April 2026

Hey all,

Fall is typically my favorite season, but nothing beats the first warm spring days after an absolutely brutal winter. Here in New York City, the streets are always electric when the sun first starts shining in earnest, filled with people outside soaking it up.

For me, warmer weather means the ability to ditch the subway in favor of long walks or rides on my electric scooter. I’ve lived in New York for 22 years now, and this is my first Brooklyn apartment that’s relatively close to the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, making outdoor commutes into Manhattan super reasonable.

I hope spring is treating you well. Get out and enjoy this weather. You deserve it.

-Dann

🧠 Pattern-matching machines

I continue to be thoroughly intrigued by GLP-1s. Not only do we not really know how they work (just like AI…), but they sure seem to be a miracle drug. This recent New York Times article “The Transformative Effects of GLP-1 on Human Health” (gift link) explores off-label use. People are reporting miraculous changes, from reduced cravings for alcohol, smoking, and gambling, to complete mental health overhauls.

Sound familiar? This was the exact same promise of CBD: a sort of miracle cure for all ailments. As support for marijuana grew over the past decade, this was the rallying cry. And I don’t want to discount any of the real benefits of CBD/THC…but they’re in a different category than these new GLP-1s. It’s almost like society could sense a breakthrough coming and just misidentified CBD until the real sea change (GLP-1s) came around.

Once you recognize the pattern, you’ll start to see it everywhere. Before all public discourse was consumed by artificial intelligence, people were convinced that crypto/Web3/blockchain was going to change the world. When that was a dud, the hype moved towards virtual reality and the metaverse. People could sense being on the cusp of something monumental (AI) but had again misidentified it.

I personally believe in some sort of collective consciousness that is tangible and real, but is still outside the reach of scientific study with today’s tools and methodologies. But then again, it could just be the benefit of hindsight. Our human brains, primed for pattern recognition, just put together the story once all the pieces are in place. And that’s the possibility that really scares me.

In 2012, Hurricane Sandy devastated New York and New Jersey. Despite the warnings, many people were still caught off guard. That’s because the previous year, 2011, had the first-ever mandatory evacuation of coastal NYC residents in preparation for Hurricane Irene, a response that turned out to be way overboard. People were annoyed. And the year before that, 2010, promised Hurricane Earl, which veered away before impact.

If there is some form of collective consciousness, it’s terrible at predicting the details. Even with all the warnings, I wonder if AI, like Sandy, made landfall while half the country was still rolling its eyes at the forecast.

🖼️ Look at this photograph

Google has a habit of launching products (or acquiring popular services) and then killing them off shortly thereafter. If you’re ever feeling nostalgic, just take a look at Killed by Google, a graveyard of dead Google products.

One such service that I miss dearly is Picasa. Founded in 2002 by a company called Lifescape, Picasa was one of the first ways to organize and view all your digital photos across all your devices. It was originally a paid product (one-time fee), but was acquired by Google in 2004 and became completely free.

In 2015, Google announced Google Photos, a separate service that ran side-by-side with Picasa and offered unlimited free online photo storage. Picasa was killed a year after Google Photos was launched. Then, in 2021, Google Photos stopped the unlimited photo storage option.

It’s an enshittification story if I’ve ever heard one.

Part of the problem (and I’ve written about this before) is the monetization model. If you, the user, are getting something for free, then you’re being monetized in some other way. With something as private and personal as photos, that feels a little gross.

Enter Ente. A dead simple, end-to-end encrypted online photo solution that’s a paid service with fair prices. It’s even open-source.

Ente fills a niche that’s super important for proponents of privacy and transparency online. It’s in a similar category to Kagi, the paid search engine alternative to Google Search. These services aren’t for everyone. But it’s vital that we have a choice.

🙏 Maybe, please, a different handful?

In my April 2025 newsletter, I shared the dire AI 2027 prediction and warned that “there are literally only a handful of people who have the power to influence this prediction, and the rest of us are just along for the ride.”

When there’s a small quorum of people responsible for the fate of humanity, the last thing you want to hear is that Ronan Farrow, the investigative reporter that helped break the Harvey Weinstein story that sparked the #MeToo movement, has a big new article on one of them.

Well, that’s exactly what happened this month. It’s about Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.

“Sam Altman may Control our Future—Can He be Trusted?” (paywall bypass), by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz for The New Yorker, dives into the story behind Altman’s firing and reinstatement as CEO of OpenAI in 2023. It’s not the most flattering piece — hard to walk away feeling Altman is very trustworthy.

Anthropic, arguably the current frontrunner in the race-to-kill-all-of-humanity, has been having quite the month as well. It’s certainly the most transparent of all the LLM companies (an attempt to lead by example), but a series of unfortunate events might give one pause:

• In March, a misconfiguration in Anthropic’s content management system left close to 3,000 files publicly accessible, including information about a yet-unannounced new model: Claude Mythos.
• Days later, Anthropic accidentally published the full source code for Claude Code. Oops!
• Earlier this month, it was revealed that users in a private Discord channel gained unauthorized access to the Mythos model on the day it was publicly announced.

For a company that has built its brand around prioritizing safety and security, this is quite embarrassing.

For the human race watching these “handful of people” and hoping we survive this dangerous new technology, it’s terrifying.

📱 The great and mighty tmux

I added a huge quality of life improvement to my Claude Code workflow: the use of tmux sessions. I’ve been using Claude Code for several personal projects: managing the Docker containers on my home server, maintaining my neighborhood blog Oh No Dobro, writing a productivity tool for Obsidian, building an app to help plan and organize movie nights with my friends, etc.

Most of this work happens on my Mac Studio that’s stuck at my desk. But I can work on these projects anywhere by connecting to that computer via SSH.

Before setting things up with tmux, I’d need to keep this SSH session alive while it was working. Now, I can connect and disconnect, pick up where I left off from any device, and keep all these sessions separate. It even works on my iPhone, where I’ve been using Echo (a terminal app) paired with Tailscale for the SSH connection. I have a different connector for each project, with a startup command that looks like this: tmux attach -t ohnodobro || tmux new -s ohnodobro.

It took a bit of work to get the settings just right on all my devices, but now it’s just a single click or command to pick up right where I left off with each project. I’m having a blast.

🌀 From black to white

I finally picked up Carlo Rovelli’s newest book: White Holes. I’m a few years late (the book was released in 2023), but I was reminded why he’s one of my favorite authors. As The Washington Post put it: “No one writes about the cosmos like theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli.”

I first mentioned Rovelli in March 2022, after reading The Order of Time. Then again that November after reading Helgoland.

His writing makes me want to be a quantum physicist. But diving into scholarly articles or journals on the topic makes me realize I don’t actually want to be a quantum physicist. I just want to read more Rovelli.

Admittedly, prior to reading this new book, my understanding of black holes primarily came from entertainment, like the movie Interstellar or the book Project Hail Mary (which dives into space time deeper than the film adaptation). White Holes made me re-think several preconceived notions about black holes (and the white holes on the other side) as he takes the reader on a journey past an event horizon.

Notably, I’d previously understood that there’s a spot in the center of a black hole where Einstein’s formulas fail and the numbers are infinite. The singularity, where the laws of our universe don’t apply.

But, he argues, what if this isn’t a place in space, but rather a place in time? Using Einstein’s own formulas, with time dilation, this point where the numbers fall apart is always in the future. 🤯

I’m certainly not explaining it as eloquently as him. But if you want your mind blown, I highly recommend picking up a book of his. I’d probably recommend starting with The Order of Time, but you can’t go wrong with any of them.

End note

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I send these newsletters once per month, and I’m happy you’re along for the ride. I’m trying to make it one of the best things that arrives in your inbox each month, so thoughts and feedback are always appreciated. You can just reply to this email.

Also, if you find anything interesting, send it my way.

Thanks for reading. Until next time, Dann