About Me
I am just some guy with a cool wife and funny kids who likes making things that probably don’t need to exist, like this website, a bunch of albums, and all these words.
I made Resolution and I just finished an acoustic album.
About Me
I am just some guy with a cool wife and funny kids who likes making things that probably don’t need to exist, like this website, a bunch of albums, and all these words.
Here’s some of my work.
I’m also the lunatic behind a what-if scenario planning & goal setting application called Resolution. You can use it for free here, or check out our fairly large set of examples.
Look at This Hat
I recently finished an acoustic album, and it came out pretty good! If you like stripped down, half-earnest half-winking-at-the-camera punk rock songs recorded by some Dad in his living room, you should listen to it.
Listen Now:
Year in Review (sort of)
This isn’t quite an end-of-year post, but technically, we are approaching the end of the year, so why not. At present, there are some things I’m high on (ideas, not substances), and some things I’m a lot lower on. In an attempt to stay positive, I’m going to counter each of my lows with a high. I know, I know — but this is how hard I have to try sometimes to keep my grumbling at bay, or at the very least somewhat moderated.
Low: Generative AI
I mean, do we even need to go here? I tried. God, I really, really tried. But this thing reeked of disingenuousness and hand-waving almost from the day it hit the zeitgeist, and now we’re here. The whole thing hasn’t collapsed yet, but the general mood has soured dramatically even in just the last couple of months. We’re certainly getting the downside — spam, shitposting at scale, customer service chatbots, people repeating made up nonsense from ChatGPT on national news broadcasts, plus massive (and needless!) energy and water use. But the upside continues to be utter vaporware, breathlessly described by a bunch of grown up Ready Player One dorks again, and again, and again, but never actually turning into anything people can use. Even in the enterprise, white-dollar knobs like me are subjected to endless prompts to use “AI assistants” in already awful, user-hostile business applications that (1) do not work, (2) do not know whether they worked or not, (3) constantly promise they will get better, (4) never get better.
This is going to take forever to wind down, because so much of this is motivated by ego and funded by entrenched companies that print money doing something completely unrelated, so there’s no forcing mechanism to make any of them give up the ghost. We could be here for a while.
High: Not-Generative AI
The Photos app on my TV is really pretty amazing. I spent a couple hours in my late 20s teaching my (long since discarded) iMac what a bunch of my friends and family looked like, and then eventually added my kids. That’s all it took, apparently, for THE MACHINE to provide me with a lifetime of whimsical albums, slideshows, and movies about so many awesome times in my life. Sometimes it’s hard to even go to bed, with so many good memories available to enjoy (and after around 2012, to enjoy in pretty consistently high quality).
Low: Most Software
The web is a disaster — search is useless, everything is computer generated chum, and social networking is dead for anything other than pissing matches and engagement bait. Despite that, web browsers are where we spend all of our desktop computing time, using crappy apps built with generic, high level frameworks that are slow, battery-soggy, and easy to turn into even crappier desktop apps. DO NOT GIVE ME A DESKTOP APP WITH A “RELOAD” BUTTON IN IT.
We’re really stuck with this now, aren’t we? We have no good HTML to view in our HTML viewer, and yet somehow that’s the application we use all day, every day. Two menu bars for everything. I still can’t believe it.
High: Some Software
God bless you, indie developers. Rogue Amoeba, I just bought your entire $200 bundle thing. Do I need it? Probably not — I needed Loopback, but everything you make is just so beautiful, and thoughtful, and functional, and faaaaast, I couldn’t say no. There are also some gems in SetApp (along with some weird stuff, but whatever) like CleanShot, the venerable MarsEdit, OneSwitch, Permute, and a few others. And of course, Logic and Final Cut continue to grind along like the champs they are despite coming from a massive corporation, and the general eyebrow-raising quality issues that have snuck into a lot of Apple’s software over the last few years. Here’s to hoping they don’t ruin Pixelmator.
Low: The News
It’s rough. Plus, I canceled my Washington Post subscription after nearly ten years thanks to Jeff Bezos’ truly groveling decision to block the paper’s presidential endorsement at the last minute. I’m not saying it mattered, but I’m not subsidizing that guy’s vehicle for sucking up to Donald Trump.
High: Other… news?
Hey, somebody has to do journalism, which means I need to pay for it. I’m currently subscribing to The Village Green (my extremely local newspaper) and The Verge, which just rolled out subscriptions and has slowly evolved from a run of the mill tech dork website to a legitimately thought-provoking and investigative entity. Good job, guys.
Low: The New England Patriots
Drake Maye = pretty good! Everyone else = pretty bad! No one should (or will!) feel bad for us, but those twenty years of regional dominance were pretty fun if you were from the region, as I am.
High: The Boston Celtics
WHAT THEY GONNA SAY NOW? WHAT THEY GONNA SAY NOW????
Low: I’m Not in a Band
This is quite the drought for me, but I did put out the first of two short acoustic albums, and that was fun. The second one’s basically done, but I need to sit down and mix everything, because AI isn’t real and can’t do it for me despite it being a common, theoretically low-skill grunt task that is basically a bunch of math.
RESOLUTION LIVES FOREVER
Did I have to get a job again because I’m a coward, and built the most conservative version of my passion project possible, largely driven by a fear of failure that almost certainly played a role in my project largely… failing? Probably. AND YET! This coward’s conservatively constructed application is still 100% live and accepting payments, friends! I use it all the time, even for my real job that actually makes money, and the monthly costs to run it are laughably low. No state of the art GPUs required. Even for Brian?
Yep, even for Brian.
Never Good Enough
For some reason, WordPress has decided to incinerate itself. It’s true, but not really true, because WordPress is a million different things. It’s an open source CMS. It’s a hosting provider of said CMS. It’s the flagship product, of sorts, of an extremely successful and (on the surface, at least?) cool looking tech company. It’s also an ecosystem of service providers and product companies that aren’t affiliated with that tech company, and that’s where it’s all decided to come apart.
Basically, the people (person, really) who control WordPress have a problem with how much WPEngine, the very profitable company that hosts this website, contributes back to the open-source WordPress project. After that, everyone’s opinion sort of goes into a black box and there’s copyright infringement accusations and plugin seizing and all kinds of nonsense, but it all sort of stems from the feeling Automattic (and more specifically, Matt Mullenweg) have that WPEngine is free-riding off an open source project that Automattic effectively leads development of.
Are they right?
Not even a little! I really, really, truly do not care about the financial specifics of the slowly advancing WordPress project, or who makes money from it. That’s the beauty of it being open-source! If I felt like things were moving too slowly, I could go work on it, or give someone money to work on it, or whatever, but that would be entirely up to me. As it happens, I feel (or felt) fine about WordPress until this entire thing blew up, so like Deputy Marshall Sam Gerard, I do not care.
Unfortunately, now I have to care for several reasons.
- This site is hosted by WPEngine, an entirely unsexy and uninteresting IT provider that has generally served me well over the years here and elsewhere. Whether they like it or not, they are now in a protracted legal and PR war with Matt Mullengweg, and thus WordPress.org, which does not appear to have any sort of governance outside of doing whatever Mullenweg says.
- I left WordPress once, but came back years ago and was planning on never switching again. If for some reason this place starts to fall apart for reasons beyond my control, I might have to rebuild all of this on another CMS. Please… don’t make me figure out Ghost or something, I’m old now, everything takes longer.
Annoying logistics aside, the real bummer is Mullenweg, the heart and soul of a company that represents so many cool things on the internet, either (a) going completely insane, or (b) taking off his “I love the internet mask” to reveal the same egomaniacal tech bro persona ruining everything else in tech. I guess I’m rooting for the second one just because I have a hard time rooting for the existence of mental health problems in a person, but man, that’s a depressing outcome. Do they not have enough money over there? Can you not just continue to be profitable and make cool things? Automattic runs the journal I keep track of my kids childhood with, for God’s sake. Somebody take the wheel over there, and fast.
Visionaries
I was ranting to my wife the other night about how frustrating it is that so much energy is going into absurd nerd fantasy when there’s just SO MUCH to improve about the actual technology real people use every day.
At some point, I blurted out something about how maybe getting two completely insane platforms — the internet, and the iPhone — in less than fifty years was enough. Maybe we needed to get better at those before deciding we were moving onto… whatever this is.
“The computer should be alive. I should be able to wear the computer.”
WHOA, WHOA, SETTLE DOWN. There’s work to be done here, folks. The singularity ain’t coming in our lifetimes, so this is going to be a grind.
Or… well, I guess if you’re a billionaire you can play pretend for a few years.
The Theoretical Beauty of the Legislative Branch
I’ve been reading John Roberts rulings since I was a pre-law undergraduate student, and simply put… the guy lives in a fantasy world.
The Supreme Court on Friday curtailed the power of federal government agencies to regulate vast parts of American life, overturning a 40-year-old legal precedent long targeted by conservatives who say the government gives unaccountable bureaucrats too much authority.
For decades, the court’s decision in Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council directed judges to defer to the reasonable interpretations of federal agency officials in cases that involve how to administer ambiguous federal laws. That power will now revert to judges, a move experts said could lead to a spate of challenges of federal guidelines and make regulation more unpredictable as different courts assess agency decisions in different ways.
Writing for the majority in the 6-3 ruling in a pair of cases, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the Chevron framework has proved “unworkable” and allowed federal agencies to change course even without direction from Congress.
“Chevron was a judicial invention that required judges to disregard their statutory duties,” Roberts wrote.
You don’t have to be especially cynical to realize that the United States Congress has had a lot of trouble producing thorough, detailed legislation at a rate sufficient to meet the challenges of the 21st century. That’s why so many things go to the courts! But Roberts is nothing if not consistent — from his judicial philosophy to his decisions and opinions on the regulatory state, this dude has always believed that the legislative branch should clearly articulate what is and isn’t permitted, and that courts can make this happen by simply rejecting regulatory actions that don’t have express legislative authority.
Cool, cool. But I have to like, live here, man, and the thing you are describing almost never happens. We hate long, detailed legislation! We’ve been told to hate it since the Reagan administration, by legislators waving around giant stacks of papers and lamenting “this 9000 page bill!”, as if the number of pages in a law is a measure for the “amount of government” or something. So which is it? Simple bills, or detailed bills?
I actually believe that Roberts would like detailed bills. He would probably shoot a lot of them down from his position on Mount Olympus, but he would enjoy the back and forth, and I don’t think he’d undercut the few things he actually allowed to pass. It’s not an intellectually incoherent approach to government at all — it’s just a completely impractical civic fantasy that people should be debating in dorm rooms late at night, not suddenly deciding to implement in a country that is already paralyzed and ready to tear itself apart.
Again — “the Chevron framework has proved ‘unworkable’”, says… some freaking guy we don’t even vote for. I mean, look, I’m not begging for my life to be micromanaged by a bunch of dorks at the Department of Agriculture or anything, but at least I can vote for one of two extremely old men who can appoint some political hack to get in or out of their way a little bit. John Roberts, on the other hand — I mean, the guy literally has zero accountability. Zero! So don’t start poking at shit, man!
I just can’t take seriously anybody who thinks today’s Congress — we didn’t even have a SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE for weeks for absolutely no discernible reason — is even remotely up to the task of providing the kind of detail Roberts and his coalition have suddenly decided is necessary. This pre-WWII vision of American government guys like Roberts continue to wave around a hundred years after it had any relevance at all is just childishly unworkable, and now my kids are probably going to have to do their own private-sector mercury testing or whatever while the guy puts up William McKinley posters in his bedroom. I’ve been super patient with this dude for 25 years but I think I’m done with him.
“complimentary chiropractic adjustment”
This is funny, informed, profane, and generally delightful.
Most organizations cannot ship the most basic applications imaginable with any consistency, and you’re out here saying that the best way to remain competitive is to roll out experimental technology that is an order of magnitude more sophisticated than anything else your I.T department runs, which you have no experience hiring for, when the organization has never used a GPU for anything other than junior engineers playing video games with their camera off during standup, and even if you do that all right there is a chance that the problem is simply unsolvable due to the characteristics of your data and business? This isn’t a recipe for disaster, it’s a cookbook for someone looking to prepare a twelve course fucking catastrophe.
I have no notes. There is going to be some absolutely incredible goalpost-moving over the next five years — unlike crypto, the vague, amorphous “AI” space will be able to declare victory in any number of ways even if the most visible applications never become practical or production-viable. “But Nate, AI is everywhere now!” is a thing you will definitely be able to say without lying in 2026, but also a thing you could have said in 2016 before the market discovered thirsty chatbots and mass-laundering of intellectual property.
AI’ll Believe It When I See It
As someone who’s been deep (trapped, often) in the Apple ecosystem since 1987, it’s very important to me that the company not… ruin everything, basically. Then again, one of the reasons I’m still here is that Apple 2.0 has been surprisingly good at maintaining the basic customer experience even as they became far, far too large to punk rock their way through things like “should we comply with the request of this lucrative market’s authoritarian regime”.
Being a big public company in 2024 does not usually allow you to prioritize “wisdom”. I get it.
As the Generative AI Hype Bubble Spectacular reaches it’s eye-rolling stage — the part where everyone knows how this movie is going to end except the investor class that’s too deep in it now to get out — Apple has apparently assessed the terrain and decided what it’s going to do with all of this stuff.
- Throw in commodity transformer text replacement into the operating system level (i.e., shorten this, make it “friendly”, etc., basically everyone’s AI-app from early 2023)
- Bake some image generation into a few low-stakes areas (chats, emojis, etc.)
- Give you a HILARIOUSLY walled off integration with ChatGPT where it literally asks you if you want to send this stuff to OpenAI every single time
- Use an on-device LLM to theoretically make Siri less stupid when it comes to listening
- Invest in a whole bunch of non-LLM stuff at the operating system level to allow apps to give Siri the necessary context to be less stupid when it comes to doing stuff
The first three are very real things that I don’t care about at all, and will probably never use except to troll my friends once or twice a year. The fourth one is a win unless it somehow makes things worse, but talking to Siri is already like talking to an old person who doesn’t speak English very well so that seems unlikely.
The fifth is such a massive, fundamental effort that has so little to do with the kinds of innovations OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. have put into the world, it might as well be an entirely different company/product/industry. Throwing all this under the roof of “AI” is so meaningless and self-deluding I don’t even know where to begin.
Anyways, the net impact on me as a consumer is… low. The obvious shareholder-appeasement cruft (ChatGPT integration, image generation) is pretty easy to ignore, and Apple’s been pretty good at not shoving stuff like this in my face as long as it’s not an opportunity to sell me one of their services. This isn’t one, and in fact, might even cost them cloud compute sometimes for no revenue, so I feel pretty good they’ll leave me alone. I am most certainly not upgrading any of the (alarmingly numerous) Apple hardware products in my home for any of this, though. I’ll do that at the same rate I always do, because generative nonsense aside, these products continue to marginally improve in generally positive ways.
Will this make other people upgrade more quickly? I kinda doubt it. Is that the intent? Honestly I kind of doubt that, too — Apple might be just another stupid, next-quarter-minded 2024 corporation like everyone else, but at the same time… they aren’t. They’re the king of the mountain, they print money, and their executives are long-term Apple people shareholders have never been very good at dethroning. So I think they threw those guys a bone (AI! ChatGPT!) in the most non-destructive way possible, and then went on to promote a vision of “intelligence” that is much more inline with what they want to do (the Siri as a real assistant model), but is probably still well outside of their ability to deliver.
Good Things – Bad Things = The Things
This is a pretty incredible look at (among other things) how their best player being such a massive defensive liability is just killing the Dallas Mavericks, whether casual fans are able to see it or not.
I’ve absolutely played on recreational teams with this problem, where our best scorer and most obviously talented guy was pretty clearly the reason we lost. And I’ve seen in it non-basketball scenarios as well, like incredible sales closers who put up big numbers but suck the life out the rest of the teams, hurt our brand, etc.
The real question for Luka is… is he willing to be different? Can he make himself valuable without the ball in his hands, or because he’s less talented in those areas, and excellence is harder to achieve as a result, is that just off the table and everyone else needs to somehow mitigate it?
Instagram: Now With More, Worse Ads
I’ve worked almost entirely in B2B (or B2B2C) software, so I’ve never had the now borderline cliche experience of working on a free application that starts off being exactly what people want, but is unprofitable, and then needs to be made incrementally worse — forever — first just to break even, and then eventually to grow profits ad infinitum.
At least when you just increase your prices, you can try to provide some additional value (as long as it costs less to provide than the size of the price increase) and wave your hands a lot and hope people accept the tradeoff. But with this, Instagram is just… worse. It’s not even debatable — the business makes tons and tons of money doing what it does, but if the product was worse it could make more. So they made it worse.
Writing user communications for this kind of thing seems like it would be absolutely soul-crushing.