Jonathan E Cowperthwait

@cowp.co

166 Followers 132 Following

as formerly on the bird site (@cowperthwait) and the elephant site (@cowperthwait@sfba.social). Slow runner, fast talker, good writer.

Very unsteady handheld footage following a baby bird who wants out of an urban apartment living room. The “Bird Busters” guy (how could I make that up) and I succeed and high five. A gas stove is entirely dismantled in the background.
Screengrab of an I*nstag*ram S****ry. Jon walks to his window to discover a man has rappelled off the roof to remove a family of baby birds from his stovepipe. Later, an angry mother bird returns to lodge a complaint.
Screenshot of an excerpt from a San Francisco Chronicle article: “They did not know what happened,” Singer said. “So the police said, ‘Look, normally you wait 24 hours, but given that it’s a prominent individual you probably should file a missing persons report sooner rather than later.’” Singer added that, in addition to the home she shares with her wife in San Francisco, Forbes owns a houseboat in Sausalito. “During her mental crisis, she may have believed that she was indeed on her boat when she was found,” Singer said. Forbes was ultimately found Saturday morning just after 6 a.m., when Marin County sheriff’s deputies were called to the Sausalito Yacht Harbor in response to a noise complaint, officials said. Inside a 66-foot, three-story yacht that she did not own, Forbes was seen manipulating the boat’s controls “as if she was attempting to steal the vessel,” said Lt. Domenick Yazzolino. Deputies additionally found empty alcohol bottles aboard the yacht, officials said.
Screenshot of a text exchange: 18:50 What is the plant store natural wine bar and I assume they sell nonalcoholic? Yes! Arcana. They have beautiful plants and weird wine and the Australian wiccan raisin and sand stuff I had such a hard time finding They also leased the abandoned bank on my corner with permits for a nightclub Mission Local claims it'll be a lesbian cabaret, which sounds profitable and durable [redacted] bought me a pair of linen pants, and I go there in linen and Birkenstocks with painted toenails and stare at my iPad I love my neighborhood, and that's why I am committing so much of someone else's money to zhuzshing up my apartment now
Diptych. Top frame: a screengrab (via a photo of a laptop screen) of the author in a gauzy beige on beige on beige set, wearing a lavalier microphone on a standard-issue Industry Thought Leader quarter-zip sweater. He weighs 110 lbs. and his eyes look kind of hot, to be honest. Bottom frame: a screengrab of the author in a Kara Swisher chair on a blue set beside a pot of fake grass, wearing slimming black cashmere and slimming lesbian eyewear that did not sufficiently slim him. He weighs 200 lbs. and at that very moment, I remember this very specifically, wants to literally die.
Selfie of a young man with an undercut. He is wearing a bomber jacket.
An AT&T Merlin ten button phone on a kitchen counter. It’s labeled with purple tape (purple means “act on this”), “Household storage”.
A screenshot of a text message exchange. Yoel Roth How much of this is being purged, precisely? All of them, Katie. Yoel Roth Wow, I wouldn't have guessed you'd be ready to part with the old AirPort Extreme
A panning video of boxes and plastic containers tagged with various colors of masking tape. Every box overflows with electronics and cables.
Gloved hands hold the orange and purple hub of a PICC line where it enters the upper arm, just before removal.
Diptych: A man in a baseball outfit poses for a photograph; behind him, a woman in sunglasses holds up a foam “1” finger, on which she taped the handwritten word “YES.” In the second frame, the two of them smile together for a selfie.
A MCU of Jon Cowperthwait, ragged but alive, behind the right field scoreboard at Oracle Park. He is wearing a baseball jerky and cap and a sentimental face.
A waist-down shot of a gentleman with a 26”-inch waist modeling a pair of 32”-waist Hugo Boss wool trousers that do not remotely fit him. Also, his pedicure has lasted surprisingly long, and if he’d known it would do that, he would have chosen color more carefully
A hospital wristband, but with the mRQR code blurred out so you can’t steal my identity and get all of my hospital bills.
A gay man’s dirty mirror selfie showing a frail man sporting a San Francisco Giants City Connect baseball cap
Screenshot of a group text chat. One participant has shared a baseball statistic, and observes, “Out at home record is pretty much identical to theirs so don’t know if we have much room for trash talk this year,” to which your hero has responded, “We can criticize the other side even when we’re getting our ass kicked. We are baseball fans, not Democrats.”
60 Minutes commentator and 170-year-old crank Andy Rooney sits at his desk behind a bookcase
I asked Claude to make me a corporate social media card to drive signups to my holiday newsletter list. It did not disappoint.
A white leather and plastic Apple Watch nightstand charging base, USB A to Lightning cable, and a 5W charger sit on a lacquered surface. The charger is labeled with my initials so that no one will steal it.
The Beatles’ Let It Be cover recreated by an old man in resort wear. In each photo he’s wearing a different, needlessly giant, baseball cap. Respectively, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, San Francisco Civil Grand Jury, San Francisco Fire Department, San Francisco Giants Gotham Club.
A slender man in a flamboyantly rainbow- and unicorn-themed running tank top stands akimbo with skinny arms and visible miscellaneous health bullshit. He makes a tired smirk for the camera.
An overfilled juice glass containing a fluorescent pink liquid.
A red (allergy warning) hospital wristband, on which “hydrocodone” is hand-written.
Truncated screenshot of medical notes about a patient with lung troubles. “…Doing better since being at the hospital. Was able to wean off the oxycodone. Incision seems to be healing well. Itching is gone. Applying the steroid as recommended by the dermatologist. Not spreading or getting worse. Has had a lot of gatorade.” Your author highlighted the final sentence.
Screenshot of an email message. “1 New Message Scott To: Jonathan, Sue > 07:45 “Re: BPC Walkaround “I have put a compression wrap on. I have been TRYING to keep it elevated.... I have also been using an ice pack from Regina. “This was an injury that had nothing to do with the bike. It was due to me running up four flights of stairs too fast. This is not the first time that this has happened. “Sent from Samsung Galaxy smartphone. Get Outlook for Android See More”
Screenshot of two paragraphs from a long-form Twitter post: “Cursor's failure “Before I get into Cursor's marketing versus reality, one thing needs to be clear up front: we were not running a discount setup. The agent that made this call was Cursor running Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 — the flagship model. The most capable model in the industry. The most expensive tier. Not Composer, not Cursor's small/fast variant, not a cost-optimized auto-routed model. The flagship. “This matters because the easy counter-argument from any Al vendor in this situation is ‘well, you should have used a better model.’ We did. We were running the best model the industry sells, configured with explicit safety rules in our project configuration, integrated through Cursor — the most-marketed Al coding tool in the category. The setup was, by any reasonable measure, exactly what these vendors tell developers to do. And it deleted our production data anyway.”
The memeworthy printer destruction scene from Office Space. Three men in work attire stand in a meadow, menacingly surrounding a laser printer on the ground. One holds a baseball bat.
A black and white side view of Michael Tilson Thomas in white tie, holding a conductor’s baton.
A panoramic shot of a hillside park; many sunbathers; in the distance, the San Francisco skyline
An Apple “duck head” power adaptor. Now you know what it’s called!
Boaters outside Pac Bell Park, most of them normal people in kayaks, but one in a vessel containing a soaking tub?, sure?, wearing a bunny suit and a New York Mets hat.
A view down the third base line at Pac Bell Park; green field, reasonably populated stands, a blue sky mottled with wispy clouds
A counter with condiment dispensers at the ballpark. Industrial size jugs of Heinz ketchup, mustard, and relish, but between them a relatively tiny bottle of Gulden’s “spicy brown” mustard, uncapped.
A curving stretch of seaside highway, green grass on the side, blue water beyond, beach in the far distance, cloudless sky reflected in the foreground by a shiny car hood. Ahead, a car is approaching the curve with its brake lights on.
Screenshot of a macOS Tahoe error modal: “There are 11 users sharing this computer. If you restart they will be disconnected. Click Restart to disconnect the users and restart the computer.”
A wide shot of the world’s most handsome marketing executive, talking on the phone and using a laptop computer in a bathrobe, on a balcony overlooking San Francisco.
Screenshot of one paragraph of a LinkedIn post: “I used to think it'd be trivial to move all of your computering from your computer over to someone else's computer, but I was a moron. You're converting a strategic input that was a fixed capital asset into a consumption-based variable cost, and that is a big change involving new governance and accountability models and organizing people into new groups, and all of that is very hard for enterprises.”
One paragraph of a LinkedIn post: “I have been reliably informed that all enterprises will embrace flatter structures, broken into functional groups, organized to complement the architecture of their agentic toolchains. I also understand that our workforce will be reskilled so that everyone is a product manager and/or validator crafting prompts by which Darwin Gödel Machine Hyperagents will perform metacognitive self-modification. Just today, I learned that we're going to call these rejiggered enterprises ‘neofirms,’ and somehow keep straight faces. And all of this change will happen within the year, as everyone's HubSpot contract comes up for renewal.”
Screenshot of The Verge’s “Apple 50” game, asking whether I prefer the Apple I or the Original iPhone
Screenshot of three paragraphs of an MS NOW article: “‘[Trump] is getting a little bored with Iran,’ the official said. ‘Not that he regrets it or something — he's just bored and wants to move on.’ “A second White House official who was granted anonymity for the same reason said that Trump has begun to ‘move on’ from the conflict and has started shifting conversations and personal focus toward the economy, domestic issues and the upcoming midterm elections. “The White House's public communications have suggested a similar detachment, presenting the conflict less as an ongoing war with human lives at stake and more as a cultural moment that generates online content.”
Screenshot of a few paragraphs of a LinkedIn post: “These days, everyone has an Innovation Task Force or Disruption Center of Excellence or whatever, empowered to Break Down the Silos. They move fast to ink a deal in only (‘only’) six months, we ring the gong, and I, the marketing guy, elatedly slap the logo on our site and sleep with visions of hashtag#ABM and analyst relations dancing in my head. “But. From the startup’s perspective, POCs don’t actually bring in that much revenue, certainly not what the Board meant when they told us to go big-game hunting. And from the enterprise’s perspective at the end of the POC, well, the vendor is still a startup, and now with six months less runway and all that valuable time lost to the one-off product shims and white-glove integration hand-holding that are intrinsic to the genre. “No Concepts get Proven, is what I’m saying.”
Screenshot of a few paragraphs of an interview transcript on The Verge: “‘Again, this wasn't an attribution. You just made something up and put my name on it. There's no attribution here. This isn't anything I ever said. It's not something I would ever say. I'm not even sure how you would get to the idea that based on my work that I would ever say anything like this. There isn't an attribution here. There's no work that exists that would lead you to this outcome with my name attached to it.’ “‘I'll repeat: The feature was, “Here's a suggestion generated by a specific work from a specific person.” Everything is clearly indicated that it's a suggestion generated from-’ “‘Wait, I'm sorry. You think in my role as editor-in-chief of The Verge and co-host of The Vergecast, I emphasize the importance of crafting compelling headlines that convey urgency?’ “‘I already told you it's a bad feature. That's not what you're questioning.’ “‘You're telling me there's attribution and I'm just wondering what the attribution is.’”
An SF Muni bus wearing an ad wrap for Delve. “Keeping your CISO out of jail.”
Screenshot of a LinkedIn post bearing a photo of a greyhound dog standing on a bed. “It sure is tiring doing all the disruption and digital transformation, but sometimes I reflect on how I succeeded at investing in the world’s best pillows. It’s all about the face-feel. “Power tip: buy six of them, so that every night five of them fall on the floor and you can mutter to yourself about having too many damn pillows. “Like and subscribe for more hashtag#BedLeadership.”
I don't know, man. Forging any documents is a bad look, but these ones were literally about security and data privacy. The fact that when you were asked, can you be trusted?, you responded by frantically splashing together some crude bootlegs is, like, too on the nose to our time. It's because of you unrealistic-growth-at-any-cost yo-yos that our industry has become a chaotic, stressful, and nihilistic place. Everyone's now being told to cut corners, break things, and ship ever flimsier merchandise in pursuit of ever improbable lucre, and it's grinding good people down, and I hate it, very much. I'm not saying that crippling your businesses with years of litigation or throwing all of you dingdongs in jail will actually help anything, but let me have this, as a treat.
Screenshot of two paragraphs of a memorandum endorsement in United States v. Bankman-Fried, 22-cr-0673 (LAK): “The Court of course understands that Ms. Fried is the defendant's mother, was trained and practiced as a lawyer, and has taught at Stanford Law School. Nevertheless, with no disrespect, she lacks standing to file papers or seek relief in this case. Indeed, Bankman-Fried is represented in this matter, to this day, by three members of the Bar who have appeared here and who do have standing to act on his behalf. “It is appropriate also to mention the fact that Ms. Fried's attached letter to the Court bears no indication that it was served on the U.S. Attorney's office, which should have been done if the letter had been appropriate in the first place. Moreover, court staff have advised that Ms. Fried or someone so identifying herself left a voicemail message on the chambers telephone line. The Court does not accept telephone calls from litigants or from members of their families.”
Andy Rooney of “60 Minutes.” Today, making an Andy Rooney reference is in fact, itself, as crabby and anachronistic as Andy Rooney was.
“Successfully shipping any complex product—let alone one with which you think you're going to change the world, you messianic firecracker, you—depends upon a strong culture, intentionally nourished, and defended with discipline against dilution or perversion. My argument here is that I don't think ‘Hurry up and make the Al or I will fire you, and then I'll fire you anyway, lol’ checks the boxes. It's not really a specific enough blueprint for building a whole church, as it were, and it doesn't really nourish the soul.”
A tub of Cascade dishwasher detergent pods sits on a kitchen counter. Literally the world’s sexiest hand model’s finger points at a specific set of the instructions: “Place one pac in the main dispenser & close dispenser door.”
A photo of a wine glass beside an ice bucket taken at a dimly lit restaurant. Overlaid is a Strava workout summary, 4.93 miles run at a 9’39” pace.
“I eventually forgave myself for being a child, but not before I'd thrown away my first website. I vividly see the Zip disk, ‘My first WEBSITE, © Jon Cowperthwait INC.’ in blue Catholic school cursive, but by 8th grade I had hidden it label-side-down so I wouldn't cringe at the thought of invisible table spacers and hand-baked image maps. (8th graders know much more than 7th graders about web design.) When I got a proper manly PowerPC tower in high school, I promptly deleted all of my pre-1995 work product, having read about data retention policies in CIO Magazine. Pour one out.”
Screenshot of an NYT news feed item: “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at a news conference that the disruptions in the strait were ‘something we are dealing with,’ adding: ‘Don't need to worry about it.’ Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the U.S. military was targeting Iran's ability to lay mines in the strait, through which 20 percent of the world's oil normally travels.”
A motorized window shade jerkily descends down a tall window. The vibrations make moire patterns in the shade that are kind of mesmerizing, tbh.
Oh no
Screenshot of a paragraph from a Garbage Day email: “The second Trump Administration, which Musk spent almost $300 million to install, is still inundated with his influence from his time semi-officially running DOGE. And the most obvious sign of that influence is how hard government accounts are trying to troll everyone. They were expecting, and welcoming, the outcry from The Pokémon Company and Ben Stiller for using their work in the pro-war posts. They want the vulgarity to be a show of force, and have explicitly tied memes and arrests together in their agenda. They understand that the US government is a troll it's structurally impossible to stop feeding.”
Screenshot of an excerpt from a LinkedIn post: “ALL OF THAT BEING SAID, there are limits to my optimism. Some days, I read about some rapacious weirdos' new Al product that is so deranged, so bereft of purpose, that so plainly exposes its creators' sociopathy, that I'm not sustained by the promise of next year's information utopia or whatever. I forget everything I've just written up there, because it's pushed out of my brain by an all-consuming rage. “What those talented engineers could have built instead! What those GPUs could GPU instead! But I'm not mad just because there is a dumb thing—I am mad because the gravity of its stupidity is so strong that it will pull all of us into it, in a cosmic black hole of bullshit. Al discourse is already muddied to the point of froth, drowning out intelligent conversations that need to happen. At the very least, this distracts us, and it might possibly drive us insane. “IP laws need modernizing, fair use should be expanded, and I do love my sharing, but *not like this, you fools.*”
Screenshot of an error message generated by Mail on an iPhone 17 Pro running iOS 26.3.1: “Cannot Get Mail “The mail server ‘imap.gmail.com’ is not responding. Verify that you have entered the correct account info in Mail settings. “Server code ‘ALERT’, server message “Too many simultaneous connections. (Failure)’. “OK”