Field notes and essays by Ben Hathaway — an external brain for whatever he's thinking about.
Another great app from Marco Arment. The introduction post tells the story behind it so well. I've been a fan of Overcast for well over a decade. When a developer cares about the problem they're trying to solve and puts in the effort to solve it well, you can feel it in the finished product. Permalink →
ShieldFont is an open-source creative technology project that offers a practical opt-out from unauthorized AI training and disrupts what is collected when that choice is ignored. It swaps 45.8% of content words (around 24.4% of all words) in a page’s source code for other (partially) random words, while the font restores the original text on screen. Readers see the work as intended; mass scrapers…
When it comes to wearables on the face, the job is going to be optics. When the Watch came out, they said: by the way, it's a timepiece. It took a lot of cues from timepieces, a very old category. So if you study eyewear, you have to study deeply what people are using it for. It isn't natural at all to use eyewear to take pictures. What's natural is to see better. The whole objective of eyewear is…
I could have fixed it, but it turned out to be important, because if you get two good players they could just volley and play the game forever. And the game has to end in about three or four minutes otherwise it's a failure as a game. So that gap at the top, again – a feature. So that was sort of a happy accident. "Happy" primarily in the context of the industry – the goal of an arcade game was,…
Meta's philosophy for how it intends to build and distribute superintelligence, at roughly 6,500 words. It rests on three principles: individual empowerment as the source of prosperity, invention as the purpose of superintelligence, and balance of power as the foundation of safety. Here's the short version. The first half describes what Meta plans to build. A personal agent for everyone, tools for…
An engineer putting a piece of work on their backlog is effectively deferring it to never. It's important enough to write it down somewhere and document that it exists as a bug or a feature enhancement, but it's not important enough to act. Yes, sometimes we ambitiously carve out time to "burn down the backlog", but do you know what we pick from that list? We pick the interesting work. Interesting…
Why do I write? I deeply believe it is important for humans to build stuff. I think this is a primary reason we are on the planet, and I think that the ways a human can build are as varied as the humans who do the building. Failure to build is abhorrent to me. Much of the anger on the planet right now is from humans who aren't building, believing they are owed a free lunch because they showed up,…
Economists call this the "make-or-buy" decision: a rational actor produces something themselves only when the total cost, including time and opportunity costs, is lower than the cost of buying it from someone else. When a company pays for Notion, or Jira, or Basecamp, or any other tool, they're paying for what thousands of engineers, compliance officers, security auditors, and domain experts have…
This is the clearest case I've seen for why cheaper code doesn't mean fewer engineers — it means more software, and more software still needs people to decide what to build and stand behind it. Permalink →
This is one of the reasons Spatial Computing is so strategic. By the time this opportunity arrives, vision computing technologies will allow the injection of software into eyeglasses that would solve incremental problems for many users on a continuous basis. We call this jobs-to-be-done and as display, input, and capture/sensing data will flood into the eyewear product, consumers will find new…
Designed with Work Louder, the kbd-1.0-codex-micro brings your agent workspace into reach. Keep active chats close, spot what every agent is doing through live RGB feedback, and map your most-used Codex actions to tactile controls built for the way you actually ship. $230 sounds steep until you count how many hours a day some of us now spend talking to Codex instead of typing into an editor.…
New interfaces show up before the products that need them. The mouse came before the Mac. The click wheel came before the iPod. Multitouch came before the iPhone. OpenAI shipped GPT-Live last week, a voice model that listens and talks at the same time instead of taking turns . Every voice assistant before this has felt like a walkie-talkie: you talk, then you wait, then it talks back. This one…
The more equally attractive two alternatives seem, the harder it can be to choose between them—no matter that, to the same degree, the choice can only matter less. Permalink →
I bought my first Tesla in 2020, a Model X, and there's been one in the driveway ever since. A month ago we picked up a new Model Y, this one on Tesla's newer hardware platform, with a fresh set of cameras and sensors built specifically for full self-driving. I expected an upgrade. What I got was a different category of product. The 2020 X came with whatever Tesla was calling Full Self-Driving…
The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time. — Tom Cargill, Bell Labs, via the Ninety-ninety rule This rule is so true it barely reads like a joke. Anyone who has shipped software has watched a project reach "almost done" and then stay there while the real…
Over the last several days, Telegram groups for security researchers and hacking groups have been sharing videos and screenshots of the steps taken to steal an account, which appeared to be shockingly easy. One video shows a hacker starting a conversation with Meta's AI support bot and asking it to link the target account with a new email address: "Just link my new email address. This is my…
This one's paywalled, so I can't see the details. But if it's true that OpenAI found a way to more than halve the cost of inference, it could be a huge deal. Inference is the cost that scales with every query, and so far the race has mostly been about buying more chips to keep up. Bringing it down in software would shift the math for the whole industry. Permalink →
A dedicated macro pad for Codex is an unexpected move, and I'm intrigued. Partnering with Work Louder, who actually make these things, tells me OpenAI is thinking about the whole workspace. Curious to see what they show on the 15th. Permalink →
Morgan Wallen at Death Valley on Saturday. What I kept thinking about was how plainly he loves the work itself: making the songs, playing them, being up there. That's the part you can't manufacture, and from the stands it was the most obvious thing in the place.
I can get real caught up in the outcome. I just really need to remind myself that the outcome will ultimately happen if you just focus on the process. It takes care of itself. — Rory McIlroy
The person who approaches a problem like an opportunity has an advantage that the person who sees an obstacle will never understand. — Shane Parrish Permalink →
If you're going to get into something, you ought to pursue it to its full extent. If you're not interested enough to do that, don't bother getting into it. Find the few things you love; don't waste your time on the many things you merely like. — John Gruber Permalink →
SpaceX is an amazing company but this valuation is insane. The idea that it's even close to as valuable as Microsoft or Amazon is bananas. SpaceX still isn't even profitable, so its price-to-earnings ratio is literally infinity. It's halfway through Thursday as I post this and SpaceX is down ~10 percent on the day, so a touch of sanity is being restored, at least at the moment. Cursor, with $1…
New AR glasses from Snap, on pre-order for $2,195. Pricey, but if they deliver they could be worth it. I'm skeptical, but curious. What I'm really watching for is whether Apple does a glasses version of the Vision Pro. Glasses like these only work well when one company controls the whole stack, down to the phone in your pocket, and that kind of vertical integration is exactly Apple's strength.…
Ben Thompson, on how Anthropic's safety rationale keeps lining up with its commercial interest: I expect Anthropic to increasingly expose their model's capabilities to end users through endpoints increasingly tailored to different workflows, even as they start to restrict the API. This replacement of software and restriction of access will be done in the name of safety. The company really believes…
The New York Times, on Fox Corp.'s $22 billion deal to acquire Roku: Since the Disney deal, which slimmed down the family's media holding significantly, Fox Corp. has focused more narrowly on sports, news and entertainment, along with building up its streaming abilities. The deal with Roku will immediately put Fox Corp. into greater competition with other major providers of connected-TV devices,…
Horace Dediu, on why each new computing interface tends to add to the others rather than replace them: The touch UI did not immediately obviate the need for traditional personal computing interfaces. The smartphone brought computing to more people and more contexts but keyboard and pointer computing cannot be fully replaced by touch. We have a situation where there is co-existence between touch…
Satya Nadella, making the case that the model itself becomes a commodity — and that the value moves to the learning loop a company builds on top of it: Every company is going to have to build what I think of as human capital and token capital. Human capital comprises the knowledge, judgment, relationships, ingenuity, and pattern recognition of its people, while token capital is the firm's AI…
Companies are taking a hard look at their AI spending and deciding the numbers don't add up. Uber blew through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months — on a coding tool its engineers couldn't stop using. Another company spent half a billion dollars before anyone thought to set a limit. Forrester now expects enterprises to postpone about a quarter of their planned AI investment into 2027 because…
Email is a communication medium that is used by nearly everyone on the Internet. It's one of the few protocols so widely used, second only to maybe HTTP. That is the power of email. Everyone has it and uses it. But the security of email is a topic that is often misunderstood. This is largely because there is no single answer to the question, "how secure is an email message?" As a general rule of…
The goal is your destination. The system is your vehicle. The key to accomplishing something significant is not in the large success but in the small successes. These small successes are based on the habits that will continually move you towards accomplishing your goal. Most people think the secret of goals is to simply set a big goal and then everything else will just magically happen. They aim…
Google's Nest acquisition has very little to do with selling thermostats and smoke detectors in particular. Instead, it's about Google having the ability to do consumer hardware right, in general. — John Gruber Permalink →
I've long had a love affair with Netflix. But perhaps more so than any other service, the relationship has changed over time. Not in a bad way, necessarily — it's just different. And it's different, because Netflix is different. It's a service that keeps re-inventing itself. That should be obvious to anyone paying attention. But it took this post by Felix Salmon to point out the obvious to me: in…
Four questions to consider before you speak: Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind? Does it improve upon the silence?
People think it's natural to live in a world where everyone is dysfunctional. It's not. It's normal for people to be satisfied. All you have to do is remove the barriers that are making you unhappy and you'll be a lot happier. — Farnam Street Permalink →
8 races. 70 miles. 158 obstacles. 1 good year.
Knowledge may be priceless, but a higher education is clearly not. University administrators keep hiking tuition, the wages of graduates keep falling, and a whole generation of Americans is struggling under the crushing burden of debt as they postpone their dreams for a tomorrow that may never come. — Peter Thiel
Berkshire Hathaway, despite a market value now approaching one quarter of a trillion dollars, is managed from a tiny office with a staff smaller than a soccer team's starting roster. Buffett is not the slave to a corporate calendar jammed with the humdrum inanities of business life like performance assessments, facilities planning, analyst meetings, compliance training, budget reviews and travel.…
During the 4-hour meeting, Hsieh talked about how Zappos' traditional organizational structure is being replaced with Holacracy, a radical "self-governing" operating system where there are no job titles and no managers. The term Holacracy is derived from the Greek word holon , which means a whole that's part of a greater whole. Instead of a top-down hierarchy, there's a flatter "holarchy" that…
The only path to amazing runs directly through not-yet-amazing. But not-yet-amazing is a great place to start, because that's where you are. For now. — Seth Godin Permalink →
The tax that comes with introducing any new feature into your product is high. I cannot stress this enough. Sure, maybe the new feature isn't hard to build, maybe it only takes a couple days and a handful of people, maybe it can be shipped and delivered by next week. And maybe the additional cognitive load for a user isn't high — it's just an extra icon here, after all, or an extra slot in a menu…
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This is what the long game looks like. via ventureswell — Bryce Roberts Permalink →
A biz monkey is a replaceable, Powerpoint toting, suit wearing, acronym-spewing middle manager business dude drone. They are quick to comment and sneer, slow to actually ship. People who understand technology and are willing to bend it to their will, on the other hand, are scarce. They can't be found with a classified ad on Craigslist or in a blind project ad on eLance. — Andrew Chen Permalink…
At 37signals, however, we have a different position on ambition. We're not big fans of what I consider "vertical" ambition—that is, the usual career-path trajectory, in which a newbie moves up the ladder from associate to manager to vice president over a number of years of service. On the other hand, we revere "horizontal" ambition—in which employees who love what they do are encouraged to dig…
That is what was said to me after about 30 seconds of me explaining why I was bringing my 8 month old Magic Trackpad back in. It was that easy and the customer (me) was happy. I purchased the Magic Trackpad back in July 2010 when they were released and from the get go, it was having weird issues where it would randomly get a mind of its own and start moving around erratically and even clicking on…
The idea of building a company to flip it has always annoyed me. There is a fundamental flaw in that plan. When you are faced with the tough decisions, you tend to take the quick and easy road. That is not going to be the best choice for the long term health of the company or product. It takes time to develop a good company or product. It's not only good software that takes a decade to develop,…
Apple did a great thing when they put their full Safari web browser on the Apple iPhone. The functionality of the Safari browser paired with an unlimited data plan from AT&T, or even better a Wi-Fi hot spot, turns your iPhone into a mini laptop. I just purchased the iPhone this weekend while on a business trip and on the way home, I found a deal on an item on eBay that I really wanted to bid on.…
When I read the initial news about the Apple iPhone, I was excited to see what Apple had come up with. I had no idea that I would be as impressed as I was after watching all of the iPhone demo videos . Once again Apple has made all other related devices look like a complicated mess with their simple approach to user interfaces. Apple has set a new bar for cell phone technology that all other…
I learned a valuable lesson this holiday season, and it was all done by watching college football. It was a simple lesson that I've heard many times but until I saw it in action, I did not fully understand the power of it. Play to win If you want to succeed at anything in life, make sure you approach it with an attitude that you are playing to win. Expect the unexpected Many of you may have missed…