mattkevan

What open model subscription services are there that’s better. Genuinely interested in knowing.

I thought $80 of deepseek usage for $10 was a pretty good deal, but I’d be delighted to hear of better ones.

Claude 5 hitting developers and product managers like 4o hit people who thought ChatGPT was their boyfriend or they were inventing a new branch of science.

It's so obvious on projects like this that everything's generated.

"One line. A worktree, a box, an agent." Fuck does that mean?

Have some pride and actually write the text yourself. Tell my why it's interesting. What problems are you trying to solve?

If you can't be bothered to write it, why should I be bothered to read it.

I would very much like one of those, and have done for years. Like the old PowerBook Duos, where you slotted the laptop into a docking station for extra ports, graphics etc.

Maybe they could call it an iPhone Duo. Oh wait…

Another anecdote: Gemini is the only model that’s flat out lied to me, then accused me of lying when I provided evidence that it was wrong.

Many other models get things wrong, but Gemini is the only one to go on the defensive.

Yeah I’ve done that, and added a list of banned words and phrases to AGENTS. It regularly forgets and lands load-bearing seams worth my eye.

I hate Opus 5’s writing style. It’s exhausting. Really hoping there’s a release that fixes it soon as I can feel my sanity slipping away as I try and parse what the hell it’s trying to say.

Maybe if employers offered better working conditions and salaries people wouldn’t feel the need to go on strike?

From what I remember, they bought Danger which had a popular product that worked, but some VP made them rewrite all their software on a Microsoft stack. This took years and didn’t work very well. By the time they were finally released they were woefully outdated and only on the market for a few weeks before being killed.

It’s easy to forget what a difference multitouch capacitive touchscreens made to mobile devices. As far as I’m aware, the iPhone was the first device to use it at scale. Apple also spent years designing a new interaction paradigm for it, taking multitouch from cool tech demo (Fingerworks) to the mainstream.

Microsoft had Windows Mobile and WinCE for years before iOS, but typically they got the UI wrong and tried to jam a desktop interface on a mobile OS (a few years later they overcompensated and jammed a tablet interface on a desktop OS). By the time the iPhone was out it was too late to rework Mobile into a multitouch OS.

Famously, the BlackBerry guys thought it was impossible to put a full desktop os on a phone, and that Apple must have faked the initial demo. Again, by the time they could respond by ditching their existing software and buying QNX it was too late for them too.

Android only survived because it was a new OS and the team immediately ditched their Blackberry clone UI and built an iOS clone instead. Even then it took until at least v5 before it was as smooth as iOS, and the tablet story is still poor.

Ha yeah you're right. It wasn't a proper homepage if it didn't have an animated traffic cone 'Under construction' gif.

It's really annoying. I've had to write a CLAUDE.md file that specifically bans particular phrases and tries to keep narrative out of comments. Also the I have ADHD skill [1] helps to force Opus to get to the point.

It's also the case when using Claude Design - it loves to fill the UI with little labels that describe how everything works. I think it's been trained on both UI microcopy and functional annotations and can't tell the difference. It's extremely obvious when a website has been one-shotted with Claude. I like the Oh My Pi harness, but the site's insufferable [2]. Reasonix is another one - interesting app, but the UI is awful due to the amount of unnecessary crap.

[1] https://github.com/ayghri/i-have-adhd

[2] https://omp.sh

[3] https://reasonix.io

I’m old and it’s definitely not the old web. I consider the old web to be when PNGs were sliced with Fireworks and laid out in tables.

2009-2014 is Web 2.0, back when people still thought social media was a good idea.

Ha, openlibrary and google books for now. And yes, the covers are not great. Currently just pleased to get it working, will add better providers later.

I’m making Stacks, an open source ebook manager and server, as a lightweight alternative to Calibre.

Written in Swift, it consists of a SwiftUI browser and a Mac/Linux server and CLI. Shares are automatically discovered via Bonjour/avahi and also published as OPDS feeds.

It can import Calibre libraries and has basic support for managing books on Kindles, but I’ve only tested it with a MTP Paperwhite as that’s all I’ve got.

https://github.com/MattKevan/Stacks

I had that same model, except I fitted the chips myself. The first time I’d really ever looked inside a computer and very exciting for me age 11. The old Arthur ROMs were a prize possession for quite some time afterwards.

I reckon the same dipshits responsible for Microsoft’s product naming in the early 2000s all moved on to Google to wreak the same havoc there.

I once had a model insist that I was a web designer living in Brighton who ran an agency called 'Guerilla Futures' and was the author of a series of UX design for babies books.

Obviously it was a hallucination, but a very detailed and consistent one. Especially as if things had gone slightly differently there's a good chance I could have ended up in Brighton. Plus it's a pretty good name and the books are a fun idea too. Was this my Sliding Doors moment?

• A social ebook reading app where you can create reading groups and have realtime discussions.

• A visual moodboard and notes app that uses local models to link and surface content, a bit like an AI powered Memex.

• A new UI design tool for Mac/iOS with deep support for design systems and AI agents.

• A CMS and static site generator that runs entirely in the browser. Download the site as a zip or publish directly to GitHub/Netlify.

https://github.com/sparktype-project/sparktype

Where are we on the embrace/extend/extinguish curve right about now?

What an arsehole.

Multi-billionaire says to work harder to make him richer faster. The sooner this attitude is recognised as a sickness the better.

Ah design by committee, that well known route to design excellence!

Obltrtr

That’s an insane take.

Maybe if they're posted again and again, they're real pain points and should be addressed?

Photoshop's interface is getting worse [1] and everyone hates Adobe, so there's a great opportunity for a tool like GIMP to step up and become the default alternative. It's got a lot of features, it's been around for a long time and has reasonable name recognition (for better or worse).

However, unless they do a Blender and make a sustained effort to improve the UI, understand what people want and how it fits into professional workflows, it's never going to happen.

The attitude seems to be: If you don't like it, fuck you. I think they're genuinely happy with how things are. The inscrutable UI and off-putting name are features not bugs, keeping away the sort of people they don't want.

[1] https://unsung.aresluna.org/photoshops-challenges-with-focus...

The company absolutely failed the test. If they're not using industry standard tools then it's a sign they don't take the role seriously. That would be a huge red flag to me.

It's like applying to be developer and being told to use Microsoft FrontPage. It's doable, but raises serious questions about the professionalism of the organisation.

I’m building a UI design app similar to Figma or Sketch, but with a few differences:

1. Responsive artboards and flex-like layout engine

2. Deep support for design tokens

3. HTML/CSS previews and export

4. Multiplayer AI and human collaboration. Agents can connect to documents and collaborate like any other user.

Built in Swift and cross platform Mac, iPad and iPhone.

I’m designing and building the UI and implementing the underlying features with Codex. So far it’s going surprisingly well.

Pipedream was an odd bit of software, but the article is a bad take on RiscOS itself.

It was way ahead of Windows at the time and even Mac OS didn’t really catch up until System 8.

I was astonished when going to friends’ houses at how backward and clunky their IBM compatibles with 5” drives seemed in comparison.

From an interface side, what’s interesting (and alluded to in the article) is how file-focused RiscOS is. There wasn’t the concept of an in-app file picker. If you wanted to open a file, you navigated to its location in the file system. To save, you dragged the icon to the folder you wanted to put it.

Programs being folders was useful for mischief. Most people never noticed the ! in the filename, so I’d amuse myself by turning classmates’ document folders into applications that would run a script when clicked. I’d fire scary error messages, load full-screen images or mess with the system settings.