Mandy Brown: To reduce reading to the practice of empathy is to divorce it of its real power and pleasure: to enjoy the fruits of another person’s creative effort, to think with the writer and their characters, not becoming them, but becoming more fully yourself. If reading matters deeply, then what of writing? Reading helps you think alongside someone else. Writing helps you think alongside your…
Paul Ford on the Aboard podcast, speaking on the state of the software industry, how projects get funded, and how to think about OpenAI and Anthropic: What it feels now is two or three monoliths have showed up, and everyone is sort of like in [ 2001: A Space Odyssey ], just a monkey looking up worshiping them. And the VCs are like, “If you worship the obelisk hard enough, we will give you…
John Gruber: imagine [your readers are] there. They will be if you keep it up. That’s one of my bits of advice to new bloggers: I firmly believe all blogs eventually get the audience they deserve, if they keep going. Write for the audience you want, not the audience you have. 🔗
Marcin Wichary: Arguments for systemic completeness are always going to be easier to make than arguments for thoughtful simplicity. Which is the difference between an implementation and a product. 🔗
Matthew Green: Even if models are good at producing real results, they’re much better at producing results that look real but are misleading. Something that looks real, but isn’t quite? We have a word for that: artificial. Artificial intelligence produces artificial output. Seeds after its own kind. This can be enormously frustrating, and often means that human attention is more necessary than…
Jason Fried: The speed at which a product is developed doesn't inherently make the product better or worse. The number of commits doesn't make the product better or worse. The number of people or agents working on it doesn't make it better or worse. The number of hours you’re pouring into it doesn’t make it better or worse. Working on a weekend, or late into the evening, doesn’t make it better or…
Tom MacWright: the norms of publishing open source software and publishing writing on the web were mostly community and interpersonal norms, not legal or technical ones. Before, you could rip off someone's code, but you'd be an asshole for doing it and the community would judge you [...] Now there just isn't a way to opt out. Whatever software you publish will be cloned and whatever you write on…
Side note here from Dave Rupert: We’ve made it so damn complex to make a webpage, no wonder AI is so popular. Well, well, well, if it isn’t the consequences of our own actions. (See also: the overly-prescriptive nature of many design systems begs to be automated with AI. We replace ourselves when we remove freedom for judgement.) 🔗
Marcin Wichary: digital interfaces are pretty much all infinitely extensible. There will always be a way to add one more button, one more link, one more setting, one more ad. “Just one more, bro. I promise!” Here’s my challenge nobody will accept: everyone should start writing on their company blogs about all the things they didn’t ship, instead of the things they did ship. Be as proud of the “No”…
Mass-Driver: A tool that shields us from the friction of the work is compelling, but if we don’t experience the friction, we will never change the work. Friction can be a good thing. 🔗
John Gruber: The Codex app is clearly capable of amazing things. But the reason that there are a billion users of ChatGPT but only a few million users of Codex — by OpenAI’s own accounting — is because ChatGPT is simple and focused and based on a single coherent concept: chat. The frustration of the eggheads now running product at OpenAI is obvious: how come these hundreds of millions of morons…
Bryan Cantrill talks principles and their value. His analogy to the United States constitution was quite inspiring — things we may not be living up to, but we aspire to. Later on in the talk Bryan (a former employee at Sun) quotes Scott McNealy (former CEO at Sun) who is reflecting on his time at the company: Nearly three decades of competing without a notable incident of our folks going off…
Tammy Everts: [Core Web Vitals] is based on aggregated data across millions of sites. It tells you what’s fast in general. It knows nothing about your users, your product, or your business. This article is a spit in the face of the well-worn argument: “Well if it’s good enough for Google, it’s good enough for us.” you should never assume that meeting external thresholds is actually helping your…
Michael Lynch: The first time I saw Michelangelo’s David in person, I wept. Never in my life have I witnessed a more beautiful piece of content […] My awe only grew when I noticed the museum gift shop converting 60% of its traffic, numbers that would make any content creator salivate. Does that verbiage resonate with your mindset? When I describe website visitors as “readers,” it reminds me that…
Eden Dasilva quoting Rob Sheridan on where music stands today: There’s this whole world where people exist just to show up in the middle and take a big chunk of the money from something they had no part in creating […] there’s too many examples being dangled in front of our face of how much money is being funneled away to billionaires and corporations, and artists always come last. That’s my…
Bryan Braun quoting James Clear: You are not your grand plans. You are your daily patterns. It’s not what you say, it’s what you do. Bryan: Your character is the result of your actual sacrifices—for others, for your integrity, and for the common good—not your generous aspirations. It’s also good to be generous to yourself: Sometimes I’m winning and sometimes I’m losing, but I’m always fighting,…
Philosopher and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist: The wise thing in life is to slow down and make space for what appears unproductive but is the only productive time — which is when you are receptive, where things can germinate, where something can call to you and you can answer. 🔗
Marcin Wichary: I think it’s fair to look at Creator Studio specifically, and fear Apple is following in Microsoft’s and especially Adobe’s unforgivable footsteps in prioritizing abstract corporate identity goals over both functional and visual aspects of app iconography. You see this everywhere: corporate goals > end user considerations. 🔗
John Gruber: It’s like Apple decided every single one of its own apps must wear a stupid-looking hat, and they put those stupid-looking hats on third-party apps too, whether the developers of those apps want them or not Agree — something is rotten in the state of macOS icon design . Presumably in the name of consistency, macOS’ icons have become more toolbar icons than iconic excellence . The…
Forget the main message about loop engineering, I appreciate the meta message here from Jack Franklin: when it comes to AI, you must consider the context of who is giving you advice because a person's circumstances can make a huge difference to how they encourage AI usage. He clarifies his own position with a disclaimer: I am probably a person with an opinion on AI you should be wary of because: I…