Links (12,291 links)

A thoughtful and much more nuanced view on the feature factory idea, exactly what one would hope for with another 10 years of thought.

The projects → products thing caused a lot of companies to name everything/anything a “product,” over-hire product management, set design/UX back, “install” an “operating model” as if it was plug and play, and generally lose sight of first principles. During ZIRP, even “high performing” product orgs tried to go “multi product” and turned everything into products even when it made absolutely no sense to customers. It also had the effect of turning anything further down the stack (platforms, etc.) into a second-class citizen, or forcing it to adopt customer-facing product language to justify existence. Another thing: teams/companies forcing premature convergence, premature hiring, and premature branding around “new product teams,” when the context was completely off. A lot of layoffs were caused by this logic.

Not much to do with Underworld, actually a potted history of Suburban Base Records, Boogie Times and friends.

I want to talk about a category of object that is shaped like a tool, but distinctly isn’t one. You can hold it. You can use it. It fits in the hand the way a tool should. It produces the feeling of work-- the friction, the labor, the sense of forward motion-- but it doesn’t produce work. The object is not broken, it is performing its function. It’s function is to feel like a tool.

What makes this particularly difficult to see is that LLMs are also, genuinely, tools. They do real work. The line between the tool and the tool-shaped object is not a line at all but a gradient, and the gradient shifts with every use case, every user, every prompt. You can only fail to notice when you have crossed from one side to the other.

A considered approach to fixing tech debt by migrating to new systems.

A great jumping off point for more in-depth research.

In the sense of what approaches can you use where systems thinking feels strained, not what supersedes it.

Via Hacker News.

Decoherence grows relative to the rate of change of a system, and it increases faster the more decoherent a system is, resulting in runaway exponential growth. It is not a new phenomenon, and humans have always countered it through carefully finding ways to do more with less, unifying disparate patterns and models into a cohesive whole. However, the widespread use of AI is currently producing it at a rate that is unsustainable.

Excellent mini-essay walking through early blogging on the open internet, social and the algorithm era, subscriptions and small-group Cosyweb.

When it comes to economics, or social interaction, or now software, the only viable approach is to become smaller; smallness at scale, though, means there is not one global market, but infinite local ones. “Local” might mean geographic, or it might mean a private network; what many markets definitely means is many opportunities, because economies of scale matter less than the ability to meet new needs that only arise at the level of the association.

Rebranding in the age of crowdsourced snark is a blood sport. Before social media, identity innovations might inspire trade-journal analysis or, if truly egregious, provoke wonk-ish newspaper comment. But nowadays brand vigilantes and Monday-morning typographers (including, on occasion, your present correspondent) seize upon even the tiniest tweak to a logo, tagline, sonic chirp or Pantone chip.

A run-through of grade with variable fonts.

At first glance, grade might seem very much like weight. But where weight serves to differentiate (adding emphasis and contrast to text), grade’s purpose is to unify (bringing consistency to text that looks different when it shouldn’t). It allows designers to adjust type precisely so that it appears the same across different materials, backgrounds, and lighting conditions without changing spacing, line breaks, or layout. And once you notice the problem grade addresses, it’s hard to not see it everywhere.

Thoughts on space opera from Charlie Stross, touching on work from Iain M. Banks, Alastair Reynolds, Ursula le Guin and Lois McMaster Bujold.

The romantic impulse renders space opera antithetical to solarpunk. A fictional setting composed entirely of wild individualists isn't going to end up as some sort of libertarian utopia, it's going to be a cat ranch: meanwhile someone needs to stay behind and tend the home fires, someone has to mind the grain silos on that "small farming planet", someone else needs to manage the shipyard that repairs the interstellar freighter.

There’s a theory called Information Foraging, which suggests that people follow clues rather than systematically exploring hierarchies.

Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card describe people as information foragers. This is such a rad term for people looking for stuff on the web. Like a badger foraging for small invertebrates, we humans look for signs that useful information might be nearby and constantly decide whether to continue the search.

This article is 10 years old, but even with 10 years worth of constant updates to No Man's Sky I can still very much taste the oatmeal underneath. I reckon it might be impossible to escape the generative trap by layering more on top.

A brutal ending for a business I liked a lot back in the day.

Via Rosieland.

Great observation. I think the same thing can happen to anything that can feel like a cause.

Harper is a free, open-source grammar checker designed to be just right. Think of it as the private alternative to Grammarly, built after years of dealing with the shortcomings of the competition.

A nudge to revisit Songs: Ohia.

When Songs: Ohia started in the mid-1990s, it was via lo-fi skeletal songs recorded to tape that were tender yet raw and delivered with a quivering high tenor reminiscent of Neil Young and soon-to-be collaborator Will Oldham. As grunge and alt-rock boomed, Molina went against the grain. “There was nothing less cool than a ukulele in 1994,” laughs his former bandmate Max Winter in the film. “Holy shit, he may as well have been playing bagpipes.”

Offline, privacy-first grammar checker. Fast, open-source, Rust-powered

The link – the Web’s most fundamental building block, the thing that connects one human’s work to another’s – is quietly being erased from the experience of finding things online. The search engine no longer says “here, go read what this person wrote.” It now says “here, I’ve already read it for you.” The contract is broken.

So what becomes valuable, in a world like this? Not more content. We are drowning in content. What becomes valuable is someone you trust, saying: This is worth your time. Here’s why.

A deep dive into the math behind making mismatched brand logos actually look good together. And a tiny React library that does it for you.

Our household is looking forward to Wildwood. We'll be heading to this exhibition if we can make it down to London before January.

Via It's Nice That.

Step behind the scenes of LAIKA's latest stop-motion film and explore how a world is built through original props, sketches, puppets, miniature sets, and more.

I feel like I have to swap out screen recording apps more than any other type of app.

Forever free and open-source. A lightweight, and intuitive screen recorder with a native look and feel.

The macOS screen recorder for the rest of us - always free and open source with a native look and feel 📺

Yet beyond Cruise’s usual acolytes, there are plenty of people who might well have been keen to see Digger if they’d known what it really was: an ambitious, meta-textual liberal satire that seeks to address collective culpability for ecological collapse. Unfortunately all of the promotion for the film has sought to suppress this – in part because explaining how necessitates revealing a key plot spoiler.

A viable-looking alternative to Goodreads.

I know people who are totally on top of their money, worth millions of dollars, yet they are visibly stressed all the time. They are financially secure, highly optimized, and entirely unhappy.

Financial overtraining happens when we get so deep in the woods that the process itself becomes a source of pain. We get so efficient with all the tips and tricks that, instead of getting the results we actually want—peace of mind, freedom, security—we just feel worse. We become penny-wise and pound-foolish with our own well-being.

Design teams have spent years trying to get people to actually read their design system documentation. Agents read it every single time.

The core problem is that digital games are licenses, which forces an ongoing relationship between you and the owner of the media. And because there’s an ongoing relationship with you, any ongoing licensing relationships that the media owner has also affect you and your games. If a license for any media that is part of the game expires or is affected, then the developer must take action to remediate the “issue” in the game.

Outrageously complete (but filterable) MCU watch order guide.

Help improve OpenStreetMap with StreetComplete! This app finds missing map data in your vicinity and displays it on a map as quests. Solve each quest by visiting the location on-site and answering a simple question to update the map.

Create 3D models from OpenStreetMap data

There will emerge a market for code written by humans. This has to happen: I can't prove it, but I can feel it. Despite vast improvements in the generative models, AI-generated art and music are still slop. AI-generated prose has gotten sloppier with phenomena like the much-mocked "Claudese". It's so obviously devoid of a human mind behind it that Zoomers and Alphennials are starting to use "that's so AI" as an insult. Despite the leaps-and-bounds improvements of recent models, I have to believe that AI code is slop too; the major difference between code and these other expressive forms is that we are far more tolerant of slop code: for the most part we just care if the damn thing works.

It is right to revere reason. But moral philosophers from Aristotle to Rawls knew that if an argument leads to intolerable places, it must have a hidden faulty step. EAs’ instinct, though, is to enjoy counterintuitive conclusions, even if they seem perverse.

The AI Greta Garbo is a bizarre soignée figure, a Stepford robo-star, a Hallmark-greeting-card parody of the icy hauteur, distraite sensuality and deadpan comedy that Garbo projected in life. The AI Garbo is like the classiest ever presenter of a TV shopping channel, purring her way through a dull and humourless script that seeks to create a brand synergy between the frictionless ball-bearings manufactured by SKF and what the company imagines to be Garbo’s own all-important smoothness.

On Friday I gave the closing keynote at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America in San Jose. I tied together the key trends from the past year into a chronological exploration of everything that happened in 2026. The video is on YouTube; here are my annotated slides and notes to accompany the talk.

We’re building a phone that isn’t designed to run fixed-function applications. I doubt anyone will ever get up on a stage and show off a AAA mobile game (that nobody plays) on it. It’s not for TikTok and short-form video, though I guess you can ask it for that. You can ask it for whatever: it’ll build apps for you, on the phone, whenever you want.

The primary science fiction scenario for out-of-control AIs involves machines developing their own malevolent intentions. This has provoked a host of discussions as to whether an AI could develop consciousness or have something like human intentionality. These speculations are misplaced, however: an AI does not need either consciousness or autonomous intentionality to become dangerous. It can be directed by a human to achieve one goal and develop intentions to achieve the subordinate goals necessary to carry out the human directive it was given.

Via leebryant.

Poptimism has become the perfect example of Gramscian hegemony™—where late-stage capitalism has so commandeered the human value system that well-meaning liberals believe their full-throated defense of art-for-money's-sake is somehow chipping away at the class structure.

Cultural-political mic-drop.

Stop listening to emergency podcasts; stop doomscrolling; go for a walk and talk to people; buy your local newspaper – and, finally, stop believing that we are living “through one of the most difficult, anxious and chaotic times in human history”.

If PJ Harvey had her way, she would have made her public debut on Slint’s Spiderland. At age 20 or so, she answered the Kentucky five-piece’s call for a female backing vocalist, but never heard back. In one way, you can imagine it: both subtly violent acts from their respective south, with the accents to prove it. But even at the turn of the 1990s, the idea of Polly Jean Harvey bringing up the rear is hard to fathom—her Westcountry leer would have unleashed the devil incarnate into Slint’s whispered intimations of evil.

Bird frame for Raspberry Pi or your homelab - real-time bird detection by audio, fully local AI, rendered as real, hand-cut 1800s bird illustrations. On an e-ink panel, a TV, or any screen.

What an absolute frontier operator.

The cost of writing code collapsed, and the cost of reviewing, fixing and operating it is following, and I'm assuming it gets there. What's left of making software is finding out what people actually want, defining it precisely, and making it pleasant to use. That cost is per piece of software and doesn't transfer, so as the amount of software goes to infinity, which it will because there's no ceiling on demand, that cost becomes the whole job.