Lea Verou:

Once you’ve spent a lot of time and effort on something, you overestimate how much it matters to everyone else

Too true!

Bryan Cantrill:

If [you’re] fine with an LLM crafting prose from your prompt, spare us all the wasted cycles and just give us your prompt. Or, better yet, consider doing what generations of writers have done before you, and treating that prompt as a skeleton that you use to write your piece yourself!

Pete Millspaugh:

It’s kind of hard to believe that important parts of internet infrastructure run like this: a plain text file maintained by a group of volunteers online.

I learned about the Public Suffix List when I was trying to extract domains from URLs and realized there’s more nuance here than I thought.

Michelle Barker:

Maybe [coding this thing] would be easier with an LLM. But it would be less satisfying, like a sugary snack devoured in haste to stave off hunger.

Well damn, why she gotta do me like that? That analogy hits home. I feel seen.

Robin Spielmann takes a stab at defining “design engineer”:

The role [of a design engineer] is: there is a specific set of tasks that has to be done in every digital product, and on most teams nobody is responsible for them.

A design engineer understands there’s a ton beneath the surface of a static mock:

A [static screen] shows a product at its best. One screen width, plausible data that someone made up, and the path where everything goes right. Shipping that same screen means answering a much longer list of questions. What happens with a name that’s sixty characters long? Does the layout jump around when the data finally loads? What if there is no data at all, and is that an empty state or does it look like something broke? What about a slow connection, a narrow phone, someone who never touches a mouse?

Making decisions around those questions is the job of a design engineer:

[a great product is] the sum of a few hundred small decisions, none of which would survive being written down as a requirement.

There’s the reality right there! There’s just too much to write down and convey as requirements (plus trade-offs have to be made). You need someone who 1) understands these concerns exists, and 2) takes them on with care.

I kinda like this working definition of a “design engineer”:

A design engineer is the person who owns whether a product still agrees with itself.

Alex Wellerstein:

As a humanist at a moment when the most profound disrespect to humanistic endeavor, art, thought, and ideals are being broadcast constantly from the engines of capital, the halls of governance, the administrators of higher education, and the centers of science and technology, I will admit that “The Machine Stops” sings to me and my concerns. Not so much in the sense that I think its specific future of people living underground is one that I am particularly worried about. But Plato’s cave was never a warning about literal caves, either — it is about the cave of men’s minds. We live at a moment in which great excavators are at work, boring metaphorical holes in to the metaphorical earth, and their monied and powerful operators are telling us pleasant lies about how happy we’ll all be, once we embrace living in our little cells.

Chris Coyier has a lot of good <li> elements in this post:

Be yourself is such great advice and amazingly hard to act on.

Making shit is the coolest thing you can do. But maybe the new coolest thing you can do is actually care for the things you make for the long haul.

Every time I see someone running I’m like good for you buddy.

Lastly, I love this thought from Chris:

You can make the things you’re interested in interesting for others. That’s how you make friends, by the way, or avoid the right people.

Think about that for more than a second. I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that terse <li>.

fiddery on her Bear blog:

To our disappointment […] the restaurant revamped their menu with AI. NO! […] I love to support/shop small and local businesses and I’ve seen more and more of them use genAI in their signage.

I’ve been encountering stuff like this in the wild too. It’s kinda heartbreaking. I feel the same as fiddery. I understand many restaurants like these have slim margins, but I would rather read an entire menu typeset in Papyrus with “shitty” photographs of each plate taken by the owner themselves, than look at an AI-generated menu.

John Gruber commenting on apps that change what the screen looks like when a screenshot is taken:

I think it’s bullshit. If I take a screenshot I want to see exactly what is on my screen.

It says a lot the file that does this is literally called GrowthHack.tsx. Hacking growth is unnatural. You want to grow like a tree, not a cancer.

Interesting talk by Feross Aboukhadijeh, CEO of Socket, on where we are with security, open source, and AI.

How’s the whole skills.md thing going?

English is the malware now

Ok, what about MCP?

[Researchers] found nearly 2,700 instances of vulnerable servers running on the open internet and we know this has been actively exploited in the wild. This is the kind of thing that can happen when we start bolting MCP onto things.

So, not good?

The time to exploit has gone massively down. In 2018, you had 2.3 years to patch before there was an attack against you. Now you have about 10 hours. It’s wild. 10 hours from disclosure to active exploitation. If your team finds an exploit on Monday morning, attackers are using it on Monday afternoon. We can’t use our old, manual processes to respond. We need automation.