Delay fish
Marlin from Finding Nemo:
I just can't afford any more delays and you're one of those fish that cause delays. And sometimes it's a good thing. There's a whole group of fish. They're delay fish.
I think about this when I'm trying to get something done and not making progress. What is slowing everything down, making simple tasks more complicated than they need to be? Or is it my fault, overthinking something that should be simple?
Not everyone has the same priorities. That doesn’t mean everyone else is necessary wrong, but they don’t have the same urgency. Meetings might have people with good intentions. Emails might have good counter-points to consider. But they are delay fish, getting in the way of accomplishing anything.
After the OpenAI fallout this weekend, I’m pretty confident that Satya Nadella gets this. Friday afternoon he was probably looking forward to the weekend without a clue of the crisis unfolding at OpenAI. Then by Sunday night he had announced that Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and other folks from OpenAI were joining Microsoft to lead a new AI research team, while preserving Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI. Lemons to lemonade.
You can be sure there were meetings in those 48 hours. I bet there were delay fish, urging for a pause, time to reflect on what Microsoft should do. There was chaos and so also a moment to act and Satya took it.
Sometimes you need Dory. You need to be innocent, joyful, thoughtful, creative, brainstorming, slowing down. But sometimes you just need to get shit done and move on.
Uptown in Dallas over the weekend, coffee and work at Foxtrot as the trolly goes by in the background.
Pretty big deal that Spotify didn't have to pay Google the usual in-app purchase fees. The inconsistencies across developers is just as unsustainable as the high 15% or 30% cut. As I've been saying forever, the ultimate solution is side-loading and external payments. Getting closer to that future.
Most companies would delay any product changes if they were in the middle of leadership chaos. Rolling out ChatGPT Voice to everyone this week says a lot about their confidence. Who is even CEO? Who cares, let’s ship it.
Doing a little more tinkering with Stimulus. @vincent and I have talked about refactoring more of my clunky, old-school JavaScript to use Stimulus. It would at least provide a nice structure for all the code without feeling too abstracted and bloated.
Happy to keep growing the list of formats that Micro.blog can import to your blog. As of today: Twitter, WordPress, Medium, Tumblr, Ghost, Markdown, Substack, Goodreads, and Write.as. Plus cross-posting out of Micro.blog: Medium, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Flickr, Bluesky, Nostr, and Pixelfed.
We just posted a new Core Intuition all about the chaos at OpenAI over the last several days, including the resolution with Sam Altman returning as CEO. The full episode is all on this, the relationship with Microsoft, the odd company structure of OpenAI, and the impact of AI on... well, everything.
Happy Thanksgiving! 🦃 I finished Mario Wonder. Great game, I’ve been playing a couple levels every day since its release. Missed a few things that I can still go back to, or play different characters. 🕹️
The ads on TV for Humane’s pin are pretty effective. I don’t expect much success for the first version of the pin, but I do think they’re on to something if they can keep iterating. Best comparison is the Newton — a little ahead of its time.
Super Mario Wonder is excellent on replay. I'm slowly finding all the levels I missed. Some of the levels are actually kind of difficult, which I love, and seems rare since the NES and SNES days. 🍄
Cool driving by REI on Black Friday and seeing the store closed. Kudos for thinking of employees and customers before profit. On the other hand, we participated in the shopping craziness by getting a Roomba. Figured the vacuum robot tech must be well along by now. Mixed results in the first run.
Dealing with fallout from another server failure. We have pretty good redundancy most places, except ironically some of the most stable parts that always felt low on the list to prioritize because they never failed... until they did. Picking up the pieces, improving a few things for later.
We talk about domain names as your web identity, how it's more permanent and meaningful when you're microblogging on your own site instead of someone else's domain. Some social network is down? Shrug. Your web site is down? That feels personal. We've had good uptime but it's gotta be even better.
