Who does an ultramarathon in the desert and calls it a vacation? Who's building a new free public swimming pool at the center of Berlin? What's the latest in Trump's agenda vs anything that ever made sense in the world, and why Anthropic is calling for a pause in AI development?

These and more. Come we can laugh and cry together.

Follow me on my socials if you can find them.

Leave a comment if you're not AI

Cheers.

I propose modern public holidays, starting with a yearly “check your backups” day (USB sticks, external drives, photo chaos) and I campaign for using exclamation marks again.

Then I rant about workplaces adopting Claude so heavily that company chat starts reading like AI-on-AI communication: people use AI to generate overly long polite messages and recipients use AI to compress them back into one sentence, creating extra cognitive load and raising the question of how harsh we’re training ourselves (and AIs) to be.

I share personal updates on brutal Berlin pollen, the threatened shutdown of multicultural RBB Cosmo (where I also make a Greek show), my coding side projects (a 2D anti-AI platformer, a Google reviews “fair ratings” extension, and an encrypted no-notifications messaging app), surreal Trump/IRS corruption news, and a lake trip where my kid ignores nature for inflatable plastic toys.

Follow my stuff on:

https://ennui92.github.io/ermis-dev/

00:00 Welcome From Berlin00:40 Modern Public Holidays01:07 Backup Day Proposal03:28 Exclamation Mark Revival04:20 AI Written Workplace Talk05:53 Full Circle Communication09:05 Being Nice To AI11:13 Proper Episode Intro11:35 Berlin Allergy Season14:39 Cosmo Radio Shutdown19:02 Coding Side Projects21:53 No Rush Messaging App24:46 Trump And IRS Corruption27:28 Lake Day In Berlin30:15 Plastic Toys In Nature31:26 Wrap Up And Goodbye

Links at the bottom. Greece won. Three years in a row. The title of the most complex country in the world to do business in. I open by complaining about it, then quietly admit I still keep an accountant there even though I left, because the complexity is also why I cannot leave.

(Before you read further... You know who writes these descriptions... right? Right. Ermis out)Then a small thing about the €230 question I once paid a lawyer to answer, that I'd now ask ChatGPT for free. Which is great. Except for the part where the same machine is firing people I know.Some parenting at 1.5 years. He sleeps through the night now. He wants to wear one red boot. Just the one. We are walking, slowly, into the part of toddlerhood where he figures out he can lie down in the middle of the pavement and there is nothing I can do about it.And then the long stretch. I am building a 2D platformer called Pull the Plug. I cannot code. I am making it anyway, with Claude. I'll tell you about the shortcuts I built this week that finally made the thing move faster. Fly cam. God mode. A one-button checkpoint. A screenshot batcher. Petty victories. They felt enormous.The game is ugly. Shipping anyway.We can pull the plug together, kill the AI, then go grow tomatoes. That was always the plan.—

• Play the ugly in-progress version: https://pull-the-plug.feepok.workers.dev
• Game landing + waitlist: https://ennui92.github.io/pull-the-plug-site/
• Daily devlog: https://ermis.dev
• Newsletter: https://ermis1.substack.com