In his talk “Why AI Is Breaking Software Security As We Know It” (my notes here), Feross Aboukhadijeh talks about the Axios npm incident and how the maintainer got phished by succumbing to (amongst other things) a faux Microsoft Teams interface: this is the kind of thing that AI makes easy to do, because it can vibe...

Gordon Brander writes: The thing about computers is that they can do anything you wish, so long as you specify your wish in exacting detail. However, LLMs relieve this constraint. An LLM can extrapolate what you mean (more or less) from just a few words. So computers can do vibes now. It used to be that computers...

My whole life I’ve felt like I have great eyesight (and I still do). But lately I’ve been noticing what feels like…some slippage. Nothing big. Just this feeling in the morning like, as my brain and body wake up, my vision needs to as well. The strange novelty of this phenomenon was operating in some small part of my...

Terry Godier has a post titled “Mea culpa” (which, given his framing, might’ve been better titled “Claude’s Culpa”). I’m not sure how much to even trust anything in his post given the backstory, but this line stood out: I was careless in relying on AI [...] without doing the work to understand Let’s face it:...

Every zeitgeist comes with new design idioms unique to its challenges. Many of them disappear as fads change, but others bake themselves into deeper parts of existing software interaction paradigms. For example, there’s the hamburger menu (≡) which saw a proliferation during the rise of mobile due to the constraints...

Jason Grigsby has a great article where he surfaces an opinion from the Safari team about how AI agents shouldn’t get special treatment: An agent acting on a user’s behalf is, in effect, assistive technology: it should operate a site as the user would, and the site should not single it out for different treatment....

Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and former president of Disney Animation, was on the David Senra podcast and I quite enjoyed the interview. (If you like the interview, you should read his book.) Ed talks about what he considered his job to be: get the dynamics right for groups of people working together. To do this,...

There are two wolves inside of me, lol. Some days I want to be a “designer”. Other days I want to be a “developer”. On the days I find myself wanting to feed the developer, it’s often because making something “work” seems easier (and more impressive) than making something “good”. Making something function often...

I wish I could remember how this podcast came across my radar so I could give credit where it’s due. But alas, I cannot. It’s episode 217 with Dr. Iain McGilchrist. At one point, he shares his perspective about how science and reason can only take you so far: [science and reason] have their limitations. Most...

As icons continue to change across Apple’s platforms, I have thoughts. They mainly revolve around two perspectives: What I think of icons as a long-time user of Apple’s platforms. What I think of icons as a digital collector and physical archivist of icons. Let’s see if I can articulate my thoughts. Apple Recommends...

In the past, search engines and the open web granted access to other people’s knowledge but the task fell to you to synthesize an understanding from it and build a capability to act. Now with LLMs, it’s possible to build things you don’t fully understand which then require a perpetual license in order to have the...

“We asked 100 people: What are the top three companies on earth best positioned to make a world-class Mac-assed Mac app?” Buzz! “Apple!” Survey says: Yes! Apple at the number one spot. Makes sense. Who better to make the very definition of a great Mac app than the people who make the Mac? No brainer, I suppose....