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Jasmine Sun

Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.

8 things

When Harry Met SallyOther

loved

On the other hand, seeing When Harry Met Sally at the Roxie was a total delight. I was grinning for probably 80% of it.

A July 2025 link roundup of what she read, watched and used that month.

2025-08-02·jasmi.news ↗

ReadwiseSoftware Readwise

loved

All my friends know that I'm obsessed with Readwise, which combines a web highlighter, a powerful read-it-later app, and every feature under the sun to organize and remember everything that I read.

Transcript of her interview on Readwise's podcast, republished on her own newsletter, about her writing and research stack.

2025-04-17·jasmi.news ↗

Close to the MachineBook Ellen Ullman

recommended

Ellen Ullman's Close to the Machine is a memoir I couldn't believe I hadn't read earlier. Many of her observations about engineering culture feel as relevant today as when she was a programmer in the 1980s

A July 2025 link roundup of what she read, watched and used that month.

2025-08-02·jasmi.news ↗

OpalSoftware Opal

uses

I'm getting into screen-time blocking. I use the app Opal on a recommendation from Lucas Gelfond. It won't let me scroll Twitter, Substack, or Instagram for 80% of the day. Gmail is also blocked from 11pm to 8am.

A July 2025 link roundup of what she read, watched and used that month.

2025-08-02·jasmi.news ↗

MochiSoftware

uses

I initially started making Anki (well, Mochi) cards to keep track of Google DeepMind's LLM lineage—Gopher, Chinchilla, Gato, PaLM, Sparrow, Meena, LaMDA, Bard, Gemini, etc.

A July 2025 link roundup of what she read, watched and used that month.

2025-08-02·jasmi.news ↗

Readwise ChatSoftware Readwise

uses

More recently, I started using Readwise Chat. Sometimes I don't remember what books I've read, especially now that I've been reading and using Readwise for a long time.

Transcript of her interview on Readwise's podcast, republished on her own newsletter, about her writing and research stack.

2025-04-17·jasmi.news ↗

MaterialistsOther Celine Song

disliked

I assumed Celine Song's Materialists would be as inoffensively cute as Past Lives, but it was even emptier than I expected.

A July 2025 link roundup of what she read, watched and used that month.

2025-08-02·jasmi.news ↗

Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.

The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.

A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.

What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:

Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.