In his AI Speaker Series presentation at Sutter Hill Ventures, Henry Modisett, Head of Design at Perplexity, shared insights on designing AI products and the evolving role of designers in this new landscape. Here's my notes from his talk: Technological innovation is outpacing our ability to…

I'm a huge fan of Star Wars. The first movie (no, not Episode 1) came out when I was young, so I grew up thinking about the Millennium Falcon and lightsabers. Perhaps it sparked my interest in science—even if it's not exactly science fiction. Oh, there's a nice way to start a nerd fight: Is Star…

First, there was the terminal. You typed text. Scrolling text came back. It was: Powerful Flexible for power users Easy to program But also, since it was centered around a blank input field, it was: Daunting Unintuitive Bad for selecting and manipulating stuff Fortunately, in the intervening decades…

25th May 2025 Anthropic publish most of the system prompts for their chat models as part of their release notes. They recently shared the new prompts for both Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4. I enjoyed digging through the prompts, since they act as a sort of unofficial manual for how best to use…

Don’t let an LLM make decisions or execute business logic: they suck at that. I build NPCs for an online game, and I get asked a lot “How did you get ChatGPT to do that?” The answer is invariably: “I didn’t, and also you shouldn’t”. In most applications, the LLM should be the user-interface only…

The Promise of Memoization When React applications start to slow down, React.memo, useMemo, and useCallback are often the first tools developers reach for. After all, preventing unnecessary re-renders seems like a straightforward path to better performance. But in the React ecosystem, memoization is…

The rise of LLM-powered code generation tools is reshaping how developers write software - and introducing new risks to the software supply chain in the process. These AI coding assistants, like large language models in general, have a habit of hallucinating. They suggest code that incorporates…

If you pay attention to AI company branding, you'll notice a pattern: Circular shape (often with a gradient) Central opening or focal point Radiating elements from the center Soft, organic curves Sound familiar? It should, because it's also an apt description of... well, you know. A butthole. The…

It's not hard to bork your site's user experience by letting a long, expensive task hog the main thread. No matter how complex an application becomes, the event loop can still do only one thing at a time. If any of your code is squatting on it, everything else is on standby, and it usually doesn't…

“We didn’t know what we were doing,” says Josh Schwartz, creator of The O.C. For the show’s first few episodes, the music choices were simply plucked from his own iPod. But once the now-legendary music supervisor Alexandra Patsavas came aboard, the show turned into a weekly showcase for some of the…

Jun 2024 Comments at substack. Mindset matters more than where you go. Who you go with matters more than where you go. After seeing each other for a few months, many new couples take a short trip, which often ends in an apocalyptic, relationship-destroying fight. My theory is that’s the trip working…

Preface In March 2023, I published The Age of Average. The article argued that the world in which we live, including its art and architecture, film and fashion, increasingly looks alike. Since publishing the piece, it’s been read over half a million times, presented at conferences and discussed on…

Building your own entitlement service is key for supporting a modern, flexible SaaS product. Whenever I read about billing systems, there’s a lot of talk about the billing aspects but not so much around entitlements. In the spirit of sharing, and since I haven’t found any good articles about it, I…

A list of useful, not-obvious hacks to get the most out of your browser’s debugger. Assumes an intermediate-level-or-higher understanding of the developer tools. By using expressions that have side effects in places you wouldn’t expect, we can squeeze more functionality out of basic features like…

Back Clickbait title, I know. It's kinda true though. Every 2 days, there's a new thing about react and how to use it, that the whole"it's just javascript" statement makes no sense to me anymore. I've

I used to tell this story, about my theory of fucks. The theory goes like so: you are born with so many fucks to give. However many you’ve got is all there is; they are like eggs, that way. Some of us are born with quite a lot, some with less, but none of us knows how many we have. When we’re young,…

I don’t like that word. Just use the command line Just use the command line. Just figure out what to install. How to install it.

At first sight, the idea of 1,216-page two-volume work on keyboards for $150 might seem like a heavy lift. But it was years in the making. 41 min read· Jan 22, 2024 -- Yes, you can hire me as a crowdfunding consultant, book editor, or project manager. See this page for more details. A typical…

Feb 04, 2024 “AI Inside” Tech companies are scrambling to stake their claims in the AI gold rush, and — on top of the legal and ethical woes they’re leaving in their wake — a lot of them are shipping surprisingly bad product. The tell? If the name focuses on “✨AI”, brace yourself. Remember Intel’s…

Ten years ago, Stephen Fry ate balls in the Hobbit films. If that doesn’t ring a bell as something from Tolkien, don’t worry. Not only is it from the second film in the culturally forgotten Hobbit trilogy, but this specific sequence only exists in the Extended Edition. That’s right. The Hobbit…

At around the same time as news of the New York Times lawsuit vs OpenAI broke, Reid Southen, the film industry concept artist (Marvel, DC, Matrix Resurrections, Hunger Games, etc.) I wrote about last week, and I started doing some experiments together. We will publish a full report next week, but it…

26th October 2023 Last year I wrote about my initial experiments with DALL-E 2, OpenAI’s image generation model. I’ve been having an absurd amount of fun playing with its sequel, DALL-E 3 recently. Here are some notes, including a peek under the hood and some notes on the leaked system prompt.…

Shouts & Murmurs September 25, 2023 Illustration by Luci Gutiérrez Hey, guys! There’s been a lot of discussion going on lately and I just wanted to clear the air. I totally understand that people think I got my job because of my dad, but I definitely would have still been the Lord and Saviour Jesus…

Published: September 26, 2023 When my brother and I were younger, our tastes in music were nearly polar opposites. I was a total hipster, and valued what I saw as artistic integrity and creative innovation. I was almost entirely into new and active, of-the-moment artists. In contrast, my brother…

The first question plaguing omnivorous, content-hungry humans with a spare hour or two is this: What should I watch? In recent years, a second question has come to dominate our evening streaming rituals: How do I watch it? Drenching your eyeballs in sweet television can be surprisingly tricky,…

Most people know that most LEGO bricks are made of ABS, but that’s not the only plastic that LEGO uses!

Typography is so much more than picking a font and deciding what sizes to use for headings and body text. It could be regarded as its own branch of science. And it’s not just science either, it’s a mi

Details on the painful experiences and hard-earned lessons I've learned migrating the Redux packages to ESM Table of Contents Introduction For the last 8+ years, the JS ecosystem has been undergoing a

“What if India ruled Great Britain?” reads the caption of a TikTok video, now viewed over 1.7 million times. The prompt is followed by a series of faux documentary images that narrate a history which

It's been 10 years since Google acquired Waze, and I thought it would be the right time to tell the story and some of what I learned. In June 2013, Waze was acquired by Google for $1.15B. In those day

You have been using JavaScript for 10 years. It’s time for your test. You are sitting in front of a computer. The test is simple: you have to open a package.json file and read it. The package.json is

Maybe grandma's secret family recipe isn't so secret after all. Paul Boston When Danny Meyer was gearing up to open his barbecue restaurant, Blue Smoke, there was one recipe he knew he had to have on

Carl De Souza/AFP via Getty Images This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Maggie Kloza, the lead zoologist of mammals at the Dallas Zoo. This conversation has been edited and condensed

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I wish I was better at journaling. I love it and love having documentation of the things I’ve done, feelings I’ve felt, experiences I’ve had, etc. I just haven’t built the habit yet. I’d like to chang