Austin Carr

NEW @BW caper about the Microsoft engineer who stole 152,000 Xbox gift cards + was living off the proceeds in a $1.6 million home with plans to buy a ski chalet, yacht, and seaplane bloomberg.com/features/2021-…

@TheStalwart I'm assuming you personally funded this museum exhibit? 🐋

@MikeIsaac instagram.com/reel/DUOlbWUke…

i saw one lady leave a note on her saved space that said "i pop tires MFers!!!!" and i suport her my position as a californian who does not have to deal with this: if you spend an hour shoveling a mountain of snow out of a spot, you have the right to save it with an orange cone

i genuinely enjoy stories about weird unspoken rules and regional social niceties that can be thrown into upheaval by one bad egg (and to be clear, i go fully costanza mode when someone breaks with decorum)

@DKThomp Well, certainly not with Copilot

I simply do not think that "most tasks professionals currently undertake" will be "fully automated by AI" within the next 12 to 18 months.

An inside look into how Silicon Valley's richest venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is shaping federal and state AI policy, w/ @omaseddiq: bloomberg.com/news/features/…

How a crew of crypto-focused hackers moved from SIM swap attacks to coordinated, violent home invasions and kidnappings, targeting small-time crypto investors (@austincarr / Bloomberg) bloomberg.com/features/2026-… #a260104p10" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">techmeme.com/260104/p10#a26… 📥 Send tips! techmeme.com/contact

"If we cannot hack them, we rob them." Crypto thieves are pursuing investors at home in brutal attacks and kidnappings. Read The Big Take ⬇️ bloomberg.com/features/2026-…

Very well researched article by @AustinCarr that covers the tactics employed by an organized crypto crime ring that started off with SIM swaps and progressed to wrench attacks. bloomberg.com/features/2026-…

Rising prices and the irreversible nature of crypto transactions have led to a surge of brutal home invasions and kidnappings. bloomberg.com/features/2026-…

@MikeIsaac Wild that Ted Sarandos once said Netflix's "goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us” Then just ~12 years later, Ted enters agreement to buy HBO as just 1 piece of deal valued at less than 1/5th Netflix's market cap. I guess HBO Now/Go/Max/etc did not move fast enough

truly did not expect this, thought paramount had acquisitions on lock netflix’s achilles heel was always not owning any real franchise IP. (though not for lack of trying) WBD library is brimming with em. a goliath among streamers, now on steroids nytimes.com/2025/12/05/bus…

Newspapers are closing at an emergency-level rate—over the past 20 years, America has lost more than 3,000. For the past six years, the photographer Ann Hermes has been documenting the lives lived in these dying places across the country. See more images: newyorkermag.visitlink.me/059DXx

@sharonwaxman @nytimes I don't get it. Any other journalist who did something like this would be blackballed. But she gets a new job at Vanity Fair and a photo spread in the NYT.

my book EMPIRE OF ORGASM!!! available for preorder now!! out next tuesday!!

As the world moves toward digital artificiality, Airbnb's redesign and Apple's Liquid Glass UI bring back skeuomorphism and dimensionality to digital interfaces (@austincarr / Bloomberg) bloomberg.com/news/articles/… #a250614p7" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">techmeme.com/250614/p7#a250… twitter.com/Techmeme/statu…

Fwiw, Apple designers essentially agree with you. They're not bringing back leather stitching for iCal or other similarly noisy, one-off visual metaphors. They've said the aim with Liquid Glass is in part to avoid merely replicating real-world elements -- and stay away from being constrained by real-world physics. Meaning they developed what they describe as a digital meta material that is not dependent on behaving like a physical counterpart...so it can flow like water or layer like glass or flex like a contact lens. If anything, imho, they're almost playing with digital viscosity more so than trying to bring back Jobs-era skeuomorphism. Also worth keeping in mind that this is intended for navigational systems, and not to be used everywhere. Apple does still encourage flatness and solid colors and opaque layers, based on what I've read. Obvi not perfect but feels refreshing to me and like they'll be a lot of useful cases for Liquid Glass when Apple/devs figure out the right balance. Probably the biggest challenge is predictability: with super skeuomorphic designs, you should know exactly that a wood shelf in iBooks is where your books are stored like in the real world, or green casino felt is where gaming happens. But when Apple is integrating this new meta material, all of a sudden digital glass could turn to having a wet or gel-like or inky or bubbly texture depending on the interaction, perhaps to the initial confusion of iPhone users who have never actually interfaced with that offline.

Okay, serious talk. Why do we really need to mimic the real world in our UIs? We’ve created a new virtual one where we get to explore and invent new interfaces and interactions. Why bring back leather, glass, and knobs? I’m not against physicality in UI. I'm saying purposeful physicality. Design can achieve a lot without fully replicating the real world. I've been testing Liquid Glass on my phone and, in its current form, it seems overly realistic, maybe even over-designed. Frost the glass.

Deep dive by Bloomberg connecting the history of skeuomorphism → flat → fluid in software design with a few quotes from me and a not-yet-shown peek at how we designed !Camera. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Some thoughts on post-flat design and the future of skeuomorphism, with Airbnb's @bchesky & Not Boring's @asallen: bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

@ID_AA_Carmack Again, hardened surfaces and solid colors are *not* going away. You can still read writing on digital white sheets of paper. Apple still encourages buttons and menus to be opaque in many instances.

All of the same issues apply in AR as well. Outside of movies, people do not work out their thoughts on windowpanes or transparent “whiteboards” because of the exact same legibility issues. Would you prefer a notebook of white sheets, or hundreds of different blurry image backgrounds?

Translucent UI is usually a bad idea outside of movies and non-critical game interfaces. The early moments of joy are fleeting, while the usability issues remain. Windows and Mac have both been down this road before, but I guess a new generation of designers needs to learn the lessons anew. Sigh.

Idk, these screenshots show Liquid Glass in the worst light, and I think folks are unfairly prejudging the (beta) redesign. I mean, translucency was a core principle of iOS 7, too... I get why people think Liquid Glass is a return to Aqua or Windows Aero, but it more so builds on that physicality, imho, without being as skeuomorphic. The textures offer some interesting/intuitive naturalistic properties that are not restrained by real-world physics. It's also clear Apple designers put a lot of work into HIGs on how to manage legibility. Like avoiding glass on glass; altering depth/frost/opacity/etc depending on the menu/content context; and keeping a lot of the most dynamic features for navigational tools. Frankly, it keeps a lot of elements from the flat era, and I almost see more inspiration from dynamic island than Vision Pro.

@shaunmmaguire @patrickc Not quite, but only a touch more depth

@patrickc Safari icon 2025 onwards: 🔵 You saw it here first.

I miss the delightfully intricate icon styles of 10+ years ago.

Lovely to see how deep Apple is taking spatial UI with its new "liquid glass" redesign. Feels like the next generation of the translucency + parallax effects introduced with iOS 7. The depth seems much more immersive now yet it's still a very measured move beyond the flat era.