💬 Quotes
🔗 ‘Anthropic’s Safety Superpower’
Apple’s is design quality and user-centricism, Microsoft’s is market share with no regard for technical or design elegance, Google’s is market share with high regard for technical elegance, and Meta’s is strip-mining the world’s social graph for profit.
💬 John Gruber
.. he is sometimes very good at getting to the nub very efficiently.
🔗 Does the Rule of 40 Work for Hardware?
I first wrote about the Rule of 40 in 2015. I’d heard a late-stage investor describe it at a board meeting - growth rate plus profit should add up to at least 40% - and the simplicity stuck with me.
💬 Brad Feld
🖋️ Is Human Agency important OUTSIDE of 'The Organisation'
Satya Nadella seems to be arguing that Human Agency is important inside the organisation and that ‘done right’ AI allows for real ‘Human Agency’. My take is that he is only talking about how humans serve the organisation. What about if you are ‘just’ a human?
Of course, we don’t have the Gemini app as our app. In fact, none of that client code is part of how we run on iOS. For these models, we use none of the models that Google deploy to their customers, nor do we use the infrastructure and means by which they deploy models to their customers. And then, when it comes to the knowledge base, we of course don’t use Google Search or anything like that as the foundation of our system. So I hope that’s clear. The amount of the Google Assistant we use is none.”
💬 Craig Federighi
🔗 Meet the System Orchestrator: Toward Intent-centric Computing
Transitioning the OS from a layer between hardware and applications to a layer between foundation models and experiences fundamentally shifts the architecture, but, in the case of Apple, it preserves its value as the agent of trust and discovery.
💬 Horace Dediu
🖋️ Do You Want To Make A Company Successful OR Work For A Successful Company?
The transition might have been the undoing of Silicon Valley.
🔗 A new home for Progress Planner, and for us.
When we started Progress Planner, the idea was simple. A website is never “done.” The work that keeps a site healthy is small, repetitive, and a little boring. Almost nobody does it, because nothing reminds them to.
💬 Joost De Valk
I know what he means - but gotta say at some point - we just have to to say - ok done. Sadly, not quite ready for that in this house.
🔗 Silicon Valley’s Biggest Payday. Yet!
By the time the public gets to participate, the $20 million has become $182 billion on paper. The $900 million has become $120 billion. The risk has been taken, absorbed, and rewarded many times over before the first share is sold on the Nasdaq. Public investors are not funding the bet. They are paying for it after it won.
💬 Om
… Public investors are not funding the bet. They are paying for it after it won.
🔗 The Underworld Market to Remove the Recording Indicator Light on Meta Glasses
Using a Meta platform to find people to hack a Meta device so you can surreptitiously record strangers. So perfectly Meta.
💬 John Gruber
Part of the problem is that we measure what’s easy, not what’s relevant. And part of the problem is that we have trouble explaining trust, while it’s easy to pursue ever more transparency.
💬 Seth Godin
🖋️ Sometimes 'Non Obvious' comes disguised as 'Obvious'
Manton suggests that Apple rarely builds anything now … ‘except the most obvious products’. I disagree, because that statement depends on two things … what is meant by ‘obvious’ and what is meant by ‘product’.
I’ve decided that it’s time to end the “Soft Opening” era of my new site/blog. Lots of folks discovered it on their own. I incorrectly supposed that by hiding it behind a mysterious URL identical to my last name, I’d be able to live-test the CMS and my customizations in secrecy.
💬 Andy Ihnatko
I have zero expectations that this is going to be my story - other than - ‘developing in plain site’ - now that I have been 🔗🔎 doing off and on for a while (recategorisation on going) - it’s just nobody notices because only I am there!
👁️ So with him.
🔗 The Enification of Enification
When there’s a change to a thing and you don’t like it or approve of it, you need to consider a frightening alternative possibility. Maybe it isn’t enshittification. Maybe it’s just change.
💬 Andy Ihnatko
🔗 We Are Living in Pinocchio’s World
The grifters and the hucksters and the influencers selling impossible things succeed because audiences reward certainty and punish doubt. They honor confidence and resist complication. A clean story about a genius who will fix everything travels faster than a difficult story about tradeoffs. The Field of Miracles stays open because people keep wanting to bury their coins there.
💬 Om
Trust isn’t something a brand builds with an ad campaign. It’s what’s left if the marketers don’t ruin it.
Curiosity isn’t simply what’s left after a complete education. It’s still there if the system doesn’t ruin it.
Musicality isn’t a feature you add to an amplifier. It’s what’s left when you stop ruining it.
Customer delight isn’t something we add to our projects. It’s what’s left if we don’t ruin it.
Satisfaction in our work isn’t created by the boss. It’s what’s left if they don’t ruin it.
Reminds me of two connected thoughts that I have always liked …
How do you make a statue of an elephant? Get the biggest granite block you can find and chip away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant.
💬 Too many people to name. [🔗 Why](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/06/22/chip-away/)
Music is the space between the notes
💬 Coltrane, Mozart, Debussy… take your pick ...
🔗 Honestly, Stop Saying Honestly
We already killed the slop in our writing . The em dash, “delve,” “tapestry,” “in today’s fast-paced world” - the measured lexicon of words that spiked in published text the moment the models got loose on it. “Delve” alone rose about 1,500 percent in scientific abstracts between 2022 and 2024. These words are not wrong. They are tells. A reader sees three of them and stops trusting the page, even when the substance is fine.
💬 Adventures in Claude
Two Thoughts
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Very self aware 😂 and interesting to see how anyone can control the LLM’s output if they spend time on the problem - something which we don’t typically do - used as we are to our world of ‘instant gratification’.
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Just a couple of months ago 🖇️ I wrote: “but no one can deny that we have seen a bucket load more of them ( (em dashes) ) since LLMs turned up.
Jeremy Keith [ @adactio ] writes 🔗 here and quotes 🔗 Time
What is being mechanized by AI is our tastes - our ability to discern quality (or originality)
💬 Ray Nayler
Might I suggest that we have been doing that all by ourselves for decades - if not forever?
Tech accelerated it and now AI is certainly moving it into hyper drive - because that is what AI does.