This is a really clean update for Mastodon with a well communicated set of changes. One of the things that I think caused a lot of grief is mixing up messages with normal posts so I’m glad they now fixed that.
A shift that I’ve seen around me as well where people get disillusioned with the ‘principles’ and flakiness of Google phones and just use iPhones instead.
A beautiful story of how iteration on an app is a process that’s worth it and that can yield something close to perfection like with Pedometer++. I wish every app had a person like this behind it who goes the distance and sweats every detail.
We have been working in the “What comes after” for as long as I can remember because 1. it’s obvious1 2. you need to be ruthless about anything that does not add value.
This interview with Cat Wu, head of product at Claude Code, is interesting for some of the tidbits around how the different roles in software teams are changing. But there’s one thing that stood out for me.
Knowing what to build, knowing when the system is telling you something, knowing when to cut, knowing when the fast path is the wrong path — these were never just “execution.” They were always the harder parts and to pretend they’re solved by AI is questionable, to say the least.
The care for these kind of minute details of map design is part of what makes Google Maps such a standout product. What products do you use day to day where the makers sweat out the tiniest of details like this?
The disabled creating custom prosthetics and turning themselves into highly visible and fashionable “neo-people” is at least one positive way that cyberpunk is turning into reality.
Not the first time Meta created racy bots and it will probably not be the last unless Taylor Swift sues them. I guess they do need to get more talent in to create things that are actually useful.
This may sound harsh, but it’s a lot fairer than they deserve: “But since the product is no longer jumping exponentially in capabilities, they will need to fall back on proper product development if they want to be competitive. They need to accept that they are software—plain old software—and that means people need to be able to use it.”
A good overview of how Git developers configure git for themselves with a bunch of settings that should be the default for everybody but which will take ages to be rolled out. You should copy most of these into your own config.
I usually enjoy Cortex’s romps into productivity porn, but what struck me here is that they open with Grey discovering Asana and how he spent the week setting his business and life up in it.
We’ve revived our tech blog and will be sharing a bunch of stuff around our AI process and what it means to be an “AI first” company. Here’s an in-depth first piece about what it takes to develop a successful real life product with LLMs.
For those who want to introduce some whimsy into their programming and for whom using a variable width font in your code editor is a bit too far, there is now Comic Mono (via). It doesn’t even look all too terrible.
It’s rare to find writing in German as lithe and delightful as what Christoph Rauscher puts out. The monthly lists are one particularly good example. I’m learning new and interesting words still in most of his pieces.
Something that Ed Zitron has already mentioned, internet users are being trained very rapidly to suspect everything to be a scam. In the case of honey, it’s a Paypal owned online shopping extension that lies and deceives.
I made the mistake of opening the desktop Spotify app which does not really work anymore. The UI is broken and there’s lots of irrelevant stuff going on.
Seeing if I can move from Arc to Vivaldi but there are half a dozen radical improvements in Arc that *make* the experience. It just shows how much innovation and solid thinking was packed in all of that frivolous design.
Nicolas from All About Berlin has done so much to make living in this administrative nightmare bearable for people. It’s a very clear example of what kind of 10-100x improvements are there to be had.
Most people should not bother with specialized productivity software but just see how far they can get with what’s already on their phones: Reminders, Notes and the likes. Apple has made these unassuming tools absurdly powerful without losing too much on usability.
Threads works functionally but as a product it’s very bad. As this article mentions being on Threads is a slow-motion exercise in going insane. Threads actively disables many things that make microblogging work and for the rest of the experience there’s very little thought that went into it other than “let’s make a text-based Instagram and see what happens”.
The comments online around the Apple Vision Pro have been pretty deranged in a stupid kind of way. Lots of people jumped to the foregone conclusion that Apple released a failure or that it “wasn’t going to be a success”. Most of that seemed to have been motivated by clout chasing.
Late to the party but I very much love this interview with Karri Saarinen, the co-founder of Linear. Their way of working, “The Linear Method”, will be waved away by companies (“we can’t do that because…”) but with leadership with the right mentality and experience I don’t think it’s that far off at all. Ask your leadership how you can work like this.
As much as it pains me, I’m teaching myself Helix and trying out the Jetbrains IDEs. Code has been the first editor that really clicked for me but as with all free things, there’s a hidden price to pay for it.
After trying so many note taking apps coming in back from nvAlt and friends, it’s fine to have found one that sticks with Obsidian. I have a relatively tricked out Obsidian setup (which I’ll maybe write about at some point) and for personal notes I’ve been using Bear also for years now.
The examples are hugely exaggerated for effect but the explanation of why so many people in software engineering keep themselves busy with solving imaginary problems is worth it.
After using all kinds of note taking tools (eg. Notational Velocity) at some point some years ago I moved all my personal notes to Bear and it has been my secret productivity boost ever since.
Ink & Switch is doing amazing work leveraging technology like CRDTs to create novel highly-interactive multiplayer interfaces. Here’s their work on Upswelling which is a git-like take on writing and editing.
It’s super lovely that Berlin has a lab which does these kind of user tested innovations on city processes. The work that needs to be done is written up here and it’s relatively straight-forward (there are just no short-cuts).
Going through these presentations by Matt Jones the main thing I’m left wondering is if anybody still does any real design and thinking work anymore, when it comes to technology or if all of it now is just flinging shit against the wall (which it very much looks like).