One Year With the Vision Pro - Basically, not enough ROI for $3,500.
The Tyranny of Now - ”What Innis saw is that some media are particularly good at transporting information across space, while others are particularly good at transporting it through time. Some are space-biased while others are time-biased. Each medium’s temporal or spatial emphasis stems from its material qualities. Time-biased media tend to be heavy and durable. They last a long time, but they are not easy to move around. Think of a gravestone carved out of granite or marble. Its message can remain legible for centuries, but only those who visit the cemetery are able to read it. Space-biased media tend to be lightweight and portable. They’re easy to carry, but they decay or degrade quickly. Think of a newspaper printed on cheap, thin stock. It can be distributed in the morning to a large, widely dispersed readership, but by evening it’s in the trash.”
The Great AI UI Unification - What’s going on here is a classic power user versus normal user UX problem. I’m probably more power user than normal user. I don’t mind the UX, it’s easy access to docs that explain features that I find annoying. For example, try to do a deep explanation of what’s currently in ChatGPT Pro. There really isn’t. Even more so, last I looked the help page doesn’t list new features like Deep Search. And most ironically of all, if you ask ChatGPT itself, the answers are not great, or accurate. E.g., I asked about using its reminders and it didn’t even know it had them until I fed it to blog post on it. The naming of things is not helpful as well. // Tech companies are terrible about documentation. While obscure, Apple Short Cuts is a great example. Docs for that are terrible, usually non-existent.
Tech continues to be political | Miriam Eric Suzanne - ”I don’t know how to attend conferences full of gushing talks about the tools that were designed to negate me. That feels so absurd to say. I don’t have any interest in trying to reverse-engineer use-cases for it, or improve the flaws to make it “better”, or help sell it by bending it to new uses.”
AI Alone Won’t Drive Revenue - What Are You Missing? - Some light ROI talk.
Why are big tech companies so slow? - Because they build, sell, and support a lot features.
How to add a directory to your PATH - Computers are easy, they said. You just need to read the manual, they said. It’s so intuitive!
All hat, no cowboy - A bicycle for your hands: “Becoming a good programmer takes time, so does becoming an artist. What if all the people with ideas but no time or skills or persistence or real interest could participate and _turn their ideas into the thing?_Surely non-musicians have great ideas for songs that they could turn into great songs if it weren’t for the inconvenience of musical instruments.” Yes, and: “One way to look at this – not a charitable way, but a view that feels true to me – is that managers view all need for human labor as an inconvenience. In part because they rarely get to experience what it’s like to be closer to a creative process, but also because they constantly experience the inconvenience of checking on deadlines and paying invoices. They would simply rather manage a robot than a human, so the only other people they have to interact with are other executives. Peak economic efficiency."
The “AI Agent As Coworker” Narrative Is Nonsense The AI agent co-worker narrative is nonsense - Against the agentic hype: “You have to admire Benioff’s chutzpah in defining digital labor as some brand-new massive market opportunity. But to many, it just sounds like automation. Like every other phase of automation since the beginning of the industrial age, this phase is also about doing more with fewer human resources."