Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About The World-and Why Things are Better Than You Think How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information Statistics Done Wrong: The Woefully Complete Guide Visualize This Ask the Question, Visualize the Answer One Dataset, Visualized 25 Ways Summary…

There's a lot of advice floating around about what experienced tech professionals can do to survive this current moment: Learn to prompt better. Stay creative. Embrace the tools. I find most of this advice vague enough to be useless. Then I read Steve Yegge's piece, Software Survival 3.0. He's not a…

We are all more productive, but are we still thinking? Elisa Viglianese 5 min read· May 26, 2026 -- Press enter or click to view image in full size Credit @kovalto1 adobe.stock 47% This is the percentage drop in brain activity measured among participants in an MIT Media Lab study who used ChatGPT,…

For most of my career, I never wrote down how I made decisions. Not the decisions themselves, but the logic behind them. Why this layout and not that one. Which stakeholders were best suited to try something new. Why an interaction works this way for admins, but that way for editors. How I was able…

It's Tuesday morning. Your VP of Engineering is standing in front of a slide deck, vibrating with the kind of excitement usually reserved for people who just discovered cryptocurrency in 2017. They've just come back from a conference. Or maybe a vendor dinner. Three glasses of pinot noir and a demo,…

What really brings value—and for what purpose—particularly in an era when budgets are tight? Similarly, folks focused on UX research argue that we are in the middle of a “reckoning,” questioning its ROI in certain contexts. Others disagree. As this tension builds, the world of generative AI offers a…

Have you done anything creative today? Research shows that creativity boasts remarkable mental health benefits, including emotion regulation, cognitive flexibility, and social connectedness (Jean-Berluche, 2024). Whether you’re painting, writing, playing music, or making a craft, art can provide…

I am a science-fiction writer, which means that my job is to make up futuristic parables about our current techno-social arrangements to interrogate not just what a gadget does, but who it does it for, and who it does it to. What I do not do is predict the future. No one can predict the future,…

Meta in Myanmar, Part II: The Crisis This is the second post in a series on what Meta did in Myanmar and what the broader technology community can learn from it. It will make a lot more sense if you read the first post—these first two are especially tightly linked and best understood as a single…

Hello again! This is Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter about science, applied curiosity, and why all our maps could be the wrong way round. As I announced recently, I’ll soon be starting a new series on getting a better night’s sleep that will be behind the paywall - so as a run-up to that, here’s…

i get a lot of messages asking me for writing advice, which i’m often hesitant or unable to give because i don’t think i’m particularly good at the actual task of writing: i don’t have a writing schedule, a daily output, good desk posture (or a desk at all), a spiritual artistic practice, or any of…

The speed of Apple Notes. The beauty of Bear. The productivity of Evernote. The extensibility of Obsidian. After countless hours of work and huge amounts of help from the fantastic Obsidian community , Notebook Navigator is now available for download in the Obsidian Community Plugin list! Notebook…

Oh me, oh my. Anyone else feel like that whole ‘2025 is the year of the snake and there’s a lot of shedding’ is very, VERY true? Anyway, I have some happy reasons for my tardiness (like a positive New York Times review of No New Things! Stoked in an understatement), as well as some less-fun ones I…

For Charli XCX fans, this summer is (or was) brat summer. But for San Francisco technologists and venture capitalists, it’s felt more like generative AI’s coming-of-age summer. The tech slowdown seems to have skipped over generative AI—I keep on meeting VCs investing in the area, and startup…

Over the past few weeks I have been using GPT-4 to help me cook. Need a substitute for an ingredient you forgot to buy? GPT can suggest an alternative. Time to clear out the cupboards? Simply type: “Please create a recipe using two eggs, a jar of borlotti beans, a potato, a leek, and the scrapings…

In 1964, the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum began working on a program that, as he modestly described it, “makes certain kinds of natural language conversation between man and computer possible.” ELIZA, named after a character in George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, was one of the world’s…

In conversation after conversation, I hear: “My company needs to focus…” “Our strategy is not a strategy….” “We try to do too much…” “Our leaders are always pushing us to do more at once…” “We keep chasing short-term outcomes…” “Our WIP is too high…” But here is something everyone needs to…

I gave this talk at Agile Cambridge on 2 October 2025 Thank you very much for having me. I’d like to start with a quote from Ian MacKaye, who is a musician and also a skateboarder: “Skateboarding is a way of learning how to redefine the world around you. For most people, when they saw a swimming…

The 7 deadly sins form a centuries-old religious framework that warns against unchanging human temptations that always cause weakness and trouble. Instead, humankind is urged to embrace the 7 opposing virtues, which require extra effort but ultimately strengthen and protect the individual. In this…

In my book, Co-Intelligence, I outlined a way that people could work with AI, which was, rather unsurprisingly, as a co-intelligence. Teamed with a chatbot, humans could use AI as a sort of intern or co-worker, correcting its errors, checking its work, co-developing ideas, and guiding it in the…

Brioches and Knife, Eliot Hodgkin, 08/1961 1. When people talk about the value of paying attention and slowing down, they often make it sound prudish and monk-like. Attention is something we “have to protect.” And we have to “pay”1 attention—like a tribute. But we shouldn’t forget how interesting…

The interplay between repetition and variation is central to how we perceive structure, rhythm, and depth across mediums. By: Samuel Jay Keyser BeeLine Reader uses subtle color gradients to help you read more efficiently. Made at the high point of Kline, de Kooning, and Pollock, Andy Warhol’s…

Rick Rubin in September 2006 — Photo by jasontheexploder, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0) We’re drowning in content. Every platform, every scroll, every second—more inputs, more noise, more things trying to hook your attention. The old metrics of intelligence—who memorized the most, who spoke the…

John Cutler 4 min read· May 29, 2016 In my career I’ve heard this conversation play out over and over: Eng: “Um, we have no idea what UX is even doing.” UX: “OK, why don’t we try to add the UX tickets to Jira.” Eng: “Um. Damn. That many stories? That is going to clutter everything up.” UX: “Product,…

Every few months I put together a guide on which AI system to use. Since I last wrote my guide, however, there has been a subtle but important shift in how the major AI products work. Increasingly, it isn't about the best model, it is about the best overall system for most people. The good news is…

Much has been written about what AI’s magical powers can enable—whether engineering, design or documentation. But I believe something just as interesting is happening with how teams build in the era of AI. This post was co-created with gems of insight from Henry Modisett, head of design at…

On this page The story of how a weird little UI to collect sentiment alongside survey responses defied constraints and triumphed over skepticism through usability testing. One would think that we’ve more or less figured survey UI out by now. Multiple choice questions, checkbox questions, matrix…

February 11, 2025 Macbeth Consulting the Witches, 1825, Eugène Delacroix How do you make a lan­guage model? Goes like this: erect a trellis of code, then allow the real pro­gram to grow, its devel­op­ment guided by a gru­eling training process, fueled by reams of text, mostly scraped from the…

Ridgeline subscribers — A funny thing happens when a Snickers bar goes from whole to eaten — the wrapper transmogrifies from useful to toxic. Suddenly, this thing that was keeping germs and dirt off your chocolate sugar log is now “useless” and with this comes the heaviest burden a modern person…

INDEPENDENT SCHOOL Fall 2014 GRIT A Skeptical Look at the Latest Educational Fad By Alfie Kohn This article is adapted from The Myth of the Spoiled Child, which contains references to the relevant research. A new idea is hatched; it begins to spread; it catches on; it inspires a flurry of books and…

I love a big-volume skirt but an elasticated waistband does me no favours, so I drafted this one with all the comfort of elastic, but a more flattering waistband. With an elasticated back and a flat front waistband, this has come to be called the FFS. The Flat Front Skirt (what else?!). All this…

9 min read· Feb 7, 2025 Looking to hide highlights? You can now hide them from the “•••” menu. What if coding no longer required long hours of writing syntax, debugging errors, or scrolling through endless documentation? Instead, imagine a workflow where you simply describe what you want, and it…

Assumed Audience Anyone who thinks they can’t draw, but would like to learn I know plenty of intelligent and highly motivated folks who are dying to learn to draw. Some are so intent on their desire, they’ve gone out and bought themselves iPads. The other half are actively thinking about buying an…

Perhaps you’ve heard of scarcity mindset before, but didn’t quite know what it was or why it’s so toxic. Here’s a definition: Scarcity mindset is the state of believing that what you want is in limited supply. That you will never have enough of that thing. You could have this feeling around money,…

Do you feel like you’re trapped by your creative life? This is almost a trick question because – for most creatives – the answer is a resounding “Yes.” Feeling trapped as an artist might sound oxymoronic to the uninitiated, but it often feels like a defining feature of what it means to be involved…

For years, I’ve heard some variation of the following lament from clients, collaborators, and friends with startups: “There’s so many use cases we could solve for, but every user we talk to wants something different, and we just don’t know which ones to focus on.” or, “We’ve designed for all the…

This is a talk I presented Local-first Conference https://www.localfirstconf.com/ in Berlin, May 20241ya . It’s specifically directed at the local-first https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/ community, but its relevant to anyone involved in building software. For the last ~year I’ve been keeping…