Published
Weekend Reading — 🖨️ In dialogue with the printer
This week we hallucinate some art, redesign the Macbook, all the regrets, watch the great race, and keep an eye on that Wikipedia entry.
Unlimited Dream Co. This Twitter account posts hallucinatory AI-assisted art.
🪑 Design Objective
How to enter the mind of your customer: A two-step guide
Realising that nobody cares about you as soon as possible is the best thing you can do for your product.
Integrating this mindset helps to develop two things:
- Empathy for your customers
- Non-Attachment towards your product
Two perspectives on the designer who Steve Jobs could not hire The Macbook could have looked like this:
Apple took the proverbial baton from the hand of Dieter Rams. How different would history be if it instead took that baton from the hand of Richard Sapper? We need to look no further than the period when both men were at the heights of their careers.
Why CAPTCHA Pictures Are So Unbearably Depressing
Each cube here is a tone poem in melancholia. Looking at these leaden vistas of America makes you, slightly but noticeably, feel worse than you did before.
🧰 Tools of the Trade
OpenAI Codex Codex is the AI tech behind GitHub Copilot, and is now available as public API. Watch this demo, using Codex to write a simple space game. Bonkers how good this is.
CommandBar ⌘+K add a command bar to you app:
The CommandBar Widget lives inside your app. It's basically a searchbar, with one big difference. Its results include commands: like opening a page, inviting a teammate, setting up an integration, or showing help center content.
How We Design Our APIs at Slack Slack Engineering on designing, publishing, and supporting public APIs.
How to Recalculate a Spreadsheet The algorithm behind efficiently updating a spreadsheet whenever you update a single cell.
The plural of regex is regrets
🧑🤝🧑 Teamwork
John Cutler 👇 Quotes from the real world:
1/n:
Engineer upon joining a popular "product company":
"Things are more project-based, more waterfall, and far less collaborative than I expected. But it is effective in its own way. It's weird..."
emhaasch 👍
if companies could gave WFH employees a $5 daily walk-to-your-local-coffee-shop stipend, i guarantee it would do much more for morale than any app or zoom offsite ever could
Emilie Schario “Building a data team in 2021”
📈 Business Side
Ashley Higgins 👇 Lessons from launching on Product Hunt:
Only 53% of products that hit the top 5 have used video in their post. 50% used a gif.
Lesson: Video isn't as correlated with success as you might think. Don't hold off on your launch just because you don't have fancy marketing videos.
(5/6)
Research: Why Immigrants Are More Likely to Become Entrepreneurs “A 12-year study found that both voluntary emigration and entrepreneurship were associated with a higher propensity for risk-taking.”
Airtable: The $7.7B Roblox of the Enterprise An interesting look at Airtable by the numbers.
🔒 Locked Doors
Vicki Boykis Gradually, then suddenly …
By the time you realize that it's an Evil Privacy thing, it's already gained momentum. But at the beginning stages of any initiative, the details are fuzzy and it's hard to understand whether any given thing may be good or evil.
Bad News: Selling the story of disinformation Does social media disinformation have that large an effect size?
The media narrative of sinister digital mind control has obscured a body of research that is skeptical about the effects of political advertising and disinformation.
AletheDenis 👇 A scammer runs into an Infosec expert:
If infosec doesn’t work out - some guy on Insta wants to give me $3k a month and be my sugar daddy. So, hey… at least I got options. 🤨
⭐ None of the Above
vincent_bal Shadowology — art with shadows.
Thinking of gerrymandering my yard to include my neighbor’s pool
when i was in college i had a therapist recommend i “cut my parents out” bc they “sounded really toxic” and i was like “ok but they support me financially so then i wouldn’t be able to pay for therapy” and she was like “oh never mind”
atrophy wife “i'm so jealous”
If you’re having trouble getting press for your company, just link to random Business Insider articles on Twitter and say:
“Wow, so honored!!! Thanks for the incredible mention!”
It’s all paywalled and I’ve never met anyone with a subscription.
You’ll never get called out.
Can’t help but notice how many people who complained about not understanding their kid’s math homework turned into infectious disease experts and military strategists over the last year and a half.
GeekWire’s Great Race II Taxi, Lyft, e-bike, scooter, bus and more — here’s who won in Seattle rush hour.
Cyclopamine TIL cyclops are real and there’s a plant that causes cyclopism and it grows wild in the Rocky Mountains. 🐐
World Bollard Association™ “Bollards are SO talented”