I’ve integrated the new books feature Manton launched at the end of August into my blog, so now the book details pages feel part of my blog. I may revise the design a little in the future but I’m happy with how it works right now. If I’ve posted about the book the details page also displays those posts as well.
To my surprise I really enjoyed it. It turned out that writing and learning are a lot of fun, and I was constantly looking for ways to practice my new found writing skills. I think that's part of why I still love typing - I just find creating words on a screen a lot of fun.
I couldn’t agree more. It makes my recent writing block all the more troubling. After a message from a kind friend who saw my post yesterday, I’ve decided to try and start small with posts like this one.
I have a problem, that some might call a block. Simply put, I want to blog but don’t know what to write. Every time I sit down I am left with a blank brain, every time I think I should post about that nothing comes out. A blockage that won’t budge that results in nothing being written.
In Perils of the New Armchair Scholarship Dan Cohen finishes with a summary that hits exactly where I am landing on using AI in design. Emphasis mine:
This is the professorial equivalent of the cognitive decline that we worry about with our students who have been using AI for years — and what atrophies in the seminar room will surely atrophy on the page as well. The solution seems clear: if you would like, use AI for the parts of scholarly work where it excels and check all automated output, while retaining human seniority in orchestrating and expressing the meaning of your research.
For me, as I explore how to use these new tools in my work, this is where I am landing. I do all the design thinking, the layouts, and interactions but the AI does the building. What would take me maybe a week or more to build a prototype to test a design, takes Claude an hour or two, and as a result my work is richer.
Design for me has never stopped in the design software. When I worked for myself as both designer and developer, design would continue as I built. I would move back and forth between Sketch and code, my problem was that sometimes I was aware a better solution was out there, I just couldn’t build it. When I moved to an in-house design team that symbiosis of design and dev was lost. The design software we used to prototype would influence my design thinking, I didn’t always know how to do something, or it would take too long to build so I couldn’t explore it.
In contrast, the workflow now emerging for me is much closer to what it used to be when I was self-employed, the difference now is that I am less constrained by my own technical ability. I am able to push designs further and see how they work in the browser, my work has become both quicker and deeper.
Atlas looks like an interesting app for collecting an inspiration library. Along time ago I used Yojimbo and a now long gone app (whose name escapes me) specifically for collecting screenshots as my inspiration library. I often wondered how I could return to that practice of collecting things for inspiration, perhaps this might be it.
An interesting piece from Om about Anthropic, Dario Amodei, and their Mythos model. It is a thought provoking look at the actions of Dario and the meaning of the name and it’s etymology. I recently switched from using Claude/Cowork/Code to OpenAI’s Codex/ChatGPT after reading a number of posts from Manton that made me look at OpenAI from a different angle.
I'm slowly building out a new "professional" site which will become a portfolio and possibly have some kind of design based blog. You can find it here.
This is the best take I’ve read on the Ferrari Luce.
There are bloggers who I admire a great deal. I have been reading or following them in some form for years. They manage to post interesting things day after day, their posts are well written and thoughtful. They are the ones who, in my mind, make blogging cool.
They inspire me.
When I read their posts, they make me want to post. They make me want to write. They make me wish I had interesting things to share. Yet, there is a barrier I create for myself. I don’t feel like I can do it. My days are full of my day job, I do a lot of thinking in the day, but it is specific to the work. I would share some of it if I could, but I can’t because what I’m starting work on now won’t be visible to the public until 2028 at the earliest.
How I get around this is a constant challenge that I do not know an answer to at the moment. It is frustrating.
It’s roughly two weeks since I got my first new personal Mac since 2015 and I’ve yet to comment on it. In short it’s an incredible machine. The upgrade is well worth it and I wish I had made the jump a little sooner. I am working on a piece to speak to all the differences I’m noticing but for now I wanted to say this. The battery is insane. I’ve a work issued M1 Pro MacBook Pro and the battery on that is impressive, the battery on this M5 Air blows it away. I’ve done everything on this little laptop since it arrived, from coding, to design work, to life admin, to watching videos, you name it I’ve probably done it, but I’ve only had to charge the thing once since it’s initial iCloud sync. Incredible.
