It's been a while since I published my last "Recent Readings" because, well, life has been busy. I hope to get back to doing this more regularly now tho as there are no more travel plans for the rest of the year.
With the excuses out of the way, this is what I have been reading (and listening to, or watching) recently.
An Episode of the Overcommited Podcast in which the hosts discuss how they are dealing with changing priorities and switching between projects.
As an individual contributor, taking 5 - 10 minutes before switching to another project to write down a note for yourself that makes it easier to pick up the work again is probably my best take away here.
From the management side of things the most important thing is how you communicate the change of priorities, making sure that you get all of the following points across to your team
- 1.
Here is what shifted
- 2.
Here is why
- 3.
Here is how it will impact you
Disagree and Commit was also mentioned for people on the management side of things, especially for bigger decisions, the team should always be given the option to voice their disagreement but once a decision is finalized it should be expected of them to commit to it.
It’s pretty clear that this AI revolution is not felt by many, and probably even more don’t see the upsides.
I work in Software Engineering and AI agents have a huge impact on our field, we can now do things that would have been impossible just a few years ago, like Discord rewriting it's client in Rust (just a recent example on top of mind).
But this new technology did not yet have the same kind of impact on all people and many are, understandably, very frustrated about how much resources are being put into it and how much they are bombarded with news reports about AI.
I also really liked the comparison of the AI "Golden Age" with the Dutch Golden Age
a golden age like the Dutch Golden Age: it overlapped with the Eighty Years’ War and much of what made it a golden age was financed through colonial violence and slave trade by the East and West India companies
We Should be Optimistic About the Internet Again
While I am not old enough to have the same amount of nostalgia here, I fully agree. The Atmosphere is by far the most exciting development on the Internet I've seen in my lifetime.
A big part of why I'm so exceptionally excited about the Atmosphere—and why its underlying AT Protocol has me more optimistic about the future of the internet than I've been in fifteen or twenty years—is that it gives us the tools to claw back something much more in line with what I'm nostalgic for, but in ways that take advantage of all the cool technology developed since the pre-platform days
Note: An awesome new thing I discovered, is that Leaflet let's you publish blogs in response to other blogs. The one mentioned above had two of those, so let's also look at those as well.
ATproto facilitates competition
This is the main reason I hope the ATmosphere succeeds. I am on Instagram not because I think it's a great product. I think it is a terrible product, where many parts of it are actively engineered to make my life more miserable. I am still using it because it allows me to stay in contact with other people using it.
If Instagram was part of the ATmosphere, I wouldn't have this problem. I could be using a good product like grain.social and still stay in touch with people using Instagram.
We could finally have good things in social media again.
I very much like the Idea of using local AI agents as adblockers. I also came across this idea before on geohot's blog: https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/04/15/zappa-mitmproxy.html
What would a world look like in which ad impressions are no longer worth anything since they only get seen by agents?
Tangled is an atproto based Github alternative, I believe it's also the biggest atproto project after Bluesky at this point. They recently had a pretty big release, featuring a lot of UI improvements, new Lexicons and huge performance improvements.
Checkout the whole interview from with Tangled CEO
Setting up a Tangled knot and spindle myself is also pretty high up my side-project todo list.
That's all I have for now, I am always happy to receive recommendation for good reads and hopefully I will get to share these more often from now on.