LMNT

This could’ve easily been 12 blog posts, but I opted for one that comprehensively captures how I feel about design on Apple platforms right now. The Pendulum Swing There was immediate criticism of iOS 7’s visual design. Concerns mounted pretty quickly about both style and accessibility. Some people remarked, “It’s only the beta,” implying significant change during the beta release phase was not just possible but probable. Yet, after it was released to the public largely the same as it was introduced, they said, “Give it time.” The first few years of Apple’s new design language, most of the app icons I made and apps I designed were fairly simple and in line with expectations of the platform’s direction. Few colors, subtle or no gradients, definitely no edge effects or glossy treatments. It was really restrictive compared to the icons and UI that we used to make. You know, the style that made Apple the richest company in the world. Years went by, and public tone shifted from defeat to hope. “The pendulum will swing back,” people said, wistfully. It became a common refrain in the last decade. People really expected Apple to shift back toward the kinds of things that made us all fall in love with their platforms and products to begin with. And in spite of Apple’s renewed year-after-year commitment to this restrictive visual style, my clients increasingly asked for more illustrative, visually rich icons. That’s what they wanted. That’s what I wanted. But the pendulum never swung back. Instead, we got Liquid Glass. In a way, one could say Liquid Glass is like a new version of Aqua. It has reflective properties reminiscent of that. One could also say it’s an evolution of whatever iOS 7 was, leaning into the frosted panels and bright accent colors. But whatever Liquid Glass seems to be, it isn’t what many of us were hoping for. Understanding It I love new interpretations of older things. Sequels. Remakes. I will never tire of how new perspectives can create all-new versions of familiar things. Which is good, because it seems to be happening more and more, because kids who grew up on something are now the age they get to work on it. And I love that. I also recognize that every creator’s mind changes through time and they will inevitably move on from one style in favor of the next. But there’s one nagging feeling I have about reinterpreting beloved things, which is that before anyone attempts to do it, they must first seek to understand why it is beloved. It is only through understanding it that anyone can do the job well. In order not to be mistaken, I do not think someone has to be a fan to make a good version of that thing. I also don’t think being a fan makes you the arbiter of whether it’s a good version of that thing or not. (This often is difficult for superfans to accept.) And so it seems to me that the people who spearheaded both iOS 7 (2013) and iOS 26 (2025) either did not understand that the visually-rich style from 2001–2013 played such a significant role in Apple’s success or they simply did not care that it did. Rest in Peace I am exhausted from hearing that Steve Jobs has been apparently rolling in his grave at the sole discretion of whoever didn’t have their expectations of Apple met. Instead of remarking that he would be displeased, maybe it’s better to mark his death as a point in time when things would invariably shift. Prior to Steve’s death, there was a not-so-secret effort internally to discover Apple’s DNA, which would presumably mitigate the eventual loss of its founder. The hope—I suspect—was that when Steve would die, Apple could sail off on a trajectory that continued the spirit not of Steve, but of the company he started with Woz. Woz himself might argue that ship already had sailed. But for many of us, Mac OS X marked the moment Apple came into itself. The era of iMac, iPod, and Mac OS X solidified Apple as the industry leader, even if they were not yet in that position. These products and that aesthetic is what carried Apple to where it is now. It was the Apple of that era that built the iPhone. I often think back to when Steve Jobs proudly stated, “iPhone runs OS X.” That says so much, even without his followup of everything they would get “for free” on iPhone just because they already built it for the Mac. iPhone would never have taken off had Mac OS X not paved the runway. I am not quiet about how much I love my Mac. If I had to choose one device to keep, my Mac is it. That’s why it feels so odd for me to see macOS visually drift so far from where it started. It is macOS that is the backbone of the company. Despite years of all the wishing and promising that another device will one day capture the market computers have a hold on, my Mac is still the only device that can make something for all those other devices. In that alone, it feels like Mac should be the one leading everything else. Not following behind. Yet, it’s the visual style from iOS and now visionOS that are dictating the visual style of macOS. It does not feel like a breath of fresh air as much as another nail in the coffin. Rose Gold Retrospection Am I selectively choosing the positive parts of the past, ignoring the negative parts? Am I just looking through Rose-Gold-tinted Liquid Glasses? Yes, I am. I am looking selectively at the good things. That is a huge advantage of being able to create in the future we now live in: We get to observe and learn from the past, taking the best parts of it while discarding the rest. That is how technology is supposed to work. Yet as years go by, we seem to lose more of OS X’s good things. Year after year, draggable borders and frames became thinner until they disappeared. Scrollbars vanished. Stronger contrast softened. We lost the visually rich design in applications and icons. And now, we’ve even lost the ability to make unique icon silhouettes that Apple once specifically retained when introducing the iOS 7 aesthetic to macOS because that was a distinct element of its heritage. In fact, the rounded square icons that became the hallmark visual design characteristic of iPhone and iPhoneOS originated as a way to differentiate proper OS X apps from Dashboard widgets. And to be fair, at the time, a lot of iPhone apps felt like they were little widgets themselves. Even though the platform was forked from OS X, the little screen and low resolution encouraged smaller apps on iPhone. Perceived Platform Stability The form factor of iPhone really made the square app icons make sense. With touch input, maximizing the hit area for an app icon was a smart move. But it was smart in more ways than one. By only requiring edge-to-edge square artwork, the glossy effect and rounded corners would be applied automatically. That makes it significantly easier for anyone to plop in anything they want as an app icon and have it look “okay” on device. Decisions like this gave iPhoneOS some perceived platform stability. People interpreted that as having some shared understanding between apps and how they work. But these platforms and their expectations have changed significantly since OS X and the original iPhoneOS. The smaller developer community once embraced Apple’s aesthetic and interface guidelines, sometimes leaning further in than Apple did, which generally worked pretty well. However, iOS 7’s design took this to an extreme. By lowering the bar for visual design across the board, apps no longer had an obvious differentiator to mark the ones that didn’t behave as expected. Simply put, when you saw an app that put a lot of effort into the visual design to look like an Apple app in the days of yore (including any novel material aesthetics), it generally signaled a desire to match the platform’s goals insofar as interaction as well. Custom (non-native) controls were once made with a level of care not just in their aesthetics, but also to replicate their functionality correctly. Therefore, apps that did not have these visual design characteristics probably did not behave as you expected either. However, the era we live in now has apps that don’t just outright reject the way a user expects to use an app (instead favoring their own method). That has always existed. But now they can more easily and effectively disguise themselves into looking almost identical to the “good” apps that do aim to meet user interaction expectations. All because the bar for matching the platform’s visual style is practically nonexistent. The problem I see is that the people who really do care about their apps—you know, the Mac developers who are proud of being Mac only, not just Mac-first or Mac-compatible—they look no different from the big businesses who came into this market without a goal of meeting user expectations of native functionality. It may seem like a good idea to automatically mask and apply a glass style to a stubborn third-party developer’s app icon to make it harmonize with the rest of the system. But now it’s just more difficult to see which apps don’t care about the platform they’re on. Everyone can look decent without actually being decent. And that’s bad for perceived platform stability. That’s bad for users. Take a Scroll With Me Ye olde OS X that we fell in love with may very well be dead, but there’s so much we can all still learn from it. Why did we move away from a system of explicit affordances that help users understand what will happen when they interact with a user interface? There are dozens of examples. But here’s one: Scrollbars. Scrollbars clearly existed on Mac and iPod before Apple debuted the disappearing-reappearing trick on iPhone. As iPhone was a low-resolution device at 320×480 with touch input, it could be understood why they went that route for that platform. All vertical views were likely truncated, so instead of always showing scrollbars, a decision was made to hide them. Users would later develop habits of flicking views up and down, and for those who remember the time well, you will also remember how odd it felt to use apps that did not feature vertical scrolling. Even if the view was short enough to not require it, it felt wrong without the rubber band effect. Furthermore, fairly early on in the life of iPhone, designers would ensure the content view truncated at the bottom of the screen with half an item or half a line of text visible to let people know there was more “below the fold,” a term previously used for the front page of newspapers, and later, websites. Apple may have started hiding scrollbars since the original iPhone, but when that decision came to the Mac, the same constraints did not apply. A Mac display is much larger and more dense than iPhone. A window can be any size, with any amount of content. Given this reality, an app designer cannot reliably control where a window truncates the content to communicate that there’s more there. Scrollbars do not merely provide the ability to scroll. The first iPods did not have touch or mouse input, but a scrollbar still existed to indicate the current position and relative length of the view. The best analogy I can think of is how you can easily flip pages in a book, clearly see your position in it, and understand the overall length of the book based on the density of the current page. The scrollbar simulates the depth of a book by giving you a visual, interactive control that simultaneously indicates the length and current position. If it is invisible, you get none of that. While drafting this blog post in the Notes app, I have no idea how much text is above or below this very paragraph without a visible scrollbar. This issue has become so bad that some websites with articles will show a horizontal progress bar under its header that fills up as you scroll through an article. Accessibility is for Everyone Yes, I can optionally select a preference to show scrollbars always. But good usability is just good design. Good accessibility is just good design. That’s the whole job. For how much Apple claims to care about accessibility, Apple fell flat with iOS 7. And everyone was right to criticize that then. What is remarkable is that in the 10 years that followed, there were still frosted buttons with unreadable low-contrast red text on them. No one should have to turn on an accessibility setting for a Delete button to be readable. That is the definition of a minimum viable product. It’s one thing when it’s just one thing. But it’s been immeasurable over the years because of Apple’s influence and impact. This has infiltrated every rounded corner of the industry, because designers often use Apple as an example of doing it well. People offload their design responsibility when they can point to an example from Apple doing something a certain way. And the thing that hurts so much is that Apple is good about accessibility and usability in so many ways. So how is it they exhibit such a large blind spot? We can all see it. For years, we have yearned for them to address these decade-old concerns. But instead, they double-down with Liquid Glass. Issues that were once bad seem to now be reflected, refracted, and magnified. Some details are genuinely really nice. Yet, some of the longest-standing issues remain unresolved. The design team that delivers the broadest change for a three-trillion-dollar company cannot be bothered to consider legibility as a primary function of the operating system? User Experience I suppose many people thought the purpose of user experience designers was to ensure this sort of thing would never happen. Yet here we are. And that frustrates me. The experience of using an app was always the responsibility of everyone involved in creating it, especially the user interface designer. This wasn’t something that simply no one considered before UX designers came into the scene years after the development of the modern operating system. I’d argue that while many experiences have improved, we have way more bad experiences in apps than ever before, dragging down the average considerably from where it used to be. Somehow, the introduction of UX designers into the field has marked an era with worse user experiences across every platform. And yet here we are, signing ourselves up for another decade? Asking a Lot Apple has effectively infinite resources and operates on their own timeline, but everyone else does not have this kind of luxury. Springing big changes like this all at once forces so many independent developers, entire companies, and the industry as a whole to freeze their own development schedules to accommodate Apple’s design system. It’s asking a lot. For almost nothing in return. I keep looking at all the changes Liquid Glass brings, and I cannot find one instance where it has markedly improved the experience in any way. Everything that got rounder—except for the things that didn’t—why? Everything that got inset that wasn’t before—why? Everything that is now blurry—why? I don’t think it’s a secret that the content area of some apps decreased. The margins and padding increased—except where it didn’t. In some ways, there’s almost more UI variance than there was before, which doesn’t make any sense. But in other ways, everything feels far more restrictive than it once was. Which I admit, also doesn’t make much sense. App icons weren’t just more expressive on OS X, they could be a much wider-range of materials than merely glass. I know I can still draw anything I want within that square, and that the glass appearance on objects inside of it is purely optional. But the edge of every icon now has a glass appearance I can’t do anything about. If my icon is paper, wood, metal, or—god forbid—leather? It has a glass specular highlight. On macOS, it’s currently locked at a 45° angle. Which is not something I agreed to. Swinging for the fences like this comes with substantial risk. Especially for matured products like macOS. This product is almost 25 years old, and I would hope there would be a little more caution when expecting effort from and forcing changes upon a developer community you’ve largely lost your goodwill with. These kinds of decisions have long-lasting effects and I’m sure many developers would’ve appreciated their time being considered before asking them to incorporate a design they did not sign up for. Actually, Who Is in Charge Now? And Why? Back in the day, Steve Jobs had an incredible vision for the future that mostly materialized. And as it was being constructed, everyone who went to work at Apple deferred to that vision. That’s what happened to me. I knew I would give up a certain amount of control, but I trusted that vision. More than that, the fact that everyone else would do the same spoke volumes, and the result was a technological renaissance that has already passed. I think many of us were pretty okay with Steve in charge. But now when I see Liquid Glass, part of it feels like it just resets us back to where we were ten years ago. The pendulum didn’t swing back. Giving it time didn’t make it better. After ten years, it all feels like this is someone who just dug their heels in. There’s a whole design team at Apple which I can only guess is a great mix of people, with varying levels of platform experience. I must assume some people know the platform very well, while others are undoubtedly fairly new to it, which is great. I can only hope that everyone on that team attempts to understand the platform’s history before they make drastic changes to it. But what I am now absolutely sure of is that if the last decade represents Alan Dye’s vision for this platform, then I disagree with it. I don’t trust this direction. I didn’t need the last ten years to see that, but I’m disappointed that in ten years he still doesn’t see it. I don’t understand why this guy’s in charge of the Human Interface group at Apple. It makes no sense to me. The Next Ten Years I know this largely doesn’t matter. And I know that I will continue to enjoy making icons even under arbitrary design constraints that I disagree with. I know Parakeet will continue to make the nicest icons on any platform well into the future. I already made 15 different Liquid Glass versions of our clients’ icons as experiments. And I think they all work really well with just a touch of that glass effect. I don’t think everything needs it. Chromatic shadows are nice, and reusing layers for different color modes is very useful. I generally think icon production is a fair bit simpler for me, which I appreciate. Looking back at the app icons we made over the last ten years for over a hundred clients at Parakeet, I can see exactly when things shifted. I think it will happen again, just faster this time. So if I have any predictions, it’s that the adoption of Liquid Glass will be relatively quick, but developers and companies will probably deviate from it more quickly than they did with the previous style of iOS. A lot of these companies have matured in their own right, with their own established styles, having done their own research, with their own formed opinions. I doubt they will abandon that in any meaningful way in favor of an aesthetic that is more distinctly Apple’s. Liquid Glass and the general implementation of it will not meaningfully change during the beta phase of the “26” release cycle. They’re not going to backtrack. And they’re not going to address long-standing concerns all of a sudden. The general adoption of this may test the patience of an already weary community of developers who feel tired of toiling away on trivial changes such as this. As I said, I don’t think there is any meaningful benefit to it, and designers and developers may themselves feel that as they implement it. Larger companies may take a hard look at whether it makes sense to have native apps at all versus just web apps. With so much eroded goodwill and Apple profiting immense amounts from third party developers, larger companies may reasonably question the benefit. I think they’d be right to do so. The web’s capabilities likely cover a lot of use cases that many apps need. By the Way Over the years, it feels harder and harder to relate with the general atmosphere Apple surrounds itself in. It wasn’t always this pristine. Everyone who presented wasn’t always so stylish. Not everyone used to talk like this. What is that, by the way? Why does everyone sound like a voice assistant? Or is it that voice assistants got their speaking style from Apple’s presentation style? Apple didn’t used to craft a narrative around every decision in order to justify it. I feel like their presentations are burdened by reason and rationale, and their individual WWDC sessions feel increasingly pretentious like each of them are gods coming down to share their wisdom with us plebs. It’d be nice if they were knocked off their pedestal, because I think they’re better when they’re trying to outdo someone else rather than themselves.

Remember The Good Place? The point system for individual decisions lives rent free in my head. You can’t adhere to this concept too strictly. There’s a long list of decisions that lead to the decision you actually get to make. One of the examples from the show was making a salad, but the tomato you bought was grown in pesticide-rich farmland, farmed by underpaid workers, shipped from Mexico to Indiana using fuel-inefficient vehicles. There are a lot of little trade-offs we’re willing to make for the things we want. But how many trade-offs are we willing to make? And how big can a trade-off get before we just can’t justify it anymore? If this sounds like my Where’s the Line? post, I admit that it kinda sounds like that to me too. This stuff is not black and white. Morals are not always clear cut. There’s nuance. But sometimes, there really isn’t any nuance. Sometimes it really is clear cut. For example, J.K. Rowling is an asshole. We’ve known this for quite some time. I’ve said it before. And I hate beating that drum, because I have so many other things I would like to do in my life. I promise, I don’t really want every other blog post to be about how disgusted I am at the state things, but—if I’m being honest—I’m finding myself meta-disgusted at the moment. The disgust I am feeling lately is less about how awful the actual thing is and more about how there is a lack of collective disgust about it. How is it that everyone seems unwilling to give up on Harry Potter to spite J.K. Rowling? I understand that the universe she created captivated people. I understand that books and films are enjoyable. But J.K. Rowling is and has been funneling a lot of her money—that was once your money—into anti-transgender causes. If that’s not enough, she uses her entire online existence to spread this revolting viewpoint. Far too many people are far too comfortable ignoring the damage she is actively doing. And I just want to be clear: it’s fine to put her out of your mind as long as you are not also financially supporting her in any way. It’s not worth it. In this very specific case, it is definitely not worth it. The entertainment we have in this world is so vast. There are so many things to appreciate and enjoy that are not created by such a reprehensible human being. Find some of those things. Please. Do not be a person who facilitates her hatred. Do not turn a blind eye to the money you spend on Harry Potter. You can’t justify it. You can only make excuses. Do not make excuses. Your money is better spent almost anywhere else. Your admiration for that story is better invested in something else. Stop introducing Harry Potter to your children. On a personal note, while I don’t watch, read, or buy anything Harry Potter anymore, I’ve been feeling really guilty about having Harry Potter wallpapers on my website. So I removed them from the wallpapers index page. For the moment, the files are still in the archive directory, and the pages for the wallpapers still exist, but they are completely orphaned from the rest of the site. I think that’s the right thing to do, but I might remove them entirely later.

Well, it’s finally here, the dystopian dream team. Jony Ive and Sam Altman hitched their carts together to create god knows what. While some people are “excited” or “intrigued,” I am frankly “disgusted.” In an intro video with special thanks to the Coppola family and Café Zoetrope for the location, and Harry Gregson-Williams for letting them borrow The Martian score, the two gush about the city of San Francisco, a city not devoid of problems that people like these two men helped create. Jony Ive may be a brilliant designer, and he may have assembled a brilliant team. They very well may be enjoying having every tool at their disposal to create anything they could ever dream of. I don’t doubt it. But Jony himself does not strike me as a person who ever really liked computers. He and his team are great at constructing a beautiful arrangement of parts, inside a pristine enclosure, with novel mechanics to open and close it. No doubt. But there’s never been any indication he even likes computers. Sam Altman has built an entire business around theft. Taking everything he can find—but not pay for—he has constructed a monstrous machine that uses an unbelievable amount of energy and an unfathomable amount of water to keep cool. It is an ecological nightmare. In addition, ChatGPT doesn’t just itself fail to recognize the difference between fact and fiction, it presents these answers to people who are themselves unable to discern the difference. Sam Altman is a person who thinks today’s limitation of a laptop is waiting for ChatGPT to respond. He said this. Both of these men are made for each other in the worst way imaginable. They both seemingly have a disdain for computers. None of what they spoke about in that ten-minute masturbatory video showed any ounce of wonder and amazement for what humans are able to do with computers. I don’t think these men are here to save us. On that note, I don’t think we need to be saved. I don’t love my phone that much anymore. But I do appreciate its value as a communication device, a camera, and an iPod. The thing is, I actually really love my Mac. But there’s this unkillable idea in Silicon Valley right now that there will be another thing someday. The promise of a theoretical future device that does something worth having. Billionaires keep pretending like they’re doing research to find it, but I feel like we’re already living the dream. I can draw and write and create whatever I want, and publish it or send it to people around the world to see instantaneously. And I can access whatever everyone else shares instantly from my devices too. That’s the peak. We’re at the summit! Computers and phones have stopped making the big leaps they once did. That’s fine! That’s okay. We did it! We largely accomplished the goals, maximizing what these objects should be. From here on out, big changes are no longer possible, nor are they necessary. These kinds of devices have reached the point where they have just joined refrigerators, washing machines, and microwaves. I understand that’s no longer glamorous, but the exciting part may just be over. We’re not going to have a new device that supersedes a computer is or what we consider a phone to be today. For this general category of computing devices, I think we already figured it out. Right now, with all these new products created around AI features, we’re not witnessing another leap or a new product category that will overtake the devices we have today. What we’re seeing right now is not innovation, we’re seeing people struggle to contend with the reality that it’s over. They’re coping with the fact that the innovation phase for computing devices has finished. They’re grasping for continued relevance. Even Nintendo made more of a direct sequel to their hardware than they have before. While every previous console was just one weird thing after another, this one’s built on what they had that worked best. It incorporates all these weird ideas they’ve had over the years in a form factor that they simply already figured out. Despite none of us really needing another new device with all new things to learn and adapt to for modest—if any—gain, the tech magnates just simply have more money than they know what to do with. And they have to prove to themselves over and over again that their past successes weren’t flukes. Surely, they think, they can repeat past successes with entirely new products. Surely those successes weren’t just the product of the period of time that kind of innovation needed to happen. Right? I don’t think any new product (or new product category) that we’re seeing lately is done with the goal of improving our lives. Instead, it’s done out of sheer hubris. I cannot and will not be convinced that the guy who pushed for a $17,000 gold watch has absolutely any idea how to enrich my life. A lot of people respect Jony Ive and admire him for the legacy he left behind at Apple, which is why a lot of Apple fans are falling for this in a way they initially fell for Humane—even if they won’t admit they did, I saw them do it. Jony lends that credibility to someone without any. It’s awful to see Sam Altman spend six and a half billion dollars to buy Jony’s credibility. It’s worse to see Jony sell his credibility. Do not mistake these men as anything but a couple of rich dudes who are remarkably unrelatable. They are too far removed to understand what anyone else’s life is like. And that’s what makes them awful candidates to create anything for everyone else. I’m not curious to see what they make. I’m not excited about the potential of it. There is no third primary device. There’s no reason to believe that it could exist. There is no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt. I’ve seen this all before. Too many times. And so have you.

Masa Louie, what does “time” mean when ordering? Me What? Masa Like, “One time cappuccino, one time latte, one time special morning set…” Me …What in the world? “Time”? Who said this? Are you sure they said “time”? Where were they from? Masa I don’t know. But… ヨーロッパ style. Me Hold on. Let me think about this. two minutes later Me OK. I understand. In German, people order things using “einmal” kind of like 一つ. When translating literally, it could mean “one-time,” so when Germans speak English, they might say “one-time cappuccino, one-time latte, one-time special morning set.” It’s not normal English. You don’t have to remember it. Almost every day in my little local café, there are a decent amount of tourists, because it’s one of the only places nearby that serves breakfast, and at an earlier hour than anywhere else. The tourists are often from Asia, North America, and Europe. Not everyone speaks English natively, but it might be their second language. That makes English the lingua franca in the café for all non-Japanese tourists. Being the resident English expert, the staff often asks me to help them with English. I’m all too happy to help, but this one was so bizarre. My initial thought was that there’s no variation of English I know where this would make any sense. But now it makes sense. It’s not really English at all. When ordering sets of things in German, “mal” can be indicative of multiplication. Like “one-time” or “one of the.” 1 × Cappuccino 1 × Latte 1 × Special Morning Set This is just one, small, foreign language quirk from today. There were others.

I was roaming the underground shopping area outside Tokyo Station, and walked past a miniature Don Quixote, a discount shop. The normal size one is almost intolerable, so I never ever go there. As I walked by, I saw an orange bag with a Reese’s logo on it, and I finally understood what Peter Arnell was on about with the gravitational pull of Pepsi, because my body involuntarily shifted into the shop. But upon closer inspection, it was actually a bag of Reese’s Dipped Pretzels, which is not at all what I wanted. I was gutted. It’s impossible to find peanut butter cups. No other Reese’s product existed in the entire store. How could this happen to me?

[Download the video.] Yes, someone in the government is breaking the law, and yes, that other politician is being a hypocrite, and yes again, that one over there is clearly a nazi. It’s all anybody can see. We’re past the point of calling it out. There’s no one left to convince. They’re openly doing it now because there are no consequences. After pointing it out for the thousandth time, they’re not going to feel guilty; they’re going to ask, “Yeah, so what? What are you gonna do about it?” So?

There’s a lot to take away from Humane’s story, but first, I want to share something I said on Twitter in July 2022, a full year before Humane revealed their product, the Ai Pin: me I can’t imagine that product being successful. Which makes me wonder— is the whole idea for Humane to patent any technologies it develops in the hopes of licensing those technologies to big companies? Maybe the product is effectively a demo to facilitate Humane selling patents. 👀 Even prior to posting this, in response to any skepticism I had about Humane, people told me—publicly and privately—to “wait and see.” Some of these people knew Imran Chaudhri, Humane’s founder. Others had no idea who he was. Either way, a lot of people were giving him and Humane the benefit of the doubt from the start. I think we have to stop doing that in this industry. Next time, let’s not “wait and see.” Instead, let’s spot the red flags more easily and have them be addressed. Claiming credibility through patents Paying editors to create Wikipedia articles about you Manufacturing hype before manufacturing products Pivoting the product to AI, even before shipping Pitching products via a TED talk Having no plan for inevitable electronic waste Before Humane, Imran Chaudhri was not a person that many people outside of Apple knew of. After he was fired, to aid his credibility going forward, he boasted about his patent collection on his personal website. At a company like Apple, patent authorship is politicized, and only a few people are usually listed on any given patent. Being one of those few people listed as a patent author can make someone feel really special and inflate their ego. To give you an example, Ken Kocienda is an early employee of Humane who also boasts about his Apple inventions. I don’t think there are many people left who haven’t heard Ken tell his story of how he “invented” iPhone autocorrect. He rests on this singular laurel. That claim should make you wonder, if Ken was not on that team, wouldn’t someone else have done it? Yes. The answer is definitely yes. Did anyone else work on this other than Ken? I’d bet on it. But he’s the only person making this claim, so it’s the only story you hear. Pro Tip™: Always ask if someone’s trying to sell you their book. (He is.) A cornerstone of working at Apple is recognizing that most things are collaborations, sometimes with people and teams that you never interact with, and it is rather humbling to know that you are just one small piece of a much larger puzzle. But from the outside, it can seem like a person who has a thousand patents is a certified genius. Imran has claimed to have “invented” many, many things that were surely done in collaboration with others and definitely would have been done without his involvement. There’s no reason to believe that a person listed as an Apple patent author makes them capable of inventing anything on their own that was made possible by the enormous teams and vast resources Apple has at its disposal. When people make claims, please check them. However, what was a little more troubling to me was how his contributions at Apple—including those patents—became the basis for an encyclopedic entry on Wikipedia. Around when the company was founded, a Wikipedia article suddenly appeared about Imran Chaudhri that he paid for, proven by a disclaimer left on the article’s Talk page, which I’m sure very few people look at. I don’t think any media outlet ever picked up on this. In 2018, like Imran himself, Humane was barely something anyone knew about. They were in “stealth mode” for three years. Before manufacturing any product for customers, the company was manufacturing hype for itself. People were simping for Humane, hanging on every word about a product that quite literally had not existed yet. In October 2022, Imran tweeted: Imran Chaudhri the rumors are true… the smartphone is dead and coming next year from @Humane, the world’s first device built from the ground up for AI The thing that strikes me is that before then, it was not clear Humane was making an AI-powered product at all. They probably weren’t. Earlier patents they filed focused on the “laser ink” display which maybe they hoped would play a bigger role. AI was likely a pivot after realizing the vision wasn’t materializing into a meaningful product or because investors were feeling the industry’s AI pressure. I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think this was supposed to be an AI product. It just became one. It’s hard for me—as someone who has been in this industry for 15 years—to understand the fundamental difference between startup “stealth mode” and the entire period of time before you announce a product, so even though it took three years to emerge from said “stealth mode,” it still took two more years to announce their first product, which Imran did via a TED Talk. If you watched the video of that talk, you know how cringe it was. Imran is not the first—nor will he be the last—to attempt a Steve Jobs or Jony Ive impersonation to introduce a product. But as he made his attempt, he noticeably lacked Steve’s charming stage presence and the elegant way Jony reads a script. Instead, Imran made a strange pitch that made me curious if he lives in the same reality I do. It had been fifteen years since Steve introduced the iPhone, where making a call on stage was—for the last time—impressive. Imran opens with this, and only a few people in the audience seemed impressed. Next, he has has the device translate his words, which after it does, he claims was “fluent French.” He then sprinkles in a statement he thinks sound smart but is so unconvincing. Imran Chaudhri This is not a deepfake. In fact, it’s deeply profound. Live translation is a dream feature for lots of people. Getting it right would be incredible. But does this deliver on that promise? Not quite. Like many AI demos, Imran has the voice assistant answer a question he already knows the answer to, holding up a candy bar so the the voice assistant can say he should avoid eating it due to his cocoa butter intolerance. There’s a delayed, polite applause. He reminds the audience that he, not the AI voice assistant, is in control. “I’m going to eat it anyway,” he says. To which the voice assistant responds, “Enjoy it.” The audience laughs, while I wonder who thinks this device would in any way stop him from eating it. Watching how this was pitched to the public, I wonder how was this pitched to TED. I’d love to know who signed off. A few months later, Humane’s product was dubbed the Ai Pin, and a few months later from that, it was listed as one the Best 200 Inventions of 2023 by Time, before it was ever released and—more importantly—before anyone at Time was able to even try it. Some noted that Time is co-chaired by a couple of Humane’s investors. Whether it was a favor or not, it certainly looked like one. When the price was revealed to be $699 plus a $24/mo. service fee, anyone who hadn’t already dropped off was certain to have by then. Humane’s CEO, Bethany Bongiorno—who is married to Imran—replied to casual criticism on Twitter in November 2023: Bethany Bongiorno our goal was never to solve smartphone addiction or deter phone usage. it was to build a new contextual compute device and platform to unlock the full capabilities of ai. we are just at the start of what is possible. contextual queries and operations, building your own ai, visual search with the world as your operating system - this is all what gets unlocked. and the by product will be that you use your phone less, or differently - just like with every shift in technology that brings around a new form factor. Surely Bethany remembers when her husband—and chairman of their company—posted “the smartphone is dead” just one year earlier. Humane sold just 10,000 of the 100,000 they expected to. I’d love to know how many were actually produced. I’d also like to know how many were returned in total, because it was reported that the new sales were lower than the units returned. I can’t blame anyone who returned theirs. If I had bought one and it was was overheating, I would sooner seek a refund than a replacement battery. For a device clipped to your clothing, overheating is something I’d like to avoid. The device’s problems were well-documented. The response time was awful. The battery life was abysmal. Even when it worked, it offered little value. Didn’t Humane test this device? If they didn’t know about these problems until after it shipped, that’s a huge blind spot. If they did, that’s even worse. With these problems, low sales numbers and a high return rate was inevitable. It is—of course—not the fault of any reporter who rightly criticized the device, but rather Humane, its founders, and its investors who are responsible for shipping it like this. This all paints a grim picture for electronic waste. In the future, this should be addressed at the very beginning of any hardware company. People should know what the end-of-life plans are for devices before they’re sold. It’s unlikely, because without regulation, why would any company care? But as consumers, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect companies to have their own plans to properly dispose of their own devices after customers are finished using them. After it was clear to most people that Humane was not going to come back from those poor sales numbers, they pivoted once again. But rather than pivoting the product, they pivoted the company’s marketing. They pretended to have forgotten the supposedly valuable part of their proposition, the “operating system” they call CosmOS. So they reintroduced it with flowcharts and videos that I’m sure did not instill any confidence among customers that Humane would continue to support their product. Instead, it signaled pretty clearly Humane was seeking a buyer for the whole company. As a side note, I am not an expert on what constitutes an operating system, but to me, CosmOS doesn’t seem like an operating system. It seems like a series of API calls the device or service makes via a voice assistant and a web portal interface for the customers’ data. On top of an operating system. And at this point, it might be a good time to point out that the web portal interface called .Center was the primary—if not the only—method for users to interact with their data outside of the Ai Pin itself. That means photos and videos captured or notes recorded could only be viewed, edited, or exported from that website. By storing all of this stuff on a server for only this product to access and having no synced local copy anywhere—even on the device itself for direct syncing or export to other services—customers were forced into this model which undoubtedly duplicates functionality their other devices already have. I don’t blame Humane for lacking integration with Apple’s services, but I blame them for not building proper desktop or phone software that kept user data in a format their users could easily migrate elsewhere. With reports of the company hoping for an acquisition in the 750 million–1 billion dollar range, I suspect everyone was finally laughing. I’ve brought this up before, but Instagram was once sold for a billion dollars. Star Wars was sold for four billion dollars. It takes a planet-sized ego to think this company could be worth a billion dollars. But maybe customers were not laughing. For them, the future of this device was decidedly unclear, until just the other day when Humane announced that HP was acquiring some of Humane. HP is not acquiring the product or the customer base, but instead CosmOS and the team that built it. It would not be an Imran Chaudhri statement if it didn’t mention their patents, so Humane made it abundantly clear that part of what HP is acquiring includes “more than 300 patents and patent applications.” In a separate statement for their customers, Humane said the device will cease to function in any meaningful way after February 28, 2025. That’s less than 10 days from the acquisition announcement. Adding insult to injury, customers will only be able to access and export their data from the only place it was ever made available, the .Center website. For data on the Ai Pin that hasn’t been retrieved, it must first upload to the service before customers can access it. All within less than 10 days. After that, the data will be inaccessible, even if it’s still on the device. The way this product is being shut down reveals so much about the company. To all the journalists out there, please don’t repeat that Humane is “winding down.” That phrase should be used only when the availability of services are being phased out over a decent period of time. Decent is not 10 days. This is being immediately shut down. This device, its services, and support will no longer be available by the end of this month. The remaining hardware will likely be disposed of, by the company and its customers. Humane suggests to customers that they handle that on their own, which I find insulting, as I think the company is responsible for the waste. Humane existed for six years, which is quite a long time, but it collapsed quicker than any other company I have seen before. I hope that in the future, people can see red flags more clearly and that journalists identify them much earlier, without giving companies the benefit of the doubt. It’s better to be skeptical until proof is presented. There’s really no reason to believe that people who were good individual contributors would be good entrepreneurs. It’s a completely different skillset with entirely different challenges. Yet, the industry reports on “former Apple employees” like they’re going to be the next Steve Jobs. Stop idolizing these people.

Modern cartography should not be determined via political pressure. If we all can’t agree on that, we really should. That’s the basis of why it was so cowardly for both Google and Apple to rename the Gulf of Mexico in their maps. As far as I know, there is no law in the United States that compels any private company to draw or label their maps according to what that country considers its official naming. And because there isn’t means that any company that complies with any country’s official naming—specifically as outlined by the executive branch of the United States government—did so completely voluntarily. I just want to say right out of the gate that if the argument is that the name is official, it should go without saying that it is official only in one country in the world. Even people who speak US English and have their devices set to US English may not live—shocker—in the United States. But if we do care about official names, there is a long list of place names, including indisputable names of countries themselves that are not recognized across regions and languages. In just one example, Japan is not the official name of the country inside of Japan. It’s officially Nippon (or Nihon in everyday conversation). In kanji it’s represented as 日本, but Nippon is the romanized name. And yet that isn’t the name the rest of the world uses, because of long-standing misrepresentations of its name from Europeans that cascaded the world over. (In Japanese maps, 日本 is used.) Maybe that doesn’t seem so weird to you, so let me show you what happens in the other direction. In Japanese, people call the United Kingdom Igirisu. That’s derived from “English,” which I think we all know represents only one country inside the country known as the United Kingdom. That’s genuinely confusing. And if you’re curious, England is called Ingurando, which is about as close as you can get in Japanese. I bring this up because in the global arena, if we can’t even let countries name themselves, then arguing about the names of bodies of water in the open sea must seem ridiculous even within this broader scope of the same topic. But, I admit that I’ve digressed. For weeks now, I’ve noticed a common refrain, “pick your battles.” It’s a phrase I have heard many times in my life as a very opinionated person who loves to fight every battle. People say it as a way to remind you that there’s likely a larger battle in the future you’ll want to save your strength for, as if holding your strength in reserve will make your argument stronger in a theoretical future argument. Everyone knows it doesn’t work that way. People in power say it to keep others from having power themselves. It’s not a mechanism to help you be stronger; it’s a mechanism to keep you quiet. But this whole Gulf of Mexico thing was an easy battle to fight. And there’s some value in winning the small battles that we can. The name of this body of water was not disputed by anyone. And yes, while it’s not the most important issue facing the world today, I’d like to think we’re capable of fighting more than one battle at a time, which we’re going to have to do going forward. Any one battle cannot be won before we can shift focus to the next. Get used to trying to fight multiple battles simultaneously. That’s what makes this one feel so awful. It wasn’t a particularly difficult battle because there was no actual dispute happening. There are longer-standing, actual disagreements on some bodies of water, namely S-23, commonly known as the Sea of Japan. This name has been disputed formally for decades, with evidence from over 1000 years ago supporting naming it the East Sea. North Korea and South Korea agree on this. And though Russia shares comparatively very little coastline with it and China shares absolutely zero coastline with it, they too have qualms with the name. For reference, Apple Maps—by my checking right now (in US English, in Japan)—does not label this body of water at all. Searching “Sea of Japan” will pinpoint its coordinates, but that’s as far as it goes. Google, on the other hand, does label it as the “Sea of Japan.” If you give this broader issue any thought whatsoever, all bodies of water in the open sea should be named poetically by neighboring countries rather than named for any neighboring countries. But also earlier, longer-standing names should probably be respected. That’s why it should be Denali. That’s why it should be the Gulf of Mexico. These names have heritage and history. John Gruber says because they’re regionally tailored, maps from Google and Apple aren’t singular global atlases. The Oxford English Dictionary, he argues, is the same for everyone. A definition changes for everyone simultaneously. Every publisher—just as every cartographer—gets to do what they think is right, not what they are dictated to do by any government. While it’s true there is only one “OED,” there are a few English dictionaries from Oxford, including the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, the New Oxford American Dictionary (NOAD), and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Also, not everyone uses the Oxford English Dictionary. There are obviously other English dictionaries, at least the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. The OED is like Google Maps and Apple Maps in that it is not the singular (English) dictionary either. Changing one dictionary does not change every dictionary. Whether MapQuest renames the Gulf of Mexico is truly their own decision. And I hope they make the right one, because Apple and Google did not. They had an opportunity to resist authoritarianism, but instead obeyed in advance, without any legal requirement to do so. This is not as trivial as it is being made out to be. Donald Trump just demonstrated the influence he has over tech companies. They did exactly as he asked even though they were not forced to. That frightens me. Just as I asked where the line is for individuals, I’m curious where the line is for companies like Apple and Google too. Because though undoubtedly Donald Trump would’ve been pissed had either company not renamed the body of water, I’d like to have seen him try to force them to do it. It would have necessitated much more visible authoritarianism, and people would have got way more upset about that. Apple is a big, powerful company with the capability of doing what’s right even in the face of potential retaliation. They had the power to resist but didn’t. I cannot even begin to describe how disappointing that feels. I don’t think my anger or disappointment is misplaced. This decision wasn’t Trump’s decision. It was Tim Cook’s decision. In a footnote comparison about the Associated Press losing part of their White House access because they refuse to call it the Gulf of America, John quips that it’d be ridiculous if Apple stopped inviting him to events if he styled MacOS with a capital M, instead of macOS with a lowercase m. Sure, that would be ridiculous, but Apple has revoked press access for petty reasons before. But writing 5000 words in defense of Apple’s decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico is also in service of staying on the invitation list. Donald Trump asked Tim Cook to kiss the ring, and Tim didn’t seem to hesitate. If I worked at Apple, I would not only be ashamed to work there after this, I would quit. I would feel absolutely awful to continue exchanging the value of my time for any amount of money from a company that quickly surrenders to one man.

Where’s the line that can’t be crossed? Surely there’s something so vile, so intolerable, so universal in its horror that there’s no other choice but to stop and shut everything down. Something where a hashtag would be insulting, where a march or protest would be insufficient. Something that necessitates an absolute refusal to comply, withholding all work and diverting all focus to rioting, property damage, and violence. Complete civil disobedience. If the pitcher pulls out a pistol and shoots the batter, then I’m sorry to say we’re not playing baseball anymore. When the government disregards the rules of the game, what sense is there in the rest of us playing by the rules? People need to become comfortable with the idea of violence as a means to political ends. It is the only rational answer to oppression. We’re not going to vote our way out of this. A gun owner has decided—by purchasing a gun—that they’re okay with using it. Being comfortable killing another human is something I am not comfortable with. I want to believe that puts me on moral high ground, but it really just makes me vulnerable to someone who doesn’t care. When any of us are faced with violence, we may have to respond with violence ourselves. By not responding with violence, we simply permit others to kill us. That’s a really tough moral dilemma. We’re over here debating whether punching fascists is okay when that’s the absolute least we should be doing. Most people left-of-center have not quite contended with this. The Democratic Party is still largely led and influenced by the Obamas, and Michelle has famously said, “when they go low, we go high.” As a reminder, we’re no longer playing baseball. The virtue of going high is no longer of any value. Can any of us really claim to maintain a moral high ground? So again, where’s the line that—if crossed—you’d feel totally justified in being violent? Most people would say they’d intervene violently if their family’s lives were in danger. Does the answer change when it’s the police putting your family in danger? What about when you remove your family from the equation, and instead it’s your friend? Your neighbor? It’s astounding how much these variables factor into the calculus. Clearly, proximity is a factor. Five shot dead in a nearby neighborhood registers totally differently from five shot dead in a faraway war. But it’s also in how we tend to classify things. It’s easier to dismiss something if we call it a tragedy rather than an atrocity, because that makes it easier to accept. As migrants are detained, as trans people lose their rights, as Black people are murdered by police, will we continue to label these as tragedies we can’t do anything about? When will they be atrocities that cannot be tolerated with threat of public retaliation? Would the people of the United States of America permit another genocide? I fear so. So where is the line? If none of these things that have already happened crossed that line, then where is it? Ponder and debate where that line is that can’t be crossed, but while we do, we’ll witness a progression of a thousand more terrible things leading up to it. They’ll have no trouble committing atrocities that don’t cross that line, we’ll call them tragedies to cope, and we’ll think we can social-media post our way out of fascism, even though we know—deep down—we can’t. Yes, there’ll be protests when police kill more Black people. There’ll be marches when more basic human rights are revoked. But most of these will be self-proclaimed peaceful protests. You have to know the government is fine with peaceful protests that pose no direct threat. They don’t care how you vote in four years. They only care if you’re going to stop them now. Without a threat, there is no incentive to abide. That works both ways. The government threatens the wellbeing of the civilians so that civilians comply. But if the civilians are unwilling to be a threat themselves, then the government has no reason to comply. Sure, we can say none of these awful things are tolerable, yet we provably tolerate them every day by going about our lives as usual the very next day. Because we’re tired and scared, with everything to lose. But they’re not tired and scared. They’re quite comfortable. They know people left-of-center are unwilling to be violent for fear of losing the moral high ground. That allows them to walk right up to the line and step right over it.

Bumble, 4:50 PM Julia Everyone here wants to get married and have 2.5 kids. me TELL ME ABOUT IT In Japan, there’s a constant reminder from the government—by way of media amplifying it—that the population is in decline, that birth rates are dropping, and that the aging population will have no younger generation paying enough into social insurance to support them. Japan is a collectivist society, so it’s possible that people feel a responsibility to have children. I’ve never seen so many people dying to get pregnant. It really is shocking to me that I see more babies here than I ever have before in my life. But for this system to work, it means every generation has to be bigger than the last. For any of you watching how businesses around the world are chasing infinite growth, you know this is impossible. This is not a sustainable model by any stretch of the imagination. I think by the very nature of time itself, the responsibility always rests on younger generations to solve the problems caused by older generations. When will the focus shift to implementing alternative solutions for social security that don’t effectively require everyone to have at least two children? That seems like the actual issue to me.

café staff Do you like Harry Potter? me No. Zero percent. café staff Oh. Why? me JK Rowling is an asshole. Louie opens Google Translate She has waged a crusade against transgender people for no reason whatsoever. It’s completely unforgivable, and her words about transgender people made me lose every love I once had for Harry Potter. There’s been discussion over separating art from the artist for decades. We’ve seen it before, and we’ll see it again. Everyone has to make up their own mind, but for me, I take no issue with casting Harry Potter aside. It’s unfortunate, because thousands of people worked to create a beautiful, visually rich universe for those films. Yet, knowing she receives royalties for all of it has completely soured me. This issue may be more visible in the United States than it is in Japan. I see people uncritically loving Harry Potter more here than I did back in the States. And I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t bother me. Some people frankly don’t know. Or they don’t care. But that’s what gives her the wealth and power she has, ignorance and indifference. In my almost two years in Japan so far, I’ve noticed people tend to shy away from discussing serious issues, perhaps for fear of discomfort. On that, I cannot abide. In spite of any discomfort people may have, trans people—and any other marginalized group—deserve our attention and their issues addressed. Otherwise, we rob them the ability to be comfortable. And they have a right to that all the same.

Ever since my very first website, I’ve had a donate button. And over the years, some people have been very generous and I’m very appreciative of that. I’m no stranger to talking about money. It’s part of my job. For most of my career, I’ve been a contractor, specializing in helping indie developers and companies create app icons and icon systems. And that means writing, negotiating, and signing contracts. Discussing payment terms and amounts is really normal for me. While some people might not look for a new job all that often and seldom deal with those things, I am regularly having that conversation. But when it comes to my website and the things I make for fun, I hesitate to bring it up. I don’t like talking about money in that context, I suspect because I feel shame when asking for donations. Even though—rationally—I don’t think I should. These days, most personal websites exist as a single page to merely state someone’s profession and link to their email. But for 20 years, my website has been a free-to-download repository for over 1000 icons and over 100 wallpapers. I make all of it in the time I have outside my day job. I love it that much, ever since I was a kid. My most-favorite hobby is basically the same thing I do for work. To me, it’s never been a case of “choose a job you love, and you’ll never have work a day in your life” (that’s bullshit), instead, it’s been a case of extreme luck to have people hire me to do what I already love to do. Last year, I made over 450 freely-downloadable icons to use on your Mac. That represents almost half of all icons I made in the last 20 years. While you can apply them to folders and hard drives, a lot of them exist outside a context that necessitates using them for anything practical. I love making them as art, and I think they’re nice to look at and fun to collect. Despite all my fears around asking for donations, I’d like to ask you to think about it. If I ever made something you liked and you want to show your appreciation for it, there are a few ways to do that: Firstly, I’ve put many of my designs on t-shirts, which you can buy from Cotton Bureau. I guarantee you’ll look cute or cool in them, whichever of those descriptors you prefer. Secondly, I’ve made some fonts based on pop culture logos, which you can buy from my type foundry, Crown. Even if you don’t have any use for them, they’re something you get in exchange for your money. Thirdly, I’ve made playing cards and poker dice under my Junior brand. I’m proud of them, and whether you want to play familiar games with my poker decks or new games with my Japanese hanafuda decks, they’re a worthwhile addition to your game shelf or closet. You can buy them from my friends at BuyOlympia. Fourthly, you can donate directly via Stripe. This method is perfect for when you liked something I made or wrote. Lastly, I started a Patreon account for LMNT. This is new. You can subscribe, though there are no exclusives or rewards if you subscribe, but if you want to “set it and forget it” with regard to donating—instead of remembering to donate every so often—this may be perfect for you. On the modern web, my website is an anomaly. I collect no data from you, there are no ads, and I have no sponsors. There’s no cookie pop-up, no email newsletter pop-up, no anti-ad-blocker pop-up, no subscription pop-up. I don’t artificially throttle downloads or put a page in between that makes you wait to get you to buy the capability for faster downloads. My website doesn’t make external requests. I do not require you to jump through any hoops to access any part of my website or any download anything from my website. There are no paywalls. My website does not run on any third-party service that benefits from it. I don’t even put watermarks on wallpapers because I don’t want a logo to get in the way of you enjoying it. I don’t know many websites like mine (anymore). It seems like most sites have resorted to doing all of that kind of stuff. Despite all evidence that points to increased revenue by doing any of those things, I’ve rejected every single one in favor of just putting a donate button at the bottom of every post. Not in the middle. Not obscuring the page. Only at the bottom, out of the way. I know not everyone can afford it, so I don’t push it. But for those who can, I’d ask you to click it. I don’t need your money to do what I do. I’m going to do it anyway. But I’m asking you now to consider buying something or donating, because it makes things a little easier for me to justify devoting time to making this nice place on the web not just for me, but for you too. Every one of these ways supports what I do, but some more than others. In the interest of transparency, here’s a table that details how much I get from each of those methods: LMNT Link External Link Cost to You What I Get Donation Stripe Any 95% Subscription Patreon $5/mo. 85% Fonts Crown $10–120 85% Playing Cards Junior $10–30 75% T-shirts Cotton Bureau $30 20% Thanks for thinking about it.

John Gruber, to Siri Who won Super Bowl 13? I understand that American football—and by extension, the Super Bowl—is a popular subject and that this seems like a simple question, however, I refuse to believe this kind of question represents how most people use or expect to use Siri, aside from testing its limits for the sole purpose of journalism specific to critiquing Siri. John Gruber, to Siri Who won the 2004 North Dakota high school boys’ state basketball championship? No matter how specific any one of these questions may be, there are an infinite amount of them. There is no limit to the questions that one could ask virtual assistants about facts and statistics. I reject the premise that this is even a competition Apple needs to be a part of. I don’t care if other “AI” chatbots get these right more often, because this problem will never be 100% solved anyway. And we have to recognize that. While it is reasonable to expect Siri could support specific historical statistics like Super Bowl winners—even if Apple hard-codes the answers—it is not reasonable to expect data accuracy for every question of the sort. Because everything is actually a lot. Today, it’s who won Super Bowl XIII. But if it gets that right, then tomorrow, it’s who was MVP of Super Bowl XIII. The first search result for “mvp super bowl” on DuckDuckGo has all the answers to exactly that question. No one would actually need to ask Siri, but if they do, Siri should not be making guesses. When asked trivia that can’t be answered by Apple’s own service integrations or partnerships with database owners, Siri should simply not answer the question and perform the search for you instead. That’s what it used to do. That’s what it should do. Or you could just perform the search yourself, instead of placing trust in a service that has been an unreliable source of this kind of information since 2011. There are databases that contain these kinds of statistics that Apple could partner with, but unfortunately, there are not databases that comprehensively contain every statistic about everything a human could ever ask. So we should probably stop judging Siri, virtual assistants, and LLMs by this forever-goalpost-moving metric. At what point do people expect it to answer who the winning quarterback was for the Super Bowl? The losing one? What about which team never won the Super Bowl? Which player has played in the most Super Bowls? Instead of listing every Super Bowl question I can think of, it’s easier to admit that any attempt made to answer every theoretical question will be flawed. Even with increased accuracy in some areas, it’s impossible to know how reliable it actually is about everything else. If Siri one day answers the Super Bowl question correctly every time for every game, that will imply it can accurately answer similar questions, too. But it won’t. And we won’t know whether it’s right or wrong without double-checking the answer anyway. So instead of relying on Siri for this kind of data, just… don’t ask for it. For what it’s worth, Siri has never been 100% reliable, and we all know that. But because there are several apps and features that Apple makes that are effectively 100% reliable, I understand how the expectation exists. Siri will never be 100% reliable for this kind of request. I don’t pretend to represent how most people use Siri, but—for contrast—here’s what I usually ask of my HomePods: me Play music I like. Where’s my phone? What’s the weather today? These requests are based on the faith I have in specific service integration. I know my HomePods are connected to the Internet, Apple Music, Find My, and Apple Weather. I can somewhat confidently make these kinds of requests based on that understanding. But no one really knows all of Siri’s integrations, right? Even if someone thinks they do, there still are limitations for what we can request from those services. I can ask where my phone is. I can ask where my friend is. Both work because I understand there’s Find My integration. But before heading out this morning, I used that faith to ask my HomePod a question I was less sure it could answer. me What’s the battery percentage of my MacBook? Siri could not answer this question. I know that isn’t an Apple Intelligence request, and that’s what today’s criticism is focused on, but I think being unable to answer that question is a much more damning critique of Siri than who won a Super Bowl. My faith in that question is rooted in specific knowledge that battery level data is visible in the Find My app. I assumed—wrongly—that since battery percentage was visible in the app, it would be available through a Siri request. No one understands the bounds of reasonable requests to make of Siri. That’s what makes the Super Bowl question seem reasonable to some people. Forget Siri for a moment. Can you get this historical Super Bowl data in Apple’s own Sports app? Not a chance, right? No critique about that. Why do we expect more of Siri? Instead of expecting Apple to provide answers for those types of questions with Siri, I would rather Apple spend the effort to provide exact parity between the visual interface (apps) and voice interface (Siri). If you can’t do it in an Apple app, Siri shouldn’t either. But if you can do it in an app, then Siri should absolutely support it. That’s something we can expect. That’s something that can be 100% reliable.

Tinder, 9:02 PM me Do you think there are limitations to love? な No. me Do you think love is limited to one partner? な Yes. To me, yes. When it comes to family—parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews—presumably you’re allowed to love them all. You can love as many friends as you’d like, no problem. The amount of people you can love is limitless, unless—of course—we’re talking about romantic partners. Then, we’re only allowed one. (At a time, that is.) I used to talk more about non-monogamy and polyamory. And while I suspect some people did not like that very much, for some others, I received many private messages expressing excitement for being a visible person saying it out loud. So here I am, once again, saying how frustrating it can be sometimes. How alone it can feel. I know there are others like me, who feel like their heart allows room for more than one person to love romantically. But I think this is one thing that is much, much harder in Japan than it was in America. I don’t think I was ready for that. It was already difficult. It’s not all about finding partners, but rather finding people who understand. There’s a sense that everyone is different and everyone’s views are to be respected, but respect does not mean genuine understanding. Tolerance is certainly a step, but what I’m really after is acceptance. It matters less to me that everyone agrees about the right way to have a relationship. There are many, many ways to have one. It’s more that it’s quickly dismissed because of what they think it is instead of what it really is. To me, polyamory is about there being more than one way to love. It’s an acknowledgement that monogamy is just one way to love, not the only way.

Gunpei Yokoi, a designer of the original Game Boy, described his philosophy as “lateral thinking with withered technology.” Instead of focusing on the newest, shiniest, and often most-expensive components, Nintendo focused on maximizing the potential of more mature and cheaper technology. Despite backlit color displays being available at the time, Nintendo opted for a four-shade monochrome display. They made the most of that choice, producing a vast library of games that people still enjoy today. At release, Game Boy required four batteries and had the potential for a whopping 30 hours of battery life. Sega introduced Game Gear a year later with a backlit color display. To accommodate that choice, it required six AA batteries, which is one reason for its larger form factor. The battery life was a mere 3–5 hours. While Nintendo made efforts to reduce the size of their product while gradually incorporating newer technology, Sega doubled down on their strategy, introducing the extremely-novel Nomad handheld, which still required six AA batteries—or an AC adapter—to power it. To be clear, Nomad did not intend to replace Game Gear. Its even-shorter battery life may have assured that. Sega never made a handheld again. Nintendo is famously still at it. As of now, of the top four best-selling consoles of all time, three are Nintendo handhelds (Nintendo DS, Switch, and Game Boy). Though Nintendo employs more-modern technologies now, they are still criticized for not having the most-modern technologies that their rivals are all-too-happy to include, often at the cost of compatibility, affordability, and energy efficiency. This is not a condemnation of using cutting-edge technology. But if given the choice, I prefer “lateral thinking with withered technology.” I think that’s a great philosophy to consider when making anything.

I saw a few posts and headlines that made me do a double-take. Not because they were particularly shocking, but because they are incredibly avoidable. Ghost is a recently-popular (but actually more than a decade old) blogging platform. People have been moving from Substack (nazis) and Wordpress (bozos) to Ghost. A couple weeks ago, Ghost announced they’re introducing native support for custom fonts, “with even more control over your brand.” WOFF web fonts have existed for 15 years. Read.cv is a professional networking site, like an alternative to LinkedIn, where users could share their résumés and portfolios. People have been flocking here not just as an alternative to LinkedIn but also for people in need of an online professional profile. They even offered blogging tools. Anyway, the team was acquired by Perplexity, an AI search engine, and Read.cv is shutting down. Read.cv was never about AI and had nothing to do with it. Adam Mosseri from Instagram announced they’re raising the cap on reel length from 90 seconds to 3 minutes. He says while 90 seconds was initially chosen to focus on short-form video, this change will allow users to “tell their stories” better. Of course, Instagram has always been restrictive. Even when it was only for sharing photos, they could only be square crops. Because they said so. I went to sleep seeing TikTok’s ban become effective in the United States: being removed from the App Store, delivering alerts in-app to its users, and Oracle preparing to shut down TikTok’s US servers. And then I woke up to news that Donald Trump is taking credit for saving TikTok, despite he himself calling for its ban 5 years ago. Platforms, man. Maxim Leyzerovich you know what can’t get shut down? html Custom typography is easily available if you make your own damn website. You don’t have to wait around for anyone to provide that functionality for you. It’s been here. Sharing your résumé and portfolio is easily done if you make your own damn website. You don’t have to hang your hat on a platform that will sell out to an AI company. Publishing video is not terribly difficult—of any length—if you make your own damn website. You can embed a YouTube URL if all else fails, but if you learn how to encode a video for the web on your computer, you can simply upload the file to your own website. None of us will ever control our own identities on third-party platforms. You relinquish control over your identity when you choose to present yourself on one of these platforms. You can be rate-limited for posting too much. You can be suspended by a bot that determines your behavior is bot-like. The platform can pivot at any time from one thing to another. The entire platform could shut down. You have no control, and jumping from one to another will only mean that you have to do it all again later. Or, instead of all this, you could learn how to make a damn website.

As Mark Zuckerberg changes content moderation policies at Meta, I wanted to re-read my post from last year. me The necessity around content moderation is based on the extended reach provided by platforms. Even the companies that claim to care about decentralization—for some reason—still make space for trending content, universal search, and unrestricted replies. These features do not support decentralization. They support platforming. Content moderation is a much bigger issue for platforms than it is for independent, decentralized websites. Without those features mentioned above, posts have limited range and have a hard time gaining traction. Surfacing those posts by functioning as a platform is what enables potential harm. me My ears have limited range. I can’t hear into infinity. Twitter gave everyone in the world the capability to shout into my ear. There’s nothing sustainable or healthy about that. Whenever I beat the RSS drum, someone always asks about discoverability, so I want to put this bluntly: it is through algorithmic discoverability features that harmful posts become visible. Whether they are original posts, reposts, or replies, harmful posts are only able to successfully reach their intended audience by depending on those features functioning as social media websites built them. It should be a little hard for any post to gain traction. That’s a necessary filter to reduce your exposure to things that will deeply upset you and derail your day. Maybe we should build social networking around blogs and RSS feeds. Individual entries in RSS feeds do not need titles, and entries can be anything of any length. They can contain rich media and rich text. They can be everything we have with traditional social media and more. We can link to each others’ posts to quote them. There are no ads. There is no centralized service. There is no company selling your data. You have complete autonomy to move to another RSS reader. You can like whatever you want locally and never have that data stored on a server. Your website is your profile. While Bluesky and Mastodon have domain name verification, if you were to post directly from your domain, no verification is needed. Online verification is an invented problem. As for discoverability? Link generously. Link to people you like who say and make things you like. That’s how everyone discovers more people like that. Replies? Honestly, more than half of social media replies I’ve received over the last 20 years have been unwanted. It’s better on some platforms than others. But in general, replies I receive via email are significantly more meaningful and thoughtful. It functions as a filter. The only reason we don’t have this at scale now is because we don’t have a good RSS writer for regular people. Making an RSS feed is not very complicated, but it is more complicated than it should be for regular people. How does this relate to content moderation? The people you do not want to hear from, the content you do not want to see? You’d never see it. Maybe it exists, but by removing the mechanisms that bring that content to your eyeballs, most harmful content will stay far away from you. This is just another invented problem by social media platforms. It doesn’t have to be this way. It never did.

You may have seen Mark Zuckerberg’s five-minute video about how Facebook is doing literal U-turns on many of their content moderation policies. If you didn’t watch it, I guess you could, but you might just come away so upset and disheartened by how a man who initially built a website to rate the attractiveness of women at Harvard could become so culturally powerful at a global level. I have used social media for a long time. I have seen Facebook and Twitter both go from novel status-sharing to cultural battlegrounds. I have seen them both pretend to grow up; neither platform was ever built on the premise of providing “free speech” to the world. Pretending they were is just propaganda from their respective founders. It was an evolution formed from opportunity. Setting aside what free speech means, it is something valued by people the world over. As a selling point, it is universal. The easiest way to capture the world as your user base is to advertise something everyone wants. As long as people post on websites they do not own, there will always be content moderation. It will just specifically target different groups based on the political climate. It’s not about free speech. It’s about the speech the platform allows and amplifies. The result of everyone in the world posting whatever they want has not been overwhelmingly positive, however. Regardless of content moderation policies, while social media has undoubtedly contributed positively to the world by exposing reprehensible behavior and rapidly distributing evidence on a global scale to hold some people accountable, it has also failed in equal measure. It is not always successful as a means for accountability. Arguably, it is an ineffective means of doing so. In addition, while these platforms have been been great tools for organizing like-minded groups of people who can put pressure on policy at local, federal, and even global levels, that is not limited to …good people. [Download the video.] Josiah Bartlett The Internet has been a phenomenal tool for hate groups. The decisions Mark Zuckerberg is making are as unsurprising as they are terrible. When I watched the video, Mark said he would move the content moderation team out of California. I whispered, “to Texas,” just before he said the same. Twitter’s trajectory is in lockstep. I won’t say X is as bad as it can get, because I believe it can become much worse. Both of these platforms will get worse. This is gonna be so, so bad.

Dan Counsell Can we please have the macOS X Lion UI back? 😍 Yes, I would also like that. I would welcome any standard UI that gives us back some tools we lost. There’s a refined clarity to this version of Aqua. It evolved gracefully to this point, where every element was distinctly different and yet cohesive. Consider the search field alone. Now, search fields have the same appearance of every other field: squared. The pill shape distinguished itself. Removing that characteristic introduced a level of ambiguity that is unnecessary. The same can be said for so much in modern visual design (or lack thereof). I’d like to point to something I said almost 5 years ago: me When we lost visual richness in software, we lost a requirement to think about design with regards to how it looks. That’s not just making it look nice, that’s making sure that we visually communicate the UI successfully. It’s very unfortunate that the baby was thrown out with the bathwater. I distinctly remember when Apple claimed one value in the new design language was “deference,” but after 12 years, this approach is clearly not as thoughtful as it was advertised. It is not as accessible as they have wished. We still have thin red text on gray buttons that lack significant contrast. We still have translucent elements and blurred backgrounds that confound reason and rationale. We traded away that refined clarity for over a decade of ambiguity. I took some time to reformat an old Twitter thread on the subject into a proper blog post, and I encourage you to read it. How much has improved since then?

I don’t understand the value of AI summaries compared to traditional truncation. While some headlines are indeed long, summarizing them will always remove context the original publisher thought was necessary. (The same is true for personal messages, but that’s not what this is about.) Headlines are already shortened versions of entire articles. It serves seemingly no purpose at all to summarize them. If Apple wants to—for some reason—further limit the amount of text visible in a stack of notifications to three lines, the better solution is to simply show three truncated headlines, not the Apple Intelligence semicolon-separated summarized headlines. As it stands, a lot of Apple Intelligence is poorly designed. “Beta” or not, this is irresponsible, especially coming from a company with this much power and influence. One of the reasons we have mobile screens that are the entire front face of a device (that is, without buttons) was so we wouldn’t be so limited to display all the necessary information alongside the UI for the visible content. Why is Apple so averse to users just scrolling? What’s actually wrong with a scrolling list of notifications? If a headline needs the full size of a notification, so be it. Scrolling is effectively infinite. The Lock Screen serves almost no other purpose than to display notifications. What space are they actually saving?

I don’t like how the viability of Star Wars is under constant threat from people who Star Wars can never appease. Some fans—primarily men—have gatekept Star Wars for too long. They like Star Wars, but not Return of the Jedi. They like Star Wars, but not the Special Edition. They like Star Wars, but not the prequels. They like Star Wars, but not the sequels. They like Star Wars, but not the animation. Many of these fans—again, primarily men—who claim to like Star Wars actually don’t like most of it. I don’t mind if people don’t like all of it. That’s fine. But some of the reasons for disliking the things they dislike continue to deeply trouble me. If a Star Wars film or TV show has an increased amount of visible queer people, people of color, or women on screen with actual dialogue, the result will be an obnoxious amount of negative reviews, actresses will be harassed on social media, and some of these bozos will make three-hour-long YouTube videos about how bad Star Wars has become. Frankly, I think Lucasfilm needs to publicly disown that very specific variety of “fans.” The best example of how this has been done correctly was from Ewan McGregor. He used his his power and influence to denounce this vile segment of the fanbase, by saying, “You’re no Star Wars fan in my mind.” Star Wars posted his video on Twitter directly, which I think was one of their smartest social media moves. For Star Wars to grow beyond what it has already been, it needs to stop trying to appeal to fans who are almost never satisfied. Lucasfilm should proudly produce films and shows that specifically appeal to new crowds. The original film represents all of what Star Wars can be. Science fiction is not its genre, it’s the setting. It’s an adventure, a thriller, a drama, a Western, a romance, a comedy, a tragedy, including elements of horror, mystery, and gangster films. By dialing up one or more of these genres, new Star Wars media will inherently appeal to different people. The magic of Star Wars is that ability to adapt its classic antifascist story to fit any genre and any blend of genres. Therefore, new iterations of it may not appeal to certain crowds who liked previous iterations. They have to be fine with that, and Lucasfilm has to be fine with that. That’s our only hope for it to grow beyond.

My tolerance for the vast majority of the web is so small now. It nearly completely eroded over the last decade. My trust, patience, and willingness to put up with the absolute hostility of modern websites is at an all-time low. Just about every website and every app has seemingly given up on the goal of being actually good. Maybe designers don’t have the power they once held, ceding it to businesspeople who entered the industry only to squeeze it dry. Maybe there’s nothing left to solve and everyone’s moving things around for the worse. To me, a core attribute of being a designer or an engineer is making things in service of the end user. But we know that most major companies in this arena are openly exploiting users and their vulnerabilities. Designers and engineers who facilitate that are accomplices. But it’s not just the major companies. Individuals are following in those footsteps. Personal blogs are now littered with newsletter popups before you’ve read a single article. Even small online shops you’ve never visited before put notification badges on icons while chatbots float in the corner. Login walls are being presented before any justification is made for doing so. We’ve fully lost the plot. Everyone has subscribed to proliferate this awful version of digital life. I don’t believe this constitutes a necessary evolution, but it is unfortunately a very predictable outcome. What once was done purely for the love of it from the people who cared the most is now done by everyone in the whole world for the hopes of being wealthy or famous, even if for a moment. I’m grumpy. I know. I’m becoming an old man at the young age of 36. But I know the web and software can be much, much better than this. I have to say this out loud because I want to hold myself to it: I have no interest in that style of digital life. I do not want to push a mailing list or login before allowing someone to read my blog because I want everyone to be able to read it. I do not want to require subscriptions to access my downloads because I want everyone to be able to download them. I do not want to host my files on platforms I don’t control. I don’t want to operate a store via a third-party website. Because I don’t trust those things at all. I don’t trust any company to at some point not become totally awful. It’s really sad we all know that to be true. Every company seems doomed to turn against their own principles when it becomes financially beneficial to. Designers and engineers who work at those companies have abandoned their own principles when they contribute. I’ve seen how many people are willing to make that trade, but I am not one of them. So if I have a resolution for 2025, it’s this: I will learn how to do more things to become more independent. The web can be better. But it will depend on people who don’t just reject its current state, but do something about it. We can spend lifetimes wishing. Or we can spend it making what we know should exist. I’m going down that path.

A lot of yearly online recaps focus on the consumption and engagement we’ve had in a year, like what music we listened to. But I want to highlight what I’ve done this year, because I’m really, really proud of it. 2024 was the first full calendar year I’ve lived completely in Japan. I didn’t travel outside the country, and for the first time in a long time, I didn’t have an itch to travel anywhere. I felt pretty content being exactly where I am with the life I have around me. I started the year with a blog post—one of my most popular, I suspect—Make a Damn Website. This post resonated with several people and I’m really happy it did. My followup later in the year How to Make a Damn Website prompted people to actually do it, and I got several emails from those who did. I’m not just proud of myself for motivating anyone to do that, I’m also proud of those people for doing it. As a side note, I love receiving email. It’s awesome. I wrote a lot of other blog posts, too—more this year than ever before. In fact, this is the 94th blog post I’ve made in 2024. Surprisingly, that doesn’t include blog posts that were for icon or wallpaper releases, sketchbook posts, or photo entries. These 94 posts were primarily for writing. This is a direct result of finally making a website for myself that I want to continue building. I’m really happy to have done that. I made several new sections to my website, really fleshing it out. Photos, Sketchbook, Favorites, Media Art, Shop, Yellow Pages, Projects, Colophon, and Features. I finally, meaningfully broke away from social media and have a clear idea of how I want to use it going forward, which is as syndication for my website. Now that I realize I have full control over my website, I just want to point people here instead of posting among the noise anywhere else. No one else writes for my blog, and there are no ads around my words. It’s just me and how I choose to express myself. For now, social media is a means to let everyone know there’s something new on my website and answer an occasional question. I created 13 wallpapers this year. Some of them were updates to older wallpapers, in which case I redrew them almost entirely or gave them a significant upgrade in color or resolution. I’m particularly proud of Meditation, which resembles one of the save points in Star Wars: Jedi Survivor. I drew over 450 downloadable macOS icons. That’s so much. For a couple years, I didn’t release any icons, and even when I had in previous years, it was usually only a few sets, setting aside when I worked at the Iconfactory and was doing that as part of my day job. But in January this year I just felt compelled to render out these cute train station clocks at Maihama and kept rolling with it. Some sets were related to living in Japan, like Hamorebi, Tokyo Subway, Tokyo LED, Tokyo Tiles, and Nobori. Some were about Nintendo, like Super Mario Bros., Nintendo Controllers, and Marufuku Nintendo; or video-game-themed in general, like Famicom Tetris and PlayStation Controllers. Of course there were lots of Apple-related things, like iPod mini Drives, Volume 3 of Ive Drives, Forstall Folders (Volume 1, Volume 2, and Volume 3), Finders Keepers (Halloween, Volume 1, and Volume 2), Infinite Loop, and iPod Socks. I can’t believe on Christmas Day I released two different icon sets, just because I was in such a groove. It felt great. I really love making icons. It’s not just my job. But speaking of work, at Parakeet we made a bunch of really nice new app icons for our clients—with many more yet to be revealed. We drew beautiful logos for new products and companies, and—perhaps most importantly—we have a new portfolio website that is home-grown. Just like my personal site, it was made from scratch, ye olde way. I hand-coded it and I’m so proud that it has almost our entire portfolio on it, which includes over 5000 individual pieces. It took so much work but I am now so thrilled to be able to direct people to it, to specific projects, and even host some of our Just For Fun icons on it. I wrote all about making it in a blog post called Parakeet Portfolio. Luka continues to be the best person I can imagine working with, and I’m excited every day we get to do something new for a great client. As for Junior, I continue to experiment with making new cards and games, but nothing to show yet. For Crown, I am working on an all-new website that aims to make showcasing my fonts significantly better and make purchasing licenses more direct. I’m also creating a new font with Ender, and I can’t wait to show you more. All of this was in one year, and looking back at it, it’s a little hard for me to believe. There have been entire years in the past where it felt like I worked so hard but had nothing to show for it, but now I’m glad that usually only happens for just a day or two now. I feel such a strong urge to create and don’t find myself stuck as often anymore. There’s still a few more days left in the year, so there’s a good chance there will be something else new, but in the meantime, there’s a fun, small thing I want to share with you for reading all the way to the end: my RSS feed is now also a podcast. A few people emailed me this year to say they liked when I narrated my posts and provided that audio, and I realized it was just a few extra lines of code to add to my XML file to make it compatible with podcast players. If I can easily do it, I’ll work on adding it to catalogues in the future. But as of now, you can manually add the same feed to your favorite podcast app and listen to any blog post that I’ve narrated so far. I put links at the bottom of all my posts about donating or buying something from my shop because that really does help motivate me. Sending cash because you like what I do, because you smiled at an icon I made, or because you’ve used one of my wallpapers for the last 10 years—that money directly funds more of it. And buying a font, some t-shirts, or my playing cards does as much for you as it does for me. You get something pretty and nice, and I get to keep doing what I’m doing. Win / win. Thank you for reading my blog this year, and—as always—feel free to reply via email.

In my entire life, I’m sure I only needed to read one post about a lost remote control. After that, they all seem the same. The “unpopular opinions” that resonate with thousands of people are actually popular opinions. Does anyone gain anything from social media posts complaining about gasoline prices or traffic? I don’t think so. Almost two decades ago, when microblogging gained its initial popularity, many of us posted exactly like people do today. We shared what we were eating or doing, the tiniest details of our lives, a shower thought, or some internal monologue. However, as we enter our third decade of social media, I’m not certain we’ve solved the biggest problem with it: almost none of this is interesting at a global scale. By bringing the entire world’s population together and connecting each other, the result is not just incredibly noisy; it’s also dreadfully stale. Throughout the day, every day, millions of people feel the urge to blurt out anything and everything that comes to mind. Because it’s so effortless to post, everyone does it without thinking much of it. Very few people are engaging meaningfully. Superficial posts are followed up with drive-by replies. And no one likes that, I’m fairly certain. I’m not immune to this. I’ve been doing exactly this for as long as I can remember. But last month, I decided to stop posting on social media, because I realized that if I want to say something, I’ll write a blog post about it. If I lack the energy to go through that process, then it’s not really worth sharing. I wonder if everyone would be just as satisfied if they typed something into a box, hit post, and it went nowhere at all. How much of the reason people instinctively post is just catharsis? Is it just that we need somewhere for those thoughts to go so we can let go of them? And if so, is there a nowhere place we can send them instead?

There’s this thing that Eddy Cue said during a meeting when I worked at Apple that I keep meaning to write about. I can’t reliably quote him, but it was something like this: The iTunes Music Store doesn’t just compete with CDs, and apps don’t just compete with other apps. Everything competes with everything. This thought has lingered with me for over ten years. And it’s not just money. Our most valuable resources are time and attention. Just like how we can’t re-spend $10 on something else, we can’t go back two hours to watch a different movie or split our attention between a book and a podcast. We necessarily have to make choices about what deserves our time and attention. I am becoming more selective about what I end up giving my resources to, because I want that energy returned. Not everything does that. Doomscrolling on social media drains me, whereas a good movie energizes me. So I’ve come to realize it isn’t just competition among all media and products—it’s also about competition between all of that and what I value. Looking at everything through that lens, it’s easier for me to pinpoint what’s draining those resources and eliminate them so I can focus instead on what I love doing: drawing icons, writing my blog, and making software.

“Privacy” is not a new buzzword, but it should be the most scrutinized buzzword in every industry. Whenever a new service, site, or app launches—especially when the words “private” or “privacy” are used—I check the privacy policy. What I find is often truly awful. Data collection, retention, and sharing. Go check one yourself. Companies will often claim they’re “not in the business” of selling your information (even in the privacy policy itself). But then they will say they use your personal information for “corporate events” (why?) and that they’ll share it with their service providers. You didn’t make an agreement with their service providers, so who knows what they’ll do with it. I think it’s really worth asking whether the free-for-now-but-pay-for-it-later model—so frequently used by Silicon Valley startups—is really worth the cost of your personal and private information. And it’s worth a follow-up question of whether the information you provide is solely your own anyway. Your friends’ contact information? That’s not yours to share. I’m worried that we are doomed to suffer the same consequences, over and over, forever. Each of us that gives up our information in exchange for services that we undoubtedly later are required to pay for—due to a decade-long bait-and-switch—have no real recourse. We have no way to recover the information once we’ve given it up, especially if it makes its way to third parties, whether or not a company “sells” it or not. Calling any of that “private” is wrong. It’s private only in that it’s not public. But this is not binary, and there are more open doors than closed ones in many privacy policies. I once signed up for every new thing, but in the last 10 years, I find myself rejecting every transaction of my data for access to the service. In almost every situation, I’d much rather not use it at all.

It’s once again time to consider the Trolley Problem. The classic version is a trolley is barreling down the tracks, about to kill 5 people. You can flip the track switch and kill one person instead. The implications, of course, are that you are actively participating in the death of that one person if you flip the switch, but you’re implicitly responsible for the deaths of the five people if you don’t. We’re going to have to meaningfully address this dilemma. We’re going to have to come to terms with violence being the answer to oppression. It seems widely understood at this point that we can’t negotiate with anyone who has already decided they’re comfortable with killing us. And I know it’s a terrible paradox, but we have to be comfortable with killing people who are killing people. If we had a time machine, I’d guess many of us would say we’d go back and kill Hitler before he committed atrocities. But here’s the dilemma—hindsight 20/20: If you knew Hitler would kill millions, when do you act? When he’s a baby? During his rise to power? How many people would you let die first? If we’re willing to kill Hitler in the past, how do we apply this lesson to the present and the future? When we see warning signs, can we afford to ignore them? If anyone makes an argument that killing even one person is bad, how can they justify the people they condemned to die by letting that one person live? If we’re not comfortable with killing even one person, then how do we let someone live to kill much more than that? I don’t like the death penalty. I’m not an advocate for it. (Primarily because I don’t have much faith in our justice system, but also because I don’t want anyone to have to die.) Then again, I can clearly see the case for guillotines, because I’m not keen on oppression. I don’t like seeing anyone suffer while those with extraordinary means are allowed to sit idly. But I know that not everyone is there yet. If governments would never consider someone like the UnitedHealthcare CEO a murderer—or even an accomplice or accessory to murder—despite his company being responsible for effectively harming and killing thousands of people, then is it just that we don’t have a proper legal definition for what constitutes murder that reflects our morals? If our laws say someone can’t go out and kill one person who is responsible for thousands of deaths, then how can we let someone be responsible for thousands of deaths to begin with? Shouldn’t that have stopped well before now? How do we ever end up here at the trolley switch anyway? It feels preventable. And if it’s not, then—as an entire society—we have to become very comfortable with flipping that switch. I know that no one wants to answer these questions because it makes us uncomfortable, but is it really nobler for us to stand there and let people like that continue to harm others at that kind of scale? If one person’s decisions lead to thousands of deaths, how can we justify inaction? Or—even better—why do we?

Once again, the topic of designers learning how to code has come up. It doesn’t matter what the reason is this time. It is the same message I’ve heard so many times before. Put simply, I think this discourse has run its course. I’ve been at this a while. I’ve been designing and making art for 20 years. And in that time, people around me have told me a bunch of things that I “should” or “shouldn’t” do that I determined were not in my interest, but rather in theirs. In college, I was told by a professor not to accentuate the silhouette of objects in my drawings too much. She said I should instead focus on the form. And while that may be good advice if my intention is to draw forms, what if my intention is to draw shapes? That year, I quit college to pursue my career as a designer. In the last 10 years, I’ve drawn shapes for Nike, Instagram, Messenger, Twitter, Dailymotion, Patreon, and Notion. In some of my earliest years as a designer, people told me that illustration was going away, and that I should start learning 3D. I put in a small amount of effort before realizing it was not enjoyable for me. I preferred drawing shapes, and wrangling 3D models was simply not fun. But I kept getting illustration jobs. I’ve made over a hundred app icons—more if you count alternates and variations—and I don’t think any of them use 3D models. On occasion, I’ll use a rudimentary 3D model of a basic shape as a guide, but it rarely goes much farther than that. So many times over the years, people have told designers—including myself—that we should learn to code. And over the span of the 20 years I’ve been using my computer to draw things, I have sometimes tinkered with code. I have written HTML and CSS, sure, but I’ve also poked around Xcode and made small modifications to codebases I’ve belonged to. But I don’t think this capability is particularly valuable in terms of understanding limitations of the medium. How do I know? Incredible engineers who have worked for 40 years run into walls that they couldn’t have predicted. My casual learning how to code is not going to give me much insight to reduce the amount of conversations I have with engineers. As it turns out, sometimes we just have to work things out by working together. Over time, everyone’s intuition will improve. Designers don’t have to learn how to code to understand how to work with engineers any more than engineers have to learn how to design to work with designers. And though I hear designers should learn to code so often, I almost never hear that engineers should learn to design. If there’s one thing I’ve personally learned in my career, it’s this: do what you want to do. It’s your life. It’s your work. It’s your life’s work. Do what satisfies your brain, and if it makes you money, great. If you want to learn how to code, do it. But don’t do it because someone else told you so. Do it because you think it’s worth your time. Do it because you’re curious. Do it because you want to. I’m not bothered if an engineer asks me how I want to do something. I’d actually prefer it to the alternative, where an engineer thinks their surface-level knowledge of design is sufficient. I live it. I breathe it. They don’t. That’s fine. Both parties can understand the other’s limitations without learning how to do it themselves. And—in my opinion—you can more easily push the limitations without learning it. Engineers love to tell me the things I want to do are impossible or difficult to implement. And if I took them at their word, we’d not even try. But because I don’t think it’s impossible, then we get to work it out together. Often, it’s not a technical limitation that stood in our way, but rather a misunderstood assumption. Learning to code doesn’t make this easier. But talking it out often does. If you choose to gain additional perspective by learning it on your own, go for it. My advice is only to do what you want to do and not let others tell you what you should and shouldn’t do. You know you best.

The term “green bubbles” is used when referring to SMS messages that are sent and received between an iPhone and a non-iPhone. But beyond the literal meaning, it really refers to the stigma of not using the most popular communication app for your social circle. I saw a remark online that Japan is immune to the green bubble / blue bubble debacle entirely, but I think the more accurate way to look at it is that LINE is the most popular communication method. In Japan, LINE is the “blue bubble,” and everything else is the “green bubble.” You won’t be ostracized for not using LINE, but it is expected—just like WhatsApp in Europe. There’s a huge disconnect when you meet anyone that doesn’t have or use the same communication app you do. When your only option to reach someone is through an app you rarely use, you’ll rarely reach out. SMS exists on all cell phones. It’s not just a built-in app, it’s a built-in service through your telecom provider. It’s default functionality on a network level. Therefore, it is a great fallback from RCS or iMessage. LINE, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Telegram, and Signal do not function this way. If you don’t use one of those services, there’s no fallback. iMessage isn’t lock-in, but the others absolutely are. Not everyone has cell service, so SMS is not universal. But for most users of the aforementioned apps, it’s still a widely available fallback. It’s just not a fallback offered—or made available to—these other apps. Hyper-regionally, in individual social circles, there are fewer run-ins with incompatibility. But on a larger scale, matching up your social circles with the communication app of the region can feel like a burden. To be sure, LINE is not a great app. It’s fine—like the rest of them. With complete market saturation, LINE doesn’t need to improve. LINE is an unchallenged monopoly, and it can exert monopolistic power by stagnating or even worsening its services. Though there are many alternative forms of communication, when an app like LINE or WhatsApp reaches de facto saturation in the market, I think it needs to be regulated. I believe communication apps should be interoperable. (And so too should social networking services.) I understand there are difficulties with doing that, but they could all provide a base level of interoperability not unlike iMessage having an SMS fallback. If each communication app was interoperable but had extra features when all users in a chat share the same platform, I think that is much more reasonable competitive field to be playing in. These companies should compete on the merits of their respective approaches to the problem. Users shouldn’t feel forced to pick the same app everyone else has or risk being left out of the conversation. That removes their individual choice. That is a result of monopolistic power. The relative popularity of any communication app should not be the reason any person has to be locked into it too. Chat apps should win users with quality, not dominance. It should be a choice, not a consequence of coercion.

You know, it would not seem so terrible for developers to distribute via the App Store if Apple had put any effort into making the App Store the best way—not just the only way—to distribute apps. The primary reason Apple is being required to change their policies for specific businesses or countries is due to their own monopolistic behavior. They could’ve simply not found themselves in this situation. It still blows my mind how little the App Store has improved over the last decade. It’s barely changed. Almost every bad thing about the App Store still exists. And almost every good thing that happened for app distribution and payment methods is just the result of regulation. Apple did this to themselves. But regulation is only one step in the right direction. Apple already made off with trillions of dollars in profit. Isn’t the damage already done? Sure, prevent more damage, but—I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.

In my life as an artist, one belief really stands out: When I create for myself, I don’t have anyone to satisfy but me. No one else can meaningfully appraise my personal work. I alone know what I want to make, and only I can judge whether it achieves that standard or not. Feedback from others rarely feels applicable, because it’s not for them. It’s only for me. Every day, I see new things. And every day, I’m inspired by those things. Every little thing I see shifts my perspective, shaping what I think looks good and what doesn’t. I curate this influence all the time, building on years of deliberate exposure to specific influences. The result is my own taste. Of course, everyone does this to differing degrees and about different things. My thing is drawing shapes. It’s illustration, in a very specific way. And what I do is a little bit of a science, but mostly art. It is the product of a constantly-evolving life experience that no one else can possibly replicate, let alone ever fully know. Working at The Iconfactory fifteen years ago gave me early validation from people I respected most in the field. And at Apple after that, designing for Steve Jobs—his approval represented a peak—an unattainable bar that once I had cleared, I realized I no longer needed external validation at all. It freed me to create without constantly seeking the opinions of others. Instead, I rely on my own perspective. Clients hire me because they trust that perspective, and I consistently deliver work that feels in line with that. For my personal work, it’s just more potent. Designing for clients has to meet some criteria that I didn’t get to set myself, but if there’s no client, there’s no expectation beyond my own. Because of this, external opinions often feel irrelevant. What I make reflects what I believe is good, beautiful, or meaningful, and that understanding comes from a place no one else has access to. I know that online culture has actively encouraged public reactions and feedback. And while some may find value in public appraisal, I don’t seek it. My work is validated by me.

Japan really only has one rule: Don’t inconvenience others. But when you’re a foreign tourist, you’re not necessarily aware of all the ways that might be happening. By adapting to Japan—rather than expecting Japan to accommodate you—your visit will be smoother for both you and everyone else. Don’t want to read this long post? Use a Suica card to pay for things, follow the flow of people, avoid eating on the go, put your luggage in a coin locker, learn a couple Japanese phrases, and simplify your language. §Money While most places accept credit cards—sometimes even Apple Pay—you might not want to rely on it. Running a card manually takes a lot more time than everyone else spends paying for their stuff. It’s a good idea to have some cash on you, but you don’t need cash for most things. Sifting through unfamiliar coins with a cashier—while others are waiting—is not desirable. When you have a pocket full of coins, go buy something from a vending machine. You can pay for almost anything with a Suica card. If you have Apple Wallet, hit the plus button, add a transit card, and load money onto it directly from Apple Wallet. If you make Suica your express transit card, paying at a shop is as easy as saying “Suica de onegaishimasu” or simply “Suica de.” Staff will probably respond, “touch please,” while gesturing to the touchpoint. In short, use Suica as your default payment method, with cash and card as your backups. And when paying with cash or card, place it in the tray on the counter. §Navigation Cities and train stations can be very crowded. Watch how people move. Crowds walk like schools of fish swim. People navigate together to specific exits or transfers. If you stay aware, you can move with groups going in the same direction you are. In train stations, floors and stairs have arrow stickers for the direction of traffic. Sometimes, you can even walk along sticker paths to specific trains. On escalators, stand on the left and walk on the right. In Osaka, it’s the reverse. To find the right train, platform, or exit, signs are above paths and on walls when exiting trains, in both Japanese and English. White or black signs point to train lines, whereas yellow signs point to exits. Map apps often tell you which numbered train car will be easiest for you to transfer or exit. That’s advice worth taking. People go to work before 9am, and leave work after 6pm. Avoid those times and you’ll be avoiding the most crowded trains. If you do find yourself on crowded trains, embrace being a sardine. Even if it looks like no one else can fit, more people will board the train. So move inward to make as much room as possible for more people. Wear your bags in front of you to avoid unintentionally bumping people with them. Put luggage on the racks so your bag doesn’t occupy space a person could be standing. Exiting busy trains is a combination of gently pushing and saying “sumimasen.” When everyone seems to be trying to get off the train, you should too. Step out and to the side of the door so you aren’t in anyone’s way. Then, jump back on. If you see a train arriving at the platform while you’re on your way to it, don’t run. There’s a good chance the next one is just 3 minutes behind it. It’s not worth rushing if you’re going to hold up the train and make the doors close twice. Instead, take the opportunity to find a vending machine and have a drink. §Eating & Drinking Most places don’t have English menus. If you don’t see one, it’s easier to just open your translation app and snap a photo to translate the text. Don’t be afraid to point to the item you want to order. No one’s going to judge you for it. Most people know that vegetarian means no meat, but don’t know that vegan means no eggs, milk, or honey. No one knows what gluten-free means. Instead of using these terms, just say what you can’t eat. However, be prepared to hear that you can’t make any substitutions. Order something else. Everything you see on a menu is everything they have. Asking for things you don’t see on a menu is probably putting a little unnecessary pressure on the staff. Coffeeshops usually open after 10am, and breakfast isn’t a meal people have outside their homes very often. If you’re looking for that, find something in advance, because you probably won’t find it simply by strolling around. There’s no country-wide ban on drinking alcohol outside. So you can get a drink from a convenience store and drink it at the park! However, not everywhere has an alcohol vibe. While I’ve seen people drink on the train before, I wouldn’t do it. Other traingoers might be in shock. As far as eating on the go, while some people have bottled tea on them or eat onigiri while walking, it’s fairly rare. People avoid it because if they make a mess, someone else has to clean it up. No one wants to be that person. Be tidy. §Trash You won’t find trash cans on the street, but you can sometimes find them at train stations, shopping malls, and convenience stores. Keep in mind though, trash and recycling bins found at vending machines and konbini are offered for items purchased from those places. Be considerate of that. §Suitcases Lots of shops and restaurants are too small to be rolling your suitcase around. Keep them at the hotel, have them sent ahead of you, or put them in a coin locker. Coin lockers are in many larger train stations and tourist-heavy locations, even at some museums. But be sure you remember where yours is. The last thing you want to be doing is hunting down which coin locker location in Kyoto Station has your suitcase in it. §Interactions When leaving a shop, you can say “arigatou gozaimasu.” No one will really look down on you for saying just “arigatou,” but it’s really just for friends or people you’re close with. If you’re leaving a restaurant, instead of saying “arigatou gozaimasu,” you’ll want to say “gochisou sama deshita,” which means “thank you for the meal.” If you can’t spare the extra syllables, you can just say, “gochisou sama.” As a foreigner, no one expects you to bow, but it can be a nice thing to do if you don’t overdo it. A small nod suffices in most situations. If you’re obviously a foreigner and meeting Japanese people in Japan, they’ll probably extend their hand for a handshake rather than bow anyway. Lastly, simplify your language. Even though everyone studies English in school, few are fluent. Assume the vocabulary everyone has is a lot less than yours. I find that people who speak English as their second language are more effective at communicating with others who speak English as their second language, just because they often share the same vocabulary. Japan is a collectivist society, which means that people give everyone else priority over any one person. That’s different from many Western societies that are individualist, where individual freedom is the priority. In Japan, it’s better that you to adapt to everyone than for everyone to accommodate you. I sincerely hope that this helps anyone who travels to Japan. I’m sure it would’ve helped me to hear some of these things before I first visited!

This past week has been rough. It’s been tough to be online lately. There’s an overwhelming, dreadful feeling that washes over me whenever I unlock my Mac or iPhone. A heavy sigh, then, “What now?” It’s always something. There’s always something. Someone’s always up to something. And it’s not good. It never is. And it won’t be ever again. It’s not so much that everything suddenly broke. It’s more like a bookshelf crashed into another bookshelf. Every shelf brings with it a hundred books. Each one is not only damaged by the fall, but contributes to the destruction of the next hundred books. One after another. It’d be too simplistic to merely call this “depression.” And I don’t think I’m particularly depressed. I just think—in many ways—I’ve run out of patience. I don’t have patience for people who can’t determine right from wrong. I don’t have patience for any legal or justice system. I don’t have any patience left for war and genocide. I’m fresh out of it. But that’s not all. I don’t have an excess of energy. I have a finite supply every day. If one of those things catches me early enough in the day, I could burn through all the energy I have before lunchtime. I could find myself in the afternoon struggling to do what I actually wanted to do that day. And the answer to that is never to be keeping up with every terrible thing. And time. Time is almost all we have in the world. It’s our only resource. I can’t really do more than one thing at a time. I can’t divide my attention between two things. One will always suffer, while the other succeeds. I don’t think the social media likes I received ever made me joyful. I don’t believe participants in online arguments have ever left those conversations happy. I doubt the dopamine was ever worth the hours spent to extract it. The comments. They’ve almost never been valuable. In the history of online comments, from forums to YouTube, to every social network humans have cobbled together, Internet comments have always been among the lowest-quality content available. I can spend an hour watching a narrative TV show. I can spend an hour talking with a friend. I can spend many, many hours poring over art. We are what we eat. If I spend my time consuming low-quality, low-effort things on the web, I will not only have wasted my time, I will have not gained any inspiration. Movies, TV shows, theatre, music, video games, paintings, and architecture inspire me and make me want to draw. Those things give me life. When I see the wonderful things humans are capable of, it makes me know how much I am capable of. But when I see the terrible, stupid, meaningless drivel? I feel lifeless. Suddenly there’s nothing interesting to do or make. When I read depressing news, I don’t feel empowered; I feel defeated. I’m not inspired by tragic events. I can only be angry and sad, and while I know some great art has come from those feelings, it is not what motivates me. We all have a chance to do so much more than doomscroll into eternity. We all have the option to reply kindly and give praise. We can all be grateful and thankful and humble. And it costs close to nothing. The reverse costs so much more. After speaking with a friend at lunch today, I was reminded of how many people had written an email to tell me that I had inspired them. That something I’ve made or said inspired them to do something they care about. People made their own websites. They made an icon. Whatever it was, I realized I had the power to provide exactly the same thing I take from the world. And I can only do that if I sit down and use the time I have to make what I know to be good. Maybe it’s social media that’s getting in the way. It’s demanding of my time and my energy. It distracts me. It takes me away from making. I can’t stop bad things from happening. I can’t stop people from picking fights on the Internet. I can’t stop unwanted replies. I can’t stop anything. The best I can do is make good things. And that’s what I want to do. It’s what I’m best at, and I want to maximize the amount of time I’m able to spend doing it. Walking home from lunch, I was thinking about how this website is the thing I get to control. It’s the thing I get to build for myself. And I pictured this charmingly chunky logo with colors that feel like they came from a 90s elementary school teacher’s sweater. And the moment I finished it, I knew exactly what I was going to do with it: I was going to relieve myself from my social media accounts and give them to my website. If I’m going to use social media, I want it to be in service of my website. I want to link to my website as much as possible because I want whatever I make to live here. I want my social media accounts to be LMNT, not Louie. I don’t want to post things I wouldn’t want to post to LMNT. If it’s not for my website, then it’s not for social media. Maybe, hopefully, that one change will free me from spending so much time on social media, absolve myself from replies, and give myself the time to focus on the things I actually like to do. I want to make icons. I want to make playing cards and fonts. I want to experience things that inspire me to make those things. And I think this is the way. I have already written more this year than ever before. I have already made more icons this year than ever before. This is not work to me. This is fun. Doing this stuff is what I wish I could do 100% of the time. If I give myself that time back, I know I can do even more.

Steve Jobs was notorious for not following rules. He drove his car without plates. He parked in the handicap spot at Infinite Loop. Many people assumed he didn’t use a badge. But he did. I can personally attest that he carried a badge. While almost every employee had it pinned or on a lanyard, Steve kept his in his wallet. When badging in, he took out his wallet and held it to the reader. After seeing him do it repeatedly, I started doing the same. Only one security person ever took issue with it.

I wish there were more browsers, and I wish they were more unique. I appreciate that Arc attempted to innovate, but their ego and hubris are a little frustrating. They believe their product is so great that everyone should use it, including their own family and friends. However, when they don’t, they are left feeling perplexed. But I’m not confused why so many people don’t use Arc. I believe most users are not even considering alternative apps when the ones they use work fine. The browser wars are over, and the differences between browsers today are generally negligible. This is not Firefox vs. Internet Explorer. We live in a different era now. In this era, Arc provides limited value for most people. The Browser Company can create Arc for the few individuals it works well for. However, if they want to develop something that appeals to everyone, there must be a genuine problem to address. It might be worthwhile to begin by questioning whether there is indeed a problem to solve at the moment. What advantage, if any, does Arc offer to ordinary people? Is it possible that there may not be one? When we develop applications, alternative apps, or update their designs, how much of it is truly necessary? At some point, we solidified the layout of a calculator. If we change it too much, we diminish value rather than add to it. It might be time to recognize that we have solved some software problems, and the reason why all this stuff gets redesigned repeatedly is simply because companies don’t know what to do if these things have been solved already. How many designers, engineers, product managers, and even executives are merely trying to justify their jobs? Is it possible that this explains what happened with Apple’s Photos app? The design wasn’t broken before iOS 18. And I don’t think browsers are fundamentally flawed now either. Some things may not require redesigning. We might have simply figured them out.