“The Radical Left” sounds like a great band name.
In protest of all the day to day stupidity we are all dealing with, I’m sticking it to the man. I just took a Tylenol.
As potentially problematic as a CCP-controlled TikTok algorithm could be, given the slow-moving dystopia unleashed by the algorithms of Facebook/Instagram, and (X née Twitter), it very well could be more dangerous under the control of the friends of this administration.
Ethan Mollick at UPenn is a good follow to keep up on AI. In this post, he covers quickly everything from environmental costs, the new “Nano Banana” Google image model is crazy good (see his examples), and how the costs to run are plummeting while the quality is going up quickly.
Came across a couple of equestrians on the trails today. One complimented my MTB, and then asked if I was the motor. (I was.) Strange question coming from someone who was not the motor of their own transport, but I guess e-bikes are fully in the public consciousness now?
I made a new Trello account last week to set up a board for a nonprofit I work with. I swear to %deity% I have never been spammed so much as I have by Atlassian. I must have received 30 emails (excluding board notifications) and was auto-signed up for Jira and Confluence, despite not wanting either.
The service that sends a code to your email or txt seems to go down pretty frequently. I wish more places just allowed me to generate a code (2FA) or just have a passkey. If your site is up, but I can’t sign in… that’s not endearing.
If there’s a front runner for Word of the Year, it must be Sycophant. Think about it for a minute. OK, did you think of… 1. The U.S. President’s appointees or 2. AI chat bot “personalities” … first?
Mini computing experiments
Since mid-July, my M4 Mac mini has been my primary workstation, with one monitor, an Apple Studio Display. To work, I have to sit at my desk in an ergonomic position, in my office. Since I no longer have the MBA display to the right, I have placed my macOS dock on the right. The goal is more vertical screen space. For 99.9% the past nearly 25 years, my dock has been on the bottom. It’s been a difficult adjustment! I’ve also been using a traditional mouse instead of my Magic Trackpad II, so I don’t have gestures, such as swiping through Spaces. I will end the mouse experiment today because I miss the gestures too much. Couldn’t adjust to Control+ (right/left-arrow) to swap them.
Who knew James Dyson was also a farmer, and one of the largest landowners in the UK?
I love this video that shows all the innovations he’s implementing with the mind of a designer. Many similar ideas have failed that went super high-tech from the start. Dyson seems to be following an iterative approach, bringing tech in but by bit for specific needs, while also focusing on the full energy and nutrient lifecycle.
It’s no surprise that Anil Dash is one of the best thinkers in tech, but he put out back to back posts recently that are just very on-point.
I’ve been thinking that we are near the zenith of a new gilded age. And what comes after such an age is the next progressive era. The billionaires will get their comeuppance. Then the rest of us will create our new deal. But we need to plan now for what that is. Greg Storey seems to think similarly.
Is it a good sign when you’re unpacking a very large lithium battery and the lyrics in the music you’re listening to say “…start a fire”🔥?
I think of all the Apple apps, the one with the least Apple-design is the Reminders app for Mac. It’s a pretty great iOS app, but on Mac, if you need anything but titles and checking off to-dos, the interaction design is deeply frustrating.
Why is a designer’s own portfolio the hardest project to work on? You couldn’t know the topic any better… and yet.
Took the family for an afternoon in Rockport, and a little hike along The Atlantic Path.
Been running the iPadOS public beta on an older iPad for 24hrs. Enjoyed using Preview for something I would have needed a Mac for. Its UI is… interesting. iPadOS’s multitasking changes get a big thumbs up so far, though there’s some awkwardness still. Haven’t seen too much unusable Liquid Glass.
The cool web you remember from the past is sill around, you just have to go looking for it. Congrats to Manuel Moreale on his 100th interview for People and Blogs.
Really neat thing, the Internet Archive has become a Federal Depository Library… which is not something I was familiar with before reading about this.
A family friend was in town yesterday so we all headed into Boston for an afternoon of walking around, and got a late lunch/ early dinner in the North End. A bit hot but otherwise a really lovely day.
Wired article claiming startups are asking employees to embrace 9am-9pm, 6 days a week. That is counterproductive, as studies show that at best you’ve got 4 hours of quality in a knowledge worker. This is the reddest of red flags.