Mark Johnson
6.8K posts
Mark Johnson
@wmdmark
Designer, developer, teacher. Co-founder @Pathwright. Probably working on something new ꩜
Greenville, SC Katılım Mart 2007
1.2K Takip Edilen1.6K Takipçiler
It appears many are not aware that you can just write HTML in markdown if you want...
Thariq@trq212
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@Shpigford Software is manifest philosophy. Any opinionated software tends to create a cult-like user base.
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Mark Johnson retweetledi
Weird isn't just visual. Weird is whatever strays from the norm. Weird is relative to the current state of the world.
You can have weird principles. They should be things people can legitimately disagree with.
You have to remember Obsidian was very weird when it launched six years ago. Local files, malleability, backlinks, graph, even Markdown syntax... these were not as widely understood and accepted as they are today.
That's why I spent so much time writing essays like "File over app" to try and explain our choices. The goal was to describe why our weird ideas should be normal, and it worked!
Now the world has somewhat caught up and accepted those choices, so it's time to find the next frontier of weirdness.
kepano@kepano
my advice to people making .md apps: make it weirder! .md is the Schelling point what the market wants is more unique and diverse ways to interact with existing .md files
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P.S. if you've ever done any kind of serious user-centered UX work, which button is the correct choice is immediately obvious.
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Alarming how many "rational" people will willingly choose an option that would wipe out half the human race. The difference between logic and wisdom on display.
Tim Urban@waitbutwhy
Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press?
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Encouraging to see high-craft engineering amongst all the slop.
Tobias Renström@tbsrnstrm
Almost 16 months in the making, I'm finally at a point where I'm calling this good to go on the App Store. It's been my privilege to share the journey with you all, here's to the cool things still to come. Spatial is now available at apps.apple.com/app/id67539798…
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My main issue with agentic AI work is that it bypasses the natural unfolding that comes from struggling through problems step by step. In my experience, the incremental struggle is what leads to better designs, breakthroughs, and products with "soul"; something noticably absent in AI-produced work.
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Mark Johnson retweetledi
You're not imagining things—the Greeks and Trojans really are at war.
• The rage you're sensing? It's real. It belongs to Achilles, and honestly, it's going to be a problem for *everyone*.
• Achilles's anger is not a metaphor—it's a body count.
So yeah—sing, Muse. 👀
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Had a kind of surreal experience today with claude code...
- started it in a tmux session with full access on my computer
- had it build scripts/skills for read/write access to my email, iMessages, notes, etc.
- had it turn itself into a daemon with proper permissions
- had it build a simple web terminal interface that streamed the tmux session + an input box via a cloudflared tunnel
I can now:
- securely chat w/ my computer from anywhere on any device
- say things like "look up my notes about my meeting tomorrow and write a brief based on my roam notes on the topic", "summarize the family group texts", "clear my browser cache" and it just works.
- I can ask it to add new features or update the UI (the one I'm using) and refresh to see the changes. It updates itself!
- I also had it successfully negotiate w/ the Poke bouncer (this was fun, @interaction) via iMessages
Eventually, I think, all computers will work like this.
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“If you let constraints define the space too early, you do not just get a worse outcome. You lose outcomes that never get discovered.”
Karri Saarinen@karrisaarinen
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Mark Johnson retweetledi
A few things I've noticed as all devs write code with AI.
When you write foundational / architectural code of a new project by hand, you "feel" the code pushing back if your abstraction isn't right. You feel when something is harder than it should be. The code is telling you it's not in the right shape. Good engineers are sensitive to this.
When you're using an LLM, you keep pushing right through this in a way that feels like you're making progress, and it may even be directionally correct in a sense, but the underlying foundation of it all is actually bad in a way that either kills progress of the LLM later as it buckles under the complexity it has created or destroys your ability to maintain the code long term.
Related to this, I see a general restlessness with just sitting and thinking about a problem for a while.
As I've been working on a new library here at Laravel, there have been days where it feels like I mainly just stare at my screen thinking about something. When Claude Code is at your fingertips, it's tempting to just start yapping into the terminal and watching code come out the other end. Again, directionally correct in some ways, but often doesn't land on the elegant solution that is waiting to be discovered.
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“Put some files in a folder and collaborate with an AI agent on them” is an absurdly overpowered workflow.
Try it and you’ll see a glimpse of the future of computing.
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A UX paradox: The value proposition is to reduce effort for a task but humans only value things that took effort to produce.
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@JohnONolan @vanschneider My first thought as well. It's easily recognizable once you've seen enough of it. Still a nice passage. AI can be sometimes be profound/helpful amidst the slop.
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It’s quite interesting to watch GPT-5 simulate the effects of its own parameters.
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