🛋️

when software had a soul there was a moment around 2005 when using a Mac felt like touching something alive. the dock bounced. the genie effect swooped. exposé scattered your windows like cards on a table. none of it was strictly necessary. all of it felt like someone cared – not about metrics, but about the feeling of using a machine. software back then had texture. it had a philosophy. you could feel the person behind it. someone made a decision to make that icon beautiful, to animate that transition just so, to write that error message with a little warmth. apps had personalities. some were weird. some were over-designed in ways that would make a modern PM flinch. but they were alive. the web was the same. personal sites were genuinely personal. blogs felt like letters. forums had regulars. you knew who made what. the internet had neighborhoods, and each one felt different. nothing was optimized for scale. things were made by people who loved what they were making. somewhere along the way, we traded all of that for growth. A/B tests flattened the edges. design systems standardized the personality out. everything got faster, smoother, more consistent – and somehow less interesting. the quirks were removed because they didn't test well. the warmth got cut because it wasn't measurable. we optimized our way into a world of things that work perfectly and feel like nothing. now every app looks the same. every interface follows the same patterns. every product speaks in the same calm, frictionless voice, siloed in their own little islands. the humanity got rounded off. and then came AI agents. and the speed got inhuman. now you can generate an entire product in an afternoon. ship a feature before lunch. spin up ten variations before anyone's had their coffee. the gap from idea to code is basically zero. which sounds incredible. and it is. but there's a catch. when making things are too easy, the slop comes for free too. mediocre things don't look obviously bad – they look fine. they work. they ship. they pass review. and now there are infinite of them. the internet is filling up with software that functions but means nothing. interfaces that are correct but feel dead. products made by agents, reviewed by no one, shipped into the void. this is the thing that keeps me up at night. not that AI will replace people who care. but that it will drown them out. here's what I still believe: the best things are made by people who couldn't help themselves. someone who lost sleep over an icon. who rewrote the same line of copy twelve times. who added an animation nobody asked for because it made the thing feel right. that obsession – that's not inefficiency. that's the whole point. AI doesn't make that irrelevant. it actually makes it rarer and more valuable. taste is not a markdown skill. caring is not a parameter. the weird, specific, "soul" thing you put into something – that can't be programmed into existence. the path forward isn't to make more slop faster. it's to finally give people with real vision the tools to make the thing they always imagined but couldn't build alone. the designer who had the idea but couldn't code. the kid who saw something nobody else saw. the person who cared too much about something most people wouldn't notice. if we get this right, we don't get a faster factory. we get a renaissance. more strange, personal, opinionated software made by teams of people who care and mean it. that's still possible. but only if the people who care get the space and tools to actually express themselves – and don't just hand the wheel to the agent and walk away.

Sports cars are inherently masculine objects, but there is a great deal of balance between poise, grace and the high performance, high tech aspects of it. On one end we get Jaguar E-type and on the other, it’s a Countach. There is huge latitude of expression across designers and across the decades, but there is a roaring, hairy chested coital animality that supplies the underlying motif of design for all sports cars. This inspires and fuels the competitive spirit in the driver. That IMO is missing, not in a subtle way. It is entirely cut. Jony Ive’s brilliance is misplaced in a high performance sports car. And, so would be Sottsass or Rams. Some of the individual tactile controls are highly functional, tech is neat, details are impressive but that's besides the point -- abstractly this is still very Jony Ivy-ish. Which means, low testosterone, graceful, silky smooth beautiful design. No matter how "technical" it looks on the surface. Nice may be for a home object but not in a Ferrari which should be violent and high octane, and not in a brash Lamborghini way. Pininfarina’s pedigree of design from Testarossa era to Enzo has been systematically dismantled since ~2012 so this is just further dilution and departure from its roots. Makes you question if rotating design firms whether it’s Pininfarina or LoveFrom or whoever should ever be brought into the company to dictate its heart and soul every decade. It is one thing to bring in the expertise and labor, another to dictate the design philosophy. A founder mode for design as much as for its administration.

The reason why RAM has become four times more expensive is that a huge amount of RAM that has not yet been produced was purchased with non-existent money to be installed in GPUs that also have not yet been produced, in order to place them in data centers that have not yet been built, powered by infrastructure that may never appear, to satisfy demand that does not actually exist and to obtain profit that is mathematically impossible.

And the sweeping goes on and on and on 🧹🧹🧹🎶 A fresh wallet has scooped up 30 Bad Kids over the past four days. The floor price is up over 100% since the flash crush. Something is cooking here. Idk what, but I can smell it from a mile away. Stay bad 😈

Cortlandt: "I'll have fun things to announce in the future"😈

A Genesis whale is dumping Bad Kids on mass 🐳😈 🔹Over 70 BKs dumped into collection offers in 3 days 🔹 Collection offers are down to 78 $ATOM (~$325) 🔹 I'm scooping up more kids at these levels 🔹 This is the ultimate capitulation phase 🧻👐 Bad Kids 🤝 The New Cosmos

WE ARE GONNA MAKE IT

Today in Dead-Internet-Theory-becoming-real: Crazy app where you livestream as an influencer to an audience of... shoggoths RIP consensus reality. Where is this going? Gradually, then suddenly, your friends will start mysteriously vanishing from view as they opt out of social participation, choosing instead the dopamine superstimulus of AI-created fake realities. Yes, lotus eaters. For years people have been opting out of social participation in favor of addicting infinite scroll apps like tiktok, but AI will by default accelerate this trend. Fun to watch them roast Justine for the lighting in her Waymo tho

What would be SUPER cool is if you established a precedent for the other lab leaders to follow by posting a live document outlining all system prompts, tools, and other post-training changes as they happen. This would signal a commitment to users that ya’ll are more interested in truth and transparency than manipulating infostreams at mass scale for personal gain.

Just think that we have 3.5 years of these toddler like headlines.