Wrote a thousand words on taste, but think I can get it down to five: “Taste is measuring without counting.”

5 min from last week’s Shopify Townhall that captures the crazy momentum of Generative Design at Shopify. ① you’ve never been more empowered as a designer to make your ideas real ② the workflows involves multiple tools, stitched together, to create new experiences ③ increasingly designers are building out their own tools to accelerate these new workflows 🚀 @katarinabatina @kazdenc @lukedupont @ryancreatescopy

In the 1950s, Curt Richter ran a cruel experiment: he dropped rats into deep jars of water. Left alone, they drowned within minutes. But if he pulled them out just before they gave up, dried them, let them rest, then dropped them back in- they swam for hours. Up to 60. Why? Because they'd been saved once. They had hope it could happen again. That experience alone changed their will to survive. Hope wasn’t just an emotion- it was the difference between life or death. Severe and very severe ME/CFS patients are not rats, but they too are dropped into a condition they can't escape. Isolated, disbelieved, untreated, many begin to sink when no one comes. But hope, even abstract hope, keeps people swimming. A message, a study, an advocate- these can be enough to remind someone rescue is possible. Concrete hope ("this treatment will save me") can backfire if it fails. But abstract hope ("someone might help someday") is resilient. Be the reason someone holds on.

Appetite of a cormorant

if it’s not already obvious: the most valuable items in the future will be the old and beautiful all of text will become ai slop, all of art will become ai slop or a reaction to ai slop. the vast majority of genuine human beauty that will exist has already been created.

Every website looks the same now. AI slop. Soulless. @cyantist wanted something real. She said: "Make the web fun again." So we built her a custom app, not a template. Now visitors stay and play. The future isn’t easy websites. It’s better ones. cyanbanister.com/

statistically no. people who write their websites in pure html css are busy reading classic literature, learning to windsurf, and hiking with their families, since they don't have to upgrade their build stack from version 14.5.75 to 15.1.200 every three weeks