Feels like a good day to repost this piece. What a mess we’re in at Chelsea. #CFC

One of the worst parts of the blogs-as-newsletters tend of recent years is that you subscribe to a site via RSS and get constant pop-ups asking to let it send you emails.

A personal tale of flawed bot detection, Kafkaesque customer support threads, and doing whatever it takes to avoid missing a one-off gig – now updated with a (mostly) happy ending... at least until next time.

A more positive post this week! I was happy to run across @kagi.com, which not only offers a paid search engine free of ads and bias, but also runs an initiative to improve visiblity of small and independent websites.

So used to defanging URLs at work that I instinctively went to add brackets when writing a domain down on paper.

Microsoft's terms of use for Copilot now state that it is "for entertainment purposes only" and shouldn't be relied upon for important advice. Meanwhile, it's forced Copilot into its productivity suite and airs adverts where it's used in high-powered business negotiations.

Ah, this time it looks like Claude is actually down. Still, I've had to retry certain requests a fair bit in recent weeks.

As well as the lower caps, I'm seeing "taking longer than usual" messages a lot more frequently in Claude conversations these days.

I’ve been saying this for a while: AI is Uber in 2015. Investment will not flow at current rates forever. Barring some huge technical advancement, higher prices and lower limits will come. If AI is core to your products/workflows, that could spell trouble.

I posted the new edition of Field Notes to the blog early this month, which is definitely a special Easter treat and not at all because I was too busy over the bank holiday weekend to finish my next blog post.

Muse were fantastic last night at Brixton Academy, but the Ticketmaster saga just keeps on giving. I’ll write a blog post soon with the whole story, but it’s been incompetence and obfuscation at every turn.

It’s likely this week’s blog post will be a PSA about Ticketmaster randomly cancelling tickets for “bot activity”. I support their aims, but ticketing for Friday’s Muse gig is a complete mess – many legit fans have lost their tickets at the last minute after making travel plans.

Three races in and I'm still unconvinced by F1's new regulations. Hoping its leadership uses the break before Miami to take stock – although short-term fixes may not be possible. #JapaneseGP #F1

Nice writeup on subscription bombing – a technique used by threat actors to spam users with signup emails so they miss something important in the noise, like a password reset notification.

📰 The next edition of Field Notes hits inboxes this week! Sign up here to get it first: mattcasmith.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Three races in and I'm still unconvinced by F1's new regulations. Hoping its leadership uses the break before Miami to take stock – although short-term fixes may not be possible. #JapaneseGP #F1

This is the kind of update that would have consumed an entire weekend in years gone by.

“The problem no longer fits inside one computer, to be accelerated by one GPU,” says Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, a company whose objective is to sell as many GPUs as possible in perpetuity.

RollerCoaster Tycoon was famously written in Assembly, but it’s rare to hear much more detail. So this is a fascinating look at how technical limitations influenced its gameplay, even touching details as small as whether a guest has bought a map.

Just got an email to say Huel is being acquired by Danone. No immediate changes to subscriptions, but I’ve seen enough acquisitions in my time not to trust that over the long term.

Enzo Maresca has come out of this mess looking really good, huh? Binning him and hiring Rosenior were two gigantic missteps. #EVECHE #CFC

Nvidia says DLSS 5 is the best thing since ray tracing – "the GPT moment for graphics" – but graphics alone don't make great games. When AI redraws frames, it makes assumptions about how games should look and overrides developers' creative decisions.

An old friend was in town, so made an occasion of it and enjoyed some top-tier steak and wine tonight.

Genius developers, a million frameworks, and AI coding agents… and my success rate sorting tables in SaaS tools is 50 percent.

Modern games are so poorly optimised that a good graphics card already isn't enough to hit decent frame rates. But now we're going to waste some of that processing power to have AI guess what things should look like?

Every so often I look at tech I take for granted and realise how amazing it would have seemed in 2010. Today it’s being able to hand off a podcast I’m listening to between Spotify on my PC and iPhone.

Loved @craigmod.com’s essay about how he vibe coded accounting software for his unique use case. That’s where I see AI’s potential – not replacing professional devs making commercial software where everything must be secure and polished. Building little tools for an audience of one.

✈️☀️📖 The latest edition of Field Notes is now up on the blog – this time covering a short visit to Malta and the sci-fi thriller I read on the trip.

Russell issues aside, it was heartening to see the Ferraris and McLarens challenging the Mercedes more closely at various points today. RUS-ANT is in danger of becoming the new HAM-BOT. #ChineseGP #F1

In the history of digital business, has anybody ever needed Outlook to show them their contacts’ birthdays on a side-by-side calendar?

The clipping and reliance on battery feels opaque and out of step with Formula 1’s spirit. But I’m interested in how these regs play out this year. We saw glimpses of wheel-to-wheel battles, close following, reliability chaos – things we’ve missed for decades. #AustralianGP #F1

Apple's new MacBook Neo has a spec problem – but it's also an audience problem. Many casual users don't need laptops anymore. My wife does everything on her iPhone and hasn't touched her laptop in years.

Xbox built itself on an edgy brand that targeted hardcore gamers. It focused on a powerful console and cutting-edge games. New boss Asha Sharma needs to choose – will Xbox return to that core audience, or risk further diluting its brand chasing new fans?

The key to good business writing is empathy – not emotional, but practical. The easier it is for the recipient to take action, the more likely it is that they’ll do it.

I wish it was possible to hide the Read Along sidebar box on Spotify podcasts. It's so distracting when you have a podcast playing on a second screen.

It’s bad enough that Microsoft used an AI knockoff of somebody’s pre-existing diagram, but the lack of care is painful. Will be sure to “continvoucly morge” all future bug fixes. 👍

Every unnecessary software feature is not only bloat, but a potential security vulnerability. Why can't we keep it simple?

AI discourse is in a weird place right now. As the tech continued to develop, I thought (perhaps naively) one of the pro- and anti- camps would fade away as its trajectory became clearer. Instead, they're both at fever pitch.

Uploaded the latest Field Notes to the blog on Thursday. Normal article service will resume next Sunday, and I’ve got some great stuff jotted down for March’s newsletter – sign up to get it first.

This applies just as much to journaling as it does to public writing, btw. You can have an awful day and think: “This will make a hell of a journal entry to look back on in ten years.”

One of the understated benefits of writing is perspective. Events that would be quite unfortunate for most people are just new material for a writer.

We debate whether AI will take our jobs, but what about the jobs that remain? Knowledge workers could end up simultaneously bored and overwhelmed – reduced to typing prompts and reviewing output, with the value of the process lost.

Just uploaded January's edition of my Field Notes newsletter to the blog. To receive February's first (next Sunday!), subscribe via the link in the replies.

I’m so used to reading people’s Substack blogs now that I clicked a Medium link this morning and did a double take. It felt wrong somehow.

We’ve got bigger, higher resolution screens than ever before. There’s so much potential for beautiful interfaces. Yet information density seems to be dropping everywhere from social networks to RSS feed readers. So many of those extra pixels hold nothing of value.

Discovered an SEO error that was on my site since sometime in 2020 when I hadn’t had enough coffee. The cool thing is that search engines are indecipherable black boxes, so I have no idea how this has damaged my reach for the last six years. 🙃

When the X algorithm is serving up slop, it's time to return to a classic 2007-style feed with the help of lists and aggressive curation.

Pizza date with colleagues.

Certain football clubs are following the same enshittification playbook used by so many tech companies – the problem is there's no audience more captive than football fans. Users can jump ship, but we're stuck with it.

I love how action-oriented Claude is. I'm working on a blog post and it told me to "stop asking me questions and publish the damn thing".