Bryan Roy

@shagbark_hick You're describing Noah Kahan New England vs. Vineyard Vines New England

It's 100% true that Massachusetts has a completely unique and singular culture of its own, and that it'd feel "foreign" to those unfamiliar with it. I'd even go so far as to count MA among other typically "less American-feeling" states, like New Mexico, Louisiana, and even California. Thinking about it now, true old MA culture strikes me as this bizarre mixture of extreme orderliness in the civic sphere and a kind of almost bawdy roughness amongst the actual people. That so much of the state is or was very Catholic may have something to do with it. You can almost see the bifurcation between the Catholic "rabble" -- tough old Polish and Irish union guys, heavy-drinking mill-town denizens, etc -- and their Post-Puritan uber-lib overlords. That they've coexisted and blended in the fashion they have for so long is a kind of mystery. The whole state feels to consist of Old-Euro ethnic ruffians and professorial WASPs blended together variously in leafy university towns, depressing postindustrial ghettos, and Shire-like farmers' market villages. Nothing like the pie-for-breakfast Yanks of Vermont, the dour and milk-faced New Hampshirites, or the mumbling drunk loggers of Maine. A totally distinct culture, what with Pączki and Irish Pubs and neatly-trimmed lawns and a bureaucratized social safety net that'd make Sweden blush. I genuinely adored living in Western MA and in recent days, I honestly think I'd gladly live there again. Those guys are "rough" in a way that jives with me; like Jersey but way more farmy and hippie-tolerant and WAY less stressed.

Vibe coding is the new product management. Training and tuning models is the new coding.

@marclou @katarinaore What do you do for v02 max?

@katarinaore Zone 2 run, lifting, v02 max, surf. I rotate so I’m never tired

I reversed aging with good sleep, a healthy diet, and daily workouts 😇

Inspo board 🤔

Product managers and designers I love working with: - Creative - Decisive - Storytellers - Open minded - Think like marketers - Obsessed with users - Pushes team on craft - Doesn’t defer to metrics - Never hides behind process - Crystal clear on the problem

@fnthawar @Shopify In highly collaborative cross functional orgs, product management is now the bottleneck. Once AI can simulate feedback loops with stakeholders and users, 10x PMs can keep up with 10x Engineers and Designers.

I wanted to double underline the sunk cost fallacy, just throwing things away, and vibe coding as a way to explore —and then throw it away! It's how a series of systems at @Shopify are built * GSD (Get Shit Done): our product management system. The PROTOTYPE phase is for exploration, the artifacts (code) should be thrown away before the BUILD phase * Hackdays: you don't have to ship anything (you can!) but working with folks you don't usually get to work with and trying non-obvious avenues of attack * Subtraction: what if we don't need this tool/code/process/approach anymore? Can we make it simpler? All of these lean on LEARNING as the artifact 🔑 — not the design, process or existing code Vibe coding is super useful for all types of these explorations

Spotify made personalized playlists for every user so that you didn’t need to curate music. Someone needs to make personalized context for every user so that you don’t need to prompt chats.

Every person in tech will feel how AI changes product management. For example: Pre-AI: Set up hours of back-to-back meetings to “align” with stakeholders Post-AI: Train your agents and models to simulate discussions and feedback in seconds

@signulll The only antidote is founder mode

it’s cool how inverted the reward curve is when building. if you’re building early it’s like a giant orchard of low hanging fruit, where even clumsy swipes hit something juicy. whereas if you’re at big co it’s like a barren canopy, all that’s left are the weird, high up grafts that take cranes & politics to reach. this is why starting feels like alchemy & maintaining feels like accounting.

The <autofocus/> html attribute crawled so perplexity could run.

Spotify’s AI DJ began as a prototype with a generic voice that sounded like FM radio. We almost shipped that. It would’ve failed. The push for craft gave it the unique voice and personality of our coworker Xavier. Engineers built it. UX Writers made it matter. AI without great writing is just math.

Every product shipped at a big tech company is the sum of data + debates + decisions I’ve been testing “AI agents as coworkers” in @cursor_ai to simulate this Takeaways: 1. Product management is about to be reinvented 2. Chatting with AI still feels like the command line era

@signulll My favorite example of this is when we shipped Your Time Capsule (a nostalgic personalized playlist of songs we think you liked in high school). Previous iterations of the name were off putting at best @ajaymkalia

@signulll We thought a lot about this at Spotify. User delight is both an art and a science. The Personalization org has a small but mighty design team that partners with ML engineers to ship products and features with this intention.

i was chatting with a buddy of mine about how ai products live on a knife’s edge between feeling creepy vs. generating delight. same exact capability can land on either side depending on context, timing, & framing. surprise & personalization = delight. surveillance & overfamiliarity = creepy. in essence, “creepy” = i feel acted upon, “delight” = i feel acted for. i think about this a fuck ton.

New ad for the new business youtu.be/hnMIdbiXbF8?si…

Now you can Airbnb more than an Airbnb

The more things change, the more they stay the same. 🏒 ❄️ 📍 Boston Public Garden 🗓️ 1930 - 2025

@brennanjp What website is this?

Smartwater is my go-to at gas stations, etc. 25/100... 🫠 Not good!

What a shot.

@tylerjohnson_59 Hooked by the story. Sold by the product (my son turns 2 soon). Rooting for you and your family.

My mom and aunt are also here helping out. Unbelievable support from my family. Will get all orders shipped on Monday.

Here is the hardest worker I know. My dad. Went to college for year and then dropped out. Tried out for Iowa men’s golf team but didn’t make it. Went back home and worked at the family car dealership business in small town Iowa until he was 42. Left the business to be the superintendent at a rural 9 hole golf course. Currently works 2nd shift in a warehouse. He’s 64. Not sure when retirement will be for him. On release days, he helps me package and ship the toddler bags. The goal is to make him the first employee. Need to make it happen.