I feel that this six second clip of Jason Schwartzman reacting to someone taking too long a drink of orange juice in the movie Mountainhead will come in handy.

You know how in many design apps you can select an object and move it with the keyboard arrow keys? Often, if you hold SHIFT while using the arrow keys, the object will move at larger increments. Until recently, Google Slides had the opposite behaviour – with large move increments by default and the SHIFT modifier for smaller increments. It was an outlier, and annoying.

Well friends, all that changes today (or earlier this week – I don’t know). As of today, Google Slides how has the de facto standard move keyboard behaviour (small increments by default, SHIFT for larger increments).

Thanks!

As a self-declared upper-middle manager at a technology & design company, I have a mantra that I repeat slightly more often than is appropriate:

The greatest risk to our company is falls.

It’s not market instability, or hackers, or inadequate planning. It’s falls.

Your company is made up of people. People are made up of sticks and meat. When we fall down, we break. Be careful out there.

I wouldn’t be an effective executive if I didn’t follow-up my risk warning with some solid strategy, so here you go: Take two trips.

You’ve got one too many grocery bags? Don’t carry it all in at once. Take two trips.

You’ve got a coffee, a laptop, and a door to open on your way out to the deck this morning (hypothetically speaking) – take two trips!

Oh, and watch out for mulch.

My shower-thought today: ChatGPT can write a book for you, but it can’t make you a person who wrote a book.

Caveat: I have neither had ChatGPT write a book for me, nor have I written a book.

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.