⛔️Offline for the rest of the year ✌🏼

Starting to add some fun pages to the site. Still a huge WIP but happy enough with it right now to get it out and start adding some more content.

Another day, another typeface and domain purchased.

Super annoying how limited Framer's CMS is for certain things. They've also had a feature request to password protect individual pages for YEARS and it seems like they've completely ignored that feedback from customers.

Thinking of taking some of these free MIT writing courses. Trying to write more lately and these look promising. If anyone has any other recommendations, lemme know.

Another varied & fulfilling weekend: - Reading - Sketching - Researching and drafting blogs - Working on iOS apps - Designing a new piece of furniture - 3D printing some things - Tweaking my site & adding Favorites pages - Caulking windows & testing paint samples - Holiday markets

Love this thehumanmade.org

We accept that crops grow and then get harvested and then the field lies fallow. We accept that animals hibernate. But when it comes to our own sense of meaning, we expect constant summer... www.joanwestenberg.com/p/the-harve...

For the first time ever, we cut down our own Christmas tree. Getting our permit, driving into the middle of the forest, and seeing other families out there doing the same was a fantastic experience. I think we did pretty good for our first time 😊

It's starting to feel like one of the best decisions I've made in the last few years was trade my ink jet printer for a laser printer. Why did I suffer for so long?

Ski resort was supposed to open this weekend but base just isn't there yet. And of course there's a late start the first year I buy a season pass 😂. Hoping for some good snow up high soon 🙏

Love building iOS apps in Swift. Getting close to completion on a few apps I've been building and just enjoying every second of it.

Bought another typeface. ES Rebond Grotesque from Extraset. extraset.ch/typefaces/re...

I believe (healthy and mutual) trust is essential to effective collaboration. If you are an experienced professional in your area of expertise, I will trust you to make good decisions and trust that you'll trust me to make good decisions.

My best advice for becoming a digital accessibility specialist is to make it your job, regardless of your title. Making a presentation? Putting together a design? Building something in code? In anything you do, be curious about what it takes to make it more accessible

Super excited to get into playing guitar again. It's been about 10 years since I played last. Looking for more and more analogue experiences to get me away from screens lately.

i’m ready for something different than whatever the fuck this is

Not too much longer now...

MX Master 4 was a really nice upgrade. Controls have the perfect tactileness and feedback.

Good job, NY 👏🏾 Congrats from the other side of the country @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social

Kinda sucks when a remote-first startup you admire posts an offsite photo of the whole team and not a single POC is there. It's incomprehensible that this can still be the case in 2025. You're either racist, lazy, willfully ignorant, or some combination of those three things. Unacceptable.

And I'm just straight up not going to read it because I can only assume you didn't use your actual brain for the words either.

“... Drawing on recent popular and academic literature on genAI, we argue that the values embedded in this technology do not align with the values of critical humanities and social science pedagogy, which include originality, academic freedom, creativity, and critical thinking.”

This is why I got so tired about writing about this shit. It was trivial to see well in advance that these products (sorry! “tools”) were going to be bad for work quality and productivity, but nobody in charge listened, shat the bed, and now there won’t be any consequences for them

I buy this argument and you all know I'm very critical about studies about the effect of using AI but this one makes a ton of sense. The design of total ease and agreeableness has always been bad for our rigorous thinking. It is bad when it comes from people too!

Spent some of my day helping one of our junior designers navigate some tricky career stuff and then we jammed on some fun design explorations to help push on some of their visual design growth areas. Super fulfilling.

from my lunch today; "the trouble is not so much AI making you more productive, but that it's tripling the output of the biggest f***ing idiot where you work"

no one could have possibly foreseen this...

I don't ever ask this, but if you have a LinkedIn account, I am actually finding some success with the "please try to be normal about AI! Don't listen to the tycoons who are lying to you!" message, so if you're up for amplifying a link, I'd appreciate it: www.linkedin.com/posts/anilda...

Got pinged to review requirements and asked clarifying questions about some unclear/strangely worded bits. The response? "Oh that's some AI slop. I'll fix and update." If you can't be bothered to review something YOURSELF before asking me to review it, what are we even doing here?

Worked on some creative stuff for myself today💪🏼 Finally getting some motivation back after a strange/fucky few months. I've also been writing and reading a lot more lately which I attribute to helping me break out of that funk. Hoping I can share more about it all soon.

Please read this about AI. It's also about me and my profession. Every word is true. I'm in a position where I can, and do say my piece without fear - the VCs simply don't care. Many of my tech friends feel they have to keep mum about their professional views on AI, or risk losing their jobs.

Some research is better than no research, but research done poorly is worse than no research. Making decisions and building features into a product using insights gleaned from improperly conducted research will *always* make your product worse. You end up building for imaginary users.

the design field currently feels like a dark room packed with people grabbing each other’s asses and whispering “craft”

Super fun watching the company that made billions claiming “our AI will solve cancer” has pivoted to “our AI will make a bunch of shit that already exists, but worse” and apparently people are still pretending it’s not all a giant grift.

Back to work this week after a 10-day moto trip and yeah, no thanks I wanna go back.

Wait…what’s up with the 4 image limit on here? That seems absolutely archaic 🤡

Have officially started the 'Design quality' initiative in my org at work. Feels really good to finally put some definitions and practices in place that fly directly in the face of the garbage being churned out from 'vibe coding' and 'move fast break stuff' BS

Spent the last few years learning how to ski. I think I’m going to switch things up this winter and focus on snowboarding. And trying not to break any bones 🩻

Some PMs have never been gamers and it shows

You know you made the right Airbnb decision when they've got Hitchens on the bookshelf.

Everyone is so consumed with creating as fast as possible because any output is being more highly-valued than positive outcomes. With AI enabling more roles to jump in and contribute it's becoming increasingly more difficult to control quality because "That's so cool! Let's ship it!"

hiya. figma is a fucking terrible source of truth. if you're building one of the 142,000 AI-powered design system tools out there right now, binding your 'truth' to a proprietary file format in a proprietary platform from an org that’s showing some shaky signs is just extremely Not The Way™.

From now on I'm making a point to use the correct language to describe technology that is currently described as "AI." An LLM isn't AI Image generators aren't AI Machine learning isn't AI Algorithms aren't AI AI is a marketing term that obscures meaningful critique of real technologies.

Not really an overstatement to say that the test of a free society is whether or not comedians can make fun of the country's leader on TV without repurcussions.

Had a lovely Labor Day weekend over in Eastern Oregon. The Wallowas are great — wish they were closer.

Stumbled across this gem yesterday (and all linked gems within) a-website-is-a-room.net