April 2026

\n Unlike previous{\" \"}\n \n clippings\n , this one is organized{\" \"}\n \n Robin Sloan newsletter\n -style: instead of neatly partitioned sections of what I’ve written\n and what I’ve read, it’s a stream of discrete vignettes from the past\n couple months.\n

\n I read the phrase epistemic vigilance{\" \"}\n in Jane Friedman’s piece on{\" \"}\n \n AI and Libraries: Why Librarians May Become Arbiters of Reality\n . It’s a fancy but perfectly precise way to describe something I’ve\n been thinking about for a while: AI hallucinations and slop introduce a\n tax on our learning—before believing what we read, we must judge where\n that knowledge came from and whether it’s credible, accurate, true.\n

Jane’s usage:

\n
\n ...what’s needed isn’t more instruction but something closer to a\n wellness intervention: relief from constant epistemic vigilance.\n
\n

\n I read Extremely Online{\" \"}\n by Taylor Lorenz. The book, content-wise, was super Up My Alley and so I\n made my way through pretty quickly. It’s a factually dense,\n chronological retelling of how people get famous on the internet over\n the last two decades, whereas I would’ve liked a narrower story with\n more of Lorenz’s editorial opinion on things like who are the good eggs\n and who are the baddies. But I get that she covers these people and\n platforms and it might come back to bite her reporting if she threw more\n punches. It reminded me of Brian McCullough’s{\" \"}\n How the Internet Happened, structurally. I was most interested\n in the chapter on blogging, and in particular this:\n

\n
\n It’s hard to remember how novel this was. Before the blog era, if you\n wanted to share your ideas with the public, you had to make it past\n layers upon layers of legacy gatekeepers. Letters to the editor,\n call-ins to the radio, article or book submissions—all had to be\n approved by a faceless authority at a moated institution.\n
\n

\n I’ve already quoted that in a riff I wrote the other day,{\" \"}\n \n Dickens was a blogger\n .\n

\n I read The Stranger{\" \"}\n by Albert Camus. The book itself was just ok (for me—one reader, at one\n moment in time), but our discussion at the Mercantile library’s\n Zillennial book club was quite interesting. Some days after that I\n re-read James Somers’s brief blog post,{\" \"}\n \n Most book clubs are doing it wrong\n . His argument—that it’s silly to only discuss the book{\" \"}\n after{\" \"}\n you’ve read it and will probably never touch it again—makes a lot of\n sense in the context of my experience with The Stranger.\n

\n I read The Untold Story of Books{\" \"}\n by Michael Castleman. There were some interesting things in there, like\n that self-publishing preceded “traditional” publishing, or that\n independent booksellers getting squeezed by The Big Guys is nothing new\n (first book fairs, then department stores, then Barnes & Noble, now\n Amazon). I learned some things, but I found it a bit disorganized, and\n also—this is a nit—I’m not sure the story of books is really{\" \"}\n untold (see: The Book-Makers by Adam Smyth,{\" \"}\n The Book by Keith Houston, etc.).\n

\n I’m reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities{\" \"}\n by Jane Jacobs. Well, I got over halfway through and sort of paused for\n now. I’m interested, but honestly it’s a bit of a slog. Part of the\n problem is that the neighborhood examples are over half a century old,\n so maybe what I need is a condensed, updated “Jacobs, 50 Years Later”\n version. I’m not quite reading it just to have said that I’ve read it,\n but close: I want to understand all the Jacobs references and reactions\n in urbanism chatter. Like this{\" \"}\n \n Bluesky post by Ingrid\n , “the death and life of great american web pages.”\n

\n I enjoyed Dan Greene’s New Yorker feature,{\" \"}\n \n The Mystery and Mass Appeal of the N.F.L. Draft\n . I submitted a letter to the editor, which I’ve never done before\n (a friend gave me the idea—hello, Jack!), with my brief reaction. I was\n interested to learn that “All letters become the property of \n The New Yorker\n ,” per{\" \"}\n \n their guidelines\n . So I suppose I can’t even tell you what I wrote here as that would\n be publishing something I gave up the rights to. In any case, I already\n like letters to the editor as a writing exercise. It’s a well-scoped bit\n of writing practice, without much pressure but still with the\n possibility of a credible reader on the other end. And it reinforces\n whatever you’ve learned or found interesting in the piece, increasing\n the likelihood that I’ll remember something from a piece that I enjoyed\n engaging with.\n

\n I’ve been binging the{\" \"}\n \n Longform\n {\" \"}\n podcast a bit. I’ve learned many things about storytelling and\n journalism from many interviewees (and the interviewers—Evan Ratliff,\n Aaron Lammer, and Max Linsky). In one episode Stephen Dubner made a\n point that validated (one reason) why I think podcasts are a useful\n medium: you get a good sense of someone hearing them talk. He said:\n

\n
\n I feel you can really tell the character of a person through their\n voice incredibly well. I think it’s easier to deceive in writing.\n
\n

\n I wrote an essay for the Val Town blog, “Code is inert. Val Town makes\n it ert” which is a play on a Paul Ford line from his novella-length 2015\n essay in Bloomberg Businessweek, “What is Code.” Paul’s one of my\n favorite programmer-writers, and so it was something of a personal\n milestone when he followed me back on Bluesky. He only follows me and a\n couple thousand others, so yeah, pretty special huh. I’ve since wiped\n the grin off my face, but in the unlikely chance that you subscribed to\n my RSS feed and are reading this, Paul—hello! Do you still plan to\n publish The Secret Life of Webpages? I hope so!\n

\n One more Val Town essay I’ll indulge in sharing here.{\" \"}\n \n Slow Mode: the Salt Fat Acid Heat of vibe coding\n . All the fatigue and eye-rolling re AI makes me hesitant to write\n about it, sometimes, but Robin Sloan counters that in his wonderful{\" \"}\n \n popup newsletter\n :\n

\n
\n I’ll add one more thing. I think we are in a period so interesting\n that basically everybody ought to be writing about it: reporting,\n reflecting, resisting, re-everything — in a blog, a newsletter, an\n email to friends, whatever.\n
\n

\n
\n I said this in my first edition: AI language models are a\n particularly, maybe even uniquely, human technology. They are\n paradoxical and poetic, like something out of myth: the uncanny\n double, the magic mirror. Psychological intuitions have proven as\n useful as technical insights.\n
\n

\n
\n You have a stake in this, simply by virtue of being a talking animal.\n Might as well jot a few notes for posterity, and for the rest of us,\n here and now.\n
\n

\n Speaking of, my coworker Tom has written quite a few things that\n influence how I think about AI. Most recently:{\" \"}\n \n Accidental anonymity\n . It’s really good. You should read it.\n

\n I registered a .com domain name for our wedding website. If anyone’s\n going to register a .wedding or .rsvp it’s probably me, and yet! When I\n judge my actions and not my words, or wishful thinking about top-level\n domains, I remember that dot com is still king, as many investors with\n skin in that game like to say. Other endings are great, but when you\n want to prioritize legibility for everyone, including grandparents, you\n settle on ole’ reliable.\n

I think “abottom” would be a useful word.

It’s more economical than “at the bottom”
People will quickly get it via its analogue “atop”

\n Per Google’s Ngram View, atop only \n sprouted up in the last century\n , and abottom usage is \n near-zero but not zero\n (seven 0s to the right of the decimal). I’m going to start\n using it, and I invite you to join me. Let’s get this thing (back) in\n the dictionary.\n

\n I’ve found a pretty nice rhythm, a groove, on my bookwork in the past\n couple months. I moved my manuscript from Obsidian to Scrivener, and so\n far so good. I’m keeping my research notes in Obsidian, but partitioning\n off the manuscript as an independent artifact makes it feel more real.\n The cadence of my work-in-public{\" \"}\n \n book newsletter\n {\" \"}\n has slowed, though, so I have some momentum to recover there.\n

\n I was home in Cincinnati for Memorial Day Weekend, and I was proud to\n see the city at peak vitality. Saturday was the most lively I’ve ever\n seen it, topping some highlights this year like the No Kings march and\n Reds opening day. On Saturday I walked to Findlay Market in OTR for a\n falafel at Dean’s then downtown to return and pick up books at the\n public library. What was special about Saturday is that between the\n Taste of Cincinnati food festival on 5th, the Reds-Cardinals series, the\n sold out FC Cincinnati game, and much more, the city was plurally{\" \"}\n happening,{\" \"}\n not just singularly populated for a one-and-done event. Pretty cool.\n

From Cincinnati,

Pete

April 2026

Jane’s usage:

\n
\n ...what’s needed isn’t more instruction but something closer to a\n wellness intervention: relief from constant epistemic vigilance.\n
\n

\n
\n It’s hard to remember how novel this was. Before the blog era, if you\n wanted to share your ideas with the public, you had to make it past\n layers upon layers of legacy gatekeepers. Letters to the editor,\n call-ins to the radio, article or book submissions—all had to be\n approved by a faceless authority at a moated institution.\n
\n

\n I’ve already quoted that in a riff I wrote the other day,{\" \"}\n \n Dickens was a blogger\n .\n

\n
\n I feel you can really tell the character of a person through their\n voice incredibly well. I think it’s easier to deceive in writing.\n
\n

\n
\n I’ll add one more thing. I think we are in a period so interesting\n that basically everybody ought to be writing about it: reporting,\n reflecting, resisting, re-everything — in a blog, a newsletter, an\n email to friends, whatever.\n
\n

\n
\n I said this in my first edition: AI language models are a\n particularly, maybe even uniquely, human technology. They are\n paradoxical and poetic, like something out of myth: the uncanny\n double, the magic mirror. Psychological intuitions have proven as\n useful as technical insights.\n
\n

\n
\n You have a stake in this, simply by virtue of being a talking animal.\n Might as well jot a few notes for posterity, and for the rest of us,\n here and now.\n
\n

\n Speaking of, my coworker Tom has written quite a few things that\n influence how I think about AI. Most recently:{\" \"}\n \n Accidental anonymity\n . It’s really good. You should read it.\n

I think “abottom” would be a useful word.

It’s more economical than “at the bottom”
People will quickly get it via its analogue “atop”

\n Per Google’s Ngram View, atop only{\" \"}\n \n sprouted up in the last century\n , and abottom usage is{\" \"}\n \n near-zero but not zero\n {\" \"}\n (seven 0s to the right of the decimal). I’m going to start using it, and\n I invite you to join me. Let’s get this thing (back) in the dictionary.\n

From Cincinnati,

Pete

\n As of this month, petemillspaugh.com{\" \"}\n is no longer a space for only web dev and adjacent topics. I decided to open it up to all of my writing and\n projects. I’d originally planned to create a separate blog for such things, but an eventual merge felt\n inevitable. You can find links to dozens of new, varied notes and essays down below.\n

This month also marks a new, energizing career direction for me.

\n\n

Leaving Membrane

\n I decided to leave Membrane to write a book. More on the book in a moment.\n

\n I joined Membrane{\" \"}\n in June of last year. It was a good year! Much of what I wrote about in{\" \"}\n My next, next, next job{\" \"}\n came true, namely learning a lot from a supportive, engaged team with a shared love for programming.\n

\n I had the chance to learn a bit of Rust working on the Membrane IDE and backend. I enjoyed learning Rust and\n making my first real code contributions in a programming language other than JavaScript. I also learned that\n what I really crave and love is the Web platform, i.e. investing fully in JS, HTML, CSS, and Web APIs, which I\n plan to do more of.\n

\n I met many smart people through user interviews and candidate interviews when we were hiring. I got to make some\n neat Membrane programs for dogfooding and demos. I learned a lot about UX while iterating on our onboarding,\n documentation, and website. I kept up our weekly(ish) changelog and wrote a handful of blog posts and recorded\n tutorial videos, like{\" \"}\n \n Testing email verification\n ,{\" \"}\n \n Stripe subscriptions\n ,{\" \"}\n \n Slack signup alerts\n , Hono API sans db,{\" \"}\n Public roadmap,{\" \"}\n \n Automating changelogs\n ,{\" \"}\n \n GitHub issue watcher\n {\" \"}\n and{\" \"}\n \n PostgreSQL admin dashboard\n .\n

\n It was a worthwhile year, and it wasn’t easy leaving a team that I really liked spending time with. If you’re\n interested in internal tools, Rust, or graph-based UIs, give Membrane a try and tell{\" \"}\n Juan what you think.\n

\n\n

A book!

\n I am writing a book about Internet domains: dot com et al. The book has its own home on the Web at{\" \"}\n dotcom.press. It will cover the history, economics, and artistry of domains.\n

\n My why for the book splits roughly into four whys:\n

I love to write, more so over time
I’m fascinated by domain names
I’m curious about the creative process of self-publishing
I’m eager to meet Internet people and hear their domain stories

\n This is not some lifelong dream realized—it snuck up on me over a couple months until I was too excited not to\n do it. Back on April 8, I went to an event on a whim at the wonderful{\" \"}\n Mercantile Library for Jane Friedman’s book,{\" \"}\n \n The Business of Being a Writer\n . Hundreds of published and aspiring authors (which did not include me at the time) were in the audience.\n Jane’s talk was fascinating, covering topics like the staying power of print, traditional publishing deals\n versus self-publishing, and building your platform in walled gardens like Twitter and Substack versus your own\n website/newsletter. After the event I started reading my freshly signed copy of Jane’s book, sometimes applying\n her lessons to my own experience as a blogger, but mostly reading out of detached curiosity.{\" \"}\n This is super interesting, but I’m not going to write a book. What would I even write about?{\" \"}\n That is, until it clicked. Domains!\n

\n Domains is the subject I kept coming back to. I’ve written a few wandering, wondering notes in my garden:{\" \"}\n dot com et al (where I borrowed the working title of the book),\n {\" \"}\n Silly TLDs, and{\" \"}\n Serious TLDs. I own nearly two dozen domains, many of\n which were gifts to friends and family. I want everyone to have their own corner of the Internet, and that\n starts with a domain. I’m interested in topics like how registrars work, creating new gTLDs, geopolitic risk\n around ccTLDs, customer trust w/r/t unusual TLDs, investing in domains, pricing domains, legal battles, and\n branding centered around a domain name. The book won’t be technical, but I anticipate that it will naturally\n appeal more to programmers and other Web-interested people.\n

\n I’m also quite excited for what a book entails outside of the writing itself. The barrier to self-publishing is\n low these days, and I see it as a deeply creative process. There may even be a timeline where I extend my newly\n established publishing company,{\" \"}\n Dot Com Press, LLC, to publish books for others. I plan to build interactive\n elements on the book’s website and publish across many formats: the expected ones like print, ebook, and\n audiobook, but also serialized as a podcast and email newsletter with one chapter per week.\n

\n Probably the most fun I’ll have along the way will be interviewing people. Pretty much anyone who’s worked\n around the Web has some story to tell or article to share about a domain. On that note,{\" \"}\n reply to this email!{\" \"}\n Interviews can be as informal as you’d like, from casually brainstorming to recording a story that ends up as\n its own book chapter.\n

\n This isn’t a transition away from web development, either. I want to code more, if anything. I don’t know if\n I’ll write another book after this, but I do expect to keep coding as my Main Thing, and that excites me.\n

\n\n

What I’m reading

\n I’ve read some great books in 2025 (and some just-ok ones). For each I’ve included a Bookshop.org affiliate\n link, a rating, who might like it, and notes if I wrote any. Many of these can be found on my brand new{\" \"}\n bookshelf.\n

\n \n The Business of Being a Writer by Jane Friedman\n : 5/5. For writers, bloggers, and anyone curious about publishing.{\" \"}\n My notes.\n
\n \n The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron\n : 5/5. For (aspiring) artists. My notes.\n
\n \n The Creative Act by Rick Rubin\n : 5/5. For creatives, artists. My notes.\n
\n \n Born to Run by Christopher McDougall\n : 5/5. For runners. My notes.\n
\n \n How Not to Die by Dr. Michael Greger\n : 4/5. For the vegan-interested. My notes.\n
\n \n Eat & Run by Scott Jurek\n : 3/5. For runners and the vegan-interested.{\" \"}\n My notes.\n
\n \n North by Scott Jurek\n : 3/5. For runners and (AT) hikers. My notes.\n
\n \n Kitchen Confidential\n : 2/5. For foodies. My notes.\n
\n \n Breath\n : 2/5. For anyone, I guess. My notes.\n
\n \n Word By Word by Kory Stamper\n : 5/5. For word nerds. If you like Authority and American Usage{\" \"}\n by David Foster Wallace, I bet you’ll like this. Whimsically written, and full of new words (unsurprisingly).\n
\n \n Where You’ll Find Me by Ty Gagne\n : 5/5. For hikers, skiers, White Mountaineers. I also recommend{\" \"}\n \n The Last Traverse\n , which I listened to.\n
\n \n Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver\n : 5/5. For Dickens readers. Sad but well done, like many of my favorite books and movies.\n
\n \n Rise of the Ultra Runners by Adharanand Finn\n : 4/5. For runners. An intro and who’s who of ultra running, and a natural follow-up to{\" \"}\n Born to Run and Scott Jurek’s books.\n
\n \n Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus\n : 3/5. For (allies of) women in STEM. I liked the premise, story, and messaging, but I wasn’t as much a\n fan of the prose.\n
\n \n My Brilliant Friend\n : 3/5. For fiction readers. I read the translation, and I think it was both well written and had a good\n narrative, yet for whatever reason it wasn’t the right book at the right time for me.\n
\n \n Marathon\n : 2/5. For marathoners. A fairly dry and somewhat outdated practical guide, but still worthwhile if you’re\n into marathon running.\n

\n \n I just signed up as a Bookshop.org affiliate, which means I earn a 10% commission on profit if you buy one.\n {\" \"}\n I expect to earn no more than a burrito’s worth every few months, but regardless of my affiliation I think\n Bookshop.org is a terrific Amazon alternative and way to support independent book stores.\n

\n\n

What I’m writing

\n Outside of books I’m reading and the book I’m writing, I’ve planted notes here and there in my garden.\n Embarrassingly, it’s been a full year since I’ve sent this “monthly-ish” clippings{\" \"}\n newsletter, but I suppose that’s the nature of gardening. So I’ll end this already-long clipping with an\n incomplete list of things I wrote since last June:\n

\n A malleable garden\n
\n I’ve been to 37 US states\n
\n \n What should I know about JavaScript engines and runtimes?\n \n
\n Reading begets reading\n
\n Reading, like running\n
\n On weather\n
\n \n When you’re already in a bad mood\n \n
\n Yang MATH is good but impossible\n
\n Present you\n
\n Orderly maximalist design\n
\n Number two, unplugged\n
\n \n Trading ambition for presence\n \n
\n On David Foster Wallace\n
\n \n Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff by Richard Carlson\n \n
\n \n Your mileage may vary: Training for a marathon on a vegan diet\n \n
\n \n The Flying Pig Marathon 2025: Race notes\n \n
\n Words & shwords\n
\n Record broken; Broken record\n

\n\n

\n Thanks for reading. If you have any domain tales or resources to share,{\" \"}\n reach out.\n

April 2026

April 2026

You’re all set!

#5 — September 2025

Writing

Conferences

Reading, watching

On New York City

Joining Membrane

Learning Rust

Book club, meetup, conference

Future of Coding book club

Browsertech NYC in March

ai.engineer World’s Fair

Working outside a tech hub

Leaving Membrane

A book!

What I’m reading

What I’m writing

#1 — January 2024

Planting my digital garden

January

December 2025

Joining Val Town

Writing

Writing from my garden in Q4:

Writing for my book in Q4:

Reading

Why bother?

#4 — August 2025

Writing

Talking

Reading, watching, listening

NYC in September

April 2026

Writing

Reading

Reading about writing

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