Each week, I pull together a short stack of the things that stood out -- something I made, something I read or watched, an experience that left a small but noticeable impression in the week. Not a grand unifying theme, not a comprehensive recap. Just the bits that felt worth pocketing before the week slips away.

Short Stack

1. JamVote

When a friend puts out an awesome new iOS app, it automatically gets the top spot in the Short Stack.

Meet JamVote, from my friend Jason Pascual. The tagline for the app is “Democracy never sounded better”, which may make you think this is related to elections or politics.

But, no, it’s to let you and your friends make a collaborative Apple Music playlist, so the whole group gets to be the DJ at the party!

Back in the day, Apple had a feature for this in iTunes, and somewhere along the way, Apple deprecated the feature. Spotify has something similar in their Spotify Jam feature.

JamVote brings the capability back to Apple Music, while also being more full-featured than Spotify Jam.

Give it a try. Your party will thank you for sharing control over the music!

2. Vibe Coding

I don’t like to spend a lot of time talking about the details of my day job here. Suffice to say, though, AI is a constant topic at my company and within my team.

I’m not a software developer myself, and yet I often find myself thinking of ways to programmatically solve a problem that I’m faced with at work. And since I work inside the software engineering organization, I have access to some pretty robust AI-powered coding tools.

I rolled up my sleeves over the last couple of days, and started telling one of these tools about the problem I wanted to solve. I gave it guidance on how I wanted it solved. I told it how to fit within the constraints that were in place from our other available tools. I explained how it should put in checks and balances, and record an audit trail for posterity’s sake. I described the end state to which the data should be transformed.

You see, I fully understood what needed to be done, and could do the job one record at a time... but that wouldn’t scale to the thousands of records that needed to be written out to the system. And for me to write the code myself, with how rusty my Python skills are at this point, it would’ve taken me weeks of frustration.

Three hours over two days, though, and I have the end result I needed. And I didn’t actually write a single line of code myself. It was all done as “vibe coding”.

Everyone’s talking about vibe coding these days in my industry, and it’s not good enough for running large-scale production systems... but if you just need to shortcut a big task, a little time investment in vibe coding can go a long way.

3. Marty Supreme

As you might’ve noticed from my last couple of Short Stacks, I’ve been catching up on some of the Oscar-contender flicks. This week, it was Marty Supreme, the new film from Josh Safdie, starring Timothée Chalamet.

While Chalamet was brilliant, and I’m glad that I saw the movie, I didn’t love it. Similar to ‌Uncut Gems by The Safdie Brothers, Marty Supreme just had the tension cranked up so high throughout in a way that I found off-putting. I felt like I was being YELLED AT for two and a half hours. And when all of the characters are unlikeable in their own ways, that’s a tough sell if you’re not in that kind of mood.

It was certainly well made, an impressive period piece with interesting direction and music choices. And you cannot deny Chalamet’s talent as a performer.

4. There Is No Antimemetics Division

I just started reading There Is No Antimemetics Division, by “qntm” (also known as Sam Hughes). Too early to give a full recommendation yet, but... oh my... I haven’t read something that’s given me such a delightful sense of dread in a long time. I expect I’ll finish it by the end of this weekend, and will report back next week!

5. ICYMI (In Case You Missed It)

I published a few other things recently that I’d love it if you checked out:

1. Elsewhere on the site, I wrote about my 50th birthday, Reflecting on 50.
2. Over on my YouTube channel, I shared a New Pen Day video about the Visconti Homo Sapiens Lava Bronze.
3. And another New Pen Day video about the Skogsy LVED (Low Volume Eye Dropper).
4. And yet another New Pen Day video about the Atelier Lusso Carina Hapalua 15.

That’s the Short Stack for the week. If something from your week stood out, I’d love to hear about it!