In the mid-2000s, I was approached by a tech entrepreneur who was a fan of classical music and had a foundation that supported many classical artists. He had contacted me because of articles I had wri
Introduction: In the early 1990s, two Russian artists named Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid took the unusual step of hiring a market research firm. Their brief was simple. Understand what Americans
No one ever went broke taking a profit Unlike companies that reinvest all or most of the money back into the company every year, we take money (profit) out every year in the form of distributions (we’
We are in the middle of a massive shift in the way people use and buy software. It’s been well over a decade since Salesforce brought software to the cloud. Apple put digital experiences in people’s
Rules of thumb, and general philosophy Below you’ll find a collection of general principles we try to keep in mind at 37signals when making decisions. They aren’t requirements, and this isn’t a compre
In September 2020, a new social network named Telepath launched. I had been beta-testing it for over a year before it debuted, at the invitation of Marc Bodnick , one of Telepath’s co-founders and a Q
I recently purchased a Mazda Miata . This car is interesting because instead of running on electricity, it is powered by a combustible liquid called gasoline. The vehicle has an engine that mixes the
The Market for Lemons February 4, 2023 For most of the past decade, I have spent a considerable fraction of my professional life consulting with teams building on the web. It is not going well. Not on
Introduction At Stripe, we think a lot about scale. As we’ve scaled our products to process billions of dollars a year for millions of businesses, we’ve also needed to scale our engineering team. Ther
Guest Essay Noam Chomsky: The False Promise of ChatGPT March 8, 2023 Credit... By Ruru Kuo By Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts and Dr. Chomsky and Dr. Roberts are professors of linguistics. Dr. Watumull is a
I realize how it sounds, but I'm going to say it anyway because it's the truth. When I first clapped eyes on the World Wide Web, I fell in love. Here's how I described the experience in a 2016 post ab
Microsoft is making a desperate play. Having spent billions on a search engine that no one uses , the company has sunk billions more into equipping it with the chatbot technology ChatGPT, on the theor
Product vs. Feature Teams This article is certain to upset many people. I’m sorry for that, but the degree of ongoing noise and confusion surrounding the role of product at tech companies is only gett
8 min read · Jan 24 -- How did the company that aspired to be so much more come to this? Photo by Kai Wenzel on Unsplash Recently, Google announced it was laying off approximately 6% of its workforce
Enlarge / What might have been. Lee Hutchinson / NASA / NOAA February 1, 2023: One of the most tragic events in the history of space exploration is the loss of the space shuttle Columbia and all seven
Koos Looijesteijn I design at ForTomorrow . I’m an immigrant in Berlin, geriatric millennial, edge case, papa. “It could have been so great, but why is it so ugly and difficult to use?” people trying
My post before this was a kind of therapy / Buddhism / personal growth kind of deal, but I also spend a lot of time thinking about how to run effective teams and to be a responsible, thoughtful manage
It’s time for our annual look back on Apple’s performance during the past year, as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time th
Big Tech layoffs are in the news, you say? On January 20th, 1998, Netscape laid off a lot of people. One of them would have been me, as my "department", such as it was, had been eliminated, but I ende
How to Measure Design System Adoption Automated tracking of token and component adoption Published in UX Collective · 8 min read · Sep 25, 2022 -- Early on in Onfido ’s design system journey all our d
Addy Osmani @addyosmani Choose Format Download the book (~50 pages) Free on Apple Books Free on Google Play ePub/PDF on LeanPub Physical Book (Lulu) Get the free Audio Book In "Software Engineering -
I’ve been following with great interest this series of articles by John Gruber (and Matt Birchler’s related story ) about the chasm between iOS and Android apps. I have some thoughts since expanding m
Things 3.17 is out for iPhone , iPad , and Mac with greatly expanded support for Shortcuts. That opens up a much wider variety of possible automations than ever before. It’s a lot to take in at once,
Web browsers are more powerful than ever, but using them can be soul-sucking. The Browser Company wants to change that. "We open our browsers today and we feel nothing," says Josh Miller , co-founder
Credit... Photo illustration by Justin Metz A wave of lawsuits argue that Tesla’s self-driving software is dangerously overhyped. What can its blind spots teach us about the company’s erratic C.E.O.?
Martinez during the 2019 Campones Cup Photograph by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images I’ll always picture Josef Martinez sitting on his couch, gnawing on some chicken wings. In 2019, as Atlanta United was on
Negativity is by now so deeply ingrained in American media culture that it’s become the default frame imposed on reality. In large part, this is because since the dawn of the internet age, the surest
Adjust Share day one The course of true nationalism never did run smooth. âErnest Gellner T he city was not beautiful; no one made that claim for it. At the height of summer, people in suits, shella
So I’ve been seeing arguments for why, no, you should really stay on Twitter, because of the problems with anything vying to replace it. Most circle around what tech people might dub failure modes in
For years, Apple has carefully curated a reputation as a privacy stalwart among data-hungry and growth-seeking tech companies. In multi-platform ad campaigns, the company told consumers that “what hap
A few weeks ago, I made a tweet about how I thought Mastodon wouldn’t scale due to moderation issues. The tweet is since deleted (not because I deleted it individually, but because I later made the de
Content Moderation from the speed-running-for-fun-and-for-profit dept Wed, Nov 2nd 2022 09:32am - It’s kind of a rite of passage for any new social media network. They show up, insist that they’re the
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer. Photo: Patrick Pleul - Pool/AFP via Getty Images A pet theory: At the core of every successful social network is a glowing nugget of shame, a little radioactive powe
Stage Manager in iPadOS 16.1. This article wasn’t supposed to go like this. iPadOS 16 is launching to the public today, and it carries a lot of expectations on its shoulders: for the first time since
M itch McConnell froze when a Capitol Police officer rushed into the Senate chamber carrying a semiautomatic weapon. The majority leader had been so engrossed in the Electoral College debate happening
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