Sloane Crosley at WIRED:

My grandmother special-ordered her Toyota Camry with crank windows because she was convinced it was “one less thing that will break.”

Smart woman. Why did she do it?

I’m pretty sure the woman knew how to press a button. She didn’t special-order crank windows because it was one less learning curve for her, she ordered them because it was one less learning curve for the machine […] All she wanted was for the fucking windows to open.

This is me.

I’m don’t hate learning new technology. What I hate is learning new technology that’s prone to breaking.

I just want something that works. Predictably. Deterministically.

What I love, more than anything, is the quality that makes AI such a disaster: If it sees a space, it will fill it—with nonsense, with imagined fact, with links to fake websites. It possesses an absolute willingness to spout foolishness, balanced only by its carefree attitude toward plagiarism. AI is, very simply, a totally shameless technology.

It’s a shame how shamelessness is increasingly rewarded in the world — pun intended.

Every product can claim to make people's lives better; if you want to stand out, you must link your app to a real, immense global crisis. Try this: “Women spend more time caring for pets than men. By designing an app that controls an automated kitty litter scooper, we are freeing up women to focus on their communities and set their own agendas. WiskrSküps is critical feminist infrastructure.” Can you link your product to mitigating climate change? Improving education? Smoking cessation? Panda habitat preservation? I can, in 30 different ways. That's why I'm your boss.

Lol, Paul Ford is a gem.

Credit-hogging is an essential part of any software release, and getting good at it is what defines a true organizational leader. I always make a lot of time for it. Again: That's why I'm your boss.

He nails working in software.

While the vast majority of humans will be utterly indifferent to your announcement, you must drill in on the one or two who offer reactions that fall short of total excitement. Be sure to blow up any criticism or misunderstanding, no matter how small, into a flat-out organizational panic. Slack can be a great tool to coordinate your overreaction.

And this take on auth is spot on:

Inevitably, right away, the app's login function will break. As a society we are incapable of authenticating users. It's a tragedy, one of our greatest failings.

Wow! I wasn’t aware of this piece from 1997 by WIRED.

Twenty-five years ago, it was projected that, in an ever-more interconnected world, money would no longer be the prime currency, attention would be. This would reshape social values, and as we became more engrossed in efforts to gain attention, we would shortchange those around us; in other words, the drive for self would come at the expense of concern for others. The projection has played out as prophetic, and the attention economy is here, with its associated societal shifts.

Paul just has a way with words.

configuration is indistinguishable from procrastination

Also loved this note generalized to anyone who ever does anything successful:

But the likely outcome of the [NFT] boom is that some people will cash out at the right time and become convinced that they hold the keys to the universe and will lecture us for the rest of our lives.

And the ending:

I am very surprised that the terminal result of my efforts [to configure every aspect of my digital life] is not some sort of ecstatic communion with the internet, or even with my own computer. The function of my whole big orchestrated, tagged, integrated system was merely to rekindle old ties.

Blogging. Emailing. Tweeting. Coding. Configuring. None of these are about the practice themselves. They’re all about the friends we make along the way :)

I've always loved that moment when someone shows you the thing they built for tracking books they've read or for their jewelry business. Amateur software is magical because you can see the seams and how people wrestled the computer. Like outsider art.

I love making “amateur software” and “outsider art” as described here. The longer I work on the web, the more interested I find myself in my amateur, outsider software than anything else more “professional” that I’ve been employed to do in my career.

It’s not a bug, it’s a feature is an acknowledgment, half comic, half tragic, of the ambiguity that has always haunted computer programming.

In the popular imagination, apps and other programs are “algorithms,” sequences of clear-cut instructions that march forward with the precision of a drill sergeant. But while software may be logical, it’s rarely pristine. A program is a social artifact. It emerges through negotiation and compromise, a product of subjective judgments and shifting assumptions. As soon as it gets into the hands of users, a whole new set of expectations comes into play. What seems an irritating defect to a particular user—a hair-trigger ­toggle between landscape and portrait mode, say—may, in the eyes of the programmer, be a specification expertly executed.

Shortly after reading this article, I found this lovely t-shirt.

Apparently, on-demand valet parking services are springing up in Silicon Valley as a thing — it’s like the Uber of parking. You drive your car, pull out the app, and summon a valet who will park your car in a secure lot and retrieve it whenever you want (for a small fee of course).

The author of the article makes this observation, which I can’t help but agree with wholeheartedly:

In our oversaturated world of on-demand anything, the emergence of insta-valet services is, sadly, not shocking. We want everything to be cheap and easy … but at what point does our obsession with convenience go from maximizing efficiency to optimizing laziness?

That last line so perfectly sums up so many of the venture-backed startups I’ve seen: “at what point does our obsession with convenience go from maximizing efficiency to optimizing laziness?”. Why does it seem like almost every new consumer app/service merely panders to our indolence?