummer, but truth be told, this didn't quite hit the mark. It was kind of like "Superhuman, but for cheap" when it launched, but once
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Apple raises prices, and it's gonna hurt
Stephen Nellis and Aditya Soni quoting a statement they got from Apple: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads as memory costs skyrocket
"We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly," Apple said in a statement. "We have shielded our customers from these increases so far, but we have