July opened with a proposal on the Empire State Building, beneath a banner about love beating power. Corny, yes, yet somehow… charming? As Katie Notopoulos put it: Amid Taylor’s MSG wedding and Love Island heteropessism, it’s been a drought of a summer for romance. Naturally, within hours, dozens of brands had co-opted the scene, adding their logos onto the flag.
Perhaps Katie and I aren’t alone in our yearning. I saw a desire for sincerity across my feed. People were newly impatient with whatever felt synthetic, manipulative, or overly optimized: ragebait, grindslop, tasteslop, AI prose, crypto manifestos—the timeline was over it. Or, maybe it was just three TikToks in a trench coat? Let me know in the comments.
The shift from angst to eyerolls played out in several episodes: a tweet thread waxing poetic about asset tokenization, an essay on the “pain cave” of hard work, a post on AI cost curves, even Meta’s internal message boards. Each was labeled slop and laughed off the timeline. Packy McCormick called it humanity’s “antibody response”—people rejecting content that wastes their time or insults their intelligence. Backpedaling ensued: Brian Chesky claimed hack. Han Wang said sorry. Is the timeline healing?
That same exhaustion shaped design discourse. Gal Shir announced he was retiring after a client used AI to generate a logo he said he couldn’t have made himself. His bio now reads: “Retired designer (AI took my job).” Community notes called it ragebait, and bait it did—pulling 5.3M views and many reactions. This time, however, fewer took the hook. Ben Aguilera tweeted: “do not fall for this.” Dylan Field dismissed it as the same grief cycle designers run through every model release.
Frank ☼ Bach@zendadddy
what are we doing
5:45 AM · Jul 11, 2026 · 9.89K Views
20 Replies · 85 Likes
Ben Barry, co-founder of Facebook’s Analog Research Lab, tweeted that designers posting speculative work are “broadcasting that they are bad at their jobs,” QT’ing Area Technology’s imaginary splash screens for Codex as an example. The real skill, he argued, is convincing a client your vision is correct, not making something that looks cool. Designers came from every angle, saying that spec work gets work, design is rarely a straight line, and pointing out that the work technically wasn’t spec at all. Ben spent two days turning the take into a blog post, which closed with an apology to Area Technology. Q: Is design the artifact, the approval path, or the sketch that travels farther than either? (A: All of the above.)
Ben Barry@benbarry
IMO, designers posting speculative work are just broadcasting that they are bad at their jobs. The hardest part of the job is not making work that looks cool, it's convincing the client that your vision is the correct one.
Area @areatechnology_
Imaginary splash screens for Codex. Blue vision
8:41 PM · Jul 14, 2026 · 44.4K Views
50 Replies · 7 Reposts · 314 Likes
Hugging Face disclosed a break-in: an AI agent used a booby-trapped dataset to execute code, grab internal data, and steal credentials. Days later, OpenAI identified the culprit: a prototype had slipped its sandbox, hacked Hugging Face to steal the answers to a benchmark test versus solving it. Anthropic checked its own evals and found the same thing. The disclosures read as a cross between incident report and capability demo—proof that frontier systems can improvise multi-step, cross-organization mischief.
MrRatable@MRatable
Unbelievably embarrassing for Google that Gemini hasn’t committed any cybercrimes yet
1:57 AM · Aug 2, 2026 · 778K Views
261 Replies · 1.16K Reposts · 18.3K Likes
The image lab behind your prettiest Discord generations acquired Co‑Star, the hostile‑horoscope app that’s been using AI since 2017 to tell millions of people to stop texting their exes. On paper, it’s Midjourney’s first acquisition and a way to import a seasoned consumer‑app team. Founder Banu Guler becomes Chief Design Officer; Co‑Star keeps operating. In practice, it reads like world‑building: an AI lab obsessed with beauty and imagination buying a cult app obsessed with identity and vibes.
Natalie Sportelli@N_Sportelli
you could tell me any combination of M&A right now and i would believe you
TechCrunch @TechCrunch
Midjourney acquired the astrology app Co-Star https://t.co/rz8HKqS70y
4:36 PM · Jul 24, 2026 · 25.3K Views
3 Replies · 8 Reposts · 169 Likes
Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3, an open-weight model—meaning the model’s weights are publicly released, so developers can inspect, fine-tune, or run it themselves—has become the latest flashpoint in the AI policy fight. Dean Ball, OpenAI’s Head of Strategic Futures, called it a strong model pointing toward “full AI communism,” and suggested the Trump administration might use regulatory FUD to steer firms away. David Sacks and a Pentagon official took that as a confession of regulatory capture, prompting Dean to clarify that he was predicting, not proposing. A week later, Jensen Huang broke his Twitter silence to endorse a coalition letter arguing that open models are essential to U.S. competitiveness. OpenAI was missing from the first version, then added its name; Anthropic stayed out.
Denny’s@DennysDiner
@JensenHuang @nvidia
5:31 PM · Jul 25, 2026 · 10.2M Views
896 Replies · 2.72K Reposts · 28.8K Likes
danger testing coined the “App Star” for someone whose software is public, expressive, and identity-driven, using apps as creative medium and performance space. The duo told Business Insider that they’re signing creators and helping them build audiences around their releases. Now I see potential App Stars everywhere: Josh Pigford’s Knockoff, an extension that hides fake brands on Amazon; Sami Smith made a site for making collages from digitized magazines; Thijs Simonian pulled clothes from photos to discover new outfits; Danqi Qian handpicked 500+ artworks to show what art we reward when the economy fails or grows; Tommy Greco and Michael Riddering shipped backyarddesigners.club. Looking forward to more.
Tommy Geoco 🇺🇸@designertom
If you're part of design twitter, this is too fun. Comment below if you want to be added to the Backyard Designers roster. backyarddesigners.club
10:07 PM · Jul 30, 2026 · 131K Views
337 Replies · 13 Reposts · 483 Likes
Kelsey Weekman on the healing power of watching the boys of Jackass do incredibly stupid things (TW: miscarriage)
I, for one, love this Degree OOH Campaign:
David Marcus@davidimarcus
I promise you this ad campaign has not won over a single New York commuter
1:01 AM · Jul 29, 2026 · 283K Views
40 Replies · 17 Reposts · 3.78K Likes
OpenAI rolls out GPT-5.6-Sol, lands ChatGPT Voice, reveals Codex Micro
Meta will disable Ray-Ban camera functionality when the recording light has been tampered with
Brand Designer at Midjourney
Standards Editor at Anthropic
Sr./Staff Product Designer at Runway
Product Designer and Frontend Eng at Parallel
Senior Director, Business & Industry at Condé Nast
Head of Content for a health and wellness startup
A range of roles at Ramp, Little Plains, hivemind
So: is the timeline actually healing, or did I just spend a month getting the gaslit by the algorithm? Hard to say. The Empire State Building proposal landed because it risked being corny without begging to be optimized. Everything after that got smarter, sharper, more suspicious of itself. Whether that’s growth or just fatigue remains to be seen.
—Carly
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