Make Claude stop talking like a Buzzfeed article, using this Claude Code skill.
Claude “talks like it’s delivering a TED talk about its own pull request. You ask why a test is flaky and you get a “load-bearing assumption,” three numbered revelations, and a solemn note that the third one is the most instructive yet. Nothing is ever just a bug. There is always a kicker.
The 69-year-old rookie.
Bill Grueskin took time off from his work as visiting dean of Columbia Journalism School to work four months as an unpaid visiting editor at the Salt Lake Tribune. He had previously founded a weekly newspaper on the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation, and worked as a reporter and editor in Baltimore, Florida and the Wall Street Journal.
> For all its financial and editorial success, for all its efforts to embrace the digital world, the Salt Lake Tribune’s newsroom doesn’t look or operate that much differently from the ones in Florida and Maryland where I worked in the 1980s and 1990s. Yes, the means of delivery are newer, especially in the Tribune’s use of video and social media. And the reliance on data to drive newsroom priorities is a significant change. But the beat structure, with an emphasis on government accountability reporting and community news, is more or less the same. The daily pace was almost identical: one news meeting in the morning and one in the afternoon, along with constant pressure to ensure there were enough stories for a respectable showing the next morning. The use of artificial intelligence was limited, mostly to tweak a headline or search reams of documents for names or other details. There was the same adherence to traditional standards for accuracy and fairness. And unlike many boutique startups, the Tribune doesn’t afford itself the luxury of focusing on just one or two topics. It sees its mission much the way metro newspapers used to, with a responsibility to cover a wide swath of beats and areas as best it can with the few dozen journalists who work there.
The Tribune has made one revolutionary step, but it isn’t in its news products or processes. It’s the business model. By becoming a nonprofit, it opened a spigot of cash, from ten-dollar tip jar contributions to foundation grants that hover in the million-dollar range. That move has shielded the Tribune from many of the vagaries that bedevil other local news organizations, especially those that depend on tech companies' opaque search algorithms, crappy advertising streams, and ceaseless AI slop.
Build your own Touch ID. www.anildash.com/2026/08/2…
Analysts Warn U.S. Economy Becoming Overly Dependent On Anne Hathaway. 63% of all US exports are Anne Hathaway films and the remaining 37% are films by Robert Pattinson and Zendaya. theonion.com/analysts-…
Trump Unveils New 250-Foot Gilded Catering Container For Presidential Travel theonion.com/trump-unv…
What makes Australia Australia? Thoughts from Sydney and Darwin. By Chris Arnade. walkingtheworld.substack.com/p/what-ma…
Amazon says it “screwed up” after commandeering a public park parking lot in San Diego as a staging areas for deliveries, but local elected officials aren’t having it. By Tessa Balc timesofsandiego.com/business/…
Profiling Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, hosts of The Rest Is History podcast. “They took on topics as diverse as fall of the Aztecs, the French Revolution, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and history’s greatest monkeys.” My favorite episodes are probably the series about Custer, which covers the entire Indian Wars. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/2…
R.I.P. Columbia House: Here’s How It Improbably Survived This Long. They were the 12-records-for-a-penny guys. I think I still owe those guys money from the records I forgot to cancel. gizmodo.com/r-i-p-col…
He was waiting for his son to return from the USS Lincoln. Then Border Patrol arrested him.
When Luis Manuel Aviles was arrested by immigration authorities, his son was entering his ninth month on the USS Abraham Lincoln with the Navy – a vessel that set a U.S. military record for uninterrupted time at sea, stirring concerns about supply shortages and deteriorating mental health among soldiers.
Luis Manuel Aviles, 48, was arrested after leaving his house to take his car to the mechanic, according to his wife, Argelia Aviles. She said her husband, a handyman in Key West, Florida, has a permit to work in the United States. Originally from Nicaragua, he has lived in the U.S. for 19 years.
“He dedicates himself only to work so he can put food on the table at home. He is a good father. He loves his children with all his soul,” said Argelia, 47.
The US message to its military and their families: Fuck you for your service.
ICE released him Aug. 25. Not good enough. www.nbcnews.com/news/us-n…
Why do rich kids love socialism?
Having money isn’t at odds with wanting a fairer economic system. Critics of the Democratic Socialists of America are crowing after discovering that the co-chair of NY’s chapter, Gustavo Gordillo, lives in a $1.5M townhouse paid for by his father. Gordillo explains: “I have experienced economic life in this country from many different vantages so I know that it is often luck that determines whether someone has financial stability. This is wrong.” By Tyler Austin Harper.
www.theatlantic.com/culture/2…
Carrier pigeons are actually superior technology. By Mike Pearl. gizmodo.com/there-are…
A colleague brought her dogs to a Barn Hunt competition. Looks like fun for humans and dogs, not so much for the rats. www.youtube.com/watch
Ezra Klein: Republicans are making the same mistake Democrats did.
"While Musk’s dominance of X poses a danger to the left, it is at least as dangerous to the right. X, like the One Ring in “The Lord of the Rings,” corrupts whoever controls it. Possessing it feels like power, but it ultimately deforms and isolates you.”
He’s right that getting your politics from Twitter — or any social media — can twist your brain. But he’s dead wrong equating wokeism with MAGA. Sure, wokeism can be embarrassing and self-righteous, but the goal is racial and economic equality and fairness. Whereas MAGA’s goals are protecting pedophiles, putting people in concentration camps, persecuting people based on their sexual orientation, discouraging vaccination and turning the US into a white supremacist nation.
Maxwell’s House of Books, a bookstore in La Mesa, where we live, is rejecting orders from AI companies that are books to scan them for large language models.
A few months ago, the bookstore started getting unusually large orders from book brokers and warehouses and believes they were fronts for AI companies.
“Goodness knows what will happen to the contents of the books when AI becomes the editor, the censor,” says owner Craig Maxwell.
Note the tagline to this article, which says it was “reported on-air by a journalist and has been converted to this platform with the assistance of AI.”
By Michael Chen.
A socialist is challenging conservative incumbent Bill Wells in El Cajon, San Diego. Good luck with that. www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2026/08/2…
Roger Ebert, reviewing “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” said Tim Curry “bears a certain resemblance to Loretta Young in drag. He’s the best thing in the movie, maybe because he seems to be having the most fun. He’s also a capable actor….[U]ntil the climactic scene in which everyone’s hurtled into outer space, Dr. Furter’s been the perfect hostess.”
“Meta has to pay a $17 billion fine for what they did to become a $1.5 trillion company. That oughta teach ‘em a lesson.” nextdraft.com/archives/…