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 argue in favor for and then 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.

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?