John Gruber:

imagine [your readers are] there. They will be if you keep it up. That’s one of my bits of advice to new bloggers: I firmly believe all blogs eventually get the audience they deserve, if they keep going. Write for the audience you want, not the audience you have.

Marcin Wichary:

Arguments for systemic completeness are always going to be easier to make than arguments for thoughtful simplicity.

Which is the difference between an implementation and a product.

Matthew Green:

Even if models are good at producing real results, they’re much better at producing results that look real but are misleading.

Something that looks real, but isn’t quite?

We have a word for that: artificial.

Artificial intelligence produces artificial output. Seeds after its own kind.

This can be enormously frustrating, and often means that human attention is more necessary than ever.

Jason Fried:

The speed at which a product is developed doesn't inherently make the product better or worse. The number of commits doesn't make the product better or worse. The number of people or agents working on it doesn't make it better or worse. The number of hours you’re pouring into it doesn’t make it better or worse. Working on a weekend, or late into the evening, doesn’t make it better or worse [...]

Those are all development metrics and styles of work [...] Important to those making the work, but not inherently important to the people using the work.

[...] It's like reviewing a restaurant by talking about how many cooks were in the kitchen, how long the shift lasted, how many orders they fired, or how late they stayed cleaning up. None of that tells you about the meal, the product, the customer’s experience.

Measurements around a thing are merely proxies for the thing itself. They do not equate.

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.