Antoine Valot

“We have a mission, as UX designers, to exalt humanity. Making a living is not the point. It’s a side-effect.”  — @avalot link.medium.com/jtlvRmEWLhb #UX #design #ethics #DesignJobs #radicaldesign

Japan's "pointing and calling" safety method dates back over a century. nippon.com/en/japan-topic…

@albertadevs Run Ollama on a cron job, local, free, slow. Extra bonus: it’s slower than watching paint dry, so it’s non-addictive.

I’m still so confused what the use case is for a 24/7 Clawdbot that can’t be solved with a cron job or triggers at 1/100th of the cost

@janetpoling @Real_Politik101 ...says a descendent of europeans who walked right in and took over. 🤣

@Real_Politik101 There haven't been wars in Europe because invaders are allowed to just walk right in and take over!

The logic from the U.S. foreign policy establishment to justify staying in Europe are two reasons: 1. We have a vested interest in keeping peace in Europe to prevent turmoil on the international economy 2. We’re likely to get dragged into a war so we….1/3

Canada needs Alaska for national security reasons, and will have it one way or the other. @MarkJCarney

France needs Hawaii for national security reasons, and we will have it one way or the other. @EmmanuelMacron

Just going to put it out there that universal handcuff keys can be bought cheap on Amazon and are 100% legal for anyone to own. So if dozens of people in a big crowd happened to have one, someone like this will easily be unrestrained in no time.

@SteynViljoen Most tourists wants to explore new places, not return. Other types of travelers might care more about location and budget than quality. There’s actually both kinds of niches on AirBnb. In non-touristy places, there’s lots of cheap low-bar deals.

The bar on airbnb's have become so high that their rating system is slowly becoming useless. Returning guests would be much more useful imho.

Also, don’t think playgrounds need to look like playgrounds at all for kids to be immersed.

@PlanetInflow @TheFigen_ “Respecting personal space” is not natural. It’s a byproduct of excessive individualism, which divides us and pits us against each other. In nature, as in healthy human relationships, it’s through benign everyday *friction* that boundaries evolve.

@TheFigen_ Crown shyness is nature’s way of saying even trees respect personal space. Side by side, growing together - yet never colliding. A quiet lesson in boundaries.🌳

This is called "crown shyness" or "tree shyness"; it's a fascinating phenomenon where the tops of trees, though side by side, carefully avoid touching.

@claudeai Thanks for putting rate limits on Claude Code, it gives me time to go check out Google Gemini, while I'm stuck.

@MMAssurances J'essayais de demander un devis, mais votre formulaire en ligne me présage une expérience client insupportable. Merci d'être inutilisable, ça me gagne du temps! Un devis de moins à considérer!

@JasonBassler1 @jcorkran Because paying is for suckers, like the poor and the honest.

Bill Gates: $106B | Microsoft: $3.9T Jeff Bezos: $232.5B | Amazon: $2.3T Larry Page: $204.2B | Google: $2.84T Mark Zuckerberg: $243.5B | Meta: $1.8T Can someone please explain why on earth we’re paying the power & water bills for their data centers?

The hallucination of separateness prevents one from seeing that to cherish the ego is to cherish misery.

Tech firms that took risks with innovation have turned into trillion-dollar behemoths. None of them is in Europe. This may have something to do with how the continent hires and fires economist.com/europe/2025/10…

@tbsrnstrm Figma? Notion?

Need help! Am getting super close to a beta now, BUT still don't have a name for this visually-collect-your-thoughts-and-things-app. What would you name something like this? Would love to hear it. My shortlist has been Spatial, Scratch, Liminal, Texture and Untitled...

@TheFP Not free. Paywall.

"My wife is a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood. It took me two decades to see what she saw on 9/11."

When I was 18, I had a near-death experience. I was with friends in a field, when I became motionless and stopped breathing. I had passed away. My friends could not see my breath nor feel my pulse. I don't remember too many things, but some things are still vivid to this day. I remember seeing myself from above. It was cold and late, and we were by a baseball field. I distinctly remember the field and seeing myself slumped over on a bench about 20 feet above. I remember coming back. I had two broken wrists at the time, and I remember my wrists banging against the bench, almost like a gong in the distance. Then, I could hear, breathe, and see, in that order. When I came back, I spent a lot of time thinking about what it all meant, and what I experienced. The most clear realization was that we make decisions to work for the light or for the darkness every day, in small ways and in large ways. At the time, I had many business ideas that would make a lot of money, but they were dark. They leveraged vanity and preyed upon envy or greed. They did not help humanity to be better. They made us worse. Many people pursue such ideas now, and, worse, they wrap these dark ideas with false statements, trying to disguise them or rebrand them or make them seem positive for humanity. They are not. It is as clear to me today as it was then that we are at war. There are those that believe in humanity, and those that have no hope. Those that care, and those that exploit. It was then that I decided to dedicate my life to the light, working to create good in everything that I do. For me, it is about doing the right thing for the greater good. Nobody is perfect, myself included. I need regular reminders to stay in the light. The world is littered with small compromises that become big compromises, which take you off course and lead you to the dark side. I will leave you with this. Make the choice to work on the good. Take the time to focus on what matters. Be careful about the compromises that you make, as they may lead you to a dark place.

Readers frequently ask me how they can support my work, whether I have a Patreon or some other way to accept donations. I don't have anything like that. What I have, instead, are these books, which I can't seem to stop writing. The best way to thank me for my work is to buy the books, in any (or every) format. Selling books benefits a whole community of people who are important to my work, including my publishers and agents, and also all the people who work on publishing, fulfillment and production with me. These people don't just work on my projects, of course: they have many partners of their own.

There have been 47 episodes of mass violence on school campuses this year. The 47th took place at a Denver-area high school, 26 years after the Denver-area high school in Columbine, where three people were shot on Wednesday, two of them students. The 46th school shooting of the year had just one victim. Charlie Kirk, the conservative campus activist and podcaster, was shot in the neck during a question and answer session at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. He died shortly thereafter. The question he was being asked, right at that moment, was about the number of mass shootings in America. -David Dayen prospect.org/politics/2025-…

@UnplussedTheOG @doctorow See, the thing you’re missing is: For many people, kids are important. Any time there’s a shooting, at a school, we don’t like it. It doesn’t really matter who’s shooting who and why, we don’t want shootings to happen at schools. So shootings at schools are school shootings.

@doctorow This is why no one should believe your bullshit "statistics": listing a political assassination as a "school shooting" means you'll lie about any of them