You remember when the iPhone came out? Nobody ran around saying you've got to get an iPhone. What happened is you would just see an iPhone and you would see how great the pictures were, whatever the hell, and you'd go, I want that. Nobody had to evangelize you or explain, well, what iPhone does is it co-locates super computing power in your pocket.

I'm a big fan of using a specific tool to do a specific thing. I don't like to use hybrid tools. I like to have one tool for one job. I do a lot of things manually. There are workflows I've seen where I could automate the process, but I don't like doing that. I prefer doing things as manually as possible. I'd rather copy and paste something from

To your question about what people starting out can do, I think there has been a crisis in criticism. I mean that in the most expansive way—not just hardcore criticism, but consideration of art. Think about the first album from some little band down the street from me. Who will write a review of that on the internet? No one. It was always hard to

The thing that worries me, in addition to all the other things that worry me, is that Sam Altman has to pay back a lot of people a lot of money. And that always leads to organizations becoming evil, the way Google did. Watching Google become evil, shutting down companies like mine, doing things that they couldn't possibly be proud of, that's sad.

It's probably the talking dog thing, which has

two parts. Part one is if you meet a talking dog and its grammar isn't very good, don't forget that it's still a talking dog. It's still a miracle. But number two is just because a talking dog said it doesn't mean it's important.

I wish people spent more time talking about things they love. I wish people would say, "I fucking love this thing that I found, and here's why." And I wish that people reading that would go, "That's cool that you love that. Here's something that I love," instead of going, "Fuck you for loving that thing." I just wish we spent more time talking

I pretty deliberately don't use tools that have AI built into them. I use specific AI tools for specific things. For example, I'm not a big fan of Notion with its built-in AI. I like to draft a piece in Obsidian or IA Writer. A piece I write starts on my Freewrite, which is a smart typewriter without an internet connection. I sit at that writing

On the creative front, I don’t think the slop era is going to be meaningful. We've had these eras before where something suddenly gets cheaper or easier. Photoshop's a great example of this. There's this brief period, I remember in the 90s, where I would go online and I would look up graphics and I'd be like, “ooh, here's a picture of a mountain

Here's a simple thing you can do when traveling to countries where they don't speak the language. For many years, I gratefully used Google Translate to capture the nuance of what I wanted to say. But it turns out that's not always what you want. I have a little prompt I copy and paste into Claude or Gemini. The prompt is basically: "I'm going to