Recent content on Dan Kim
This take by M.G. Siegler on the Google event is dead on. They’re so weird and awkward! 
 
 It’s a fucking weird strategy for a product unveiling! 
 I would like to give Google credit for trying something different. This is not an Apple keynote. But I gave them credit for that last year. It didn’t work, yet they doubled down. Again, Noah is an upgrade over Fallon, but…
Legit impressed by Kagi Assistant . It always does a web search and analyzes that first, meaning it doesn’t just rely on years old training data like a lot of other shit on the market. There’s also something about how it presents information – structure, word choice, relative brevity – that makes it more understandable and clicks better. It also defaults to chat being deleted after 24…
Finally got Pi-hole running in front of my network and good lord it’s wild/frustrating to see all the garbage traffic 2026 devices and software send. Will need to tweak over time, but right now over the first 12 hours 17% of traffic being blocked as garbage. 
 Particularly problematic are, of course, IoT devices. I have them on a separate network and had intended to block liberally but never…
Really interesting and relatable post , with stories that unfortunately sound eerily familiar. I really appreciate when folks like Brett take a principled stance on AI – it’s incredibly hard to publicly go against the grain, and while it’s probably never going away, we need strong counter-opinions like this to balance out the ridiculous hype. Real world experiences that are relatable…
This is one of those posts 1) you must read and 2) it’s hard to pull out any individual quotes because the whole thing is so good. Go read it, but here’s a taste: 
 
 But at some point, you need to bring your actual functioning human brain back to the occasion, and think for a moment about what you’re putting into the world. 
 When you outsource your writing, you…
https://bubbles.town is kinda interesting! Upvoting of smaller, independent writing, so like HN/Reddit but not shitty. Automatically driven by RSS feeds and voting done with your Fedi account. Haven’t used it enough yet to determine overall quality, but promising idea. I only found out about it because somehow one of my random posts made it on there and someone chatted me up about it.
Finally setup an OTA antenna in my attic. Channels is a key part of that setup, and it’s seriously great. It’s serves as the UI and DVR for watching/recording live TV and does it all so well. Commercial skipping, 30 second fast forward, season passes, clients for every platform. It’s basically like a fast, modern, reliable version of what TiVo used to be, which is some of the highest praise I can…
You can keep saying “forward deployed engineer” all you want, but we all know a client-site consultant when we see it. Legit hilarious how hard tech bros try to make their most basic jobs from the 90s sound cool. “If we rename it to sound like a military position, it’ll sound so hardcore!” Not so hilarious is how gullible execs are eating this shit up.
Been using Kagi for search now for a couple weeks and there’s no going back to Google. Clean results, no bullshit ads everywhere, no pushing their properties like images and YouTube, no AI summaries (they do have a clever thing where if you add a “?” at the end of a query it will summarize for you). Just real, actual search results that link to real, actual websites. What a concept.
Bought an app because on paper it had all the features I wanted. Opened it and key areas didn’t work. Sloppy, obvious use of non-standard (e.g., AI generated) UI. Website looked like a Claude artifact. 1.0 was released a few weeks ago and 2.0 was magically finished in the last week. The developer is a “creative professional”. 
 I don’t care about the $5 but having to trudge through a pile of…
Literally every day I’m trying to square the circle of using an LLM. I’m not going to bullshit/lie and say I don’t use them, because I do. I avoid using it for actually important stuff (work or life stuff that I need to understand, learn, know, repeat, and care about), but there are admittedly scenarios where something I’m researching benefits from having more specific…
Man I love this song. This is the closest song I’ve heard to “early Weezer” maybe ever, certainly since the Green Album. New album has had three singles so far and it’s shaping up to be one of their best in while. =w= 🤘 
 https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj4AaLSoric
The phrase “ big tent ” is a new red flag phrase for me. Hearing CEO types bandy it around more and more under the guise of “we welcome everyone!” But what they’re really saying is “we are totally ok bending whatever principles we used to have to get more users, especially right wing asshole users!”
Saw a dude proclaim that xitter was “good again” so yeah I’m gonna go ahead and stop paying for your app now. There is no world where we can disagree that hard on the word “good” and I can support any version of your future work. 🚮
I kinda like this framing of how LLMs can do work for you, but it most definitely can’t exercise for you. And that distinction matters, big time. 
 It ignores on all the ethical/environmental/worldly concerns and accepts them as givens so that’s not great, but if we can get folks to use it less and avoid brain rot, it’s still a step in the right direction? 
 
 At work, if your job is…
I lost my Kobo Libra 2 , one of my favorite devices ever, on a flight a couple months back and couldn’t find a reasonably priced replacement (they don’t make it anymore). 
 So as you do when you’re old, cheap, and lazy, I started reading some paper books I had backlogged and wow, I am throughly loving reading on paper again. Reading paper books somehow broke bad ebook habits I built up over…
So many good points in this post so I’d encourage you to read the whole thing (it’s long, but worth it!). But in case you don’t have time, here are just a few of the best bits that stuck out to me: 
 
 People almost roll their eyes when you bring this up, but every major provider of Large Language Model services is currently embroiled in enormous lawsuits involving…
Really enjoyed the book “ Scythe ”, and this passage stuck out as particularly relevant (Thunderhead is an all knowing AI in the book). 
 
 …Thunderhead would invariably intrude…Sometimes she would let Thunderhead help her, other times she enjoyed searching alone. But since becoming a scythe’s apprentice, the Thunderhead had gone disturbingly mute, as if it were nothing…

 Look up the owner, not the name. The name is the cheapest part of the company to preserve. If the ownership trail ends at a private equity firm or a licensing group, assume the product and the reputation are no longer aligned. 
 
 This is a good one , because in the kitchen you should have stuff that lasts basically a lifetime. It’s a long, interesting essay and the villains…
I remain so fascinated/appalled by that design director dude that left Apple who was like “yes yes, absolutely fuck yes that’s exactly what I want it to look like!!!” 

For the most part Claude artifacts are an abomination and just another type of AI generated slop. They’re shiny and verbose so they look impressive, but they’re usually just a polished turd that tries to hide the fact that the author didn’t actually think through or write anything meaningful. Pure volume and vibes over substance.

 I ended up discovering a whole bunch of music that way. I downloaded a whole bunch of albums that I never had the opportunity to try because every album was an 18 dollar investment. That kind of radicalized me, and I became a fan of so much more music. 
 
 An absolutely fascinating read and extremely relatable.
“Worse on Purpose” is a truly fascinating site . I’m close enough to tech to understand how/why software has been enshittified, but I’ve long wondered why consumer brands seem to be getting worse. Feels like it’s commonly a slow burn and almost imperceptible over time, but eventually I’m like “why does this brand that used to be good (or at least fine)…
I’ve found some genuinely interesting people and topics to follow on Mastodon that I doubt I ever would have found on other networks. I dunno if it’s just a bias toward like minded folks or the nature of the Fediverse in general, but it’s been such a pleasant, calm way to stay connected. 💜🐘
Took me an embarrassingly long time to start using/paying for Kagi , but now that I’m here it’s sooooo nice not seeing Google shit jammed into every corner of a simple search results page.
This , so much. 
 
 Something seems to be lost on my peers today: it’s still easy to not use AI . The food we eat, clothes we wear, and every electronic device we touch may embody innumerable injuries to the world, and all this is inescapable. Eschewing AI is one thing that we can actually do to live out ethics that affirm values of human and environmental rights. It’s almost a gift! Just…
This has already been making the rounds but allow me to add my favorite part that I actually lol’d at… 
 
 It turns out that chatbots are good at chat. It claimed to have implemented authentication. Actually, it had basically written: 
 function authenticate(user: string): bool {
return true;
} 
 I am fairly sure this is not compliant with the WebAuthN/Passkeys…
LinkedIn is the worst. Just rage wiped all my activity there. 
 There’s a semi-subtle undercurrent of toxicity there that’s easy to miss if you’re not looking for it (humble brags, hype trains, AI bullshit among them). They interleave some nice stuff, like your friends’ real accomplishments, to keep you hooked. But for the most part the content just eats away at your brain and you kinda don’t…
I wrote a document today. I used my brain and no LLM was consulted. It took me 10 minutes to write and it’s 3/4 of a page long, yet it has all the basic info we need to get started. I’ll be able to reason about it, reference it, and talk about it succinctly without issue BECAUSE I WROTE IT.

 When asked how Meta is tackling these privacy controversies, a spokesperson for the company told Vogue Business: “We have teams dedicated to limiting and combating misuse, but as with any technology, the onus is ultimately on the individual to not actively exploit it.” 
 
 What an absolute load of horseshit to push responsibility back onto consumers . They’re your creation, jerks!
Important stuff ! 
 tl;dr: you might be an excellent land athlete or even a great pool swimmer, but swimming in the ocean or a lake is very different and much harder than you think. 
 2026 so far: 30 deaths, 20,000 rescues. Be careful out there, friends.
I talk about a bunch of things here with my good pal Huyen (Kotlin Multiplatform, Android, the web) but arguably the most important thing we chatted about was the role of AI/LLMs, how it’s a tool and should be treated as such, and why the human side of engineering still matters the most. 
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTNEs3EUSJo&t=682s
It’s true at work as much as it is at home – model the behavior you want to see more of, fight for what you believe in, and hope for the best. ✊
Easy way to sniff out a bad leader: they use “I” language for accomplishments and achievements and “we” language for accountability and unfavorable outcomes. Literally the opposite of what you’re supposed to do and such an obvious, blatant red flag.
People and the culture they build are your irreplaceable competitive advantages, period. If you’re so concerned about building a “moat”, that’s what you invest in.
When it comes to managing people (and by association, the success of your team), your most valuable currency is trust. You get a little “starter money” at the beginning, but from that point on it’s a full time job to earn more of it. It takes time and a concerted effort, but it’s one of the most important assets you can develop as a leader. If people trust you, you can get through some seriously…
I cannot overstate how important it’s been in my life to build friendships at work and in developer communities. I don’t mean just lightly getting to know colleagues, I mean real, actual friendships. More than anything else, those are the single most valuable thing I’ve carried forward from any job or conference. 💙
This post by Jonas Downey is a must read. He talks about all the feelings of being in tech right now with AI bearing down on us. But most importantly, he leaves us with a sense of hope and a reminder about our responsibilities. We, the humans, can absolutely force change and course correct this largely unprincipled direction. We just have to do the work (as always). 
 
 Let’s…
I’ve already had a long, fruitful career. I’d like to keep it going, but ultimately I’m not here to carve out more for myself. I’m here to help make it right for the folks coming up.
Sure I totally believe that white paper you wrote about AI adoption and related concerns, company that sells products and services that help with AI adoption and related concerns.
You should read this . Adam might be one of the few brave enough to say it, but everyone except hype bros is feeling it. 
 
 These LLMs are prediction machines. They are text generators that are ultimately a bunch of fancy statistics, trained on the years and years of dedication by brave engineers willing to learn and build in the open. Building in the open meant we were not gatekeeping…
A VC NFT/crypto bro said he “100% disagreed” with one of my posts that was critical of blindly following the AI hype. I for one am shocked.
This piece from Anil Dash remains my absolute favorite take on AI. It’s fair and pragmatic, and in a word, NORMAL. I think I read it every day and twice on days when I feel like I’m losing my mind amongst the AI hype. 
 
 Technologies like LLMs have utility, but the absurd way they’ve been over-hyped, the fact they’re being forced on everyone, and the insistence on…
VC guy who has never written a line of code in his life posting about how engineers are definitively the bottleneck and how AI is the answer. Absolutely blows my mind how people just talk out their ass regularly for LinkedIn claps.
I think a lot of times people mistake information for culture. Sending a bot off to summarize Slack for you can get you a lot of data, but it certainly doesn’t get you any closer to understanding your people. And in any successful organization, the people are everything . 
 No LLM is going to be able to read tone with your judgement and context, no matter how many instructions you feed it.…
A little while back I tried fully embracing the “I want it my way and I want it now!” AI mindset just to see what would happen. I wanted to see first hand if any of the hype held (spoiler: it didn’t), so I slapped together a handful of apps with LLMs to fulfill what I considered to be, at the time, niche needs that other apps didn’t do perfectly for me.
People are going to start running with this idea that 1:1s aren’t needed now because AI Jensen says so . Folks who are already weak leaders will buy into this as an excuse to cancel all their 1:1s, but that would expose a fundamental misunderstanding about what they’re for. 
 1:1s are NOT for you, they’re for your direct reports. It’s a chance for them to get guidance and help. To get ideas.…
Vibe coding is the equivalent of me sketching a drawing of my dream car, it materializing in front of me, and then proclaiming “I MADE A CAR IT’S 80% DONE”. And then the first time I drove it the wheels would fall off, the engine would explode, and I would drive off a cliff. Seems fine.
My LinkedIn timeline today: 
 
 The Engineering Manager role is dead 
 Wake up call for engineers — clean code doesn’t matter, only results 
 
 Gonna be fun to come back to those posts in a couple years. 🚮
I can’t believe I have to say this, but just because some dude says they shipped something in a week using AI doesn’t make it true (or good).