As the family IT guy its so disappointing how bad of an experience technology is for non-technical people.
I had the distinct pleasure of building educational software for kids full time for a summer while in college (s/o to @WilliamsonMark), and I remember they did weekly/biweekly user testing where a group of toddlers would come in and we'd record them using the software in various states and then adjust accordingly.
Every single session was SHOCKINGLY illuminating. Like, I expected after a number of these I'd empathize more and build better toddler software one-shot right? Hell fucking no. Every user study was so educational. I learned I simply can't enter the mind of a toddler.
Do TV companies, Netflix/Roku/etc. do user studies with elderly people? Do they realize how dogshit and impossible to navigate their interfaces are?
Asking some elderly family members to "sign up and schedule an Uber to pick you up for the airport" is like mission impossible. I thought they were exaggerating, then I tried the experience and holy shit man. Try cold finding, installing, signing up, and scheduling an Uber on a 5 year old iPhone with max font size. Its insane.
@JoyceCarolOates My T***p-voting and Fox News watching family always seems in the dark about what T***p and the GOP are doing, but they’re always loaded up with outrage over the left that’s manufactured for their consumption
Search is full of ads and wrong answers. Every other email is an ad. Prime Video charges you and shows ads. Paramount? Ads. Peacock? YouTube? Hulu? Ads followed by more ads. Netflix full of ads. Meta and X, every other thing is an ad. Pinterest is nothing but ads. AI is in everything. AI finishes sentences incorrectly and won’t stop. AI reads your email and search history to target you with more ads. Every time you open an app or visit a site there’s an update making it worse. In a hurry? First, click here to agree to terms you don’t have time to read and must accept. You need an account to do that. Change your temporary password. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email and enter that code. Now use a passkey. Your password is too simple to remember. Change it. No, not like that. Now log on. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email for a code… Welcome back! We’ve updated our terms of service and privacy policy (you have none). Subscribe to the site. Subscribe to Netflix. Subscribe to toilet paper. Subscribe to these groceries. Pay a membership fee for the right to subscribe then tip your driver who delivers the subscriptions your membership lets you subscribe to. Time to work? We’ve got to update your laptop and will slow down everything you do until you agree to update. But first, click here to agree. Update installed — your laptop’s broken now. It doesn’t matter, since your boss just replaced you with AI. Go to your phone to complain on social media. Wait, your phone needs an update so we can add more AI. Click here. Oh sorry, your phone can’t handle this update. Now it’s useless. Go get the newest phone. Here’s a text from a friend, an email, a voice mail they left three days ago but you didn’t see until now because of sync problems with the cloud. It’s their GoFundMe. Their MLM. Their Patreon. Never mind, you didn’t respond to their text within 9 minutes and now you’re no longer friends. They blocked you. Make new friends. Download this app to find people in your area. In your neighborhood. On your street. Two doors down from you. Do you know this person yet, we think you’d get along. You need an account to use this app. That username is taken. Enter a password. Not that one, you used it on another site. You need to be connected to WiFi to download the app. Allow the app to connect to other devices on your network. Allow the app to access your contacts, know your precise location, store your credit card details. Oops, sorry, we got hacked now all that info is available on the web. There’s a class action suit. You can join. It’ll take a decade to get your $3.73 share of the ten billion settlement. We’ll send it via PayPal or deposit it to your bank, just tell us those details. Oh no, another hack. That info is circulating now, too. Here’s a spam call, a spam email, a spam text. Why are you angry? Why are you talking about getting rid of your phone? Why don’t you like AI, it lets us make all of this easier? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? This is progress. You’ll be left behind. Do you want to be left behind? Do you???
X is filled with comments mentioning the negative returns of AI and AI bubble. While that may be the case for most "out of context" topics, the difference AI is making is clear across industries.
Here's latest stats for asset management companies:
Wall Street’s newest hires don’t have MBAs.
They’re Grok, Claude, and GPT. And @auquan_'s agents.
Great talking to Daniel Singer on who can encode real institutional judgment into AI built for finance.
Finance is standardizing on a two layer model.
Foundation models that can read, reason, and operate across tools, and a vertical layer where firms hard wire their underwriting logic, risk culture, and controls.
In high stakes workflows like credit, raw model intelligence breaks quickly.
What works are tightly constrained agents embedded in audited, repeatable workflows. Systems that behave like experienced associates following the firm’s playbooks, not generic AI assistants.
This shift moves the advantage from hiring more analysts to turning judgment into infrastructure, where scale comes from software rather than headcount.
Worth a read if you are thinking seriously about AI in finance: https://t.co/53gUwiYDfi
For five years, I have been covering what is unquestionably the biggest criminal justice scandal in American history.
Today it ended when the most corrupt cop in history took his life.
But it's not over.
A thread.