Caught in Amber
The future UX ⓧ Collapsing 'possible' v. 'likely' ⓧ NextGen Vibe Coding
👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture. Three to read and three to listen to—no fluff, just stuff ⚡
We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely —E.O. Wilson
📚 Reading
Our UI is being replaced behind your back:
The work of “design” is shifting from controlling what the user sees to predicting what they’ll need next. And yet most designers are still clinging to static inputs and tidy grids. They’re trying to map an unpredictable conversation into a known system. That’s not design anymore. That’s denial. The future UX is not what you click. It’s what the system already knows. What it infers. What it remembers about your last 10 interactions and uses to shorten the next one.
Hiten Shah—LinkedIn | 1 minute
Everything Not Forbidden Is Compulsory:
The constraints that held possible and likely together are collapsing … We no longer live in an industrial, linear economy constrained by physical space and time. Our nonlinear economy is dominated by software and stories and biological formulas that spread across elaborate networks with limited friction. This is not just a world of new winners or new knowledge, but a world that redefines what it means to know and what it means to win.
Dror Poleg | 5 minutes
Vibe coding MenuGen:
I'm left with an equal mix of amazement (it's actually possible and much easier/faster than what was possible before!) and a bit of frustration of what could be. Part of the pain of course is that none of this infrastructure was really designed to be used like this. The intended target audience are teams of professional web developers living in a pre-LLM world. Not vibe coding solo devs prototyping apps.
Andrej Karpathy | 13 minutes
🎧 Listening
We are missing the real AI misalignment risk:
We have smarter and smarter engines. Our drivetrains are not keeping up. At the moment, our drivetrains are rationally geared toward the economic work that makes sense for our world, which doesn't require as much intelligence a lot of the time. We're scaling the intelligence past what we typically need for most use cases … The challenge is the intelligence by itself, the smarter engine by itself, does not solve some of the problems that would enable job replacement.
Nate B Jones—AI News & Strategy Daily | 10 minutes
AI's Uneven Impact:
There is a high chance for a political movement to arrive, which tries to freeze a load of human jobs in bureaucratic amber as a way to deal with the political issues posed by this incredibly powerful technology and how fast the changes are going to come from … If we as the companies building this stuff and our customers don't generate enough examples of what like good transitions look like…the higher chance there'll be a desire to step in and protect workers in different domains…
Jack Clark—Conversations with Tyler | 63 minutes
Reflecting on 100 episodes of Lancefield on the Line:
How do we bring the human dimension alive? Because ultimately, strategy is about people making smarter choices, better choices, more coherent choices to help them fulfil an ambition that's important to them, to move them from the current to the future, taking account where relevant of the past … It's not a static process. It's not a series of PowerPoint presentations. It's a way of seeing the world.
David Lancefield | 72 minutes
💎 Timeless
1️⃣ year ago—We Need To Rewild The Internet
2️⃣ years ago—Augmented Media
3️⃣ years ago—How to Validate Your Startup Idea