on product

> The obsession with the metaverse seems to have solidified in Silicon Valley after Matthew Ball published an essay in January 2020. (...) In hindsight, it feels like a particularly narrow period of hype coinciding with — and, I think, benefitting from — the most urgent years of the COVID-19 pandemic.

> With the pandemic undoubtably came a realization of how much money Facebook stood to make, if only it had a platform. In 2019, there were two publicly traded companies worth over a trillion U.S. dollars; by the end of 2021, there were five. (...) This was a financial decision before it was a product or service people might actually want to use.

> Facebook held its Connect conference, (...) laid out its metaverse-centric vision, and changed its name to Meta to reflect this new focus, and because it had to. (...) Our world was permanently changed, or so it would have seemed, and we would surely want to virtually attend concerts and buy PNG files of band t-shirts with real money. And these companies would take their cut.

> Zuckerberg [touted] Horizon Worlds as the place users will go to socialize, and Horizon Workrooms as the virtual environment for their job. The latter has since been completely shut down, while the former was put on ice. (...) He said “remote work is here to stay for a lot of people”, (...) less than two years before ordering in-office work three days per week.

> ChatGPT launched in November 2022, and the pandemic ended. (...) It turns out we are okay with having meetings and playing games online, but we actually like seeing live music in-person and travelling to real places. (...) In Q4 2022, mentions [of the metaverse in the investor calls] are half that of the year prior. By Q1 2024, (...) there were just four mentions of “metaverse”, there were ninety of “A.I.”.

https://pxlnv.com/blog/metaverse-fever-dream/

> A few weeks ago, a friend called me at 01:40 AM. Not texted. Called. For a brief second, my body prepared itself for bad news. (...) She had just finished work, was driving home through near-empty roads in London, heard a song we both used to jam on together, and suddenly missed me. So she called. We spent thirty minutes talking about things.

> Romantic heartbreak has an elaborate infrastructure. There are films for it. Songs for it. (...) Most friendships dissolve through unattended accumulation – postponed calls, exhausting jobs, geographic distance, emotional fatigue, different sleep schedules, different priorities. (...) And because ‘nothing happened’, we often deny ourselves the right to grieve it.

> Friendships in school and college survived because institutions did most of the work for us. (...) Encountering the same people repeatedly builds closeness over time. (...) Ambition transforms everyone into project managers of their own lives. (...) Friendship – the one relationship built almost entirely on voluntary presence – begins slipping through the cracks.

> This loneliness often coexists with constant digital interaction. (...) We maintain ambient awareness of one another’s existence without participating meaningfully. (...) I know what my friends eat. (...) I know when they get promoted. (...) And yet sometimes I hesitate before calling because I no longer know the emotional weather of their lives.

> Everybody is working on themselves. Everybody is ‘going through a lot’. (...) Affection sometimes feels evaluated through invisible cost-benefit analysis: Who texts first? Who makes more effort? (...) [Friendship] has always depended on a certain irrational generosity. A willingness to waste time together magnificently. To listen to the same anxiety for the fifth time.

> Adult friendship feels increasingly radical. It resists the transactional logic modern life rewards. (...) Because a real friend offers something profoundly rare: unoptimised presence. Family is structured by blood. Marriage by institution. Work relationships by utility. Friendship survives purely through mutual choosing. Nobody has to stay. And yet some people do.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/civil-irony/the-quiet-grief-of-adult-friendship/

> You’re driving somewhere important…maybe running a little bit late. A few minutes into the drive, your car pulls over to the side of the road and asks: “How are you enjoying your drive so far?” (...) “Did you know I have a new feature? Tap here to learn more.”

> There was a time when software shipped on physical media: floppy disks, CD-ROMs. (...) If you shipped a serious bug, you lived with it until the next release. (...) Then the internet arrived. (...) Bugs could be fixed. Security holes could be closed. Documentation got easier. Support got easier.

> Once software could reliably connect to the internet, it no longer just received instructions. It could talk back to the company. (...) Instead of arguing in a meeting about which features mattered most, you could look at usage data. (...) Usage data stopped being a tool for improving software and became a tool for optimizing behavior.

> The product stops being a finished artifact and starts behaving like a laboratory. (...) Every interaction becomes a hypothesis. (...) Iit’s very hard not to optimize for what moves fastest, even if it moves the wrong thing. (...) You add a little callout. Then a tooltip. Then an onboarding tour. Then a “What’s New” screen. Then a little survey.

> Not every prompt is evil, and not every notification is marketing. Some categories are basically made of alerts: messaging, security, banking, calendars, delivery tracking. (...) Once a company builds the machinery to do it, that machinery becomes cheap to reuse, and the incentives gradually pull it away (...) toward “move the metric.”

> Great tools get out of the way so the user can accomplish their goal. (...) You open them, do the thing you came to do, and close them again without ever feeling managed, marketed to, or delayed. (...) If you want to survey me, fine. Ask at a sensible moment and accept “no” as a real answer. Most importantly, if I turn something off, it should stay off!

> Each step made sense in isolation, and each step could be defended. Together, they reshaped the priorities of an entire industry. Once software became measurable in this way, it became optimizable in this way. And optimization has a way of eating everything else.

https://blog.mikeswanson.com/backseat-software/

> The demand for software, at least inside my 10 year horizon, is for practical purposes infinite, or software developers wouldn’t be as highly paid as they are. (...) Look at the website of your dentist, your insurance company, your kid's school. (...) Then think about all the things software hasn't touched at all, which is most things.

> If agents are going to eat the entire software development life cycle, what does that leave behind? (...) Figuring out what the customer actually wants. (...) Deciding the definition of “good”. (...) Making it delightful. (...) [Then] marketing, user acquisition, retention, branding. Who knows what agents can do with them, but I’m not considering them.

> Entry-level hiring at the big tech companies is down 65% since 2019, at early-stage startups it's down 75%, and yet engineering as a share of hiring went up, from 46% to 55%. (...) If you don’t need juniors to handle well-specified tickets any more, where do the seniors come from? We have to train them in a different kind of job.

> So if the code is free and the operations are free, what’s left? It’s sometimes called "product sense", and it’s highly valued in senior developers. (...) Software is a formalization of a human desire. (...) It’s in the head of one specific baker who's never written it down and wouldn't know how to if you asked them. Somebody has to go and get it out of her, and then turn it into something exact enough to build, and then check that what got built is actually what she meant.

> Palantir coined "forward deployed engineer" for a person who goes and sits with the customer, figures out what they actually need, and builds it. (...) Then in 2025 postings for it grew by something like eight hundred percent in nine months. (...) The code-writing is in there, but it's the smallest part, and it's the part the agent does; what the company is paying $240,000 for is the person who can walk into a car parts factory and come out with a correct definition of "good."

> Product got separated from engineering as a career. (...) My speculation is that it’s about to collapse back into one job. (...) As the cost of software creation falls to zero, the bottleneck moves to the description of the problem. (...) For the horizon I can see, the forecast is: more software, more people making it, and almost none of them typing. We are all product engineers now, whether we like it or not, and a lot of us won't.

https://seldo.com/posts/we-are-all-product-engineers-now/

https://everydaymactools.com/punchcard/ 🥺

https://x.com/faionur/status/2102059072128168432
(100% correct take)

(тоже очень нравится!)

> every couple of years Apple cooks up a UI animation that reminds us why they’re worth $5T

https://ilyabirman.ru/meanwhile/all/neuro-competition-2 💙

https://x.com/beyondfest/status/2060571732554244311 🫶

https://x.com/rnaudbertrand/status/2052598792751550498 💡

> A festival in Montreal has just done something that, judging from the reaction, you would think involved setting fire to the negative. [They] screened Anne Émond’s [Peak Everything) at 1.5 times its normal speed. [The initiative] was conceived to provoke a conversation about how a younger audience actually consumes moving images in 2026.

> François Delisle pulled his own film Le temps from the festival in protest. (...) RTL France reported the experiment as a worrying new habit. (...) [Yet] the organisers did not [run it fast] for laughs. They went to Émond, to her producer and to her distributor, secured agreement from all three, scheduled a single 1.5x screening on 25 April, (...) and bolted on a panel discussion afterwards.

> Watching cinema at the wrong speed is not new. (...) Any projectionist of a certain vintage will tell you (...) the last reel of the last film often ran a little faster than 24 frames per second. The motivation was rarely artistic. The bus home, the pub, a partner. (...) PAL television standard turned this into industrial practice. Films shot at 24 frames per second have, for the better part of seventy years, been broadcast across European television at 25 frames per second.

> Variable playback speed on YouTube [has been] available since 2010. Netflix rolled out 0.5x to 1.5x playback on Android in July 2020, having been called everything from a vandal to a grave-robber. (...) Spotify, Audible and every podcast app on earth allow the same. (...) Fifty percent of 18-to-34-year-olds had watched a video on accelerated playback in the previous month.

> Average runtime for wide theatrical releases rose from around 106 minutes in the 1990s and early 2000s to roughly 114 minutes. (...) Mission: Impossible expanded from 110 minutes to 170. (...) Their problem is not really that the audience is in a hurry. Their problem is that the audience is voting with the playback slider on a thing that, twenty years ago, the editor would have trimmed before anyone outside the room saw it.

> If the work earns its 180 minutes, audiences will sit through it without reaching for the slider; Oppenheimer grossed nearly a billion dollars at full speed. (...) That is not the death of cinema. It is a question, addressed to the people who make the films, about whether every minute they have asked us to sit through is genuinely worth the asking.

https://patrickvonsychowski.substack.com/p/the-projectionist-always-sped-up

> The last two epoch-defining shifts in technology were the smartphone in the 2000s, and the Internet/web in the 1990s. Neither of those moments generated this sort of mainstream popular backlash. (...) People were optimistically curious. The single most distinctive thing about “AI” today is the vociferous public opposition to it and deeply pessimistic expectations about what it’s going to do.

> “Software brain” is a good term — a tidy two-word encapsulation of a sprawling worldview that is currently very much in vogue. Take some time to read Patel’s whole piece carefully. It feels important, and it’s really well considered.

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/23/patel-software-brain

> A lot of people hate AI. (...) There’s that NBC News poll showing AI with worse favorability than ICE and only a little bit above the war in Iran and the Democrats. (...) Gallup poll found that only 18 percent of Gen Z was hopeful about AI, down from an already-bad 27 percent last year. At the same time, anger is growing: 31 percent (...), up from 22 percent last year.

> Everyone in tech understands how much regular people dislike AI. What I think they’re missing is why. (...) AI doesn’t have a marketing problem. People experience these tools every single day! (...) This is a fundamental disconnect between how tech people with software brains see the world and how regular people are living their lives.

> [Software brain means] you see the whole world as a series of databases that can be controlled with the structured language. (...) This is a powerful way of seeing things. (...) Zillow is a database of houses. Uber is a database of cars and riders. (...) It’s a small jump to feeling like you can control everything if you can just control the data.

> Elon Musk and DOGE showed up in the government. (...) And they ran into the undeniable fact that the databases aren’t reality, and DOGE ended in hilarious failure. (...) Law isn’t actually code. (...) It’s ambiguity that makes lawyers lawyers. Honestly, it’s ambiguity that makes people hate lawyers because it’s always possible to argue the other side [or] find the gray area.

> You can see the same thing happening in every other kind of industry. You don’t hire a big consulting firm to actually come in and study your business and make it more efficient. You hire them to make slide decks that justify layoffs to your board and shareholders. Big consulting firms are great at this, and now they’re just going to generate those decks with AI.

> There’s real value in introducing AI to business. (...) But: not everything is a business. Not everything is a loop! (...) Regular people don’t see the opportunity to write code as an opportunity at all. (...) Apple, Google and Amazon have struggled for over a decade now to make regular people care about smart home automation at all.

> I’ve reviewed a lot of tech products over the past decade and a half, and all I can tell you is that it is a failure when you ask people to adapt to computers. (...) Asking people to make themselves more legible to software — to turn themselves into a database — is a doomed idea.

https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-backlash-databases-automation

not so hot take: https://x.com/chintanzalani/status/2038026663867330850