Pincone Picks for March '26

Welcome back to Pincone Picks — our monthly roundup of the best things we found on the internet. If you missed our inaugural edition ☞ start here.

March was a good month. We shipped a big update, read some incredible writing, and I personally fell down at least three rabbit holes I still haven't fully climbed out of. Here's what stuck with me.

What we shipped

We rebuilt our browser extension from the ground up. The biggest change: clicking the Pincone icon now slides a panel right on top of the page instead of opening a separate popup. Also: you can right-click any link to save it instantly, you can sign in with Google, and the panel will auto-close after you add a link. It's the fastest way to save things while you browse — read the full post and then grab it from the Chrome Web Store or Firefox Add-ons.

The Links

The Last Quiet Thing — Terry Godier
Another month, another Terry! I featured Terry in our first edition and he's back already. This time it's a beautifully written essay about how modern devices turn us into full-time IT administrators having to manage those same devices. "One by one, the objects in our lives opened their eyes, found our faces, and began to need us."

This Is Not The Computer For You — Sam Henri Gold
Sam is reviewing the new MacBook Neo from Apple, but from a totally different perspective. This one resonated with me since my first computer was an underpowered Intel Pentium II machine that I broke every other week. And I loved it. "That is the entire mechanism by which a kid becomes a developer. Or a designer. Or a filmmaker. Or whatever it is that comes after spending thousands of hours alone in a room with a machine that was never quite right for what you were asking of it."

Sucker: My Year as a Degenerate Sports Gambler — McKay Coppins, The Atlantic
The Atlantic gave a Mormon journalist $10,000 to gamble with over an NFL season. The story follows McKay gambling away all of the money, but it also dives deep into how gambling ruined the experience of watching sports — turning the favorite American pastime into a sequence of micro-bets. Long, immersive, and deeply unsettling.

Jimi Hendrix Was a Systems Engineer — Rohan S. Puranik, IEEE Spectrum
I will not even pretend I understood half of this, but this is great insight into how Jimi Hendrix produced out-of-this-world sounds from his electric guitar. It goes hard on circuit simulations (the code is on GitHub). Extra: here's Jimi live at Maui playing Voodoo Child.

The Ingenious Design of the Aluminum Beverage Can — engineerguy
Fascinating insight (from 2015) on how the design of the modern beverage can evolved. Especially the mechanics of the pull-tab. I just stumbled upon "engineerguy" on YouTube and his style of video was so calming.

What 81,000 People Want from AI — Anthropic
Anthropic invited every Claude user to sit down with an AI interviewer and talk about how they view AI. More than 80k people from 159 countries provided their feedback. A beautifully presented study, and very detailed! It has a bunch of first-hand accounts that are shocking and mind-boggling. What stood out to me is how the "Western" countries are less positive on AI than lower and middle-income countries.

H-Bomb: A Frank Lloyd Wright Typographic Mystery — Paul Lukas
Jonathan Hoefler (yes, that one) spots an upside-down "H" on Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple. And then Paul Lukas goes on a research spree to get to the bottom of what happened. I am always fascinated by these stories that start like "Huh, that letter is upside down" and end with an obsessive investigation tracking the orientation of every "H" across two entrances, four eras of lettering, a 1973 gunite treatment, a 2010 theft, and a $25 million restoration.

Details That Make Interfaces Feel Better — Jakub Krehel
A practical, interactive collection of small UI details — concentric border radius, staggered enter animations, optical vs geometric alignment, using shadows instead of borders. Each tip comes with a live demo you can play with. Learned a few nice things here!

Steve Albini's Letter to Nirvana — Letters of Note
I've been on a bit of a grunge binge these past few weeks, so this was fitting. In November 1992, Steve Albini wrote to the Nirvana guys to pitch himself as producer for what would become In Utero. The entire post is just his letter, and it has his philosophy on recording, his refusal to take royalties ("I would like to be paid like a plumber"), his disdain for the music industry's "front office bulletheads." Favorite quote: "If a record takes more than a week to make, somebody's fucking up."

Auto Catalog Archive
Over 55,000 vintage and modern car brochures, all as free downloadable PDFs. I can spend hours poring over old brochures. The typography, the photography, the copywriting — these brochures are a lost art form. Especially relevant when you contrast them with modern brochures for the latest generation of the same model. A few of my favorites: the 1973 Porsche 911, the 1981 BMW 5 Series, and the 1988 Jeep Wrangler. There goes your afternoon.

Newsletter spotlight: Robin Sloan

I found Robin Sloan through his novel Moonbound — a wild book full of really interesting ideas, narrated by a microscopic AI living inside a boy's shoulder. After finishing it, I fell into his blog and newsletter and haven't really left.

Robin is an author, programmer, olive oil maker (yes), and just a really interesting person. His newsletter lands roughly once a month and has everything from books, media, technology, and whatever else is on his mind. His blog goes deeper on the nerdy stuff: creative computing, AI aesthetics, media and technology.

Two things to start with:

• AGI is here (and I feel fine): The first edition of his self-destructing pop-up newsletter about AI. He declares AGI has arrived, then proceeds to think about what that means in a way that's completely unlike anyone else in the conversation.
• Is it okay?: His widely discussed essay on whether AI training on human writing is morally defensible. He starts by disarming both sides and then builds something genuinely new.

Subscribe to Robin Sloan's newsletter →

That's it for March. If something here made you stop and save it — well, that's kind of what Pincone is for.

See you at the end of April. 🌲