We're getting ready to launch Vibes later month on Hardcover! 🥳 They're available now in preview to supporters. I sat down yesterday with Adam to chat about how Vibes work behind the scenes and what's next for them. Warning: we say "vector" a lot. hardcover.app/live/65

#65 – Vibes - Hardcover Live

hardcover.app

A Mac Studio with 1.5 TB of memory? At current rates that would probably cost more than a car, but it could enable running some massive local models. 🤔 www.tomshardware.com/tech-industr...

Shut Up And Take My Money!

Alt: Shut Up And Take My Money! gif

static.klipy.com

The idea of a shared book database in the atmosphere is really exciting and could outlive any single project working in the book space. Worth getting involved in if you're creating anything in the book space.

Jacky!@omg.jacky.wtf · 3d ago

how many atproto people are asleep? discourse.atmosphere.community/t/in-which-a...

Hardcover hit 7k weekly active users this week - a new high! Some API improvements we made last month sped up the site a bunch, along with a number of server tweaks and site optimizations. The site has been faster with less downtime as a result. Only 1 slow response time incident in 3 weeks!

After meeting with a bunch of arborist, I finally felt safe (for the trees) to cut some roots in our basement. Each one I talked said "I've never seen something like this before". That's ~9 times people we work with have said that. The joys of owning an old house. 😅 Bucky for scale.

New blog post & personal updates on what I've been up to outside of work lately. A bit of a personal journal entry, but also a concept that's been helpful for me recently. The Personal Reset adamfortuna.com/reset

Back to the Claude mines

Great article about how fragile masculinity and the manosphere have impacted politics. Going from almost having the first woman president to this is, well, sad. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

It’s Pioneer Day today, Utah’s campy holiday that’s a combination of Independence Day and Columbus Day. For non-LDS folks like myself, it’s also called Pie and Beer Day. Picked up 4 mini pies to celebrate. 🥧

Hit a point yesterday where Hardcover's Sidekiq jobs were at 2.6m and growing. 📈 😱 They're now back at 0. What we did: 👉 Increase Kubernetes workers from 2 → 8 (they're CPU bound, so OK) 👉 Rewrite a jobs to use a Coalescing Queue design patter for counters, and cache columns 1/3

Hardcover's public API since day 1 has had no limits on the number of top-level queries to in GraphQL. That meant some people might send over 1000 mutations or 10,000 searches - towards a 60/s rate limit. Lowered this to 60 top-level requests/min over any number of requests and feels a lot safer 😅

Started listening to The Count of Monte Cristo, which has been on my list for a while. I loved the movie and the anime (Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo) from the same source. Watching France in the World Cup today too, and now I have an accidental theme. 🇫🇷 hardcover.app/books/the-co...

The Count of Monte Cristo - Hardcover

After fourteen years of wrongful imprisonment, merchant sailor Edmond Dantès escapes his grim island fortress. With the promises of youth erased and his betrothed now married to someone else, Dantès l...

hardcover.app

My talk for UtahJS was accepted! This is the first one I've given in the age of AI, and it's completely changing how I'm creating and teaching topics. What someone needs to "know" to create something using LLMs is so completely different than it was even a year ago.

Happy Reckless Ben Part 3 day for all who celebrate.

Reading @elevateutahpac.bsky.social s email about things to love about America and its spot on 👌

First time ever grilling ribs today! Calcifer, our new Ninja FlexFlame grill, has a very useful app. Able to see the temperate of the grill and the meat, and have some custom timers. Doing one rack as maple bourbon, one as Carolina bbq. Let’s see how it goes. 🤞

Wow, Fable absolutely eats up credits. I've never before hit the limit in the last year using Claude Code.

I picked up work on Hardcover Groups today, which are a combination of Meetup Events, Facebook Groups and Reddit Subreddits. Fable 5 picked the perfect day to come back. Now to see how much use I can get before it's taken away again.

Published and emailed out (to 88k people 😱) this months Hardcover Report for July 2026! Biggest updates: - Similar Books - Filter Lists - Reading Journal / Calendar Updates - API Planning hardcover.app/blog/hardcov... Would've gone out earlier, but I thought June had 31 days. 😅

Hardcover Report for July 2026 - Hardcover Blog

New similar books pages, filter lists, new review editor, dashboard updates and more.

hardcover.app

Working on something on Hardcover that I’ve wanted for a while: Filter Lists. Think BlueSky’s moderation lists and labels, but for books and authors. Add to your own block list, create a public, private or following only list, or subscribe to someone’s else’s. Choose to hide or label them. 👀

ICYMI: Fresh new article dropped: A high-impact feature, defined concretely: Either (1) regularly used by at least 51% of customers, or (2) named in the top three reasons at least 15% of customers chose or stayed with you. High bar, but the only thing that matters.

Lost confidence

RICE and other confidence-based frameworks are mostly noise. Here’s how to make decisions without pretending to know the unknowable.

longform.asmartbear.com

On March 26, 2026, during a debate on violence against women in Germany’s Bundestag, left-wing MP Kathrin Gebel was repeatedly interrupted by AfD MP Martin Reichardt. She responded: “Mr. Reichardt, the clitoris has 3,000 nerve endings, and you’re still more sensitive. That’s quite an achievement.”

The free little library on my block knows me too well.

One of my favorite AI hallucinations is how if you ask some models to generate a version of the Mona Lisa (ex: "Mona Lisa in Van Gogh's Starry Night style"), the person genreated might have two heads. ...because so much of the training data is people taking selfies with The Mona Lisa. 🖼️

Made it home safe yesterday after 12 days on the road, 10 states (6 new to both of us!), 9 different beds, and zero car or dog problems 🥳 Listened to a lot of What Went Wrong (movie podcast) and Eva zu Beck's new book The Wilder Way on the road. hardcover.app/books/the-wi...

Adam's Review of The Wilder Way by Eva zu Beck - Hardcover

Read Adam's review of The Wilder Way by Eva zu Beck on Hardcover

hardcover.app

One guess where I’m at.

I've been rebuilding the Hardcover Editor to use Plate.js ( platejs.org ) and it's been really neat! As part of this, we're also adding references to other entities in the system (books, authors, users, lists, etc). Lists can be Private or Follows only, which means they need to show up differently.

Updated Hardcover's network diagram for the new Rust Search Proxy. About 20% of our API traffic passes through it. If I knew how Rust worked I'd be very excited about this. Claude Code built it and it seems to work super well, despite looking alien to me. 😅 Only 1 API req/s hits the main app. 📚

Yesterday I went down the rabbit hole that is the Bricks and Minifigs theft controversy. It's WILD, and unexpectedly brings things back to corrupt Utah law enforcement and the LDS Chuch (American Fork). I never thought I'd be so invested in justice for Lego theft. www.youtube.com/watch?v=wscQ...

I tracked down the thief who stole $200,000 of LEGO

YouTube video by Reckless Ben

youtube.com

We're getting close to a major milestone for @hardcover.app - 100k users! 👏 Launched: 2021 2022: 200 2023: 1,300 2024: 5,000 2025: 23,000 2026: 59,500 On pace to hit over 200,000 by 2027. 🫨 We're already starting to shift focus from acquisition to focusing on retention & engagement.