Jamie Thingelstad

Artists Point in Grand Marais.

World’s Best Donuts in Grand Marais. Pro tip: you can order the night before and skip the line entirely!

Stop at Fika Coffee, my favorite coffee shop on the North Shore, on our way to Grand Marais this morning.

Our Airbnb for the weekend up north is a converted garage set in the woods. Nice place!

Short walk after pizza to Love Creamery for delicious ice cream!

Delicious pizza and beer at Ursa Minor Brewing tonight in Duluth.

Many of the SPS Commerce leadership team took in the Minnesota Business Partnership annual event. We were joined by Megan Tischler who was highlighted in the evening for the work she has done as part of our Women in Technology group and Phil Soran who is one of our board members.

Tyler and I were joined by Max and Levi at Orchestra Hall today to see the Minnesota Orchestra perform Star Wars: A New Hope In Concert. Tyler and I saw The Last Jedi In Concert in May.

We had a great time cheering the runners in the Twin Cities Marathon this morning! Our friends host a Marathon morning every year with the highlight being a “Repeat 1” playing of Jump Around by House of Pain — a favorite with the runners.

We saw The Wild Robot tonight at Edina 4. It was a new story to most of us however Mazie had read the book. I thought the animation style was very unique and fit the story well. Fabulous family movie outing!

The Thingelstad and Fernandez families ready for the TC 5K!

Results

• Mazie (45798): 7:12 min/mile pace — amazing! Came in 12th out of 1,335 women and 2nd in her age group! It seems we have a runner in our family! 🤩
• Tammy (45796): Came in 7th in her age group and put in a 8:53 min/mile pace! Impresive!
• Tyler (45797): Ran the whole thing sub 10 minute pace and building endurance!
• Jamie (45799): Walked the course and hit goal of sub 15 minute miles — 14:58! We’ll skip places in divisions for me. 😊

Transferring to the new iPhone 16 Pro!

Tammy and I went to see the Cowboy Junkies at The Dakota tonight. Both of us have enjoyed the Cowboy Junkies but hadn’t seem them live. The show was good and featured a bunch of new music, but got a little long for us with two different sets.

Since we just tried a new burger place I thought it would be fun to capture our favorite places that the Thingelstad family goes to for cheeseburgers.

• Lion’s Tap: this is not a smash burger but it is a delicious classic cheeseburger. The standard bearer.

• Tap Society: this is closest to our house and the burger here has evolved over the years. It is always good and a bonus that their fries and shakes are top notch too.

• Lake & Irving: the cheeseburger here is heavenly.

• The Dakota: there are much fancier items on the menu, but the double cheeseburger at the Dakota is great and one of the cheaper items on the menu.

• Flat Top: Honestly the best, and only true smash burger we get is the one I make on the flat top at the cabin. I haven’t found many (any?) restaurants that truly let the patty adhere to the grill surface to be scraped off. It adds a lot of time and effort.

We made our way to Wells Roadside tonight to try the newest smash burger place. This place has a cool location with a very classic drive-in feel. They specialize in wagyu smash burgers and are intentionally very affordable. You can get a double cheeseburger and fries for a very reasonable price.

Judged two novice rounds at the Minnesota Debate Teachers Association (MDTA) Jamboree today at Wayzata High School. Was fun to remember how to flow a round and the debaters in general did a great job for their very first rounds in a tournament!

My friend Garrick recently shared about Two AI Bots Discussing His Work — a test he did using Google’s Notebook LM. I listened to the three recordings that he shared and it was incredible.

I had to try this myself so I fired up Notebook LM and decided to throw some issues of the Weekly Thing at it. The results were interesting to say the least!

292 / Signal, Checkboxes, Hope

Notes:

• I found the beginning of this super interesting. It just jumps right into the privacy topic and for some reason even pulls in bee keeping which seems strangely connected to other things.
• The AI really got focused on the featured article about Section 230 and ignores everything else in this issue. There is a good chunk of writing in here about GTD that is entirely ignored.
• The bots totally understand what Section 230 is.
• It cracked me up when the AI’s highlight quotes.
• I found it odd that it mostly pronounces my last name right, but gets it wrong one time.

287 / Plinky, Piccolo, Privacy

Notes:

• This one starts out with a much more traditional podcast introduction, even using a title “The Deep Dive”. Very different from what it did on the other ones.
• The bots talking about stackless interpreters is pretty funny.
• This one works hard to cover all the various things in the newsletter and kind of rambles on.

276 / Contextual, Copilot, Collections

Notes:

• This issue includes the dates that it covers in the header, and the AI clearly sees that and makes an intentional reference to this being somewhat old. “Back in February 2024…”
• The Apple Vision Pro “Ahh, yes. It was all the rage back then.”
• “This guy is writing the user manual for the future.” Okay!
• Even the bots poke fun at blockchain. “Obsessed with the idea of decentralization.” 😂
• It is curious to me that in this one there are more references to “this guy” and “the author”. It doesn’t seem to know who I am like it does in the others.
• I love the “totally random” reference to the blog post about the Minneapolis Downtown Council. The bots can’t help but try to connect it to the rest of the content, which it isn’t at all. But it does make one up! Apparently I’m connecting urban planning to digital spaces.

Multiple Issues

At this point I was pretty impressed and intrigued by what this was doing. I wanted to try something with more content so this time I uploaded 14 recent issues of the Weekly Thing into the notebook and told it to generate. I was curious what it would do with this much material! This one has an entirely different structure.

Notes:

• The bots cover a lot of ground but focus a lot on the variety of topics.
• It is goofy to me when the AI says to the other one “I think I remember that one…” Huh?
• It thinks I switched my whole blog to a web3 platform, which I didn’t. Not sure how it got that.
• “He’s grounded.” If I want some compliments I’ll just listen to this. 😊
• “Jamie doesn’t shy away from any topic. He even went deep on cryptocurrency.”