With more LLM-generated text floating around, and this thoughtful post about dealing with people’s AI-‘writing’ output, I’m noticing something about the point of writing.

I assume anyone writing something for me to consume has a perspective they want to share. The writing isn’t inherently valuable in of itself. It’s the thought behind it that matters.

It’s not that that quality of writing doesn’t matter — it’s critical, but the writing a means to an end. I don’t need “an email”. I need someone to understand that the ideas I have about their project. I don’t need “a proposal”, I need to help someone understand why they might want to hire my company for their project.

Writing is a shadow of thought. The better the writing, the more clearly the shadow represents the shape of the original thought. Even the best writing can never perfectly capture the original thought. Writing is one of the best tools we have to share thoughts across space and time.

LLMs are good at creating the artifact. They’ll give you “an email” or “a proposal”. If I’m generous, they may even help you work through your idea. I’m not convinced they are helpful in helping me understand your idea.

I’m curious to check back in on my own thinking here are as the tools and our expectations evolve over the next few years.

As someone who helped create a conference called Zap Your PRAM, I’m either supremely qualified or completely unqualified to comment on how well conferences are named.

I’ve noticed three conferences lately that I think are particularly well-named:

• Breakpoint: a conference from BrowserStack, company that makes tools for web developers. Breakpoint is a programming debugging term and a point where responsive web designs change size/layout.
• SquiggleConf: A web tooling conference for the kind of tools that put red squiggles under your code in your editor.
• Config: Figma’s design conference. Perfect.

See more examples of how naming things is hard.

Naming this is hard. I’ve written about this a few times here before. Here’s a quick recap:

• Naming things is hard: Conferences
• Naming things is hard: Ingrid
• Naming things is hard: WordTsar
• Naming things is hard: The Russian Dragon

This post, But what if I really want a faster horse?, does a great job of articulating what I don’t like about the experience of services like Spotify — despite the inexpensive access to a mind-boggling catalogue of music.

I appreciated Chris & Dave at the ShopTalk Show taking a few minutes to discuss my Gild Just One Lily article this week. Dave brought up his optional SVG custom blog-post titles on his own blog – a great example.

The whole show is always worth a listen (especially this week, where you’ll be taken on a word-tour of the Alaska Folk Festival), but the segment I’m referring to starts at 38m 11s.

Thanks guys.

I’ve always resented the idea of voting strategically: voting for someone other than your ideal choice in order to prevent a worse outcome.

I thought (and wished and hoped) that people should vote for the candidate they think is best. Otherwise we’ll always end up in the middle-of-the-road, at best.

Then Donald Trump became president of the United States. Twice.

The middle-of-the-road sounds great.

I’d vote for a toad if it meant keeping a demagogue (or whatever Trump is) out of power.

Here in Canada, we’re voting later this month. While I don’t think Pierre Poilievre is exactly like Trump, I do think he would move Canada closer to a system that devalues journalism, environmentalism, social support systems like health care, and organized labour.

Given the frightening instability we’re seeing from the United States, voting in a stable, predictable leader who believes in climate change is the least we can do.

There is a trade off in voting strategically. We need more than just stability and sanity in political leaders. We need to push back hard on racism, nationalism, and general selfishness.

For now though, let’s vote in a Liberal party in Canada that won’t set things on fire.

On a related tangent, if Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre actually believes in all of the “Political positions” listed out on his Wikipedia page – addressing climate change, access to abortion, same-sex marriage, pro-immigration, etc – then why doesn’t he vote for the Liberal Party?

I’ve written an article about adding a bit of fanciness to a design and was proud to have it published at Smashing Magazine. The article is called Gild Just One Lily.

The phrase “gild the lily” implies unnecessary ornamentation, the idea being that adorning a lily with superficial decoration only serves to obscure its natural beauty. Well, I’m here to tell you that a little touch of what might seem like unnecessary ornamentation in design is exactly what you need.

When your design is solid, and you’ve nailed the fundamentals, adding one layer of decoration can help communicate a level of care and attention. [read the entire article]

With this article, I’ve reduced the time between publishing articles for myself down from 17 years to only 7 years.

My kids keep getting text from Pierre Poilievre and his campaign. Where did they get these phone numbers?

I understand why our new Prime Minister of Canada felt he needed to eliminate the consumer carbon tax in Canada. His opponent managed to weaponize it with a stupid rhyme.

Prime Minister Carney explains that the carbon tax had become “too divisive.” At least he’s honest about why he’s removing it – not because he thinks it’s a bad policy or because it’s ineffective.

Let’s take a moment to lament how even when receiving hundreds of dollars in direct rebate cheques from the carbon tax, we’re collectively too stupid to endure the most mild perceived imposition.