Another option: Chinese disruption in the form of significant competition, attracting investors or somehow making the OpenAI/Nvidia/MS trifecta untenable.

Apropos of nothing, if the AI bubble were to blow up into a 2008-style economic crisis—or at least the mother of all market corrections—what would be the trigger? • A major system shock (security, legal, financial) caused by an LLM fuckup • OpenAI filing Chapter 11 • NVIDIA having a down quarter

Best Picture 2025

guys I’m sorry but have you looked through Getty images for yesterday 💀

What’s truly remarkable about Wonder is that (as explained well in this podcast) they started with a truly bad idea — overpriced *on demand* food trucks in the _suburbs_ — and keep finding ways to make it even worse, while raising VC to give horrible food better distribution youtu.be/YbYu_W9SnQk

Me: this seems like just a normal corner Chinese place, what’s so great about your food Them:

NJ voting sticker: simple, elegant, patriotic NYC voting sticker: same but IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK

I’m writing on a project for a major tech brand via another agency, and I can tell which page of the Figma file came straight from the client because the fonts and colors for this 100% internal diagram are *perfectly* on brand.

Bluesky: website where everyone complains about horrible people X: website where everyone celebrates horrible people LinkedIn: website where everyone is excited to share they’ve been laid off by AI Mastodon: look, the thing you have to understand about kerning is

Best diagram of the AI bubble I've seen so far 😁

From what I’ve read about both, ahem, gentlemen, they’re very good at turning on charm to get people to give them money, and in today’s Silicon Valley people will do anything to ingratiate themselves to money, so it’s not actually that hard for Sam or Elon. Target rich environment, frankly.

I don’t understand what is happening with spam texts anymore

Fun fact: my all-time top performing LinkedIn post was written on the toilet

I just saw the phrase "AI ecosystem" in a post here. Maybe I'm an Old™, but my understanding of ecosystems is that there should be lots of different players at different levels and layers. Is there an AI ecosystem? Is it still an ecosystem if it's all just 2-3 big companies' APIs/models?

Posted some very important career news to the business website

I think this idea that it’s on individuals to make ethical consumer choices — whether it’s composting leftovers or using/not using chatbots — is a cruel psy-op when giant companies are doing everything they can to make our choices moot by putting AI in _everything_. _They_ need to be more ethical.

If nothing else this is a great example of how the AI discourse has made it impossible to talk about machine-learning models as tools without also engaging with the fantasies about them as “intelligence”, or the idea that “AI” is inevitable and unstoppable and not a choice some dudes have made.

I understand why they had to stop him but I don’t agree with imprisoning him in the phantom zone

I don't want to like ChatGPT Atlas, but then I keep finding tiny, delightful design details, like how they show a full URL and use a monospace/code font in the window title when you open DevTools:

🤷‍♂️ Of course it's Chromium based. At this point, it's not only the smart move to use Chromium (and benefit from Google's massive investment) but there's also just a ton of prior art for building products on top of Chromium. OpenAI also hired a bunch of Chrome people to build Atlas, so there's that.

IMO dudes who post this stuff are showing off to other dudes their power to make other human beings degrade themselves for money

⚠⚠ Be sure to check your kid's candy this year! ⚠⚠ Just found a enterprise agile framework in my kid's Reeses candy

There's a certain yuck subculture of "designers" who - Call themselves 'creative technologists' - Are practically giddy about 'disruptive' tech like AI or web3 - Use language like "aligned values" and "mission-driven", but really just like power - Align themselves with capital at every opportunity

God help me, I’m test driving OpenAI’s new browser. I’m grudgingly impressed by how light a touch they brought to it — obviously ChatGPT replaces Google as default search engine, and there’s a “chat with this tab” sidebar, but otherwise it’s a Chrome lookalike with a very sleek, minimal look.

I aspire to this level of chill but it’s unattainable

I feel like we’ve reached some weird state of Peak Influencing where all knowledge of human enterprises that aren’t content marketing has been buried at the bottom of the sea, and most content marketing is primarily about how to do content marketing.

AI is the final boss of enshittification

One of these is not like the others 🧱

Pro tip: always imagine Thiel voiced by Christoph Waltz, especially as either the Nazi from Inglorious Basterds or the Thiel-like billionaire character he plays this season on OMITB

Not sure what’s worse: not knowing what executives and business people do all day, or finding out 😱

One of many ways I’m weird: I have never been one of those tab hoarders with 9,000 open tabs and a mortal fear of losing their precious tabs. Tabs are not precious to me, and I find the state of affairs where tab labels are no longer visible abhorrent.

If I sometimes seem less than existentially worried about whether AI will permanently reshape human society, creativity, and our relationship with the natural world, it’s probably because I’ve known about this mess the whole time

One very important lesson learned about selling to enterprises: _always_ keep proposal/SOW language in Word docs. Not fancy PDFs. Not even Google Docs. Word docs. If their legal department needs to red-line and demand changes, they will expect to receive something they can open in Word on Windows.

This is a stretch but the ways genAI has been used to improve quality on things like transcription, image background removal, basic Photoshop-ish editing like blemish removal — those are nice. Workflows like the thing in Descript where you edit video by editing text — also nice. Boring and nice.

OH in the waiting room at my wife’s OB/GYN: “…you can tell AI to write a poem about a puppy in a library, and in 5 seconds it’ll come up with something beautiful! It’d take me two hours to write something like that!” (I doubt this lady previously spent any time writing poems about puppies before)

This highlights how fucking weird it is that, in a world with far too much human-crafted, sometimes shitty content, the AI people think what we need is _more, cheaper, even shittier content_

I genuinely think AI works better for me because I don’t *want* to be talking to it, so I never hit these annoying-sounding long conversation safeguards

Obviously, the best way to avoid giving Meta any free data with their luxury smart glasses is not to buy them. But if you want them anyway — say, because they’re Ray-Bans that can double as headphones for dog walks — you can just not enable the AI crap, and there’s also a physical on-off switch.

If there's one thing you need to understand about design in huge companies, it's that leaving good things alone is rarely an option. Some design or product VP's master plan depends on replacing something useful and recognizable with (waves hands in frustration) whatever _this_ is

Sometimes Liquid Glass™ is fine, other times it's like someone used a Kai's Power Tools filter on important parts of your desktop

Some folks are using AI for incredibly stupid things

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

Two more great things about modern discourse: 1. Whereas early social media had people talking about lots of different things, today everyone talks about the same things. You can scroll just a couple posts and get caught up, or keep going to _really_ fall into a rage pit.

Absolute all-timer sentence in today's @nytimes.com

bro you look like you drop common items

I love how in current online spaces there is no space to breathe and think between “I have 10/10 ironclad beliefs about everything and everyone who disagrees is my enemy” and total brain-dead silence

Spending tomorrow at @sanity.io's Everything *[NYC] event in Brooklyn. Schedule looks very, very Sanity — talks about custom apps and content operations, plus art, DJs, and great food. If you're gonna be there too, come say hi! I'll have some Y2K-themed @bitsandletters.com stickers.

Quick question: How do you know when your website has gone from helping your business to hurting it? Spoiler: it happens gradually, then suddenly. 😱 I shared some thoughts on this pattern I see constantly in our work on the @bitsandletters.com blog: btslttrs.com/bsky-first-...

Trying Google Gemini 2.5 Flash "Nano Banana" 🍌 image prompts to turn an unkempt Sunday morning selfie into a "professional" headshot, then a YouTube thumbnail, then a _smirky_ YouTube thumbnail 😱

Was checking my spam folder to see if a particular invoice ended up there, discovered three messages from my website contact form sent last week that I'd never seen. Email is the worst technology. Honestly, if I'd had the form send to Slack, SMS, or a random Notion page, it would've worked better.