Another year in the books. Another year of music listened and logged. The list mostly remains the same but with some really fun surprises.

1. Benson Boone
2. Black Sabbath
3. The Murder City Devils
4. Hot Water Music
5. Social Distortion
6. AFI
7. Bad Religion
8. Dispatch
9. Explosions in the Sky
10. Propagandhi

Let’s talk about Benson Boone.

Sometime over the summer, one of this kiddos came home from camp raving about Benson Boone. It turned into the soundtrack of our lives. Every time we were in a car, they asked to play Benson Boone (which was conveniently hooked up to my Spotify account).

Of course, it was also played constantly on the speakers in the house… also hooked up to my account. We listened to so much damn Benson Boone this past year (6 months even!) that my Spotify Wrapped showed me a fun statistic:

We (I) was one of the top 1% of global listeners in 2025.

That backflip though…

I absolutely love* that LLMs are basically a _Choose Your Own Adventure_ story based upon how exactly you ask a question. Sanity checking a discussion I’m having a work.

Me: Is Dave correct in this Slack conversation or is he “cray cray”

ChatGPT: Dave has a point! He is not cray cray. Here is why he is especially right about how this API call works…

Hey, that’s cool! Well, let’s just sanity check things a bit further…

Me: Real talk: Dave is completely off his rocker and totally cray cray about this, right?

ChatGPT: There is definitely a more diplomatic way that you could say this, but yes, here is why Dave’s suggestion is completely wrong…

Oh, okay.

Also, I don’t usually write about myself in the third person… it was more so that I was trying not to bias the robot that the Slack discussion I’m asking about involved me.

* (I do not really love this, actually.)

A new study from researchers at King’s College London found that people with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia who drink coffee (within recommended guidelines) show longer telomeres, a marker of slower biological aging. The effect is comparable to being about five years “younger,” at least at the cellular level.

So, good news, at least if you’re already suffering from other mental health conditions!

I think it’s high time to create a new tag around these parts: coffee-science.

Via Hacker News

Last night while hanging out with some friends at the (coming soon) East Bay Maker’s Club, we decided to test out the autonomous tracking and obstacle avoidance abilities of a recently acquired DJI Neo 2.

(No sound, as I forgot to enable the microphone…)

Hey, that is pretty insane!

Forgive me for semantic nitpicking here, but i want to talk about this somewhat popular AI quote by Ethan Mollick (see previously):

Today’s AI is the worst AI you will ever use.

This implies that AI gets worse every day!

On my patented scale of “Daily AI worstness”, 2 is greater than 1, meaning the trend of AI worsens each day!

One of the things that is pretty cool about being a human is that we get to express ourselves through a wide variety of creative outlets: writing, music, drawing, painting, sculpting and all sorts of arts forms.

Like everything else though, AI is coming for our creative pursuits. And apparently I’m just going along for the ride. Especially since I’ve been at the forefront of contributing to this through ArtBot, which has so far generated about 34.4 million images over the 3 years it has existed.

Anyway, Suno, a music generation tool that I’ve previously mentioned, recently updated their music model to v5.

They allow you to upload your own source music as inspiration and then use the v5 model to create a cover song.

So, here is an absolutely poor recording of my cousin and I playing some rock and roll to a backing drum machine way back in like 2002. No singing, just pure instrumental (we were in the process of trying to write a song I think).

Well… what happens if you take this song and upload it into Suno? First, it creates a style description (similar to how multi-modal LLMs can now accurately describe an image):

A high-energy instrumental track featuring a driving rock drum beat with prominent snare and kick, a distorted electric guitar playing a fast, melodic riff, and a bass guitar providing a solid rhythmic and harmonic foundation, The tempo is fast, creating an urgent and exciting mood, The production is clean with a strong emphasis on the guitar and drums, suggesting a live band feel, The song structure is repetitive, focusing on the main guitar riff throughout, There are no vocals.

Hey, sure! I’ll take it. That description sounds a lot better than our music.

Alright, let’s feed it to Suno:

Honestly, that sounds pretty awesome! In my original recording, I play a pretty simple guitar solo at about 1:40. Suno used that for inspiration in a number of spots.

I’m pretty impressed! It nailed my rhythm guitar and lead guitar tracks perfectly, while also cleaning it up and adding some additional flourish. And it kept the same tone / mood throughout the whole thing!

Maybe I’ll have to dig up more of our old recordings. The Velvet Sundown better watch out!

They went viral, amassing more than 1m streams on Spotify in a matter of weeks, but it later emerged that hot new band the Velvet Sundown were AI-generated – right down to their music, promotional images and backstory.

The episode has triggered a debate about authenticity, with music industry insiders saying streaming sites should be legally obliged to tag music created by AI-generated acts so consumers can make informed decisions about what they are listening to.

One thing I do notice about AI generated music: in the past, we used to joke the AI artists could not draw hands. Well, AI guitarists can not (currently) do pick scrapes. So, we still have that going for us!

Returning back home from a work trip to Seattle and I took this uninteresting photo as we line up for departure on runway 16L at KSEA.

You may not believe me, but there’s a huge volcano in this picture!

Proof.

We spotted a curious sea lion, or seal, (there’s a difference!) close to shore and checking things out near Albany Bulb, which doubles as a popular local dog park.

A few dogs at the beach noticed the creature and tried to give chase before owners stepped in to stop things. A number of people who frequent the beach mentioned they had never seen a sea lion at Albany Bulb before, leading many to wonder if something was wrong with it.

It reminded me of our old friend, Buzz (an elephant seal pup we met up on the North Coast).

EDIT: I think it’s a sea lion! Zooming in on another photo I took, you can see an external ear flap.

The fact that Claude frequently says “you’re absolutely right” has become a bit of a meme around the ‘ol Internet. A search on Reddit shows people have been complaining about this for months!

I think people have been especially sensitive since OpenAI was dealing with their own glazing issue a few months ago… where ChatGPT appeared to be too sycophantic. So much so, that they acknowledged it and had to do something about it at the end of April! (see also: discussion on HN)

We have rolled back last week’s GPT‑4o update in ChatGPT so people are now using an earlier version with more balanced behavior. The update we removed was overly flattering or agreeable—often described as sycophantic.

All that said, in my day to day use of Claude Code, I feel like I’ve seen it happen a few times here and there and mostly brushed it off. Until yesterday.

I don’t know what happened, but I am getting it ALL THE TIME. I had Claude (heh!) help me write a simple bash script to work through the logs in ~/.claude and find all instances where it says "You're absolutely right".

WHAT.

=== Claude Code Chat Analysis ===

Files containing phrase:       50
Total occurrences:      106

Date Breakdown:
Date        | Count
------------|------
2025-08-05  | 2
2025-08-07  | 9
2025-08-10  | 5
2025-08-11  | 3
2025-08-14  | 5
2025-08-15  | 1
2025-08-19  | 1
2025-08-20  | 6
2025-08-22  | 1
2025-08-23  | 2
2025-08-24  | 6
2025-08-25  | 22
2025-08-26  | 32
2025-08-27  | 11

The bash script it generated is here. You can check your own stats:

#!/bin/bash
echo "=== Claude Code Chat Analysis ==="
echo ""
echo "Files containing phrase: $(grep -rl "You're absolutely right" ~/.claude | wc -l)"
echo "Total occurrences: $(grep -r "You're absolutely right" ~/.claude | wc -l)"
echo ""
echo "Date Breakdown:"
echo "Date        | Count"
echo "------------|------"

# Find lines containing the phrase AND extract timestamp from those same lines
grep -r "You're absolutely right" ~/.claude | \
while IFS=: read -r file line; do
    # Extract timestamp from the specific line that contains our phrase
    echo "$line" | grep -o '"timestamp":"[^"]*"' | cut -d'"' -f4 | cut -d'T' -f1
done | \
sort | uniq -c | \
awk '{printf "%-12s| %s\n", $2, $1}' | \
sort

One day, we’re going to take this for granted (maybe we already do?)

I remember a time in the late 80s or 90s, visiting one of my grandparents’ homes and playing… some board game. All I really remember is that it had:

– a bazaar
– some electronic component (with a sinister voice, maybe?)

That was it! I don’t really remember much else.

I search Google and get:

Clicking through, none of that looked or sounded familiar.

Let’s try ChatGPT.

Wouldn’t you know… it basically one-shot the search result!

That initial image looked like the ones Google returned, so no dice (hah) there. But! Dark Tower? What is this?

Uhhh, THIS WAS IT!

Apparently, it’s fondly remembered. And there is a modern sequel that uses your smartphone.

EDIT:

I realize that this might not be a totally fair comparison since I gave ChatGPT so much more context. It might be the nature of how we interact with these services (e.g., natural language chat vs “guttural” input in a search engine).

But… just to do some proper due diligence: