Weeknotes 2025W28

It’s been a whole year of writing weeknotes! I really like the practice. A few people read them but I go back to them pretty frequently to remind myself of significant things and re-find cool links that I share in each of them. Onto another one!

First up is some website updates this week. I made a hamburger menu that shows up on mobile instead of a giant block of buttons. I really like how it turned out! When you click on the button, the screen blurs and you see all the navigation buttons that are normally there on a big screen and a close button. I also added a portfolio page for my side business making websites for small businesses. It’s just a list of projects I’ve done and an FAQ that answers the questions I normally (or expect to) get. When you hover over a project, a short video scrolling through the website comes up.

I’ve been getting back into playing Rainbow Six: Siege. I was really into it before I went to Morocco but kind of forgot about it until recently. I would even watch the pro-level competitions online and kept up with all the news. Anyways, it’s been fun playing a few rounds at night.

The weekend was a blast. AM and I went to a returned Peace Corps Volunteer potluck in the area and everyone brought a dish from their country of service. The food was all excellent. We finally got to use the tagine that we bought in Morocco. We did a test run early in the week to make sure we could still cook Moroccan food and made a good one for the potluck. Really fun time.

Some college friends were in town for the horse races that happen each year in my hometown. We went, had drinks, watched the races, and only lost a little bit of money. It was strange and fun seeing all the friends and acquaintances from when I was a teenager that are still there. Great weekend.

Links

• The Floppy Disk Icon as “Save:” Still Appropriate Today? by Kate Kaplan. I’ve never considered what the younger generation thinks of the floppy disk icon. It still means “save” for most users but “save” could mean lots of different things now—sync, export, turn on auto-save, etc.
• The UN Made AI-Generated Refugees by Matthew Gault at 404 Media. This is interesting. On one hand, the intended purpose of this tool is to empathize with people and understand situations by talking to “someone” but there is a risk of dehumanization.

  Because if you’re making decisions towards a population based, in part, on the outcome of these agentic systems…you’re very directly cutting out the agency of that population you are purporting to help.