Rich Ziade:

whatever you believe about AGI, if the purpose of a technology isn’t to empower humans, then what is it? If it’s “okay” to feed people garbage knowledge invented by overheated NVidia GPUs in order to “save them time,” that’s a really cynical point of view on human beings.

Also, I like his rule of scaling:

As the number of customers increases, a company’s opinion of them goes down.

Paul Ford on the icky feeling folks are getting from “AI” products and marketing:

The human desire to connect with others is very profound, and the desire of technology companies to interject themselves even more into that desire—either by communicating on behalf of humans, or by pretending to be human—works in the opposite direction. These technologies don’t seem to be encouraging connection as much as commoditizing it.

Perfect summary of the state of AI today: it’s not aimed at encouraging productivity, creativity, or connection, but rather at commoditizing all of them.

Really loving Paul’s writing for The Aboard Newsletter (I mean, he is a professional writer).

If you don’t know what product is being sold, you are the product. If you don’t know what business you are in, you are in advertising.

I’ve not heard the “you are in advertising” line before. That’s brilliant.

So much today is focused on onboarding zillions of people and squeezing them like citrus. But more people, more problems.

As an introvert, I agree: mo‘ people, mo’ problems.

Software should be good for one person, good for two, good for ten, and then after that, it should take a hard look at itself.

People don’t think in software features. People see a tool, and they want to get something done. As soon as that something gets done, they’re done with the tool. Sure, the nerdy product manager may love to poke around the entire product, but for the majority of people, software is mostly annoying. It’s a thing they negotiate with to get what they want.

People don’t invest their time in software. They mostly tolerate the little walking tours (AKA onboarding) and sales pitches (AKA upgrading) to get to the thing they want out of it.

Paul Ford:

And after building software for collective decades, I think everyone would say: It’s still really freaking hard. Deadlines slip. Requirements change. Brilliant ideas turn out to be dumb. You change your mind and throw work, money, and time away.

it wasn’t Anna Indiana or any other Silicon Valley attempt at culture that brought anyone pleasure in 2023—it was real artists like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, who took over the world with these perfectly crafted mega-spectacles that pulled millions of people into stadiums and movie theaters.

But what I wish I could get across to our friends in the Palo Alto area is that the last 20% is really, actually, hard—not just in tech, but in writing, music-making, carpentry, middle-school teaching, cobbling—it’s a grind. Sometimes for dumb, bureaucratic reasons, sometimes because it’s just hard to make things happen, inside or outside of the computer. And everything happens—all the growth, profit, promotions—in that last 20%. That’s when human connection happens.

If you do work that is hard, kind of a grind sometimes, and involves lots of little and small decisions, I think you’re pretty safe for a while.

Just as most jobs are harder than people think, most things in life are nowhere near as generic as people think.