In honor of Father’s Day, I wanted to add to the two quotes from my Dad’s obituary, “Seven days without chicken made one weak.” and “If you fail at raising your children, nothing else mattered.” with another saying he had.
Ain’t no hill for a stepper.
If you’d like to learn more about this, check out this part of the A Way with Words podcast, and apparently, it might have come from the musician John Gaar.
PowerPoint makes us stupid.
— Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander
Classic 2010 NYT We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint.
A typography savant on staff had spent a month designing link underlines (literally just lines) that were more visually pleasing than Chrome or Safari’s defaults. On Tuesdays, engineers stayed late at the office, fixing design imperfections over dinner. One of them began a 2,500-word post about Medium’s CSS code with a quote attributed to Lil Wayne: “I believe that to be the best, you have to smell like the best, dress like the best, act like the best. When you throw your trash in the garbage can, it has to be better than anybody else who ever threw their trash in the garbage can.”
From Harris Sockel’s essay What Happened to Medium, which I think is meant to be a dunk? But I think it’s awesome. Medium’s design and typography has always been really impeccable. I love when people obsess like this.
I’m sorry I couldn’t be there in person, but I was so excited to watch the Midjourney Medical launch from afar. This is a really big deal. David Holz, one of the most underrated pioneers in AI, has taken money from making cat pictures to build a full-body ultrasound scanner that can give you incredible visibility in 60 seconds.
You can re-watch the livestream here, which I recommend. You might remember David from Leap Motion, which I blogged back in 2012. It’s so cool to a small but mighty independent company innovate and apply learnings across seemingly disparate sectors.
I wish all my friends in jazz and the arts who are despondent about tech could meet David:
“We’re going to be a little confusing for the next six months as we announce all the things, but I’m hoping as they all are out there, they form a picture which I hope feels cohesive. Most of them are around creativity, but some of them, like this, are just around positive human futures that we actually want to be a part of. And I think this is an important thing for AI companies to do—for all humans to do.” — David Holz
If you understand imaging, you know the tradeoffs between X-ray, CT (computed tomography), MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), and ultrasound, and Midjourney’s approach doesn’t cover everything, but what’s incredible is the speed, amount of data, and using AI to process and get something useful out of it. Ultrasonics will be an incredibly exciting area over the next few years, first for imaging and later for intervention. I can imagine a future where you dip into one of these once a month just to keep an eye on things, not just to find bad stuff but to see the impact of exercise or dietary changes.
We’re fairly new to scanning healthy people, and I always advise friends getting their first whole-body MRI with Biograph or Prenuvo that it’s very common to hear something scary at first, only to find it’s benign. Also, I’ve now heard many examples of things that were caught and treated early, years before they might otherwise have been noticed.
Spelling bees have gotten a lot more intense. How many of these do you know?
torrone, enthymeme, iguape, Denebola, fais-dodo, cywyddau, pohutukawa, monadnock, émeute, nannofossil, tongkang, Natchitoches, flaith, semele, rusell, sawder, campernelle, Nicol, Zamenis, Tharparkar, tlachtli, madoqua, retiarius, balintawak, tessaraconter, taurokathapsia, rapakivi, uayeb, paroemia, melengket, teraglin, homelyn, chikungunya, bromocriptine (cashaw)
Check out the first 90 seconds of this video where Shrey Parikh gets 32 out of 34 correct to become the 2026 champion. That speed round is called a “spell-off,” and so many of the kids are getting all the words right that they use it to break ties. Lots of words to press. 🤠
It’s very cool to see Theo / t3.gg‘s open source arc.
Just in general, with people creating more software than ever, it’s so exciting to see an explosion of open source and a growing understanding of why working together on open source makes so much sense for the future we want to build.
Earlier tonight I won a TechFellow Award in the “Product Design and Marketing” category. I thought this would be a good opportunity to thank the two people who have had the biggest design influence over the past few years on WordPress (and me): Jane Wells and Matt “MT” Thomas.
Sorry for being quiet around here, I’ve been doing a ton of writing for other places. One went live today, Untitled as part of PHP Advent 2009. Since there are no comments on the site, I’ll accept them here.
Feeling Lucky? by Tara Hunt: “It turns out that there IS such thing as lucky people, but it’s not some sort of mystical fate playing its hand at work after all. Instead, ‘lucky people’ are those who are really observant and open to opportunities.”
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to explain this to you, a story about someone republishing Mark Pilgrim’s book and selling it on Amazon. Not directly about the GPL, but the principles are the same.
Curious if you guys have any favorite keyboard covers, I vaguely recall reading about one on Alex King’s site but can’t find it now. I’m looking for one to put over my laptop keys when I close the cover to avoid damaging the screen.
My friend Liz Welch recently finished up her new book with her siblings, The Kids are All Right. “Well, 1983 certainly wasn’t boring for the Welch family. Somehow, between their handsome father’s mysterious death, their glamorous soap opera star mother’s cancer diagnosis, and a phalanx of lawyers intent on bankruptcy proceedings, the four Welch siblings managed to handle each new heartbreaking misfortune together. But all that changed with the death of their mother. While nineteen year-old Amanda was legally on her own, the three younger siblings—Liz, 16; Dan, 14 and Diana, 8—were each dispersed to a different set of family friends.” I just ordered it on my Kindle.
I’ll be chatting with Liz Danzico at the School of Visual Arts in New York, New York when I’m there in November. I’ll be speaking in NYC three times that week: WordCamp New York, SVA, and at Web 2.0 Expo. Would love to see my Yankee peeps while out there. 🙂
I’m going to be attending TEDMED this year. I think we’re at a crucial juncture for health, where in my lifetime we’ll look back at our treatments today with the same wonder as we have when contemplating medicine before the understanding of germs. I have a feeling TEDMED will be the best spot to get a glimpse of this future.
Monolingual is a Open Source utility for Mac OS X that removes all the not-needed languages from your computer, freeing up hundreds of megabytes. My Mac mini is going “laggy” with the mouse jumping around instead of being smooth when I move the cursor around — any more tips for optimizations?
Amazon.com reviews from Jeffrey P. Bezos. Includes milk, cookies, cheese snacks, binoculars, and a Cory Doctorow novel. Unfortunately, the cookie items reviewed are no longer available so we’re not able to share in “snickerdoodles [that] were the best I’ve ever had.”
Techcrunch covers PollDaddy: PollDaddy Traffic Soars, Releases Ratings Widget With Possible Digg Competitor On The Horizon. You can read more about the new ratings widget on the PollDaddy blog.
Velocity and the Bottom Line. How performance touches everything on the web, and includes a quote from me about the importance if of speed to the user experience. You can check out my whole presentation, the Moral Philosophy of Performance, on Blip.
The Capitalist Manifesto: Greed Is Good (To a Point). A fair summary view of financial goings-on, with a bit of preaching at the end.
GigaOM Pro is a new subscription research site from my friends on the GigaOM crew. It’s also the first major media site I know about powered by BuddyPress and it’ll be interesting to see how the social features influence the sites evolution. Here’s Mark Jaquith’s post about building it.