Sean Goedecke: “Much of the complexity is produced by a small set of what I call wicked features, which interfere with every other feature. For instance, adding a whole new user type: once you do that, you have to ask can this user type access this feature for every feature for the rest of the company’s life.”

Jim Nielsen laments how Tahoe has introduced icons in menus everywhere.

For a time, I used iWeb for my personal website before switching over to RapidWeaver. I remember both with fondness. There was a time when we believed everyone would build a personal website, and we made consumer software to help them do it. iWeb was discontinued in 2011, but that didn’t stop Corbin Davenport from […]

Accounts, notifications, feature announcements, forced updates — a solid catalogue of modern app annoyances.

David Galbraith: AI buttons are different from, say Photoshop menu commands in that they can just be a description of the desired outcome rather than a sequence of steps (incidentally why I think a lot of agents’ complexity disappears). For example Photoshop used to require a complex sequence of tasks (drawing around elements with a […]

Nowfal Khadar, expanding on the Jevons paradox (production efficiency leading to higher demand), which is frequently mentioned when discussing AI and employment: Once demand saturates, employment doesn’t further increase but holds steady at peak demand. But as automation continues and workers keep getting more productive, employment starts to decline. In textiles, mechanization enabled massive output […]

Pretty funny reverse review of the evolution of macOS, starting from the latest — Tahoe: Apple’s first desktop operating system was Tahoe. Like any first version, it had a lot of issues. Users and critics flooded the web with negative reviews. While mostly stable under the hood, the outer shell — the visual user interface […]

An archive documenting the panic that often greets new technologies.

A deep dive on the micro-interactions that made Honk (a defunct messaging app) stand out. Interesting to see so much experimentation on UIs that pretty much everyone else does the same way.

Jasmine Sun: Most text is not creative. Emails, policy papers, reported news. It does not desire to surprise or delight. It aims to convey ideas and information as clearly as possible. It is inevitable—given this reality and these incentives—that most people will soon use AI to write most things.

More continue to flock to Substack, as if the last 10 years taught us nothing: Expect enclosure; expect a few big winners; expect advertising, with all the attention-hacking that will demand. Expect, also, that writers will con­tinue to mold their work to fit Sub­stack’s par­tic­ular ecology, rather than “merely” use the tools to pursue their […]

Robert Saltzman pressed Claude into thinking about itself — with some interesting results. At a certain point it even declared itself self-aware, full stop. What looks like introspection though is just a performance of it: statistical answers based on patterns that fit with what introspection and self-awareness look like. With what we (us) expect it […]

Some examples of how AI is being integrated in apps — and by integrated I don’t mean slapping a floating button with a chat interface: While chat is powerful, for most products chatting with the underlying LLM should be more of a debug interface – a fallback mode – and not the primary UX. I […]

Ted Gioia: Slop is all about wastefulness! Let’s put this in context: In the current moment, there’s no money for serious artists—in filmmaking, fiction, painting, music, whatever. But there’s an endless supply of dollars to create Slop technology. In fact, no artistic movement in human history has soaked up more cash than Slop. This seems […]

When is it okay to train a LLM on scraped data? Robin Sloan: If an AI appli­ca­tion delivers some pro­found public good, or even if it might, it’s prob­ably okay that its value is rooted in this unprece­dented oper­a­tional­iza­tion of the com­mons. If an AI appli­ca­tion simply repli­cates Every­thing, it’s prob­ably not okay. […] I […]

I think this is quite a good analogy: Think of ChatGPT as a blurry JPEG of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a JPEG retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence […]

Ted Chiang: I suggest that we think about A.I. as a management-consulting firm, along the lines of McKinsey & Company.

New, from Aalto University in Finland: It currently hosts over 700 entries, curated from thousands of items donated by Microsoft Mobile Oy and representing over 20 years of Nokia’s design history — both seen and unseen. You can freely explore the archive, learn about designers’ experiences working in Nokia and discover interesting topics surrounding design […]

A recreation of the bitmap version of the Chicago typeface originally designed by Susan Kare for Apple in 1984.