131 Posts, 89 Publications, 71 Tweets
My therapist told me the synths and VSTs I've bought represent different aspects of my personality and family, and that I should learn each one thoroughly and discover what it’s trying to tell me. Which has me thinking I could quit therapy and get a flagship workstation.
I know we hate AI on here and you're right, Pandora should seal that jar right up, and I'm sure she will one day. But in the meantime I've been building a little tool to explore how AI workflows could produce tech specs and I realized you can make a workflow for ANYTHING.
This question about NYC synth shops from 2022 sweetly devolves/ascends into an old-timers conversation about the 90s/2000s club scene and music stores. gearspace.
My son and I were talking about how each era remakes and remixes the past and produces its own version of culture, and that’s a positive thing, and then he said, “A Skibidi Night’s Dream.
Getting geared up to come on here and parasocialize.
In quiet Christmas moments I’ve been enjoying the utterly unusual software instruments I bought from www. giorgiosancristoforo.
Going to bed imagining a Bataille/Dworkin podcast.
Plus providing attention for good Internet things is very encouraging to people who make them and makes them want to make more.
If you take it literally, “Last Christmas” by Wham! is a song about organ donation from the POV of a ghost.
There was a project at the Dia in 1997 to poll 500 people to find out what they liked most and least in music. Then the artists Komar and Melamid, with friendly musical neuroscientist David Sulzer, made the most wanted song and the most unwanted song.
Patrick Bateman Genesis monologue but unironically.
Like thrift stores, the new AI systems are chaotic, weird—and ultimately human.
Judging by events, the time police are clearly not sending their best.
Farewell 2024—a boring year in which nothing really happened! On this week’s Reqless, Paul and Rich reflect on our current moment of widespread instability, from the cultural to the political to the technological, and discuss some of the ways they try to manage it (waffles!) (also building software). And because this is an AI podcast, they look back over a year of rapid change in the space, and make predictions for what’s to come in 2025.
A thing I now say to my kids is, “Do a teamwork, not a screamwork.
Last night I watched The Witch (2015), a thoughtful film about the challenges parents face raising teens, with the role of social media played by a goat.
The NYC high school application process is a bureaucratic disaster but at the same time the unvarnished sincerity of many public school teachers is overwhelming. And I’m sitting on my phone in the HS auditorium where Streisand was in the chorus.
Executives are all-in on AI, but many workers are not: A recent survey of white-collar employees conducted by Slack shows workplace AI adoption has slowed, even stalled, in recent months. On this week’s Reqless, Paul and Rich explore the various reasons Slack’s respondents gave for their reticence and what they suggest about the current moment in tech. Is the issue the tools? Or is it how they’re being asked to use them—or if they’re being asked to use them at all.
Not the most important thing at all but it's “person of strong interest,“ not “strong person of interest.
Some thoughts on AI at the end of 2024—and one great link about the beauty of non-AI tech.
This week the robots bring the pink slip…for Aboard’s CEO, Rich Ziade! On the latest episode of Reqless, Paul observes that much of Rich’s job at their old agency—listening to the client, reframing their needs, outlining a solution and a path to build it—could now be done, at least in part, by AI. What value can Rich—and other skilled software “translators”—bring to a project in a world of AI-accelerated development?
The movie “Flow” is nominally about a little black cat surviving and finding friendships with a capybara and lemur, among others, in a flooded, post-apocalyptic world, but it is also about managing anxiety during crisis by focusing on the community you are in. Also it was made in Blender.
I know if I buy enough Black Friday sale VST plugins that will defeat fascism, I just wish I knew how many.
What if the Michael Bay Skibidi Toilet movie is good?
Teaching robots, brutalist architecture, saving squirrels, and more.
On this week’s Reqless, Paul and Rich receive a letter from a <em>different</em> Rich—a UX researcher interested in helping NGOs make the most of new AI tech. What should a UX researcher learn right now so they’re ready for what’s next? They discuss the things AI is particularly good at right now (translating artifacts!), and give concrete suggestions for things a UX researcher—or any technologist—can do to understand the breadth and scope of these tools.
I see Bluesky not so much as a Twitter replacement and more as a kind of a stepdown facility to less computer.
This joke won’t land for a lot of people but I keep thinking of Musk as “Dilbert Speer.
Unfortunately I figured this out—it’s whoever promises to feed the whole library to Grok.
The doorman in this building I’m visiting just pointed to an open elevator and said “You can’t take this one, guys, it’s for garbage,” and I had to bite my tongue to not say “au contraire!
CrazySexyCool is 30. Don’t go chasing waterfalls without proper back support.
AI and the career ladder, big tech’s training data struggles, and more.
Lets tune out the news and see how it’s going over in the “run AI on the desktop” community.
AI is on the verge of utterly transforming the software industry, but how quickly will that change come? While Paul has been betting on a shorter timeline, Rich had thought the pace of institutional change would slow things down significantly. But on this week’s Reqless, Rich explains why his thinking has shifted—and how he’s coming around to Paul’s speedier timeline.
Missed this when it came out—this op-ed from Die Zeit really nailed down the situation in a way that offers a lot of clarity about our options and the way forward.
People really do believe they have a right to attention. Madness.
God I love this movie.
I was on the train and saw more people reading big hardback books than I’ve seen in a long, long time. I am also reading large books.
In two years he gets to pick a new Librarian of Congress, a ten-year appointment, and I keep wondering who it could possibly be.
I'm boxing in media consumption to once or twice a day, which great, but the amount of nightmare stupidity that builds up in an eight hour period is incomprehensible. “It's called DOGE...
The computer gives us information we can process and use—and then we decide what gets written down.
That was a fun week.
In the wake of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Paul and Rich look towards the future with an AI lens—especially with the incoming Trump administration unlikely to put any regulatory guardrails on this rapidly evolving technology. What can AI do for people in our deeply fractured state? Are we doomed to poison the information environment forever, or could we use it to start building things that help people make sense of the world?
Do you think Hochul will pardon him?
I feel like a citizen of SimCity.
Trying to get the bots to make a greeting card appropriate for the moment, failing.
What self-help books and videos and essays you all got?
Moonlight in the morning.
Non-profits often have tight budgets and specialized needs—and wind up having to pay a whole lot of money for consultants and imperfect, out-of-the-box software solutions. As generative AI promises to drastically reduce the cost of development, how will that affect the non-profit and NGO landscape? On this week’s Reqless, Paul and Rich assess this question, and offer up both immediate and longer-term advice for organizations struggling with software right now.
@cydharrell Done!
No matter where things end up in this mess I support my trans pallies all the way and we will keep flying the overcomplicated rainbow flag on our porch along with the Christmas lights and the BLM and CEASEFIRE NOW signs, as we start and fund a wine mom militia. But I think she’ll win.
@wireddotcom. bsky.
My brain is pudding and I know nothing but when I read the pollsters explaining their methods they sound like software engineers explaining why we have to port everything to a new functional declarative framework (again) while Selzer sounds like a C programmer saying “for loops are fine.
proud of my spouse @maureenflaherty. bsky.
@laurenancona I’m still here! But I miss me too.
Which will be longer? Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday?
We have a “teens welcome” sign up at our Trick or Treat station and when they identify themselves as teens we pull out the Fun Dip and they lose their minds.
All my beloved comfort follows are starting to show brainmelt, not because of anything changing but because the sheer cognitive friction of trying to parse thousands of simultaneous contradictions turns their respective skulls into one of those laser furnaces that simulates the core of the sun.
@ursonate I totally forgot about this, but yes. Sigh.
Claude’s new “computer use” feature is reassuringly janky—you can see all the pieces clanking noisily along.
The Biden administration recently put out their first-ever National Security Memorandum on Artificial Intelligence, so on this week’s Reqless, Paul and Rich unpack the memo and discuss what it might mean for the U.S. government’s future attitudes towards AI. Plus: They talk about recent developments with Anthropic’s Claude that allow you to control all the computers in the world.
Oof. 200k subs is shocking.
Tomorrow morning I am going to vote against the fascism.
For Halloween I’m going to glue a box plot to my head and tell people I’m the margin of TERROR.
Going Monday AM first thing w @maureenflaherty. bsky.
LA Times and WashPo folks resigning, women talking about their abortions, Republicans endorsing Harris—these people are immensely brave even though they will only be punished for it. The big picture is bleak, but we're seeing people do their vulnerable best in response to the world at its worst.
My hopium tolerance is increasing. Just to get from dinner to bedtime I need to huff enough to fill an airship.
A militia…but chill…a chillitia.
An AI tutorial from Ethan Mollick, a helpful tool from Google, and more.
How has public perception of AI changed over the past two years? On this week’s Reqless, Paul and Rich welcome on writer and editor Josh Tyrangiel, who’s been the <em>Washington Post</em>’s “AI tourist” columnist since early 2023. They discuss what he’s encountered in various industries experimenting with AI, and the overall sentiments he’s observed as ordinary people grapple with this technology. Plus: He discusses his recent collaboration with Oprah Winfrey on an AI special for ABC News—and the remarkable lettuce she served him for lunch.
I just want to vote so bad.
Help preserve the last publisher in the world! www.
GenAI works best when you can combine its outputs with problem-solving code.
Once a month we have folks over for waffles. The last one was a birthday party.
Reqless tends to take a measured yet optimistic stance on AI, but a lot of people out there hate it—for reasons including the environmental impact, the dubious origins of LLM training data, and, of course, the looming threat of AGI, A.K.A. our future robot overlords. On this week’s episode, Paul and Rich discuss some of those critiques, as well as zoom out to look at the longer arc of the technology industry and its impact on the world, asking the question, “In five years, is the world in a better or a worse place because of AI?”
My internals are also causing a lot of concern.
The pigeon is driving the bus.
New technologies are hard for humans to grasp in the best of times, and the tail of 2024 is not the best of times.
Still rough around the edges but we added climate risk data directly to our general purpose data management tool. aboard.
You’re a business stakeholder trying to evaluate AI tools for your organization. How should you assess them—and how should you measure the value of their outputs? On this week’s Reqless, Paul pitches Rich an acronym for this very task: TRACE. Transparent, Repeatable, Actionable, Clear, Efficient. How can these metrics help someone understand these tools before letting them into their org, and help them calculate the potential return on investment? Plus: Paul and Rich discuss a recent interview with MIT economist Daron Acemoglu on just how many jobs he’s calculated will be eliminated by AI in the next decade.
Let’s not elect someone who wants to institute a policy of denaturalization when we should be working together towards a culture of bignaturalsization.
My media consumption oscillates between the same utterly toxic, upsetting madness we're all consuming, then directly over to nerdy synth and DIY stuff on YouTube, and I worry my grip is slipping.
@Komaniecki_R https://en. wikipedia.
I can usually grind through it no matter how deadly but I just tapped out. This is just bad TV.
A new climate-change integration—plus other exciting updates about where we’re headed in the coming months.
These days, it can take longer to plan the software launch party than to spin up the software itself—which is exactly what happened with Aboard Climate, a new integration Paul, Rich, and the Aboard team debuted last week. Hangovers nursed and moderately rested, Paul and Rich discuss the event and the feature itself—which lets you incorporate real-time data from the climate-change literacy organization Probable Futures directly in Aboard—before talking about how the building process reflects today’s rapidly shifting landscape of software development.
My business partner is Lebanese and we work with many people in Beirut. There are lots of ways to give, but one I am excited to see as a fan of mutual aid is the Beirut Synth Center—which has transformed into an emergency mutual aid center.
This is just good website: restofworld. org/series/digit...
Does AI mean the end of software development jobs—or is this the start of a brand-new boom? Tech industry narratives are painting a gloomy future for coders, but on this week’s Reqless, Paul and Rich take the opposite tack. AI will shift who has access to software creation and the way things get built—so how should technologists position themselves for the coming decade?
Having adolescent twins during this moment in history and trying to figure out what to tell them, how to help them be resilient, and how to prepare them for what’s coming is a…(long breath with eyes closed)…confusing challenge that I will undertake with hope, each day.
@drozd_stephen @davidfholt Whoa! Happy birthday to Daniel.
Woke up and found that yesterday’s dolls have a bunch of new friends this morning! Wow!
Check out this other cool doll head my wife found on the beach.
My wife found this on the beach.
How much change will AI bring to the software industry? We see a wide range of outcomes.
@sophaskins Roland UX is so willfully isolationist from all other design. You have no choice but to read the manual five times and memorize countless utterly arcane configurations that each carry 40 years of tech debt.
Is the SaaS era coming to an end? On this week’s Reqless, Paul and Rich discuss recent comments from Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski, who says that generative AI has allowed them to build internal tools that let them dispose of products like Salesforce and Workday. With the cost of building software on the brink of dropping precipitously, what does that mean for the SaaS giants going forward?
I am trying to understand harmony and had the robot make me a directed graph of many common chord progressions. It's wild.
AV nerds: I want to buy a sound system for mini-conferences to be held in an office. Audiences in the 75-200 person range.
If AI is about to fundamentally change software development, what should current students be learning about code? On this week’s Reqless, Paul anoints Rich as head of a fictional programming department and asks him to lay out his syllabus—before hijacking the exercise and laying out his own syllabus. You need just enough knowledge to really use these tools to program, so what exactly should students learn?
@jamescham lol it's a little bit of a meme ala https://x.
@johnshankman Congrats!!!
Finishing your weird little projects with AI programming tools.
To my fellow NYC data+climate nerds: Would love to see you at this event in NYC late September! lu.
Generative AI is already revolutionizing software development—so how long are developers’ jobs safe? On this week’s Reqless, Paul and Rich use a recent post on the subject by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy to discuss the future of coders: What these tools will mean for organizations large and small; how new development paradigms will imperil the big consulting firms; and what advice they have for a junior developer looking at the next few decades of their career.
Everyone is like AI can't make art but it can sure as hell take that idea for a little MIDI sequencer based on nested lists and help you get the Python done in like an hour with comments + tests, then translate that to C++ so you can start to build a VCV Rack plugin, for about 70 cents in API fees.
@austinkleon Craigslist purchase!
@austinkleon We have one near the front door, and it soaks up book overflow beautifully. Absolutely great purchase.
@mulegirl @stevesilberman It’s truly sad.
@djacobs They'd see it as goofy retro-gaming—no one wants to see him playing CoD: Black Ops 6. He could talk about how he had to put it away so he could focus on Congress, show that gaming and being a responsible leader could combine.
@kaseyklimes core memory unlocked!
Our future is going to involve spiky, unpredictable changes that could cut us off from our software.
@jeffehobbs As someone who went to college near the finger lakes this unlocks a core memory.
A kid told me that when you hold hands with someone with fingers flat that’s “pancaking” and not very serious, but when you lock fingers that’s “waffling,” and way more serious. Has anyone else ever heard this lore?
How is AI changing the marketing industry? This week Paul and Rich welcome Noah Brier, a marketer and startup founder who’s excited about the ways AI could be used to solve the industry’s problems. Topics discussed include his early interest and adoption of generative AI tools, the types of problems his marketing clients are trying to tackle with AI, and why the tech industry seems to be missing the true potential of AI in its messaging.
Where are we at on this.
@sternbergh Republicans believe that video IS the Democratic National Convention.
@mulegirl No! This amazing!
The function of AI is not simply to generate stuff, but to make things more fun—and more useful.
@sophaskins They're surprisingly easy to make if you have an old MIDI cable and an old pair of of headphones! But I'm glad you found it.
@tophtucker @rsnous Absolutely no memory of writing this or which boat bar in SF.
By emphasizing the chatbot use case, are we missing the real communication powers of generative AI? On this week’s Reqless, Paul describes his recent journey to understand the 900-page, far-right master plan that is Project 2025—which he fed into ChatGPT and then asked for its contents to be summarized by “a really cheerful, optimistic squirrel.” With the power to instantly change voice and tone—for humor, to accommodate different reading levels, to speak with different dialects, etc.—is AI’s future role a sort of universal information translator?
Every four years I promise myself not to get in the bag for this stuff but then I’m streaming the DNC on the bus home and thinking, “Oh hell yeah, rules committee needs to pass a motion, let’s go, also this Mickey Guyton song should be played at baseball games.
@jeffehobbs I mean that is beyond kind Jeff, thank you.
@jeffehobbs With the hands sort of up in vampire pose and squinting.
@sogrady I am truly glad to hear that because I think of you as one of the dads who inspires me to be a more connected and thoughtful dad.
I promise myself I’m not going to think about politics for one day and then my brain goes “Beyoncé and Taylor Swift duet on Blackbird at the DNC then Paul McCartney joins for the final verse” and I hate myself for even being able to think thoughts like that.
@ChappellTracker Chappell when are you doing your first desk pop.
This is such next level fundraising. It’s just a whole other world.
What would the world look like if there were dozens of AI-ish things happening at once?
Are Meta’s ideas about AI the future of the technology? In the wake of the recent tech stock slump and with questions about newer AI companies’ true value, Paul and Rich look at Meta’s Llama and how the company is positioning its model in the broader AI landscape. Plus: They assess the recent decision in <em>United States v. Google LLC</em>—aka the Google antitrust case—and see if there are any real takeaways to be gleaned before what promises to be a lengthy appeals process.
In tech downturns, there’s a thrill in seeing what people build with less.
It’s easy to make blanket claims about “AI taking jobs”—but what does AI mean for specific industries in the near-term? On this week’s Reqless, Paul and Rich run through five careers (musician, advertiser, teacher, therapist, and consultant) and assess the ways AI might—and might not—change work. Plus: Paul describes himself as the “slightly grumpy girlfriend” as he and Rich reminisce about going to see beloved indie band Low together.
@jeffehobbs @aboard Thank you!
AI marketing should show enhancement, not replacement.
On this week’s Reqless, Paul and Rich look at how AI might affect the dominant way people organize data today: The spreadsheet. With its low barrier to entry and ability for users of all sorts to hack together solutions, does the humble spreadsheet leave any room for an AI transformation—and does it even need one? Plus: Fresh off a trip to San Francisco, Paul reports back on our driverless car future.
@mulegirl The little couch jabs are a trip.
@mulegirl So many shades of beige.
@sogrady Happy world IVF day!
@jamescham Have considered buying access to the full archives but don’t know if I want to go back in to that degree.
On this week’s podcast, Paul and Rich look at how AI is going to transform a very special industry filled with the nicest people: The law. After laying out the specific areas of the legal profession that are ripe for AI transformation, they assess a few current startups and their application frameworks (e.g., document review, research, contracts), and propose a new segment for each industry-specific podcast: “Will AI take your job?”
@kevinbaker Him translating it back to a rally in Florida. “You get a spaceship.
We keep coming back to one big question: What does AI mean for the software industry? Our new podcast tries to answer it.
Introducing Reqless—the new podcast from Aboard about how AI is changing software. In this episode, your hosts Paul Ford and Rich Ziade explain why this podcast exists, and talk about how AI is enabling everyone to start skipping steps—and why overall, you should embrace this, not fear it. (Although a little healthy fear never hurt anyone.)
@aboard Just acknowledging: We put the wrong headline on this in email, gonna keep doing better.
It’s just really nice to talk about something besides politics for a couple hours.
@kevinbaker Had this on during the 4th. (Also, wrote Schumer.
<p>A one-minute episode—we’re taking a very short summer break! But expect some big changes when we return…</p><p><u>Transcript</u></p><p><strong>Paul Ford</strong>: Hi, I'm Paul Ford, the co-founder of Aboard.</p><p><strong>Rich Ziade:</strong> And I'm Rich Ziade, the other co-founder of Aboard.</p><p><strong>Paul</strong>: And you're listening to the Aboard Po—oh, wait a minute. Oh, wow. Okay, wait. I think we're gonna rename this thing.</p><p><strong>Rich</strong>: Yeah? </p><p><strong>Paul</strong>: Yeah, it's time. We've received some high-level branding advice, and it is time for us to get out there and kinda own what we've been talking about, Richard. Let me tell you what we talk about. You know what we talk about?</p><p><strong>Rich</strong>: What?</p><p><strong>Paul</strong>: The incredibly rapid change that artificial intelligence technologies are bringing to the software industry. And sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, sometimes it's ridiculous. Often it's ridiculous. </p><p><strong>Rich</strong>: Mmm hmm. Mmm hmm. </p><p><strong>Paul</strong>: And we keep dancing around it, saying, we're this or we're that. But damn it, I think that's what we are. I think that's what we're doing for the next X months or years or decades.</p><p><strong>Rich</strong>: Great. Tune in next week. It'll be a new name. It'll show up in your same feed so you don't have to do anything. And it's fun. We still want to, like, share our ideas, thoughts, feedback to the world that is useful outside of our product.</p><p><strong>Paul</strong>: God help anybody trying to keep us on-script.</p><p><strong>Rich</strong>: Yeah. So world's shortest podcast this week. Have a lovely week, and we'll see you next week with a brand-new name and maybe a brand-new haircut.</p><p><strong>Paul</strong>: I could use one.</p><p><strong>Rich</strong>: All right, have a great week.</p><p><strong>Paul</strong>: Bye!</p>
To settle my brain I've been writing little easy-to-memorize iambic trimeter ABAB poems that contain essential lore, to print in case the Internet goes out. If I get enough of them I'll share them!
@glichfield @sally_j Gideon I kind of need a Lichfield cocktail.
@glichfield @sally_j Tbh I drank a whole lot.
Man this feels exactly like being in the waiting room as a family member goes in for surgery.
@sally_j BPM going steadily up like an EDM remix.
I guess ominous dread is it from here on out.
No newsletter has a better subject line style than IT Brew.
Perusing the academic repository Arxiv.org to look for the future of AI.
Your boss walks in and says, “What are we doing about AI?” How do you respond? On this week’s podcast, Paul and Rich break down the problem with the question itself, and the way AI is being offered as an imprecise, ineffective solution to solve business’s structural problems. Who actually needs AI—and how do you figure out the best way to use it?
It’s wild that these are my choices.
I had the robots tell me how a circuit makes a sine wave from the point of view of a band of happy-go-lucky electrons.
Why do we try to explain tech concepts and processes with metaphors—and why do we choose the metaphors we use? On this week’s podcast, Paul and Rich get philosophical, kicking off the conversation with an article about how the human is <em>not</em> like a computer, and travel through the history of personal computing to our present AI moment. Plus: How exactly should you handle the idealists in your organization?
Quite a Freudian typo on the checkout at the big and tall man store.
They were printing this cat.
Apple’s AI moves resurface a surprisingly old debate.
My decades-long tendency to save weird Internet cruft plus Google’s desire to show me old photos with context creates some of the best content in my life.
You’ve just shipped your latest release. Once you finish celebrating, how do you decide what to build next? Paul taps Rich, in his role as Aboard CEO, to set a course on a hypothetical product roadmap: Does he prioritize an enterprise-specific feature, another that might bump up broader user engagement, or the thing the boss tossed out because he had a vague hunch? Plus: Why is some industry-specific software beautiful, while other industries are left with clunky, uninspired “bureaucracy in software”?
ma'am www. instagram.
Four new field types will give your cards ridiculous levels of pure raw card power.
On this week’s podcast, Paul and Rich offer up some quick hits—and sample, in Rich’s words, “a buffet of technology news.” First, rhetoric: Specifically, the rhetorical pretzels of Nick Clegg, President for Global Affairs at Meta Platforms, who Paul and Rich saw speak at the EmTech Digital Conference. Next, cringe: Canva’s corporate rap that went viral recently, drawing (uncomplimentary) comparisons to HBO’s <em>Silicon Valley</em> or <em>Succession</em>’s “L to the OG.” And finally, stock disasters: On Salesforce’s steep downturn after posting weak profits, and whether that says anything about the market’s broader opinions on AI.
My LinkedIn account is finally old enough to legally develop a dangerous alcohol dependency.
@kjhealy Come visit the neighborhood!
@sogrady Oh yeah that’s the stuff.
I guess getting Queen Bee means you have an ovipositor that lays word-eggs.
Workshopping new cow jokes at dinner tonight. What does a cow like to listen to?
The other day I described a pointless meeting as “a real time toilet” and it instantly went into the phrase book.
Introducing…drum roll…export-to-CSV!
Does the real promise of generative AI lie in the chatbot? Paul and Rich don’t think so. Building off a post by tech entrepreneur Dustin Moskovitz on “scaffolded AI,” they discuss extreme visions of our AI future and position themselves in the center—where tools work <em>with </em>the user, rather than attempt to replace them.
Helping small groups of people communicate more effectively—and take action more decisively.
There are a huge number of low-code tools out there—but is “low code” a meaningful term? Paul and Rich discuss the promise versus the reality of low code, what most businesses really need from software, and the other descriptors they’d use if tasked with a low-code rebrand.
@troutgirl @JeromeHardaway I learned a ton too!
“On October 18, 1972, Tom Zahuranec invited the radio audience down to the KPFA Music Office to communicate mentally with a philodendron which was wired with liquid electrodes feeding impulses into a Buchla synthesizer. “ archive.
Every time I see the word “Connections,” I think about how editor of the most important American newspaper said that he might consider hiring journalists who went to state schools instead of Ivy-League schools in order to cut down on the woke.
@drozd_stephen It rules that I’ve been able to listen to this album for 25 years.
@vboykis Thank you.
Keep the most important bits of data on top.
still writin' dammit www. wired.
What does “risk-taking” really mean in business—and how can embracing some level of chaos help foster success? Paul and Rich make the case for unpredictability, talking about everything from New York City’s Diamond District to the relatively short runway when running an agency to Rich’s management style. (Hint: It involves repeatedly hitting a metaphorical gong.)
@ChappellTracker Part of me loves it but it's a milkshake duck generating machine. Have you checked out the extremely low-information website of its funder?
The coworking space has Middlemarch.
Crush fetishists having a really difficult time of it online today.
I spend a lot of evenings looking for where my Weltanschauung went wrong and I think the biggie is that I really believed increased velocity of communication would lead to net global increase in creative empathy. Mainline protestantism.
You’ve got one software system that doesn’t play nicely with your other software system—so surely the answer is a <em>third</em> software system to link them together, right? And how about adding a fourth, maybe even a fifth? Paul and Rich discuss the challenging gaps between the platforms people use to manage their businesses: How hard it can be to truly identify problems while you’re trying to grow, and how technology consultants tend to recommend shorter-term solutions that only make things more complicated—and more expensive.
Economy going through it right now.
How do you bring in ten times as many new users every day? That’s not the question you should actually be asking. Paul and Rich discuss the tech world’s faulty success metrics, the perpetual struggle of onboarding, and the importance of humility when listening to and communicating with your users.
Can cats still have a little salami as a treat?
At the Peabody museum for the first time since I was ten. I missed this guy.
The superpower of programming is hacking crap together really fast to see what breaks.
If a huge company wants to “partner” with your small business, can that ever be a fair partnership? Paul describes a recent mentorship dilemma to Rich, and they discuss the dynamics that make the position of the smaller player in that scenario so challenging. Plus: Musings on public-spectacle trials past and present, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and the existential dread prompted by even the most innocent Slack notifications.
This rules. Aboard: an AI-Powered Kanban Board App to Organize Bookmarks and Projects Download SaneBox to let AI organise your email inbox (+$25 credit) https://sanebox.
I launched a PaaS (Pirates as a Service) and immediately achieved ARR.
Thinking about Aboard’s AI capabilities like a scientific middle-schooler, by balancing knowledge and practice.
From copyright violations to environmental concerns to the looming threat of the singularity, AI is a hot-button topic these days. Paul and Rich talk through many facets of this conversation, and discuss how they think about the AI components of Aboard. Plus: A little roleplay in which we learn that Paul thinks Aboard is an earnest mid-century cartoon character.
@caseymlewis @Cekent @richziade Hi Christopher! Hi Casey!
@sogrady Kid-approved: - Chinatown is a great idea.
Most weeks, the Aboard Podcast is only <em>sponsored</em> by Aboard—but this week, Paul and Rich celebrate Aboard’s relaunch by devoting the whole episode to their shiny new AI-powered product! After they take a (technical <em>and</em> non-technical) look at exactly what’s going on under the hood, they discuss the ways Aboard uses AI to help humans, not supplant them.
@ethanhein Those moments of eye contact from five feet away where you need to look attentive and engaged while you crave death and relief.
Almost everyone needs to manage data, but few people want to define how data should work.
Just a quick update today, because....WE'RE LAUNCHING A SHINY NEW VERSION OF ABOARD!!! Paul and Rich will be back on Thursday with a full episode (which, as you can imagine, will be about the shiny new version of Aboard). In the meantime, check out all our changes—open up the app or visit Aboard.com!
Happy Participatory Budgeting Week to all who celebrate! council.
Tori Amos viral marketing is out of control.
On the liminal space between current and new versions.
Er. Mah.
This past week, the big news in the design software world was Canva’s acquisition of Affinity, and Paul and Rich kick off the episode by asking, “Is this a failure on Adobe’s part?” But of course Adobe remains a massively profitable company—so what drives the impulse to frame a giant tech company’s misses as overarching “failures”? As they mull over various motivations, they discuss how to reframe success on your own terms, outside the simple metrics of competition or industry trends.
She's an Oberlin student who “has some concerns. ” He's a Stanford guy who's “just asking questions.
You are probably not a hugely powerful and dominant silverback technology gorilla.
Can we all agree that the vibes are off? On this week’s podcast, Paul and Rich dig into our broader societal malaise (the effects of the pandemic; our phones as an endless portal to misery) and discuss how business leaders can combat these feelings. Plus: Some early analysis of the DOJ’s antitrust case against Apple, and a story about a Formula 1 team using a single Excel spreadsheet for…everything.
@drozd_stephen @robinhatch Stephen... please...
Things that are fast to build tend to be disposable—it’s the complex stuff that has the most impact.
Algorithmically innovative? An important tool for connection? A grave national security threat? Paul and Rich discuss the recent bipartisan vote in the U.S. House of Representatives to ban TikTok—and whatever you think of the platform itself, they argue that the move says something significant about the American government’s relationship with big tech.
How do you build a company that has an exciting product—but has nice, boring, stable qualities, too? Paul and Rich tackle this question from a variety of angles, from tax strategy to the value of marketing to treating the user like a spouse who might cheat on you if you stop putting any effort into the marriage. (And yes, don’t worry: There is also a fair bit of synth talk. And synth noises!)
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Learning from messy tech pasts via the history of the synthesizer industry.
Help the people out (esp. if you live in Brooklyn).
Will generative AI give us the answer or lead us to the answer—or is that the wrong question entirely? Paul and Rich assess the promise of AI through a lens of lightly skeptical optimism, trying to sort out hype from reality and figure out how exactly these tools might be embedded in everyones’ lives someday.
My daughter is bullying her twin brother by listing the qualities of their star sign and saying that he doesn’t live up to them while she does, and I am going to have a thrombosis.
Why does it always end up so complicated?
As the last decade’s big social media platforms crumble, Paul and Rich reflect on the (false) promise of the “global town square,” and the suggestion that putting millions of people in a giant room together could be productive in any way. If the era of building software to facilitate networked connections is truly on the way out, does AI promise a return to an earlier, utility-based era of technology?
Baby I just went to the state store, come on over and I’ll outen the lights so we can try out my new candle.
@bcmerchant @samfbiddle Last fiction I ever wrote! Grateful I got to do that.
It may be a huge messy database, but it’s our huge messy database.
When Paul suggests recording a podcast about public figures they admire, Rich has a counter-offer—why not talk about people they hate instead? But this particular exercise has a catch: They can only discuss things they admire or feel they can learn from said figures, a very tricky exercise with certain politicians! A countdown of five business and political leaders that some large number of people hate—plus listen to the very end to hear exactly how Paul compares himself to Taylor Swift.
Help this lady out, she's trying to help recent migrants get basic needs met and would like to talk to people who've done the work elsewhere if possible.
@ethanhein This rules.
Feeling scoot, might delete later.
You can’t tell people what to want. They will tell you what they want.
When Paul injures himself and is advised by his wife, Rich, and ChatGPT (seriously) to seek emergency medical attention, he goes to the urgent care and marvels at their utterly Byzantine technological set-up, from parallel, disconnected patient portals to being handed a literal CD-ROM with his X-rays. What can we learn from systems built for the captive user—and how does that apply to enterprise software more broadly?
Me: Hey History! I donated to a lot of causes, I hope you don’t judge me too harshly!
anyone need invite codes? just to feel that connection?
A child told me that they’d learned Google was releasing a new product like YouTube Shorts called Google HaHas, and I’m wondering how the kid rumor mill works now.
You just have to acknowledge that the intern is extremely high.
Learning piano means I hear something and go “that sounds nice, I wonder how hard it would be if…” only to be repeatedly met with yet another document demonstrating unbelievable levels of Romantic perversion.
It’s finally September on here!
What makes a person pay $120 for a tote bag—or fall in love with your software? Paul and Rich use a recent article about a TikTok influencer’s pricey (and popular!) tote bag to discuss our relationships with the things we buy, from unboxing videos (“commerce translated into emotional satisfaction”) to technologists’ largely incorrect assumption that adding one more feature will fundamentally change the way users feel about their product.
Admin at the coworking space told me I was “one of very few smilers” working there, purest form of validation. Not just nice, nicer.
Paul tries to talk about his current obsession—synthesizers—on a hardware and software level, but Rich turns the tables to talk about Paul’s obsession itself. After Rich repeatedly asks Paul, “What are you doing?” they discuss the appeal of minimally online hobbies (and, by extension, software) in an extremely online world.
@BradStone @BW @joelwebershow @technology A billion congratulations!!!
A rundown of resilience indicators, from trustworthiness to scale.
Men will literally record a podcast about their anxiety rather than go to therapy. How do you run a business when the world is on fire in so many ways? Paul and Rich talk about the state of things—including whether their perceptions of said things are even accurate—and how they should work, what to consider as they grow their company, and when to turn off. Gotta keep going.
Checking out some Schubert, still new to this song cycle, but nice to hear a song about a guy building a healthy relationship with a friendly brook.
Wow totally forgot there are Olympics this year.
Our friends find themselves in a new, corporate co-working space, determining that this, finally, is the thing that will push their digital product over the edge. Then, in a typically wide-reaching (cough) conversation, Rich and Paul discuss the current status of free speech discourse, in the context of the drama around Substack, and—well, as Rich puts it—“Who the hell asked technologists to be the arbiters of free speech?” Paul confesses that he dislikes mess, which would deeply shock anyone who saw his office desk.
Just from this headline I learned something new about Bloomberg readers: That they want to help Ecuador.
@ChappellTracker This could be your commute.
There’s always another alligator pit.
@ethanhein Congratulations! I love your analyses.
Rich and Paul ring in 2024 assessing the biggest technological development of last year, this year, and possibly many future years to come: Generative AI. Why did AI truly find a mainstream foothold in 2023—and how is the space going to evolve in the coming months? Plus: They engage in some (corporate) roleplay, and get really into character.
@djpardis 666!
At least the face-eating leopards won't go hungry.
@ChappellTracker I mean they left out the part where he said he’d like to exhume her corpse and beat her with her own shinbone. (But yeah I find it weird too.
@ChappellTracker This is…everything.
My goal is simply to understand what the hell is happening with these nerds.
Happy New Years despite all the mess.