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There is one universal truth in Los Angeles: avoid LAX at all costs. Generally you realize a relationship is getting serious if you are willing to consider picking up or dropping off your person at that airport. It was designed around the personal, private automobile in the 50s/60s and that is what handicaps it to this day. The video does a decent job of explaining why.
Joshua Schank’s ideal scenario for fixing LAX—trains (and other public transit) terminating directly inside the airport—is exactly the scenario LAWA (who runs the airport) had been against until very recently and their opposition is not even acknowledged in the video.
I’m hopeful the new people mover, which will connect to Metro’s K-line, brings some relief. But because it’s connecting to a short light rail line, with infrequent headways, that will also require connections to visit the majority of the city, I suspect it won’t be the LAX cure we all hope for. For example, it will likely take well over an hour to get from the airport to where I live, near downtown, right on a different rail line. And it certainly won’t compare to, say, Denver, where you can walk out of the terminal, down an escalator, and be on a fast heavy-rail train to downtown. Total trip time, about 25-30 minutes.
The idea of congestion pricing in the horseshoe is interesting—and likely one LAX will still need to implement if there’s any real hope for improvement.
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No one actually wants software. We just want to get things done. Sometimes software helps. Often it gets in the way.
In my corporate design spaces right now there is a lot of talk of “designing for AI”, but I’m not sure anyone knows what that means yet. This piece by Cory Etzkorn does a good job of trying to articulate the problem at-hand.
In my more indie design spaces there is a lot of talk about whether or not LLM-based AI will be capable of meeting this need and how ethical a lot of the patterns we develop around it will be (or already are). Something to think about…
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Speaking of “magic” software, I really dislike “Magic Links”. I use a password manager and a link-based authentication flow not only circumvents it, but also requires me to open up an email client, retrieve a link, and manually use it to sign in. It’s a significantly longer process (with more friction) than allowing my password manager to fill in my credentials.
I’ve also been avoiding passkeys to-date because their implementations by various sites seem all over the place and “magic” in a high-friction way. Unknown “magic” is, well, bad magic. I don’t want to have to learn and understand the differences between how Amazon and GitHub—for example—treat passkeys, because right now they treat username/password/2FA authentication the same way.
Slightly later on, once the people running the website are convinced that passkeys really help with the user experience issues around magic links, they can prompt users to add passkeys after signing in, once every 90 days or so, or whenever they sign-in using the cross-device sign-in feature of passkeys
This flow proposed by Ricky Mondello makes the most sense to me and gives me a known path forward with passkeys without worrying about getting locked out of sites and services I currently have integrated in my password manager.
That said, I worry some sites will misinterpret “90 days” as 90 minutes (or some other nonsensical interval) that simply annoys everyone while providing no additional security or utility—looking at you, financial institutions :squinting_suspicious_eyes_emoji: