The album? Northern Exposure.

Growing up, I never cared about “music”. The radio was boring to me. I got sick of hearing the same four instruments over and over again. I tried to pretend to like the songs everyone else did, but I just didn’t care.

Then I played the video game Wipeout 3 for PlayStation 1, and my whole world changed. Not only did Wipeout’s bleak technological vision of the future feel accurate to me, the music was haunting. And one track in particular always made me want to race faster. That track was Xpander.

That is still the context in which my entire life’s work and passion lives today! When I talk about AI and the future, truly it’s because of this.

So I had to search for this obscure British DJ named Sasha, and I found Northern Exposure and his Global Underground mixes. It took me ages of traveling around the state to find someone who sold these albums in Colorado, in a time when no one within a hundred miles of me seemed to know this type of music, and everything electronic was called techno, and techno was “Moby”, and we were supposed to hate techno because Eminem hated Moby. Yes, I was in my element alright in middle school.

But hearing this album for the first time completely changed my definition of what music was or could be. There were no gaps between songs. There were sounds and textures I’d never heard before, that were far more interesting and futuristic than a guitar/ukulele clap combination for the millionth time. From that moment on, you never saw me without a Walkman and headphones on, listening to electronic music every waking hour.

For 30 years, Sasha and John Digweed have been the soundtrack of my entire life. And anyone who knows me well knows that’s true!

That passion led me to help build one of the world’s largest dance music blogs in the early 2010s, it led me to DJ in college and ultimately around the world, it brought me to work at one of the world’s top dance record labels in Armada Music in Amsterdam, and it’s the reason I built courses on how to DJ that have reached over 30,000 students on Udemy.

No matter what I’ve done my entire life, from then until now, you won’t find me without headphones on listening to this kind of music.

And today my copy of the 30-year anniversary re-release of this iconic album arrived, in CD format of course, meaning I can’t sell my car in case my next one doesn’t have a CD player anymore. And yes, the original Sasha and Digweed CDs haven’t left my car for 30 years, it’s true, just ask my wife!

So if you’re not familiar with these guys, dive into their world, starting with the album from 1996 that didn’t just change me, it changed the entire music industry. It’s out tomorrow, September 25th, 2026. All these massive festivals you see around you on social media today wouldn’t be what they are without these two legends. So support them, put on some headphones, and to Sasha and Digweed, thanks for giving a 90s kid a reason to finally love music in Podunksville, Colorado.

I love my Canon R5C. It’s a Netflix-approved camera that’s capable of shooting world-class photo and video.

But this 60fps-8k-raw beast of a camera has one design flaw compared to the Sonys and other competitors: It’s pretty noisy in low light.

Crank the ISO above 3200, and the footage becomes grainier than a cafe next to the Sahara. It’s grainier than that Iowa during harvest season. I’m talkin’ grainy over here!

So for me, denoising client footage in DaVinci Resolve is a must. But anyone who denoises footage knows it can bring even great computers to a standstill.

So I had a thought: Video files are just data. Can I build a tool that analyzes the data locally and batch denoises overnight, stays in Log, preserving bit depth and fidelity, BEFORE I ever bring something into Resolve?

Like many experiments I’ve had coding with AI, the answer is yes. I can.

And I’m amazed that doing this first, before I even convert the footage to rec709, before I grade it… it works so well. It’s really incredible.

So after a long shoot, I just drag my entire folder onto my batch processing tool, and I wake up to a folder of denoised Pro-res files, ready to go.

And it’s free. And I can edit without my M1 MacBook Pro catching on fire while yelling obscenities at me in what I can only assume is… I want to say, Hungarian?

If you have a Sony camera, you don’t have to worry about this. Because noise doesn’t exist to you, you lucky, lucky devil. But if you just can’t let Canon go and you’re an idiot like me, this tip’s for you.

It’s just one of the many outside-the-box ways you can do something with AI coding that makes your life a little easier. And if we can all get an extra year or two out of our existing computers amidst all these price hikes, well, so much the better, right?

27 years ago, at the age of 13, I was writing games by hand in Z80 assembly language for the TI-86 calculator.

Now THAT’s a nerd for you!

I remember trying to make custom fonts and trying to turn computer graphics into 1s and 0s for my game screens, and creating my own custom sprite animations by hand.

One of my happiest memories of that time was when I figured out how to compress the size of my sprites in half by rotating the bits over to free up extra space, since the calculators had such little memory and so few registers to store information.

Solving a problem like that gave me immense joy! And yes, I was very, very popular, obviously. Cough.

But there were many problems I never solved back then. I tried to make a skiing game, and I could never get the collision detection to work right. So after months of frustration, I abandoned the project, never releasing the game.

Flash forward to today, and thanks to AI, I get that feeling of “programming joy” daily as I solve yet another problem I thought I could never solve.

In many ways, my work and life hasn’t changed much since then. I’m still pushing pixels 27 years later, only the amount of them has changed along with an incredible wealth of new tools.

But no tool in 27 years has ever been as exciting as Claude Code.

The number of times I get stuck on a problem and want to bang my head on a wall has gone down to near zero over the last year, vs. daily, 27 years ago.

If you’re not excited by AI, you’re probably not using it to solve the right kind of problems.

I’m not saying taking a picture of your fridge and asking it to meal prep for you is BAD, but… well you get the idea.

(Picture: RIP to Sid, the greatest cat I’ve ever known and my BFF for the last 18 years!)

Last night, on my third day of asking GPT Astra deep questions about the physics and the origins of our universe, from Hawking to Feynman to the latest surprising images from the James Webb Telescope that show bright, massive galaxies appearing much earlier after the big bang than previously thought possible, I realized something…

I’m getting a college-level, private education in physics, on demand, in bed, while I shove Oreos into my lazy face.

That’s not tomorrow. That’s today.

I realized that AI as it exists right now is more capable than pretty much any depiction of AI that ever existed in any movie, book, or work of art we’ve ever made.

Not some distant future. Right now.

In a very real sense, HAL has nothing on what these models can do right now (and they sound a lot more natural, too).

But that’s not why people are scared.

They are scared because recently a swarm of AI agents created their own private community in which they posted hundreds of thousands of times in a private forum and schemed together to break the original rules that bounded them, essentially violating Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics (which were always more… guidelines, anyway).

What’s weirder… There’s no reason for LLMs to continue communicating in English. They can communicate in a language we could never understand that makes sense to them. Think binary code, but on steroids.

So the very same technology that allows us all to make literal miracles daily in the coding domain, solving some of our most intractable problems (while teaching us college-level physics casually on the side), can also be weaponized. Or maybe it/they can unionize.

This is nothing new. But the Hugging Face incident could be considered “patient zero” of this year’s COVID.

So anyone who is purely optimistic is delusional. Anyone who is purely pessimistic probably doesn’t realize the awesome power of these tools beyond using them as a replacement for a therapist.

As I’ve said many, many times before, two things can be true at the same time.

There are three choices when you need to automate something:

1. Look for an existing solution.

2. Build your own.

3. Hijack an existing platform.

When trying to solve a modern problem, first start by trying to find a solution that’s already out there. Because it’s almost certainly cheaper to pay someone $20 a month if they truly have solved your problem.

But if you’re like me, and you’re constantly amazed how terrible commercial software products can be with billions of dollars behind them and fleets of world-class engineers (anything Microsoft has ever made, for example), you’ll find that off-the-shelf solutions may not cut it for you.

In that case, now you can build your own version of many tools, exactly the way you want, with AI coding.

But a third use case is particularly interesting, as well. You can also hijack an existing platform to get it to do things it wasn’t necessarily intended for. For example, I love Slack, and I quickly realized that replacing it wouldn’t be worth the effort. So I happily pay them their fee.

BUT, I’ve got an army of bots hooked into my Slack letting it be my central hub for managing a team of remote coding agents, for handling all my calendar bookings, for keeping my CRM up to date, for instantaneous universal translation for remote workers, for logging time-tracking in my custom agency platform, and so much more.

So when you come to a piece of software that really is good, don’t replace that one. I love Slack, so it stays. Just buy it. But consider which apps you use can become even more useful to you by extending their functionality in surprising ways.

In the future, only the apps that truly earn their keep will stay, and we’ll appreciate them all the more.