A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft

“Software engineers, as a species, love automation. Inevitably, the best of them build tools that make other kinds of work obsolete. This very instinct explained why we were so well taken care of: code had immense leverage. One piece of software could affect the work of millions of people. Naturally, this sometimes displaced programmers themselves.”

a portrait of Tenochtitlan

Career Advice

Unbundling AI — Benedict Evans

“...\[LLMs] generate prose that is grammatically and linguistically correct, and the fact that the prose is perfect tends to hide the weakness in what the prose is expressing.”

Generative AI exists because of the transformer

A beautiful piece of visual storytelling.

The American Revolution Bicentennial Guidelines

Do Cornelissen

“Advertising creatives have particularly well honed habits when it comes to the production of interesting ideas. They do it on demand. For money. They know, more than almost anyone else, that you can’t rely on inspiration. So they collect and collect and collect. Images, photography, illustrative styles, bits of type, overheard speech, fragments of idea, other ads, anything that grabs their eye. None of it with any real purpose other than one day it’ll come in handy. (And this is one place where the industry's reputation for kleptomania comes from.)”

Are rebrands starting to look the same? The challenges defining commercial design

“…it’s then easier for larger studios to encourage more tent-pole clients to utilise those same motifs. The process is arguably less a case of direct plagiarism than an example of a slow trickle-down effect – almost akin to aesthetic gentrification”

“Anything that makes a city a worse place to drive in makes it a better place to live”

‎People I (Mostly) Admire: 114. Is Perfectionism Ruining Your Life?

The Imperfectionist: Who's in charge around here?

“...if you’re waiting for some outside authority to give their stamp of approval to what you’re doing with your life—if you’re telling yourself things will only be truly OK once they’ve done so—then you’ll be waiting a long time. And even if they were to give it, it wouldn’t be worth getting.”

New ways to build and farm

23 min in: urban farming as productive climate action. “Food growing architecture” as a design discipline.

How to Make Greens Last Longer | Cook's Illustrated

We need the right kind of climate optimism

How to Be Happier Without Really Trying - Barking Up The Wrong Tree

via Brad Frost.

Should I add these features to Arc browser? (internal prototypes) - YouTube

100% agree with the ethos of this video.

Palestinian embroidery, called tatreez, is a centuries-old tradition. Digital preservation efforts, like a database called Tirazain, could help preserve it for the future.

Fluid Responsive Design | Utopia

A much more sensible (and easier) way to set layout for the web.

‎Search Engine: Does anyone actually like their job?

Yes, if it’s not work. Meat and potatoes at 28:40.

Opinion | Our Economy Thrives on Bad Feelings

Lovely brand identity work by Order.