Mark Allen

I'm probably the last person to think of this, but:

You can just have Claude Code build a tool on your Hetzner box (or the Mac mini you bought for OpenClaw) that listens for a webhook from Sentry for new issues, creates a PR with the fix and deploys a preview on Vercel.

The future is amazing.

Screenshot from Seinfeld S6E7 "The Soup", Jerry is wearing a sweatshirt with a Northwest Podiatric Laboratory logo on the chest.

Screenshot from the Northwest Podiatric Laboratory website. Text: In the mid-90’s Jerry Seinfeld called the lab looking for help. So impressed after traveling to the lab to have his orthotics made, he encouraged them to use his story. An ensuing friendship landed Dennis, Chris and their wives with invitations to a number of Seinfeld shows, including an appearance in the final episode!

Things that keep me up at night: "Why is Jerry Seinfeld wearing a sweatshirt that says Northwest Podiatric Laboratory in 'The Soup'?"

20 minutes of groggy googling later: "Ok, but if his feet are so bad that he travels to remote parts of WA for special orthotics, why does he still wear Nike Shox?"

If I were a tech recruiter looking to hire great people, I'd be trying to raid Shopify's staff. Most people I know who work there are very talented and also quite socially conscious. The attempts by Tobi to become a mini-Elon can't be sitting well.

Screenshot of a Scorched Earth-style artillary game.

Randomly wanted to play the classic "Scorched Earth" DOS game from my childhood, couldn't find a web port in 60 seconds of googling, so had Claude Code one-shot a version based on the game's wikipedia page that's pretty much what I remember playing.

marktron.github.io/scorchers/

DEEE-LITE -RARE-Groove is in the Heart-Arsenio (1990) 4K HD YouTube video by Tom Key

My surefire way to get out of a funk is to watch this live performance of Deee-Lite's Groove Is In The Heart on Arsenio. It never fails. www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5a2...

The official Board of Peace logo, which has the laziest generative AI gold crest and an inaccurate globe that for some reason has the US at the center of the globe even though the Board of Peace is allegedly supposed to be about rebuilding Gaza.

Putting aside all of the illegal, amoral, genocidal and money laundering issues that are wrapped up in the Board of Peace, the official bullshit logo that was created by an intern with 2022-era Dall-E is the cherry on top. If there was a hand in this image, it would have seven fingers.

I meant to ask an LLM to brainstorm some names for a cyberpunk video game that could fit in the William Gibson expanded universe, but accidentally typed "Kirk Gibson," the 1980s baseball player.

And now I really want to make a game called CYBER_SLIDER.EXE

Screenshot of Microsoft Word with dozens of menus expanded, showing hundreds of options. Only a tiny sliver of space is visible to type in the document.

Your product after everyone in the company learns to build with AI.

Now that I've had my first dentist appointment since I started using it, I can confidently say this water flosser was the best purchase I made in 2025. Total game changer if you hate flossing.

www.amazon.com/Philips-Soni...

Screenshot of the Mac OS ChatGPT desktop app. A chat is open, and the content is littered with buttons labeled "🌐" that don't do anything.

The ChatGPT Mac app used to be great, but it's been getting worse and worse over the last year. The newest annoyance is these globe icons that don't do anything. On the web they are links to docs in the project folder, but I guess they just didn't bother implementing that in the desktop app.

Can't believe the Love Is Blind couple that didn't make it out of the pods because they couldn't agree on the best Sunn O))) album.

What Happened to Working The history of automation says AI won't kill most jobs. It'll hollow them out.

I'm tired of seeing tech bros say "learn a trade" as a response to AI job loss fears. It's not that simple.

markallen.io/working-in-t...

Olympic studio show: We go live to women's figure skating, where snowboard correspondent Blaze Tanner is filling in for Nigel Fairfax, who ate some bad crudo.

Evelyn Rhodes: That was an ethereal triple axel by Peković.

Blaze Tanner: SHE JUST BLACK TIE YEETED THAT 1260 INTO THE AFTERLIFE, EVELYN.

During Golden Ages, there is more work than people. And when they crash, it is because there are more people than work. I realize I’m mixing units, but otherwise it gets grammatically awkward. You get the idea. Larry Page told the company in April 2011, when he became CEO, “stop working on new stuff, we’re only going to do X, Y, and Z.” And they kept every single engineer, but cut the amount of work by a solid 50% or more. You could no longer work on any problem you wanted. And there wasn’t really enough to go around. That was the beginning of the end. As soon as there wasn’t enough work, people began to fight over the work that was left. It kicked off a wave of empire building, territoriality, politicking, land grabs, and, as Lydia Ash taught me, Cookie Licking–a phrase folks at Microsoft had invented to accuse people of claiming work that they will never actually get around to doing.

Good leading indicator that a company is done. This tracks with every declining company I've seen up close. steve-yegge.medium.com/the-anthropi...

Starting to talk myself into getting excited about the Capela/Zubac level impact Harden will have on Mobley and Allen. Sports fandom is wild.

Screenshot of an ESPN tweet: “The Cavs and Clippers have had advanced talks on a James Harden and Darius Garland trade, per @sichrismannix.”

Of all the horrible news I’ve woken up to over the last year, this is right up near the top.

It's basically February, so time for my annual re-binge of The Larry Sanders Show. What a masterpiece.

Pace Layers for AI-First Product Development Designing AI-first products that don’t collapse under their own speed.

AI makes shipping code ridiculously fast, but it can be a trap. How I'm trying to adapt @stewartbrand.bsky.social's Pace Layers concept to guide my agentic AI product development. markallen.io/pace-layers-...

Coming of age at the close of the Cold War in the 90s, everyone assumed that of course they'd choose the right side of history if they had lived in 1920s Germany. But that was with perfect Hindsight Bias, and it's disappointing to see how many people are willing, happy frogs in the boiling pot now.

Thought exercise:

Make a timeline of the rise of fascism in early 20th century Europe, abstract it by removing triggering references to specific people and events, and ask conservatives at what point they would have drawn the line.

We're a lot further down the path than I expected we'd ever get.

Screenshot of text response from Claude Code: ⏺ Found the issues: 1. Year mismatch: Your test data is for 2025-01-20 but the app is calculating 2026-01-19 (we're in 2026 now) 2. [blurred text] Let me fix the debug date to match your test data exactly:

It's kind of endearing that AIs have the very human problem of still writing the old year in January.

Pretty sure I just felt a small earthquake in Toronto?

Instagram picture by @larrydn7 of Nance in a hat, chain, and with a black t-shirt saying "all my homies hate ICE" with three angry cartoon ducks in between these large words. below that on the shirt in smaller type: "no one is illegal on stolen land immigrants make america great"

Larry Nance Jr., forward for Cleveland Cavs

A minor thing in comparison to everything happening right now, but I hate that we all have to watch videos of people being murdered by the government now because they are lying about murdering people. It's doing real damage to everyone.

Screenshots from The Good Place. Frame 1 - Jason: "I think we're in the Bad Place" Frame 2 - Michael: "Jason figured it out? Jason?!" Frame 3 - Michael: "This is a real low point. Yeah, this one hurts."

Watching Faraaz figure everything out on Traitors.

Sports Betting Sites Make It All Too Easy to Lose Everything You’ve Got DraftKings and FanDuel are thriving—but lax regulations, understaffed “responsible gambling” departments, and lack of resources for gambling addicts can make sports betting platforms uniquely insidiou...

I haven't read more than the excerpt yet, but Everybody Loses by @dannyfunt.bsky.social looks like a solid history on the topic. www.vanityfair.com/news/story/s...

It is embarrassing how decadent replacing the shearling insoles of my slippers has made my winter feel. Cozy AF.

The Wall Looks Permanent Until It Falls On the optimism of preparation in a time of democratic decay.

Always a strong signal when you're still thinking about an article a week after you read it. Not sure if I believe the US is capable of looking outside its borders for solutions, but good to remember the solutions are there. data4democracy.substack.com/p/the-wall-l...

FlagRanks - Vote on Flag Design Which flag is better designed? Vote on national flags and see how your taste compares to the rest of the world.

Made this game to determine who has the second best flag in the world after Seychelles. www.flagranks.com

An array of nicknames for Gordon, which is what 75% of men over 60 years old in Canada are named.

Had to add a special Canadian case to this nickname alias script.