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I Made This

Ethically, the argument that generative AI is “just doing what humans do” seems to draw an equivalence between computer programs and humans that doesn’t feel right to me.

I keep coming back to this.

There is plenty to focus on in understanding how AI—current and future—affects our industries and culture, but I find the “just doing what humans do” argument to be thin and possibly intellectually dishonest.

The word that I rarely see present in these arguments is: scale. If an LLM can “learn” from a book just as I can learn from reading a book and then apply that knowledge, the argument tracks. But if you acknowledge the scale at which LLMs operate, then, in my opinion, it can’t possibly be further from “what humans do”. I will never be able to read all of the books and internet, watch all of the Youtube, movies, and television. And I will never be able to scale myself to answer multiple queries simultaneously with that found knowledge—or do so with virtually-infinite capacity.

Culturally, we seem to have moved on from the question of copyright infringement, with regard to LLMs. Yes, there are a few cases working their way through the courts, but does anyone give serious consideration to the idea that this technology gets unwound and put back in the box?

Wherever the courts land, I think developers of LLM technology found a loophole: copyright law never considered scale. I don’t know if it should have, but if it had, building and operating LLMs would be an entirely different endeavor.

Also, this:

In its current state, generative AI breaks the value chain between creators and consumers. We don’t have to reconnect it in exactly the same way it was connected before, but we also can’t just leave it dangling. The historical practice of conferring ownership based on the act of creation still seems sound, but that means we must be able to unambiguously identify that act. And if the same act (absent any prior legal arrangements) confers ownership in one context but not in another, then perhaps it’s not the best candidate.

I am perhaps less worried about this disconnect than I was even a few months ago. I think we’re already starting to see some areas of culture learn how to operate with LLMs in the mix, where artists are still very much creating net new work and pushing boundaries, but now with additional tools at their disposal.

But I do worry we have not yet seen the fallout of these shifts. Art in our modern age has a commercial element: something must be sold so that the artist can eat. If those driven to create art—even if they use LLMs themselves—are faced with a world where their work is so easily mimicked and ultimately consumed by LLMs for replication, do the incentives change? Does any sort of remaining commercial viability in art collapse? Likely, but to what extent?

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The grift we deserve

The Soham saga and Cluely’s rise aren’t outliers, rather, they serve as case studies in how the ecosystem actually works. We’ve built an industry that rewards optimization over ethics, virality over value, and performance over product. Hustle is treated as a stand-in for integrity, until someone plays the game too efficiently.

Even the backlash gave away the game. Y Combinator’s Garry Tan praised the community for “catching” Soham, but multiple YC-backed startups had hired him. He wasn’t freeloading off the system; he was farming it. He targeted the valley of move-fast founders, where technical skill is verified quickly and commitment is assumed blindly.

For all the talk of meritocracy, much of startup recruiting runs on speed and gut feeling. Soham didn’t subvert those norms. He followed them to their logical endpoint.

Since the pandemic started, we’ve seen several stories make the rounds of what we now call “over-employed” individuals who take on multiple full-time jobs without letting any of their employers know.

Cards on the table: I work remotely in my current role and I would like to continue doing so. And, for the record, I’m quite happily singularly-employed (monogomously-employed?) with my one role. Not under- or over-, just simply, employed. I have a stake in these situations as employers look at remote work with increasing—if oddly, often illogical—levels of scrutiny.

But Ayers’ article is actually about much more than remote work:

Maybe we also need to stop pretending the system rewards anything it claims to. Because the question isn’t whether Soham deserved the work. It’s whether we’ve built a world where his playbook made perfect sense.

Poor ethical behavior by one group doesn’t make a poor ethical response by another ‘ok’, but it’s worth reflecting on the permission structures startup culture has created.

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Time is On My Side

But free time also means freedom from expectations. I asked AI what we do with time, and it came back with words that were commercial and violent. We spend time, save time, take time, and make it; manage, track, and save it; we kill time, we pass it, we waste it, borrow, and steal it. We abuse time and it beats us back up, either in retribution or self-defense. It’s a zero-sum perspective of the material of our lives; it makes us prisoners to our own utility.

“I asked AI what we do with time, and it came back with words that were commercial and violent.” It warms my heart to see new writing from Frank.

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Every Single Human. Like. Always.

I continue to enjoy Lopp’s recounting of his LLM explorations.

Rather than prototyping with code, I prototype in a spec. I explain to the robot what I want to build as a markdown file. This spec is the only thing we create. The process is no different than the first twenty prompts, except that the output is easy to read and easy to change markdown. The robots do a dutiful job of capturing my thoughts and their implications. No code. No APIs. Just writing.

Maybe unsurprisingly, LLMs do a much better job when you put boundaries around their tasks. Breaking the work down (just as you would for yourself—or anyone) gets much better results.

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It’s time for a nationwide ban of right-on-red turns

The driver inches into the crosswalk, watching the oncoming traffic to his left and waiting for a gap to appear. He finally spots one and accelerates into the turn, without realizing that a pedestrian on his right has just stepped off the curb, beckoned by a green “Walk” sign.

Hi, I’m the pedestrian. It me. 🤗

“Right-on-red” is one of those things that Americans have decided is an innate, natural right. If you even hesitate as a driver in a right turn lane in LA, you get honked at. But its fraught with danger for pedestrians and drivers alike.

Too often I’m walking through the city and a driver never even bothers looking in my direction as they make a right on red. Too often I can touch the side of their vehicle as they pass by (turns out, people don’t like their vehicles being touched, but I see this as a them problem). Too often I get the leading pedestrian “go” signal as a driver barrels through the crosswalk after I’ve left the curb. Too often a driver makes actual eye contact as I’m walking and hits the gas, assessing the value of my life to be significantly lower than their right to turn right on red and the perceived fractions of seconds it saves them.

You won’t find a legitimate study that shows it saves drivers any measurable amount of time. You won’t find one that shows it prevents vehicle congestion meaningfully. And you won’t find one that fails to show how dangerous it is for everyone.

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California drivers kill thousands each year, but murder charges are rare

In the Netherlands, you are considered legally liable for your actions as a driver, unless you can prove otherwise. In the States, it’s up to the pedestrian or cyclist you kill to prove your liability, making it a bit harder for anyone to be held accountable.

If you want to murder someone in California, simply hit them with a car and tell the police, “I didn’t see them”. I am being extreme to prove a point, but I’m not convinced it’s an exageration. We call it, preemptive exoneration, and we participate in it as a society because we’ve not done the work to enable modes of transportation other than the private automobile.

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Traffic Engineers Must Put Safety Over Driver Throughput

But they do the definitional opposite of that.

No other branch of civil engineering tolerates this level of system failure. In any other field, if engineers knew that systems would fail catastrophically about 30 times this year and knew when, where, and why that was most likely to happen, they would be required to intervene or shut everything down. And if they didn’t, there would be serious professional consequences: firing, fines, loss of license, and, depending on how egregious the infraction, criminal penalties.

The only professional pseudo-science that also gets taken seriously and makes less intellectual sense than traffic engineering might be parking minimums. My occasional tarot reading by a friend is significantly more science-based than the intellectual work behind parking minimums.

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The Abstraction Gap

The vibes are real and the lines are fuzzier than they’ve ever been, but there is still a communication gap between design and development—AI won’t solve it; it’ll help in some areas and exacerbate it in others. Excellent piece by Naz.

The asymmetry between designer and developers is an interesting one. In my experience, designers build more of a bridge to developers because of wanting to communicate better with them. Designers start to code (sometimes as a forcing function) because they want to prototype and bring their designs to life quicker — no longer static and in turn opening their design and development possibilities. Developers might not return this in kind as they can build functional products without deep design knowledge or interfaces can be constructed using UI frameworks and libraries. Engineers are less pressured to become designers. They are paid more to specialize. Their bridge is to collaborate closely with design rather than to become a designer.

This tracks with my experience. And if you look at the tech industry as a whole, it’s more rare and notable that a founding team includes a designer, but it’s almost required of a founding team to have an engineer.

While AI tools may bridge the divide between design and development by filling in missing context, I’m uncertain if this technological solution addresses the underlying communication problem — especially in an industry already stretched thin by time and resource constraints.

Unfortunatley, I see a lot of folks papering over the gap under the assumption that AI will effectively be able to do both jobs. If it can design and it can build the design, there’s no gap to worry about anymore… right?? (I suspect there will still be a gap to worry about.)

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RSS readers make me want to jump into a vat of acid!

What triggered this? I dunno, man, I guess I saw some new app being kickstarted by The Iconfactory and I’m sure some people will love it, but I see something built around the concept of “a single chronological timeline of your most important social media services, RSS feeds, and other sources,” and I just want to put my head in the toilet and scream and scream and scream until I have displaced all of the oxygen in my body with toilet water and I drown in the toilet because my shit gills have yet to evolve.

I’m not at “jump into a vat of acid” level of repulsion with the standard RSS reader, but I find them to be a place where content I ostensibly care about goes to live in quiet purgatory, never to be discovered again.

I will admit that there is something inherently alluring about organizing all of the information you intend to absorb into one place, but I find, in practice, the incessant drip, drip, drip to overwhelm, rather than delight.

I still find myself falling back to RSS readers because I want to stay unplugged from the urgency and hysterics of social media, but I too find the singular, linear nature of these readers to somehow be both overwhelming and guilt-inducing (I will never be able to read it all).

Aside

In the last post I included Jon-Kyle Mohr’s essay on building with AI and off-handedly mentioned Cycle—an app he’s built—analogizing it to an RSS reader. But that comparison isn’t quite fair. Cycle caught my eye precisely because it seems to be recognizing both the overwhelm factor and the purgatory I describe, and trying to solve for both. I’ve only used it briefly, so don’t consider this a full endorsement, but I am excited to see something new in this space.

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Eject disk.

I see you.
You’re not burned out because you’re weak.
You’re burned out because you’ve been relevant, valuable, over-functioning for too long—inside systems that reward your ability to endure dysfunction and call it leadership.

You’ve spent years in roles that were never meant to hold your whole self.
Making it work.
Keeping the peace.
Delivering, exceeding, performing.

I am not currently burned out. I love that I can say this because it’s something I’ve felt at various times in my life and career. But for that very reason, I needed to post this so I can find it again someday.

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How to ask for stuff

Also, when we’re willing to ask for help we’re letting people know that they can ask us for help as well. You’re establishing it as a new norm. A new habit. Which can take the place of the old painful habits we both grew up with.

Also calling myself out here: I expect friends and family to ask me for help. I am poor at asking others to help me.

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Unschooling and Building with AI

This excellent piece by Jon-Kyle is making the rounds. It’s on my radar thanks to his interesting project, Cycle (think: “what if RSS, but you don’t see everything at once?”).

How I work today looks very different than it did a year ago. Or even a month ago. I’ve always been a generalist. Design was the gateway—making visual things. Making things interactive lead to a technical proficiency and learning how to program. This is now called “design engineering,” but the motivation was to do whatever necessary to see an idea through from conception to completion.

The essay resonates with my own professional experience and general meandering around my work identity: designer, sure, how else will we know what to build? Software engineer? Yes, it gets the job done. But what’s really the job? I want to build things for people to use; things that they enjoy using.

My current open-question: “how can AI help me build things?”, which he gets into from his perspective.

Also:

I don’t believe being a cog in the machine is sustainable. That detached phone it in mentality. The places where it’s possible will not exist much longer. Maybe that is ok. I don’t think it’s good to feel detachment from what you’re doing. It’s good to care. It may be difficult, and you may experience disappointment and pain by doing that, but it’s real. It’s important to be hopeful, and that involves risk, as does anything good.

This is the bit where I think I diverge—tbd. I absolutely agree that it’s not good to detach from what you’re doing and it’s good to care and it’s worth the risk in work and in most things in life. I work with people who care and it’s what keeps me in the job.

But when you listen to interviews with some of the folks who build AI companies and really boost an AI-forward mentality, there’s a disconnect for me: if AI can help generate the ideas, if AI can do the creative design, if AI can do the creative imagery, if AI can do the creative coding, if AI can do the creative marketing, and if AI can build it all, what is left for the human but to be the cog—either in greasing the wheels of needless consumption or connecting the dots between various AI agents to get the work out the door in order to be consumed?

I’m not saying Mohr’s assessment is wrong, but more directly: I really, really hope it’s correct and the signals I’m picking up on are more related to the AI boosterism that necessarily surrounds the culture of a hot, new technology that hasn’t quite found its place in society, yet.

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Greater Los Angeles

It doesn’t matter.
Los Angeles is where you confront the objective fact that you mean nothing; the desert, the ocean, the tectonic plates, the clear skies, the sun itself, the Hollywood Walk of Fame – even the parking lots: everything there somehow precedes you, even new construction sites, and it’s bigger than you and more abstract than you and indifferent to you. You don’t matter. You’re free.

A friend recently reminded me of this beautiful BLDGBLOG essay. It’s almost 2 decades old and is still a great primer on the unique culture in LA and how its physical spaces shape that culture.

If New York is the city that never sleeps, LA is the city where you don’t matter—and because you don’t matter, you are free.

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There Is No “Right Time.” There Is Only Now, Plus Courage.

As a self-professed over-thinker, this one feels targeted at me.

The emotional core of delayed action is fear dressed up in strategic language. Fear that if you move too soon, you’ll fail; fear that if you wait long enough, the risk will dissolve. But risk is a structural feature of reality, not a glitch to be patched. No amount of waiting will unroll the future into a safe and navigable map. You can’t hedge your way into certainty.

“[Courage is] the refusal to defer your life to the imaginary committee of ‘later.’” I often find the things I want in life too easy to defer based on (supposedly) well-reasoned analysis.

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The Death of Product Development

Click-baity title aside, what I find most interesting about this piece is that it mainly just describes a good, accelerated product development cycle, run by generalists and (if AI works as advertised) smaller teams with more output. If you’ve ever built your own thing or worked in a startup environment, you’ve done this. You’ve worn the PM hat until one could be hired. You’ve helped with Product Design until more headcount could be justified. You’ve already worked like this.

Imagine you’re assembling a team for an escape room challenge. Would you rather have six managers debating strategies or two sharp thinkers who rapidly test every combination to unlock the door?

Harsh to specifically throw managers under the bus here—I’ve been in plenty of meetings where sharp, non-management thinkers devolve into meaningless technical debate over minutia. But, setting that aside, would you ever want 6 people ineffectively debating strategy today with no AI tooling? You’d always pick the 2 people actively trying to solve the problem.

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The Future Favors the Curious

For all the excitement about these advancements, they also raise uncomfortable questions. The most obvious is: do we need fewer designers now? To that, I would say yes, we need fewer designers (and engineers, and everyone else in product development) for the same amount of output. Do we need fewer designers overall though? That remains to be seen. The growth of the economy since the beginning of time has been based on productivity increases leading to greater total output of our population. So if you think we have already maxxed out our total output of products and services in the world, I would expect a nosedive in the amount of designers and engineers needed. But if you think we are only scratching the surface of product development, you should expect a future where millions of designers and engineers continue to do great things but much more prolifically.

Smarter people than myself thought the advent of computers would bring about the 15-work week. Instead, we work the same hours or longer, but with more output. Could that be the outcome of AI? I worry there is an upper limit to the number of companies and services the global economy actually needs, and that if we haven’t found it yet, AI will quickly get us there, leaving behind our current model where accelerating productivity always leaves to increased GDP.

However, it’s hard to see around the corner. What don’t we see coming that will expand the base of the economy?

When I got into this industry, you needed to buy books and take expensive classes in order to learn how to use tools like Adobe Illustrator. There is nothing about designing for AI that requires you to spend significant money to learn. It’s all about the time you are willing to invest.

I remember buying books on Ruby to try to learn programming. I would’ve killed for something like Claude or ChatGPT.

Mike’s entire piece is worth your time—and I struggled not to quote more of it—so just go read it. Even if you’re not a product designer, the same themes will likely apply to your job or industry. Mike’s take is balanced and does acknowledge some of the potential downsides and chaos this transition will create (is already creative?), particularly in the tech industry.

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Pluralistic is five

When I heard Hayes describe how his phone buzzes in his pocket whenever there is breaking news, I was actually shocked. Do people really allow their devices to interrupt them on a random reinforcement schedule? I mean, no wonder the internet makes people go crazy.

People do; and it does.

Like Cory, I aggressively manage my notifications and have a fairly similar hierarchy to him. I’m slightly more permissive about what can silently appear on my notifications screen, but in general, a few messaging apps are the only apps that can vibrate my phone (who would ever turn on sound for notifs?!) or even show banners when I am in a different app. And certainly nothing like email, news, or other opt-in content gets through. If I am curious about what is in my work email, I intentionally check it.

But I hate algorithmic feeds. To explain why, I should explain how much I love non-algorithmic feeds.

This related, but separate part of his piece is worth reading all on its own. Feeds consume our attention and why would we not also aggressively and intentionally curate what we allow ourselves to see in them, similar to notifications?

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Less Precious

Social networking and media should have always been temporal. These should be thoughts and creations you’re okay with letting go of into the wind. Social platforms are a distribution channel at best, and a mechanism to garner some notice. Some apps have leaned into this: messages that disappear or vanish, time-boxed content, and auto-deletion.

Not everything is worthy of archival. In many instances, you’d even cringe at something you wrote ten, or even a year ago.

If you told someone that in the future we would be recording every conversation in public spaces and allow total strangers to read and refer to those conversations, indefinitely, I think most of us would agree that that future sounds like a dystopian hellscape. Yet this is most social media today. As Naz says in this excellent piece, “Not everything is worthy of archival”.

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When Screens Remove Our Better Angels

Sometimes, that pause before ordering a second burger isn’t judgment. It’s a kind of latent wisdom. Sometimes, the social constraints we’re so eager to shed are the very things keeping us from our worst impulses.

As a designer, I love friction. Friction acts as a constraint and sets the outer bounds of what can be accomplished in an experience. Social constraints help inform the norms that guide us in our day-to-day.

To use another analogy, if we design a road to increase the throughput of cars, some drivers will immediately take advantage of the reduced friction by driving faster. As those drivers drive faster, others around them tend to respond by increasing their speed as well, until the throughput of the road once again reaches a place where the friction in its design is noticeable—usually through car crashes and violence against pedestrians or other non-car road users.

The next frontier of digital design can’t just be about making things easier. It has to be about understanding when friction serves a purpose.

Friction is often a feature; not a bug.

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Software Should Feel Like Magic

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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Magic Links and Passkeys

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:

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The Cognition Stack for AI-native Companies & Why Sales, Support, & Social Are Converging

There are so many products and services that people would want but are far too niche to be built and deployed in a profitable way. We’re starting to see very small services emerge, from research and consulting to career support and production shops, that are founded and led by just a few people, without the intention of ever scaling.

“[S]mall services emerge… led by just a few people, without the intention of ever scaling.” – this was my company even before AI and it was a good business. But it also wasn’t really a business because if I left or stopped working—poof—it’s gone. But if there had been a way to notably scale my income at the time without doing more work (or hiring), I would’ve tried it. Similarly, if there was a way to create a process around it that others could step into, that would’ve made it more valuable. It’ll be interesting to watch what happens here with AI.

Also:

In the era ahead, humans will crave more scarce, authentic, and offline experiences than ever before. We will crave small restaurant experiences with proud chefs. We will crave one-of-a-kind art infused with human story. We will crave theater and emotional films with deep meaning. We will crave shared experiences and live music. In the age of AI, there will be rampant demand for stuff that only humans can create.

I’ve said it before, but this is my hope. Reading about a business where AI drives everything, creates everything, communicates everything, and scales itself leaves me feeling… well, “bleh”. I think we’ll all be able to tell, to some extent. And in some business areas, we’ll be ok with the tradeoff for lower cost products (or faster service). But in other areas, many of us will a human touch.

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Life Extension and Value Maximization

Nothing baffles me more than watching someone make a coffee order, ask for it “to go” only to sit at the cafe for an hour, later tossing their trash on the way out the door.

The pandemic absolutely helped normalized this and it breaks my brain. Five years after its onset and most coffee shops I frequent in LA have flipped their pre-pandemic default from re-usable containers to disposable trash. I even know a few that eliminated re-usable dishware entirely.

My rant wasn’t the point of Jen’s piece, but she touches on related themes:

My seemingly lifelong dedication to “economic mindfulness” has led to several everyday wares never appearing on my shopping lists

I love the term “economic mindfulness” – Jen has a great list of things she considers based on the physical and economic impact to her life, day-to-day.

We won’t solve systemic problems like climate change on a personal level, but one thing that I’ve never understood is the fatalistic take of, “well, I can’t make a difference, so changing my behavior isn’t worth it”.

People love flexibility and capitalism loves to hide the real costs of consumer decisions, but it might be helpful to realize we do not pay economically-realistic prices on many of the goods and services we consume.

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I’m still focused on the part where one of the world’s largest employers of software engineers said that most software engineers will be redundant by the end of year…

I try not to link to social media threads here, but sometimes that’s where the good stuff resides.

If you wanted to crawl into my head and do a better job of articulating my anxiety and muddy thoughts around how AI has changed (or might? (or will??)) the trajectory of my career, Kyle Hughes has done it.

Granted, it almost has to be business as usual because what other option is there? Either it won’t happen or we’ll be homeless.

Right, like do I stay in a job longer than I would have before because it feels “secure”? Do I pretend several CEOs (named and unnamed) haven’t put a giant target on my back and apply to work for their companies, hoping to eek a few more years of pay out before AI sends me off into the sunset? What’s the best course of action in an environment like this? It’s unknowable, in my opinion.

What do we tell students?

Oof, yeah, this. I have several friends with kids at the “considering college” age and I do not envy that calculus right now.

My brain plugged along for 30 years without ever having the passing thought that my value could be automated. In some ways, I physically can’t comprehend it.

Same. It’s one thing to watch a job move another country and see different humans take it on at a cheaper rate; that’s comprehensible. But to be told that you—and any other human who does what you do on the planet—simply won’t be needed in the near (maybe less than 12 months) future is just something else! And, twist: good luck finding a new career that isn’t also similarly affected.

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Ambition vs Love

Around the world, there are many craftspeople who do what they do out of love. Many are not ambitious, but they love the pursuit of their craft, mastering technique and making something beautiful. They can work many years happily in the satisfaction of what they’ve made.

I’ve been thinking a lot about craft lately, so Sarah Clatterbuck’s piece caught my eye. I don’t want to ruin the close for you, but the gist is that working with inquisitive people who care not only about how things work, but why they work, and enjoy making those things goes a long way to enjoying one’s career (and improving one’s own craft).

I’ve often been lucky to work with such people, but what’s been taking up cycles in my brain lately is this: what happens to craft in a world of AI?

There is a lot of mundane in my job. A good chunk of it I would be happy to have AI take away, but some of that mundane is integral to a process where I get deep enough in the details to notice things that someone else wouldn’t have noticed. I have to because I am driven by the “how” and “why” questions of design and software engineering. And also by the empathy to consistently imagine the person who will ultimately use the thing I’m making, and what they will experience.

Even in the best scenario where AI simply lifts us out of the drudgery, I worry that something will be lost in the learning process that helped me develop what I consider to be a high level of craft in my work. What replaces that? What becomes the craft if the idea is all that is needed to execute? Is that good or bad? Or maybe something altogether new that I can’t think of?

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Standing on the line.

LA is a city that works. LA is a city that dreams. The people there—friends and family and so so many strangers—are ready to work, are ready to look out for each other, are ready to dream in a way that only LA can dream and build something better from the ashes.

Every sunset ends in darkness. But it sets up the sunrise of a new day.

What is there to say? I am safe and gratefully unaffected, physically, but I’m at a bit of a loss for words after the horrific fire events in the city this month.

I appreciate the way Dan Sinker finishes his piece. Most cities are places built on dreams, but that is maybe more true in LA than anywhere else in the world. It’s the city where its own industry brings those dreams to life. It’s a city where the winter sun slants in just the right way to cast a dreamlike quality on the most mundane task, making it beautiful. It’s a city that can’t really decide what it is architecturally or in layout and in that way is a city that makes space for everyone.

The last few weeks were indeed a darkness.

I’m breaking my self-imposed conceit for 3 Things this week because I needed more LA missives and you might too.

From Mike Davidson’s very personal “47 Years Later, the Palisades Disappeared Overnight” –

When my dad explained what he was doing, he would point northeast to the hills behind us and tell us that if the winds didn’t die down, the fire miles in the distance would come towards our tiny little house and there would be trouble. As a small child, I don’t actually remember being scared about any of this. Every year there was a fire, the smoke was always so far away and so barely visible that it just seemed like anything else in life at the time. And besides, dads are superheroes to their children, so of course there was no danger.

And Snap CEO/Founder, Evan Spiegel, on the company’s official blog (Snap, née Snapchat, is headquarterd in Santa Monica), “Dear Los Angeles, I Love You” –

We are not the first community to face a megafire. We will not be the last. But we will use our strength, our ingenuity, and our love to create again and anew. Our city of great artists will add a new layer of paint to this beautiful canvas we call home.

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The Purpose of a System is What It Does

“If the purpose of a system is what it does, and we don’t like what it does, then we have to change the system. And we change the system by making everyone involved, especially those in authority, feel urgency about changing the real-world impacts that a system has.”

Yes, yes! 🤌🏼

And this follow-on:

“In my own life, I’ve found the greatest reluctance to embrace this idea, and strongest rejection of its obvious truth, comes from the politically moderate, centrist-leaning suburban folks that I grew up around and spent the first decades of my life amongst.”

To be an unwitting systems observer (how I feel, not Anil’s term) is to be virtually incapable of seeing the way the systems around us define our lives and experience. It’s at the core of a [redacted], and his experience of indifferent moderatism in the suburban core resonates significantly with my own experience growing up in the suburbs. When the systems are built for you, you tend to think of them as natural and immutable in the way a religious person might just assume their perfect deity deigned them to be so.

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Personal Renewal

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we build meaning in our lives and this speech by John W. Gardner nails it:

“You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something.”

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Collapsing the Talent Stack, Persona-Led Growth & Designing Organizations for the Future

Scott Belsky’s newsletter is worth the subscribe. I wanted to particularly call out his commentary on “collapsing the talent stack”. This tracks with how I also imagine AI will affect the design/product industry. We will see less niched titles doing micro tasks and more generalists. I’m not saying this is bad or good (I can make arguments in both directions), but business is going to expect increasingly-more from those of us that help craft product interfaces and feature roadmaps.

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ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web

This piece is already several month’s old, and it may not age well, but I suspect some element of the “snake eats tail” effect is unavoidable at both a technical and (more importantly) cultural level. Yes, everything is a remix, but what if the remix is increasingly limited, boring, and factually inaccurate?

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The Western megadrought is revealing America’s ‘lost national park’

Lake Powell was always a fools errand. It hasn’t been at capacity in decades, and only rarely since its inception. It’s time to let it go and allow nature to restore the beautiful canyons and indigenous cultural sites that have long been covered.

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House of Rain

Recommended to me by my sister, this book gave me a fresh perspective on the Four Corners region of the American Southwest and the ancestors of the indigenous Puebloan peoples.