Philosopher and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist:

The wise thing in life is to slow down and make space for what appears unproductive but is the only productive time — which is when you are receptive, where things can germinate, where something can call to you and you can answer.

Marcin Wichary:

I think it’s fair to look at Creator Studio specifically, and fear Apple is following in Microsoft’s and especially Adobe’s unforgivable footsteps in prioritizing abstract corporate identity goals over both functional and visual aspects of app iconography.

You see this everywhere: corporate goals > end user considerations.

John Gruber:

It’s like Apple decided every single one of its own apps must wear a stupid-looking hat, and they put those stupid-looking hats on third-party apps too, whether the developers of those apps want them or not

Agree — something is rotten in the state of macOS icon design.

Presumably in the name of consistency, macOS’ icons have become more toolbar icons than iconic excellence.

The purpose of icons is right there in their name: to be iconic. Shape was often the most iconic thing about an icon. Now it’s no part at all.

It’s a damn shame is what it is.

Forget the main message about loop engineering, I appreciate the meta message here from Jack Franklin:

when it comes to AI, you must consider the context of who is giving you advice because a person's circumstances can make a huge difference to how they encourage AI usage.

He clarifies his own position with a disclaimer:

I am probably a person with an opinion on AI you should be wary of because:

1. I work at Google, I am encouraged to adopt AI in my workflow, and I do not pay for any tokens or have any limits on token consumption.

2. I work on AI features in Chrome Tooling; my job is to help people achieve more with the help of AI.

He notes that using AI at work:

it is easy for me to be so positive about AI […] because I do not see the cost.

Is different than using it for personal use:

By the end of my prompting and usage, I had spent $105.92 […] there was no doubt in my mind that it was not money well spent.

Always a good question to ask on any subject: who is paying the bill?

Daniel Applequist:

the needs of AI systems must always come after the needs of real human users.

That is because the web is not a collection of technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The web is a philosophical choice to build a system that puts humans as its core constituency. The platform of technologies designed with that philosophy in mind may include AI-related systems. But if they are going to be part of the web, then they must be designed to put humans first.

(Via Eric Bailey’s newsletter.)

Nickolas Means talks about the “disaster” at Fukushima and argues that, viewed through a different lens, it wasn’t a disaster at all but a complete success in comparison to how bad it could have been.

What kept it from going so terribly wrong? Nickolas argues that it was the dynamics of great leader and a great team. His conclusion:

Lead by being worth following.

Love that.

Also: I really enjoyed this quote he pulls from Dr. Ruthanne Hising whose research shows how, contrary to what many of us may think, formal leadership (like the C-suite) doesn’t control the destiny or output of an organization as much an org chart might suggest.

[Orgs often learn] that what they had previously attributed to the direction and control of centralized, bureaucratic forces was actually the aggregation of the work and decisions of people distributed throughout the organization.

Chris O'Donnell nails the experience of blogging:

I published a quick how-to […] Documenting it in the blog post took way longer than solving the problem. I threw up the blog post thinking one or two other people might find it interesting. Instead, I got dozens of emails thanking me for solving a problem that was apparently vexing to a lot of other people.

Been. Freaking. There.

1. You experience something.
2. It strikes you that you should write it down and share it.
3. You think, “Nah, it’s such a small, inconsequential thing. It’ll take longer to write about it than it did to do it!”
4. You do it anyway.
5. Turns out, tons of people find it useful.

Blogging is often just stating the obvious

Tom MacWright, after reviewing lots of LLM-generated job applications, which link to LLM-generated websites, which link to LLM-generated GitHub projects, which link to LLM-generated…

putting your art, writing, expression out to be judged by others is an act of bravery as much as talent, and a lot of people lack bravery. Sorry to say it but if you need your work to be polished and beyond reproach, that's a determination and character problem, not a skill problem.

Oh wait, that’s me. I want my work to be polished and beyond reproach. Shoot.

The fear is being found out for being imperfect.

Yup, afraid of that.

That said, I continually try to put stuff online under my name as an exercise against these fears.

Publish your typos and show your struggle

Great, humane advice.

Josh Collinsworth asks whether LLMs really are making us more productive (whatever “productive” means).

Think about it: if LLM code was reliably of higher quality than human code, then LLMs would be making software more accessible, more maintainable, more performant, more usable, and more reliable […]

we could expect [all domain experts] to be elated, if LLMs were actually moving the metrics they care about.

But that’s pretty much the opposite of what’s happening, as far as I can tell.

Instead, everywhere I look, specialized craftspeople are overwhelmingly burned out from fighting a losing fight to get people to care

The journey is the work:

A junior who made a mistake is one step closer to being a senior; a junior who let an LLM make a mistake (and had the LLM fix it for them) has probably learned nothing.

Lots in here that resonates with current, day-to-day experience:

If you’re opening PRs faster than anyone can read through them, you’re not increasing productivity; you’re clogging the bottleneck.

I [used the LLM] mainly [to] just check off a bunch of old to-dos, most of which were unfinished because they never mattered that much in the first place.

The more you take a big-picture, holistic view […] the more gains from LLM usage shrink

Code is not the product:

Building things got cheap, but building the right thing didn’t get any easier.

Even perfect code can still make bad products.

Oof.

The less you understand, the more you trust AI. But the more you trust AI, the less you understand.

John Gruber:

It’s a goddamn privilege for anyone to bestow your article, story, or product page with their attention. The gall, to deliberately interrupt them while they are in the middle of actively reading, to present them with a dickover. It is no different from snatching a physical copy of a book or magazine out of a reader’s hands in order to badger them for something other than the attention they were already granting your work, except that the physical act of snatching a publication from a reader’s hands would subject you to being punched in the face.