Tom MacWright:

the norms of publishing open source software and publishing writing on the web were mostly community and interpersonal norms, not legal or technical ones. Before, you could rip off someone's code, but you'd be an asshole for doing it and the community would judge you [...]

Now there just isn't a way to opt out. Whatever software you publish will be cloned and whatever you write on the internet will be scraped. The people involved don't really care and their investors don't either. Web scrapers disregard robots.txt and do nearly DDoS-levels of traffic nowadays to feed the machine.

We’re all kind of asking, “What’s the point anymore?” It’s hard to see how the traditional “being a good citizen” of the web gains you anything.

trying hard is kind of a waste - your project will just get cloned, your ideas whitelabeled. Might as well ship a bunch of vibecoded projects with no new ideas instead, who cares.

It’s easy to be a good citizen of the web when you’re incentivized to do so.

It takes an act of will to be a good citizen in the face of an incentive structure that cuts against you.

Fight. Fight against the dying of the web.

Side note here from Dave Rupert:

We’ve made it so damn complex to make a webpage, no wonder AI is so popular.

Well, well, well, if it isn’t the consequences of our own actions.

(See also: the overly-prescriptive nature of many design systems begs to be automated with AI. We replace ourselves when we remove freedom for judgement.)

Marcin Wichary:

digital interfaces are pretty much all infinitely extensible. There will always be a way to add one more button, one more link, one more setting, one more ad.

“Just one more, bro. I promise!”

Here’s my challenge nobody will accept: everyone should start writing on their company blogs about all the things they didn’t ship, instead of the things they did ship.

Be as proud of the “No” as the “Yes”.

Mass-Driver:

A tool that shields us from the friction of the work is compelling, but if we don’t experience the friction, we will never change the work.

Friction can be a good thing.

John Gruber:

The Codex app is clearly capable of amazing things. But the reason that there are a billion users of ChatGPT but only a few million users of Codex — by OpenAI’s own accounting — is because ChatGPT is simple and focused and based on a single coherent concept: chat. The frustration of the eggheads now running product at OpenAI is obvious: how come these hundreds of millions of morons using ChatGPT aren’t running Codex instead? Somehow they thought they could fix this by giving Codex the ChatGPT name. This is like if Apple had gotten rid of the Messages app on the Mac and replaced it with Xcode, which they renamed to “Messages”. Now they’ve put an “iMessage” tab in the Xcode sidebar and re-released the Messages app everyone knew and loved as “Messages Classic”.

Why is keeping software singular and focused such a terribly difficult thing to 1) argue in favor for, and 2) do?

Bryan Cantrill talks principles and their value. His analogy to the United States constitution was quite inspiring — things we may not be living up to, but we aspire to.

Later on in the talk Bryan (a former employee at Sun) quotes Scott McNealy (former CEO at Sun) who is reflecting on his time at the company:

Nearly three decades of competing without a notable incident of our folks going off course morally or legally […] I never had to hide the newspaper from my children.

Bryan’s reflection:

Wow! What a way to measure yourself. [That you can say] “No matter what happened, I can hold my chin high with my children. I did the right thing. Whether I succeeded or failed, I did what I thought was right. I was true to my integrity, my decency, my honesty. I didn’t lie. I didn’t cheat.” We need that now. We really need that now.

This was a talk from 2017!

Later Bryan is talking about the post-Google, post-Facebook services companies that have arisen — we’ll do your laundry, bring pizza to your door, etc. — and how they see themselves as disruptors, but they often rely on skirting (or deliberately violating) regulation and other social norms:

[these new companies] lack any inherited wisdom or humility, and by the way they view that as a strength. They are not burdened by the past.

But Bryan argues that just because software is eating the world doesn’t mean that societal rules and norms no longer apply.

Newsflash: What is right for software is not necessarily right for society.

His overacting point being: decency and integrity should be constraints on the problems we’re solving, not obstacles.

Tammy Everts:

[Core Web Vitals] is based on aggregated data across millions of sites. It tells you what’s fast in general. It knows nothing about your users, your product, or your business.

This article is a spit in the face of the well-worn argument: “Well if it’s good enough for Google, it’s good enough for us.”

you should never assume that meeting external thresholds is actually helping your business. You need to look at your own data to set meaningful targets.

I found this via Marcin Wichary’s post, which quotes Alex Russel saying: there’s no such thing as “too fast” until you prove it.

Note to all makers of software: wherever you are on speed, even if you think you’re pretty fast, you’re likely still too slow.

Michael Lynch:

The first time I saw Michelangelo’s David in person, I wept. Never in my life have I witnessed a more beautiful piece of content […]

My awe only grew when I noticed the museum gift shop converting 60% of its traffic, numbers that would make any content creator salivate.

Does that verbiage resonate with your mindset?

When I describe website visitors as “readers,” it reminds me that these are real people who have literally billions of other things they could be reading that day, but they’re choosing to spend some of their limited time with me.

w0rdz aRe 1mpoRtAnt.

My modest suggestion is that you think about whether you chose your terms or if they were chosen for you.

Eden Dasilva quoting Rob Sheridan on where music stands today:

There’s this whole world where people exist just to show up in the middle and take a big chunk of the money from something they had no part in creating […] there’s too many examples being dangled in front of our face of how much money is being funneled away to billionaires and corporations, and artists always come last. That’s my frustration with where we’ve ended.

The ending by Dasilva:

Though my days of stealing music are well in the past, it’s clear that musicians are still being stolen from.

True of much more than music now-a-days [gestures at LLM model training].

Bryan Braun quoting James Clear:

You are not your grand plans. You are your daily patterns.

It’s not what you say, it’s what you do. Bryan:

Your character is the result of your actual sacrifices—for others, for your integrity, and for the common good—not your generous aspirations.

It’s also good to be generous to yourself:

Sometimes I’m winning and sometimes I’m losing, but I’m always fighting, and that’s a daily pattern too.