Links from 2024

Artists have always fretted about the pressure to conform, but the data-driven, music-as-content era feels different. “You are a Spotify employee at that point,” Daniel Lopatin, who makes abstract electronic music as Oneohtrix Point Never, told Pelly. “If your art practice is so ingrained in the brutal reality that Spotify has outlined for all of us, then what is the music that you’re not making? What does the music you’re not making sound like?” Listeners might wonder something similar. What does the music we’re not hearing sound like?

An excellent guide from Koto.

Smoke Signal is an event and RSVP management system.

A friendly introduction to the AT Protocol.

The "culture" of a society isn't a blob of random human activity, but an orderly ecosystem arising from the interactions between particular subunits. To maintain ecosystem health, we must reject the cynical “poptimist” framing of culture as a mere vehicle for entertainment and commerce and instead promote the benefits of

New-ish AEM model.

Team Topologies serves as our methodological foundation whenever we need to adapt our organizations, which we implement as soon as our strategy changes. We prefer a flow of small changes rather than a big bang reorganization.

Despite the fact that innovative cultures are desirable, and that most leaders claim to understand what they entail, they are hard to create and sustain. That’s because the easy-to-like behaviors that get so much attention are only one side of the coin. They must be counterbalanced by some tougher and frankly less fun behaviors: an intolerance for incompetence, rigorous discipline, brutal candor, a high level of individual accountability, and strong leadership.

And so the trend in UI design, for the past 15y, has been towards less information, fewer affordances, and turning free-standing pages into transient modals. Interfaces are stripped, made ephemeral, and apps become Fisher-Price toys for users to paw at.

Announcing Mozi

New Dopplr-like social network from Ev and friends.

I propose a new mode of interaction, where models play the role of computer (e.g. phone) applications: providing a graphical interface, interpreting user inputs, and updating their state. In this mode, instead of being an “agent” that uses a computer on behalf of the human, AI can provide a richer and more powerful computing environment for us to use.

Notes on the Practical Wisdom of AI Use

Now that they are focusing on products, AI companies as well as their users are re-discovering that software development, especially the user experience side of it, is hard, and requires a broader set of skills than AI model development.

Every trip I run into this bug and every trip I forget how to fix it. The answer: try turning it (location services) off and on again.

By contrast to hierarchies of authority, networks of competence place subjective concerns like culture, mindsets, values, and narratives as the primary drivers of everything that happens in the organization to ensure the coherence and direction of the organization's activities.

A tech lead should be a multiplier for the team, and adding code to the repository does not help in this regard. After all, it makes much more of a difference to help ten developers be 10% more effective than to contribute a mere 0.3 full-time equivalents of coding power.

Spiderland eventually earned a place in the pantheon of cult-favorite Nineties albums, and became a hallowed influence for everyone from Bush to Mogwai and Pavement. Thirty years after its release, it remains an unclassifiable triumph of rock moodcraft — its literally soft-spoken vocals and skillful play of harsh and delicate textures often imitated but never rivaled.

The more I play with it, the more convinced I am that anchor positioning is going to unlock some surprising new layouts.

There’s a piece of advice I still struggle with, but that I’m more and more convinced lies at the heart of meaningful productivity, successful creative work, and a more vibrant life in general. That advice is: act fast. Move quickly. When you get a good idea, make it your default policy to put it into practice as soon as you reasonably can.

Discover how text fragments revolutionize web navigation. Learn to link directly to specific text on any web page, surpassing traditional 'Ctrl+F' searches.

Good thoughts about thinking about tokens as features, which implies all the usual trade-offs around adding more features to something.

Browse historical places and search for old maps with timeline.

In this video, I cover why this "cluttered and weird" design is necessary, how physical space correlates with Chinese software design, why Chinese users might prefer mobile over desktop altogether, and how all of this impacts us.

Today’s Figma assets show design could align better with code

Goal cascades are compelling, but they don’t work nearly as well as we think they do.

The "pounded progressive ally" thesis has limits

Problems using Figma variable modes for multiple brands.

This, I think, is the future: the exact UI you need — and nothing more — exactly when you need it, and at no time else. This specific example was, of course, programmed deterministically, but you can imagine a future where the glasses are smart enough to generate UI on the fly based on the context of not just your request, but also your broader surroundings and state.

Additional apps list for ELD.

The stakes are high, but I think we have a real shot to collectively end the era of centralized social platforms.

If you’ve hired great people and given them a clear strategy, you shouldn’t need to approve every little thing. In No Rules Rules, Reed Hastings talks about Netflix’s approach to trust. When you hire incredible talent and make sure everyone understands the strategy, you don’t need heavy-handed control. You can just let go. And if something does go wrong? You deal with it when it happens.

From three friends in high places to essentially zero is quite the feat of statecraft. Britain is now outside its own regional club and exposed to a protectionist America and having to defrost its relationship with China after a period of mindless neglect.

A tool that brings attention and understanding to how color contrast can affect different people with visual impairments.

Here I’ll look at recent estimates of how much electricity data centres use today, what some medium-term projections look like, and how to square this with recent announcements from tech companies.

How to design for people with dyscalculia.