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I was reminded today of the profound marketing influence of Kathy Sierra, who was a pretty prolific blogger and speaker back in the day. I would summarize her thesis as such: Your best marketing and communication should talk about how you make your users awesome, not how you’re awesome. If you’d like to check out … Continue reading Kathy Sierra →

Working on approval from Google for YouTube API access, Google is setting very low expectations here:

The Trust and Safety team has received your form. They will reach out to you via your contact email if needed. The review process can take up to 4-6 weeks.

I prefer my tools to help me with repetitive tasks (and there are many of those in programming), understanding codebases, and authoring correct programs. I take offense at products that are designed to think for me. To remove the agency of my own understanding of the software I produce, and to cut connections with my coworkers. Even if LLMs lived up to the hype, we would still stand to lose all of that and our craft.

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This is what I point to when I want to say "Heh not likely."

I’ve been very down the last few days, but I just spent some time skimming through random posts on Micro.blog, including from some blogs and people I hadn’t even seen yet. Warms my heart.

The open web has made progress in recent years, even if social media often feels in crisis. We’ll get there. ❤️

As usual, Ben Thompson’s framing is quite good:

…OpenAI’s wrenching transition from research lab to consumer tech company is now complete. The next goal from here is world domination, and we’re all, for better or worse, along for the ride.

AI is so big and so complicated at this point, that I’m confident there will be better and worse. There will be useful tools, like for coding and medical research, and there will be slop and negative outcomes. Our task is to minimize the harms without throwing away the positive breakthroughs.

"[An] archipelago of high-trust communities [is] where journalists are uniquely capable of building thriving businesses."

Gregory Scott, founder of Kush Audio, shared an interesting insight about mixing music the other day: Sometimes, to bring something forward in the mix, instead of turning it up, it can be more effective to actually turn all the other things down. Let’s say you realise that ...

Note this is for the 0.8 release of WordLand coming soooon. Not in the current released product.

A friend asked for this feature a few months back, before we had a Markdown mode in WordLand.

As I'm reviewing the product for first beta I realized I could now implement the feature he asked for.

Here's how to.

1. Put a URL on the clipboard.
2. Go into Markdown mode by clicking the M icon. It turns green.
3. Select the text you want to be a link.
4. Paste the URL copied in step 2.

A video demo.

It creates the link for you, in Markdown syntax of course.

To see it in HTML, just flip the Markdown button off.

I call this feature Cute Paste. :-)

I’ve worked in the tech industry for close to two decades at this point. I’ve seen how difficult it is to build quality products, but I’ve also seen that it can be done. It just feels like no one gives a shit anymore, beyond a handful of independent devs and small shops. It’s wild.

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I’ve been wanting a vintage desktop index card holder and pen set for a bit. This excellent version has a nautical theme featuring a ship with subtle blue lines on the sails and red rope lines that call to mind the red and blue lines on standard lined index cards. The fact that the blue … Continue reading

I had been considering getting a custom punch made several times, but never looked to see if one already existed commercially. Today, while doing a 5 minute peruse of the thrift store, there it was! When you use as many tabbed index card dividers as I do, this can be incredibly useful. It’s just the … Continue reading

I was messing about with some images on a website recently and while I was happy enough with the arrangement on large screens, I thought it would be better to have the images in a kind of carousel on smaller screens—a swipable gallery. My old brain immediately thought this ...

One of the cooler companies I’ve seen in a while is LumaField, which does industrial CT scanning, as they describe it. Industrial X-ray CT (Computed Tomography) works on the same basic principle as medical CT, taking hundreds of X-ray images from different angles to capture the internal and external structure of objects in three dimensions. … Continue reading Battery Scan →

Sora is not really for me. It’s fun to watch, but I’ve never wanted to create this style of video. Then I thought, could I use it to create some animated videos with public domain material like 1920s Mickey Mouse? Nope! Their guardrails are too strict.

Good post by Michael Tsai on Apple’s exclusive control over app distribution and how the problem is more fundamental that just the ICEBlock removal:

They designed a system with a kill switch, and now people are surprised and upset that they used it. The problem is not that they pressed the button this one time when you didn’t want them to. The problem is that there is a button and Apple likes having it.

Picked up my car from the repair shop. Nice new bumper and paint, “like new” for a 2008 car. Itching to drive somewhere.

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I stop reading every piece that begins by wondering if the Dems or Repubs are "winning" the shutdown. Anything the Dems can do that has anything to do with governing is a win for all of us, including the Repubs, but esp the Dems. This is a new world, the old one is gone. Every day is a new reality.