Welcome to Birchtree

My crazy 2026 prediction (it involves Linux)

I'm not saying 2026 will be "the year of Linux on the desktop," but it will

12 Dec

My pet peeve with traditional publishing

Founded in 2011, The Verge is an exceptionally modern publisher in the grand scheme of things, but its writing style

11 Dec

Members

+ What is easy is boring

Once something becomes easy for anyone to do, it stops being interesting.

11 Dec

More on Spotify metrics

Based on the best data I can find, last year Spotify had 602 million active users as of early 2025,

10 Dec

Links

It's just technology

Richard Stallman in Reasons not to use ChatGPT I call it a "bullshit generator" because it generates output

10 Dec

More on the messy economics of streaming music

Earlier today I wrote about why I think the pay-per-stream metric is a bad singular reference point, and doubly so

09 Dec

Links

My favorite terminal emulator, Ghostty, is now a non-profit

Mitchell Hashimoto, the creator of Ghostty, wrote about this last week: I believe infrastructure of this kind should be stewarded

09 Dec