May Likes Product

I did a podcast! The lovely people at Talking Roadmaps had me on to discuss product operations and how product organizations can work smoothly together. There's a lot here about working cultures and how to scale. What a great conversation. www.talkingroadmaps.com/episodes/is-... #productsky

Ages ago, me and @forssto.bsky.social were talking about the similarities between product managers and record producers. It's something I keep coming back to.

No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no nerdist.com/article/netf...

As long as we are talking about whether programmers gatekeep I will repost the essay where I argue that even being a "gate opener" is still being a keeper of the gate and will be until our shared conception of technical ability changes. www.fightforthehuman.com/why-i-cannot...

'In these 2-hour workshops, we will be working with photographs from the Image of the Black (IB) Archive. Created between the 1960s and 1990s, the archive contains over 30,000 photographs documenting representations of people of African descent in (primarily) Western art.' 13 July, Warburg Institute

AI can be your scribe, your thought partner, data-stitcher, or your counselor. And AI can be your consigliere, your spin doctor, or your propagandist. Team superpowers. Or Orwellian Ministry of Truth. cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-428-ye...

This is such an interesting simulation and I really like the message behind it :) (Plus interactive math! My weakness!)

as promised, here is my post on AI and ethics. I think unilateral disarmament in the face of powerful new tools is neither wise nor effective. I think those of us in tech have a particular responsibility to engage, participate and build better solutions. charitydotwtf.substack.com/p/make-ai-bo...

Haters gonna hate, but the people who want to understand what meaningful science looks like and understand how to enact real and impactful change are gonna get this book :)

1/ Major Canadian experts in internet security and privacy - like @rondeibert.bsky.social, @openmedia.org and @cancivlib.bsky.social - are absolutely freaking out about Bill C-22. They’re sounding massive alarms, warning that it could:

Do you know what it would take to cancel your current project? I’m willing to bet that for many the answer will be no. This is why so much time and money is wasted in busines. We search for the evidence that proves we were right, without even knowing what would tell us it was wrong.

i share that belief. i wrote a whole piece about it: charity.wtf/2025/06/19/i... but -- i think that the best way to become a good engineer, is to work on a high performing team with other great engineers, and that means a team with engineering discipline.

alright friends and computationists, what are the signals you pick up on that make you think a team has high engineering discipline? (whatever "high" means to you) i'm not talking science or evidence. i'm talking casual conversation, heuristics, no evidence whatsoever, just radar. what trips it?

The government says they’re tackling surveillance pricing (thanks to the NDP) but they’re not. It’s a smokescreen open.substack.com/pub/badbitch...

What a guy

today in dystopia watch: all your pokemon go scans helped train a system for killer drones

I’m thinking a lot right now about automation and efficiency. We spend a lot of calories talking about AI, but I don’t see that same energy being put towards truly impactful changes: mostly because they’re largely invisible More importantly, those transformations have to be won bit by bit

AI shopping assistants act like trusted advisors, but they may be nudging users toward sponsored products instead. As retailers integrate tools like ChatGPT into e-commerce experiences, writer Vass Bednar questions who these agents are really working for. https://thewalrus.ca/ai-shopping-assistant/

next thing toilets are going to start going up in price because of the ai race

Note to Canadians: If you have the CDCP dental plan, there's a deadline that was poorly communicated through a letter you may not have received. You have to renew your coverage in the next 2 hours or there maybe a coverage gap. To renew, go to canada.ca/msca and do a whole bunch of onerous bullshit

When folks say they have 10x'd their productivity with AI, most of the time this is what is actually happening:

400 people are coming to Toronto Product Con today! I'm so stoked. I've got a product operations panel to talk about how the PDLC is shifting in 2026. Exciting! #productMgmt

looks like another consequence of carney’s cuts

"There is nothing balanced about the way trans people’s lives are reported. Anti-trans narratives dominate coverage and are often presented as fact, while trans people themselves are pushed to the margins or erased entirely." - from Amnesty International www.amnesty.org.uk/latest/new-u...

This is what happens when you incur opex but not capex, and only in proportion to your revenues (plus some amount of R&D which is getting amortised rapidly by high volume of profitable sales)

I'm at a conference right now and one of these bad studies with its bad estimates about human work choices has already come up. It's a fucking plague.

Honestly I think this might be possible to think about as an extension to the open cost project. Imagine this level of costing transparency for everything in your stack; that’d be neat (I get the difficulties. Pricing visibility is genuinely hard. But I think we should try anyway) opencost.io

you either die a developer or you live long enough to see yourself become product management

Thank you! I deflate the term, so technically I also conclude it is meaningless. I do then reinflate it, like so, however! doi.org/10.3390/bs16...

ODINI Malware Uses CPU Magnetic Emissions to Breach Faraday-Shielded Air-Gapped Computers cybersecuritynews.com?p=149570 Coming soon to a spy thriller near you.

"There was no moral panic about the internet" yet I was not even allowed to access the internet unless it was a rare strange treat because something really bad happened. The meeting my parents had when I told them I wanted to visit the American Girl website was like a nuclear safety council

Over 300 attendees (including staff & speakers) registered for Toronto Product Con now! This is so exciting!

putting the problems with harris aside, they really couldn’t find a canadian to talk about ai policy?

Perhaps you have thought to yourself, *I'm* on board the Psychology of Software Teams train, but how can I identify fellow POST fans in the wild?? Well if you find me at a 2026 conference or book reading you can get a TINY PROPAGANDA STICKER

Preprinted! Been working on this for ~1 year w wonderful coauthors Nancy & Mark: > Understanding Artificial Neural Networks: Mysterianism about Known Mechanism is Mysticism doi.org/10.5281/zeno... Have you noticed many experts say they don't understand AI? What's going on? 🤯 Let us tell you... 1/

Most of the people in my life aren't in tech. And they aren't academic theory professors. It's been really interesting to ask them about where they see AI impacting their jobs and tasks.

The more experienced people in my design research workshop have the "I was hired for my expertise, but no one seems to care about my expertise" problem, which like the language of film, is universal.

Can't wait to read this -- our podcast episode on math learning barriers including math anxiety is one of the most popular ones we've ever done. This is a massively common experience! www.changetechnically.fyi/2396236/epis...