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The Independent Variable

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Stacey King, Bulls broadcaster and 3-time NBA champion, dies at 59

He spent the past 19 seasons as a television analyst on the Bulls’ game broadcasts and hosted a popular podcast called “Gimme the Hot Sauce.”

Catching up on old links and this was an old one that hit me hard and didn't want to forget... Not only was Stacey King a 3-time champion on the Jordan Bulls and the absolute best color commentator, but he was my park district league basketball coach as I played with his two sons before eventually playing against their AAU Dream Team later on. And while it was a long time ago, I can tell you his jolly demeanor on TV was not an act—he was smart, passionate, and his joy was infectious.

glint /// terminal app

One more terminal app for good measure! Been working on this one for awhile now and it's already my main driver for writing anything. It's designed to be a standalone text editor, but you can also set a vault, daily note convention, and inbox to quickly view and create files from specific locations (i.e. Obsidian vault) with simple commands and keybindings plus light syntax highlighting for those who need to interact with code. It's also beautiful, so iA Writer users should feel at home and bonus features like spellcheck, a printable PDF output, and other markdown features you've come to expect like pasting a link over selected text to turn it into a markdown link or wrapping selected text with markup, checking off and reordering lists, and more. It's open source and available to download via brew.

sportsball /// terminal app

A terminal dashboard for live sports — Plain Text Sports meets Golazo, as a Bubble Tea TUI.

Been working on this one for a bit, but it's basically ready for primetime now. I took inspiration from Plain Text Sports and the Golazo TUI and built out my own terminal TUI for all sports. You can follow scores live, see past scores, upcoming games, favorite teams, and see standings - all from the terminal. Installable via brew.

Marketing strategy: Dumpsterfire

It’s been two weeks since my novella was released, and the actions of my publisher, and the online response this has generated, have made it impossible for me to market my book. From what I can tell, the whole project has tanked.

Emma is a friend of Foofaraw and is an absolutely wonderful writer. This is Emma’s first book and you should run to the Bookshop.org link and buy a copy in print or digital (or both like me). It sucks that she ends up in the middle of this turmoil during her debut due to the actions of the publisher. So go buy it and maybe even subscribe to her Patreon to continue to support wonderful writers.

Soccer is truly spectacular, in spite of itself

This is also why youth and amateur soccer, as a game, can be more fun to watch than pro soccer. The comparative lack of skill and relative inability to control the ball create a situation where it’s strategically less rewarding to be passive, and the continual turnovers create opportunities for profitable aggressive actions. You lose the world-class athletes doing world-class athlete things. But the trade-off is it’s just more continuously exciting.

A truly insane take.

Uber caps employee AI spending after blowing through budget in 4 months

Bloomberg reports that the company has instituted a new rule that places a monthly $1,500 cap per employee and per agentic coding tool, including Anthropic’s Claude Code or Cursor.

AI fanatics love to say “this is the worst AI will ever be,” but it’s probably also the cheapest it will ever be as it’s subsidized by VC money until they can get people hooked and loyal to brands; bleeding billions as they do. And still, Uber has to put caps on their employees (caps which feel pretty high to me). Just imagine how expensive things’ll be when they have to start turning a profit.