Notes

I meet so many aspiring designers who proudly assert that they’re really good at “ideas”. The world does not need more idea people, at least until it catches up on the inspiring backlog of Matt Webb’s ideas. We need to make home-defragging robots before dreaming up new things to buy.

Klarna is going DIY on software thanks to AI.

I bet if you’re on a dev team there, you are either:

• frustrated that your productive colleagues and “ignore the bullshit” team are having their good work credited solely to their use of copilots, or
• scared because you know it’s time to find another job and all you know how to do is consume user stories.

I just re-read this classic post about leadership in the metaverse and it strikes me how similar the experience seems, from my outsider perspective, to running a large open source project. Is OSS a metaverse?

The strategy of empowering a nitwit despot just to get SCOTUS stacked in their favor really paid off for the antifederalist anarcho-capitalists today.

A parable of our decade in two pieces of nearly-identical hardware:

In 2012 we had the Descriptive Camera using Mechanical Turk, as a thought provoking student project and a blog post.

In 2024 we get the Poetry Camera using AI, with a slick website and signups for buying one.

I see a lot of experts-of-the-day gnashing teeth over @rabbit@threads.net being “exposed” for using puppeted Android apps in the cloud:

What did you all think they were using? Hand-wavy AI magic you’ve been pretending to understand? Some secret Android API that app developers have been quietly implementing just for them?

This is the obvious way to pull off what they’re doing with today’s ecosystem. It’s funky and pushing the envelope in ways that deserve scrutiny for security and privacy, but isn’t this what “innovation” is supposed to look like?