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Contrary takes.

An interesting fact I learned at the time: The median delay between human speakers during a conversation is 0ms (zero). In other words, in many cases, the listener starts speaking before the speaker is done. You've probably experienced this, and you talk about how you "finish each other's sentences".

Top voice agent facts

Nobody's asking the harder question: what would a commercial model look like that rewards measurable plumbing and creative risk? That captures the incremental certainty of optimisation and the asymmetric upside of fame?

Coding agent tools can help with most of this, but there is still a substantial burden on the developer driving those tools to ensure that the produced code is good code for the subset of good that's needed for the current project.

Good guide on hacking old Kindles.

DarkSky is back!

But not in the UK yet, it appears.

A simple, open format for guiding coding agents.

The genie is good at exploration. So good in fact, that Atsign engineer Chris Swan wrote “getting from idea to code is cheaper than it’s ever been.” But good ideas are a new constraint. “The set of people who have ideas for apps worth building is not everybody. It might be a larger set than the people currently making apps, but it’s finite, and probably not much larger,” Swan suggests.

What happens when a large open source project dies.

This is a great software ecosystem/evolution post.

I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure. Here's the stack I landed on, what was harder than expected, and what you still can't avoid.

When the interface is a natural language conversation, years of muscle memory become worthless. The switching cost that justified $25K per seat per year dissolves. For many vertical software companies, the interface was most of the value. The underlying data was licensed, public, or semi-commoditized. What justified premium pricing was the workflow built on top of that data. That's over.

Some truth in this but lacks nuance.

The word “brand” is used so broadly that its meaning has become elusive. Everything from logos and imagery to worldviews, social media popularity, and market capitalization gets labeled as “brand.” However, what constitutes a brand is not appearance or popularity, but the reason people continue to choose it.

All of the people I love hate this stuff, and all the people I hate love it. And yet, likely because of the same personality flaws that drew me to technology in the first place, I am annoyingly excited.

What does it mean to keep practicing a craft you love when you suspect it's dying?

A collection of small details that make a big difference.

I were to leave you with one idea, it is to go back to the ideas in How to Measure Anything by Douglas Hubbard. The basic idea there is that you can measure far more than you think, but only if you’re clear about what decision the measurement is meant to support, accept uncertainty instead of chasing false precision, and choose measurement approaches that reduce uncertainty at the lowest possible cost.

I shut down my Clawdbot AI agent after an experience that made me question what I was willing to hand over in exchange for autonomy.

These fictions were functional adaptations to real constraints. The job, the credential, the expert, each solved a genuine problem in a high-friction world. But the constraints changed. And now the adaptations are decaying.

Employment among “business operations specialists, all other”—a grab-bag combining process design, co-ordination and analysis—has jumped by almost 60%, with solid wage growth to match.

I probably didn't.

I’ve long been allergic to the notion, prevalent in self-help circles, that if you truly managed to liberate yourself from your issues, you’d ideally spend your days just sort of passively floating around, smiling at everyone, maybe attending the occasional yoga retreat, but not much more. “The more I heal, the less ambitious I become” is a phrase I’ve encountered multiple times online in recent months. And yes, sure, if your ambition was only ever a function of anxiety, becoming less ambitious would be an excellent development. Then again, the desire to create remarkable outcomes in your creative work, relationships or community – or even just in your bank balance – might just be an authentic part of who you are, once the clouds of insecurity begin to clear.

I hope this article would be helpful in avoiding common mistakes in icon design, which Apple managed to collect all in one OS release. I love computers, I love interfaces, I love visual communication. It makes me sad seeing perfectly good knowledge already accessible 30 years ago being completely ignored or thrown away today.

A rant, but a completely justified one.

I put together this list of prioritization anti-patterns and traps to watch out for. If we can detect and filter out a meaningful percentage of the duds and traps, it can make a big difference.

A Ranking from Most to Least Evil

...which is actually still pretty evil.

What this means in practical terms is daring to trust your own curiosity. In creative work, that might mean abandoning the effort to “remember everything you read”, or conducting exhaustive research so as to ensure you’ve considered all the factors other people think you ought to consider, and instead using what naturally interests you as a filter.

Sanneh’s full embrace of commercialism was, then, the cultural equivalent of Mark Fisher’s idea of capitalist realism. In accepting that pop culture is fundamentally an industrial product — and often at its best when in pursuit of extremely cynical financial goals — it became illegitimate to discriminate against pop musicians for being "manufactured." Good pop is good business — and vice versa.

I love having my perspective shaken up. A glass screen with no buttons sounds like the most excluding device imaginable, McCausland acknowledges, yet his phone became the most accessible tool he’s ever used. He’s similarly excited by the Meta Specs – I don’t think that’s what they’re actually called – which are always on and offer live video interpretation, telling you what you’re looking at. Like a phone but, crucially, wearable. “The one thing blind people never have is two hands free,” he observes.

Demonstrable curiosity about other people’s experiences and ideas can benefit everyone. Asking questions, not cutting people off, pausing to digest what someone has said rather than pouncing on breaks in a discussion to make your own point: these are not enough to qualify someone as a supercommunicator. But in plenty of organisations they would still represent good progress.

The desire to understand calculus versus the desire to check your notifications are both real desires, and both produce (to a degree) real feelings of satisfaction when fulfilled. But the person who spends a year learning calculus becomes someone different, someone who can see patterns in the world that were previously invisible, who has expanded the range of things they're capable of caring about, who has Been Through It.The person who checks their notifications is, afterward, exactly the same person who wanted to check their notifications five minutes ago.

Those who have been told they are “too much,” “too intense,” or “too literal,” often turn out to have been responding to conditions that others were able to avoid seeing. They noticed something real, and they noticed it early, not because they were broken, but because the dominant cultural paradigm was. For people whose perception is attuned closely to the world as it is, collapse awareness is not a failure of coping, but an understandable response to the realities of an overextended and collapsing civilisation.

The focus on more gets in the way of increasing value. Increasing pressure to do more almost inevitably has a bad result: the team tries to go faster, and wind up skimping on code quality and on tests. They soon begin shipping more defects, slowing down because of the increased rework to fix the defects, and slowing down even more because the code quality rapidly declines. Things get worse and worse, pressure increases, and it becomes a race to disaster.

One piece of data beats everything else. A quarter of a century ago, my dad taught me the best way to measure the health of our business was to look at the cash figure every day. Each morning at 10am, I get an email from Caroline in the finance team showing the cash we have in the bank compared with the same day last year. This fact offers no hiding place. The year-on-year comparison shows the strength of your cashflow and whether you are truly making money.

You can design structures, processes and plans, but nothing will take hold unless human behaviour changes too. Behaviours are the foundational levers of change. But they’re rarely taken seriously because they’re hard to attach to quantifiable goals.

A2UI was designed to address the specific challenges of interoperable, cross-platform, generative or template-based UI responses from agents. A2UI allows agents to generate the interface which best suits the current conversation with the agent, and send it to a front end application.