I jumped head first into the punk/metal pool this month. Here's what's been bumping on repeat for me lately:

Less Than Jake - Anthem

I remember a friend of mine (whose birthday is today, ironically) playing this album in his basement on repeat as we tried to 100% Super Mario 64. Good, clean ska fun. Most of the albums on this list contain songs that I haven’t really listened to, but while chopping up the tree in the back yard these last couple weeks, I’ve had time to immerse myself. And I gotta say, listening to the lyrics of “She’s Gonna Break Soon,” I found myself with a literal lol.

Neck Deep - Life’s Not Out to Get You

I was working out of a Starbucks near my parents house this week and listened to this album the entire day while coding. I reached out to them in the morning to see if they wanted to grab lunch, and sure enough, an hour later, we were at Snuffy’s Malt Shop where my dad peer pressured me into eating a malt. The album whales too.

Mumford and Sons - Prizefighter

My Current Vibes playlist contains albums for every mood, and this album fills the mood for “Sunday morning.” There are a couple of songs that hit right when I need them: Alleycat asks: “’Is this all there is?’ What do you mean, is this not enough for you?” Clover reminds me to “slow down.” Cannot wait to see them again this summer!

The Wonder Years - The Greatest Generation

I Just Want to Sell Out My Funeral came across KTIM while I was cleaning out my garage¹, and I fell over myself to add this album to current vibes. It turns out that particular song combines elements from several other songs on the album. I dunno, I used to dog on myself for enjoying emo, but 38 year old Tim ain’t got time to dog on hisself anymore. I’m in my emo era.

Thrice - The Artist in the Ambulance

I played an unreal amount of Madden ’04 as a kid, and that’s how I discovered Thrice. I think this album is classified as “post-hardcore”, but there’s hints of emo and pop-punk in there as well. So many of these songs bring me back to high school.

System of a Down - Toxicity

Again, brings me right back to high school. We’re working towards converting the garage into a music zone; as soon as that’s good to go, I’m gonna fill it with a drum kit and play this album front to back. Terribly, but enthusiastically.

The Rezillos - Can’t Stand the Rezillos

If I had to pick a number one album right now, it’s this one. Still makes me chuckle thinking about discovering this one from a “What’s in your Bag” segment at Amoeba Records with Tony Hawk. My favorite song right now is ​(My Baby Does) Good Sculptures​, which makes me think of my wife every time I hear it.

Pynch - Howling at a Concrete Moon

Another one that’s been on the Current Vibes rotation for a couple years now. 2009 is how I discovered this band, but there’s really not a bad song on this album. Some of these albums are useful for processing how depressing our world can be, and Pynch has a natural ability to write lyrics that speak to finding your way in spite of the hardship. Put another way: listening to this album makes me feel less lonely.

Pynch - Beautiful Noise

This album is less cynical than its predecessor Howling at a Concrete Moon while maintaining the relatable storytelling. I get Post-Punk / New-Wave stuck in my head a lot.

New Found Flory - Listen Up!

I’m so glad these boys are still rocking as hard as they were back in high school. The lyrics in this album are chock full of uplifting messages (​Laugh It Off​ reminds us to not take life so seriously, You Got This is self evident, 100% reminds me of the ‘Do The Thing’ theme of this summer).

Kisses - The Heart of the Nightlife

I burned this album to a CD-R back in college and listened to it constantly. It was another one that came across KTIM and it’s filled in the spot for “music to groove to while doing housework”.

I Prevail - Lifelines

I got to see my nephew play baseball last weekend. These 10/11 year olds have ​walk up music​. Can you believe that? The high school one town over just got a jumbotron. Freaking wild. Anyway, someone’s walkup song was Chaos and I had to Shazam it. This album reminds me of ​Hybrid Theory​: a genre-blurring record with screaming and melody, metal and electronic. I guess it’s “metalcore”.

The Cords - The Cords

Music that sounds upbeat and positive with depressing and hopeless lyrics is extremely compelling to me. I know I’ve said this about this album in the past, but I was hooked on this jangle pop album from the first 8 bars. October is my current favorite jam (“It’s not that it’s gone, it’s just not the same as it was” hits hard).

Cheekface - It’s Sorted

Similar to Pynch, I listen to this album and feel less lonely. ​Popular 2’​s observations about everyone being the unwitting stars of several Ring camera movies makes me snort laugh every time I think about it. I also frequently get I Am Continuing to Do my Thing stuck in my head. Excited to see these guys in October!

blink-182 - ONE MORE TIME...

Everything I wrote about New Found Glory’s new album applies to this one. ANTHEM PART 3 continues to be the theme for 2026.

The Beths - Straight Line Was A Lie

Everything I wrote about The Cords and Pynch applies to this gang as well. I saw them perform around my birthday last year, and I still often think about how the backing vocals aren’t actually Elizabeth, but rather the boys singing falsetto. If I were going to be in a band, I’d want to be a drummer for a band like this. Or The Rezillos. Or Cheekface. Or The Cords. Or System of a Down. Maybe blink, if I practice a lot.

If any of these albums or descriptions remind you of other albums, shoot them my way!

Well gang, I think we can call it a day. Nothing's gonna top this.

A must-watch video from Casey Muratori reflecting on the commencement speech where Eric Schmidt, founder of Google, was booed when encouraging students to adopt AI.

This is a case where he had direct decision-making authority during the time period when the very worst most dystopian parts of the technology business model were developed, perfected and entrenched.

He is giving this commencement speech to a group of students who have known nothing but that their whole lives. They're not like me. They didn't know a time before all of this. They didn't experience technology in the 80s or something like this. So all they know is the dark pattern version. All they know is the one where they don't own anything and their data is kept by other people and their behavior is tracked and their data is sold and they are targeted for advertising. That's what they know about technology. That's what technology is like for them and only that.

Eric Schmidt, one of the primary architects, is now looking them in the eye with a straight face and saying, "You should be enthusiastic about the next new wave of technology. You should want to be in the room and make decisions about how that new technology will go. And you should bring your humanity with you and your good judgment about how we can do things in a way that will benefit all of us and be good for all of us."

Well, yeah, but why didn't Eric Schmidt do any of that? He just said in the first part of the commencement speech that there were all these really bad things that happened on his watch and he was in the rooms the entire time. He was in one of the most important rooms where these decisions were being made and he either didn't want to or couldn't stop any of that from happening.

So if he wanted to pass on something valuable to these students... well, that would have been the thing. It would have been the introspection of what went wrong. Why did he fail? Why did he say "okay" to building this very bad aspect of technology on top of the useful tool? The parts that we all think are actually good. Why didn't he stop that part? Why doesn't he take some responsibility for it?

If you are gonna take credit (and win capitalism) for building Google, you gotta take credit for all of it. Looking back in 2026, was the invention of Google a net-positive for society? How about Microsoft, or Apple, or Meta?

(Props also for the excellent Tim Robinson reference, which captures the essence of what's going on here.)

A lot of the problem is going to come down to us. To be clear, I am cool with a lot of cognitive surrender. I don’t remember phone numbers anymore because my phone does that for me. I am happy my kids didn’t need to learn cursive. I am fine with calculators doing my daily math and my computer figuring out how to schedule my classes. These were once useful skills, but we were probably right to get rid of them.

AI is different because the technology is general enough that virtually any cognitive task can be offloaded into it to some degree. I don’t want to be too precious about writing: there is no principle that says a polished email draft has to come out of a human mind any more than a column of arithmetic has to. But we don’t want to give up everything, and that we mostly don’t know yet, for any specific task, what is important and what is not. Deciding that is going to be a real challenge.

My north star with technology is “am I making the computer do something useful to somebody?”

Useful, as Ethan Mollick touches on here, is the difference between “AI solved the problem for me” and “a personalized AI taught me this hard thing in a way that stuck for me.”

I’m not gonna dog on anyone who likes to write code. It’s therapeutic, it’s constant problem solving, it forces you to understand how something works.

I think software engineers tend to loudly express strong opinions that don’t meaningfully improve the problems that most people have.

AI, like every other tool, comes down to the human that is wielding it.

In contexts not concerning the elite private colleges of New England and their decades-old conflicts and syllabi and on-campus squabbles, this mode of prestige media procedure matters absolutely and enormously, at scales difficult to tabulate. It’s not hard to call them all to mind: “Climate change is increasingly lethal, though critics say… it is not.” Or, “Israel is murdering journalists in Gaza at historically unprecedented rates, though critics say… it is not.” Or, “Trans people claim to be real, though critics say…”

Every bit of this is disheartening on its face. But it’s actually worse than any first-blush irritation, that familiar annoyance that comes from encountering still another textbook exercise in witless triangulation. Because what this sort of reporting ultimately means is that if you have enough money to get somebody, anybody, to produce a white paper for you, which you can then put on some think-tank stationery? Then, my friend, you are ready to enter into the rushing current of elite reportage.

This profile on the Fire in the Mountains Festival is a must-read.

I’ve been sinking deeper into a rabbit hole of punk, but this article made me want to move laterally toward exploring metal.

Tangentally related: I was browsing Apple Music the other day and saw they remastered Dethklok’s original album.

It's not yet summer, but I'm declaring 2026 to be the summer where I "Do The Thing."

Shannon and I have been talking about getting tattoos for years now. We went to a friend's brewery's anniversary party this past weekend, and they had a tattoo pop-up stand. You could pick from one of roughly 30 tattoos.

Mine was a no brainer: skulls have been a big part of my aesthetic lately, and this one looked perfect. Slightly smiling, like I always seem to be.

Shannon's choice, a marshmallow roasting on a flame, was similarly the perfect fit for her.

I'm very motivated to make this summer memorable. We're off to a good start.

In thinking about protecting the past, I'm grateful to Brennan Brown for their post, "How are we preparing for the Long Web?," a great introduction to the web-preservation movement that's unfolding right now. I like that the tone of the post is mostly hopeful - it poises us as readers embarking on a project through time, a thought experiment into the future.

Personally, I find frameworks like React to be neat from a developer's perspective and obnoxious from nearly every single other metric.

I'm sure at some point I'll have cause to meaningfully invest time in learning a fancy Javascript front end framework, and maybe I'll eat my own hat. But boy, as the old man in the room, I have a hard time accepting that the benefits of a front end framework outweigh the downsides of increased pipeline complexity, page size, and third party dependency attack vectors.¹

I say all that because I feel like React made the web more inhospitable. It's harder to archive. It requires browsers to require even more resources. It's just... greedy.

They point to some stats that highlight just how much has been lost over the past few years, one of the worst ones being that over 66.5% of links published in the last nine years are dead. Nine years. The stats can only be more devastating if we go back twenty. Brown's post hones in on the ways that digital history is disappearing & puts together a great list of the ways that webmasters and archivists can make their sites as future-proof as possible, namely by sticking to HTML/CSS3 & updating one file, not thousands. I won't re-hash Brown's entire post, but I bring it up here as an example of the ways that the decay of the internet is being stalled and how everyday webmasters are fighting back against it.

This post inspired me to go through my own links and do what I can to preserve the contents of them.

So I vibed up a feature that loops through all 700+ of my links and checks to see if they are still alive.

The results? Of the 626 links that were checked, my script couldn't access 83 links.

Of the 81 YouTube videos I've shared, six are broken.

Looking through the list of broken links made me realize I should do some more weeding around here.

Mostly I need to cut the links to topical hot takes. Sure, it was fun to dig on Sony for hiking the price of some Whitney Houston music hours after her death. But I don't need to remember that forever, right?²

Early on, I picked up the habit of checking with him when some technical thing or other wasn’t working the way I expected:

• “I can’t connect to the thingamabob :(”
• “The whatchamacallit isn’t working :(”
• “How do I fix the doohickey?”
• etc.

Without fail, James’s response would be not an answer but a question, one that has shaped my thinking ever since:

What have you tried?

I just stuck that on post it note and stuck it to my monitor for tomorrow morning.

Taking inspiration from my buddy Paul's talk, I decided this week that I needed to commit to finishing my patio project.

For those who forgot, I started redoing my patio last summer, but sort of lost steam + got bad anxiety about doing things to my house, so it's sat dormant. A giant sand pit, a daily reminder that I can't finish anything.

The last couple of nights, I've pulled up a patio chair in the sand and imagined what this place can look like. I mean, the hard stuff is pretty much done. I have all the pavers. The retaining wall is complete. Now I just need to clean the sand again, level it, and set the pavers.

I was having a hard time imagining what a good paver layout would look like since I have two different colors, so I vibe coded a little tool to help me visualize what different patterns might look like.

A few weeks ago, my friend Kelly sent out a survey collecting data points for her Minnebar talk. One question on this survey was: "Think of a piece of code you've written that you're proud of. In a sentence or two, what made it good?"

After a lot of reflection, here was my response:

In middle school, I learned how to write TI-BASIC, and I used it to program small apps to help me with math homework. Simple apps that helped me remember things like the Pythagorean theorem.

What made these apps good was sharing them with my friends and seeing them use them for their own homework and tests. I've heard some even used my Pythagorean theorem app in college.

To me, "good code" is mostly unimportant. What's important is unblocking others from being stuck on the semantics (e.g. memorizing a mathematical equation), allowing them to focus their energy on solving a bigger problem.

I was thinking about my Pythagorean theorem app this evening while staring at my patio, and it dawned on me that I have a device in my pocket at all times which Claude claims is somewhere between 200,000× and over 1,000,000,000× more powerful than that humble TI-83+ Silver Edition.

There are a lot of people who have a lot of opinions about artificial intelligence. I find validity in all of them: it's bad for the environment, it's being crammed down our throats, it's trained on stolen data, using these tools fly in the face of hard-earned engineering skills, etc. etc.

Me? My general stance on all technology is "what can this thing do?"

I want to make things. Useful things. Cool things. Fun things.

You know what's fun?

Having an idea for a single page app at 7pm, then hanging out with your family watching Survivor 50 until about 9:45pm, then jumping into a few Claude Code sessions to whip together the idea in about two hours.

If you visit junk.timbornholdt.com/vibes, you'll see a pretty weird looking landing page of random pages.

I have four tools on there right now:

1. A visualizer for my patio (better seen on desktop)
2. A syllabus guide to the lo-fi genre
3. A page designed to encourage me to try new-to-me PS2 games
4. Based off albums that I was into last month (need to update now), a page that gives me more detailed listening notes when exploring similar albums

The coolest part? This is all tied into Github Actions. If I want to make another page like this, I load Claude on my iPhone, tell it what app I want it to build, then let it commit that code to my vibes repo, which automatically gets rsyncd to my junk VPS.

I now have the ability to start out on a walk, come up with a random tool I need built, tell Claude to Ralph Wiggum loop itself until it accomplishes the vision, then see the results for myself right on my phone.

It took me two hours to make this happen. Most of it was spent deploying and securing a brand new VPS.

The future is kinda dope.

I hope all of this will help me finish that damn patio.

(PS: Look at how terrible that SVG logo is that it generated lmao I love it so much)