Paul Ford on the Aboard podcast, speaking on the state of the software industry, how projects get funded, and how to think about OpenAI and Anthropic:

What it feels now is two or three monoliths have showed up, and everyone is sort of like in [2001: A Space Odyssey], just a monkey looking up worshiping them. And the VCs are like, “If you worship the obelisk hard enough, we will give you bananas.” That is the software industry today.

Also a good warning here: if it’s too easy, if you’re enjoying yourself, you’re probably not building good real, useful software.

When you are making software with a prompt, think of that as consumption […] You are not actually creating for the user, you are creating to satisfy yourself. You know how you know? Because it’s not miserable enough. You gotta get that email from a person who is like, “I really don’t like the changes you made...”

the number-one skill of every truly good senior engineer is…being unbelievably good at debugging…Because [software is] always broken. Even if it’s working, it’s broken.

Paul Ford, as ever, has the right words:

logging into anything with Adobe is essentially a statement on how little they care about human beings.

Lol.

if you talk to a designer... about [Adobe] one of the first things they’ll say to you is like, “I don’t even understand Photoshop anymore.” It’s like their girlfriend is now a scientologist.

Paul Ford commenting on the “marketplace of ideas” and the “global town square”:

you think that you’re delivering ideas, debate, and philosophical exchange. You are not...What you are delivering, always, is validation. You can’t escape this when you are making content. People consume the content, seeking validation in context. No one organically seeks out conflict and pressure against their carefully constructed belief system.

We thought we were getting a global space to discuss ideas, allowing the best ones to rise to the top for everyone’s benefit. What we got was the exact opposite: a global space where nothing can be discussed.

it’s bizarre that we thought that this could be the global town square, because it’s actually the opposite. It’s a system for keeping ideas out of the commons because it’s too intense and too emotional. And so what you end up with is everybody having conversations in the group chat back along their ideological lines [and pointing to stuff out in the global space] and going, “that’s a nightmare”.

Paul Ford:

the entire structure around social media and how we interact and how we talk today tells people that they have this intense power and voice and this ability to affect change that they don’t really have...

we jam this intense moral pressure on everyone. It’s like, if you don’t try hard enough to change the world, you have failed everyone.

Paul Ford on the Aboard podcast:

When you present yourself purely digitally, you commoditize yourself. No matter how much you think you’re not, you are a two-dimensional rectangle.

I’ve found that many people who know me in “real life” think my personal website is weird.

Like why would you have your own personal website? That’s weird ha.