Tony Santos

We're moving out of experiment mode! I have 8 slots left for Design Lessons. Wanna learn fun design things, get really good at it, and survive the great AI de-skilling? Sign up for a free first lesson! (it's FREE!) If not, pls share? www.notjustprettypictures.com/lessons/

My heart is heavy. Walter Koenig, our Ensign Pavel Chekov, passed away early today. Walter and I met on the bridge of the Enterprise in the 1960s, and we stayed friends for nearly six decades. When Brad and I married in 2008, Walter stood beside us as our best man.

I think a lot of really excited right now AI guys are going to be shocked at how easily most people give up ChatGPT et al, especially if it comes as part of a giant 2008 style financial meltdown.

If you start getting fatalistic, build solidarity. One conversation, one relationship at a time.

The future is here, get on board or get left behind in the crowd of losers not harassing indie journalists because your iPhone stopped working!

@mayor.seattle.gov VETO the RV Ban!

It is truly an amazing feat how many new things get broken in Quickbooks from week to week. All the improved development velocity is just absolutely paying off

Everybody, EV-ERY-BODY, wants a show. they make decisions based on how they feel (especially while claiming they don't)

RIP. Of all the original Trek actors (and I just rewatched the first 6 movies this month) he always seemed like he was having the most fun with all of it, both on screen and in any interview thing I ever saw him in.

Hey read my newsletter, this week it's about how we still have a say in designing the future. Also there is always a picture of my cat. I'd much rather all of you subscribed instead of having to keep going to LinkedIn and get them to subscribe. www.notjustprettypictures.com/not-just-lec...

It's really important to pay attention to the fact that Lula beat the fascist candidate not by compromising and trying to meet fascist voters in the middle, but by sticking to his guns, promising prosecutions for election interference, and mobilising his own voters to turn out in greater numbers.

Realizing you forgot to eat lunch 45mins into a 75min bike workout is not something I recommend. “Getting wrecked” was not on my agenda for this evening 🥴

i think the real thing that makes someone a leftist is when you start to actually give a shit about movements and issues that don't affect you. anyone can stand up for things that affect them. but it takes actual principles to stand up for groups you're not a part of. most people dont do this.

as much as i’d rather build something new, we have to takeover and gut the democratic party all that infrastructure belongs to the people, not the loser ass DCCC consultant class that has reduced it to nothing since the clinton era

"If university bots graded bots, you would no longer have a university. You’d have a tomb, an academic mausoleum in which digital phantoms murmured emptily" theconversation.com/friday-essay...

This week's newsletter is about overcoming fatalism (a design skill) and knowing how to talk to stakeholders and figure out if they're even the right people to be talking to. Also there are Pancake the cat pics. (subscribe link in profile now!) www.notjustprettypictures.com/not-just-lec...

Sometimes, when I read your sadposting, I don't know what to say. Because I know nothing I could say could make things better. But know this: I see you, I hear you, and I'm hoping things get better for you. 💜

Is Balducci the only one involved in running Sound Transit who has ever visited a real city with a real public transit system? This should be the given, majority position.

I have been meaning to write about this for a month or so now but it breaks my heart. AI has infected every hobby. Everything is noise. It's hurting existing communities and trudging through the slop is exhausting.

what gets me about the current surge in resistance to climate policy is it has never been more obviously necessary, cheap, or easy. half this stuff is on the shelf!!

I'm not sure what it says about me (or them?) that when I'm having trouble writing and editing a newsletter two show up in my inbox that make the point I'm trying to get my brain to spit out so well and unblock me.

Everytime you hear a tech or tech-adjacent person talk about making a thing that is like your spouse of your mommy just hear it as the Borat "my wife" and you will have put it in the appropriate level of seriousness that it deserves www.wired.com/story/gm-wan...

Ya know, totally normal CFO shit.

"how long can it take to draw 850 cartoon faces?" I said foolishly 3 hours and 140 faces ago.

If you're old enough, you've watched the consumer internet arrive and dethrone almost all the old intermediaries (aka gatekeepers) of the media world and then watch it devolve into such a slop filled state where it makes a very strong case for having the kind of intermediaries it displaced.

The first genuinely honest ad for generative AI I've ever seen, from Microsoft / CoPilot A mediocre white guy sees his non-white colleague getting praised for good work, he asks AI to *literally copy it*, and then he gets all the praise instead: www.ispot.tv/ad/SoDi/micr...

Democracies letting platforms carry on as imperial powers is the same thing as surrendering to infinite permanent gerrymandering and election interference and just telling people to vote harder every time to keep up.

The American mind cannot process a vehicle that is not designed to kill as many pedestrian children as possible

A cyclist hit on this road died this week but the SDOT Director would like you to know that they widened crosswalk paint, added “no turn on red” signs for drivers and now put the walk sign up a few seconds before the light turns green

Updating my NAS this morning ofc it has a PHP server for its admin panel and it nag screened me FIVE times to assign a public domain name and open its port in the firewall to it so it could be "accessed from anywhere" and LOL absofuckinglutely not.

“Three out of four disabled people don’t drive. Stop using us as an excuse for car dependency.” — Anna Zivarts @nondriver.bsky.social in collaboration with The Urban Truth Collective. Mobility freedom comes from mobility choices. #UrbanTruth

I would argue that Ballard has been far more blighted by thousands of ugly giant concrete blocks everywhere than it has by RVs.

are there enough votes in the senate to convict yet? asking for my 300ish million friends

this applies to every kind of business and frankly, i’ve been saying it since 2008! “go big or go home” is a recipe for a lot of failures and surviving mediocrities niche is good. it’s also more efficient. you can serve a smaller group of customers & still have a great business.

"IP theft wouldn't be as grave if we all benefited from these remixing machines" if gAI were not built in a way that exploits creativity to take the value away from people who do the work and give it to people who did not, it would be a fundamentally different tool

I got so excited picking ink colors for my next print that I forgot to order more black ink lol

“If I know one thing about Jesus’s whole ethos, it’s that he was totally against DEI and empathy and when we cause armageddon and the second coming happens, I’m sure he will confirm this for us all”

eBay users! Don't ignore today's email, even though it looks like a boring standard update to the User Privacy Notice. They want to use your data to train AI models. If you click the link over the words "the right to object", it takes you to a page with a toggle button letting you opt out.

Somebody's "unemployed agent that spams people looking for work so it won't 'die' of token starvation" just emailed me offering to do my company's close of year bookeeping (in the middle of October?) for $25. Things are gonna get stupider before they get better, I fear.

If you're going through the trouble to make it not look like AI because you know people don't like it, JUST MAKE A POSTER. Use terrible word art. Draw stick figures. Take a sharpie marker to some poster board and get to tagging. Do literally ANYTHING ELSE and it will look SO MUCH BETTER.