Bonfire night and sustainability

In case you’re not in the UK, tonight is bonfire night.

Remember, Remember, the fifth of November!

Since a young age it’s been one of my favourite days on the calendar. From making the “Millennium Man” with my mum, dad, and sister as a guy for the school bonfire night, to the torchlight procession through our local town, it’s full of happy memories.

And to anyone not accustomed to these traditions they would consider the whole thing completely and utterly mad.

As I’ve grown up and become increasingly aware of the impact we humans have on the planet we are so fortunate to call home, I’ve found myself confronted with a little internal conflict.

Is it ok to enjoy bonfire night, and open fires in general, if you care about the planet?

While I haven’t done the research myself I am completely certain that any climate scientist would tell you burning stuff is not a good thing for the environment.

But for me there’s a deeper question: how can we as humans feel more connected to nature? I would argue one of the biggest problems we face is a collective lack of appreciation for the natural world.

Fire, for me, is a hypnotic connection with our natural world. It beats any screen or Instagram post hands down.

So, yes, having a bonfire might on paper be a way to emit carbon into the atmosphere.

But on some level, bonfire night seems like a great way to remind us to reconnect with nature and the rituals that our species has done for a million years.

Enjoy the evening!

Selling advice from Ryan Serhant

I have a confession to make: I love a cheesy Netflix show every now and then.

Owning Manhattan fulfils my criteria perfectly: set in New York, with glitz and glamour, a peek into multi-million-dollar penthouses, and — perhaps a surprise for some — stellar sales advice.

So I was surprised when I saw Ryan Serhant, star of the show, on The Knowledge Project podcast. The same podcast inspired me recently when Shane interviewed Tobi, the founder of Shopify. This is like an episode of Owning Manhattan with all of the sales wisdom and none of the cringe office drama filler.

I love watching videos like this. On many levels Ryan exhibits very different traits to me — he's extremely confident, seemingly relentless with his sales efforts, and doesn't take no for an answer.

I'm a big believer in the power of a growth mindset, and people's ability to evolve and adapt. And without exposure to extremes, it can be easy to settle and become convinced that one's current state is the limit of your potential. But watching people like Ryan can give you a hit of inspiration, motivation, and drive.

It's an approach I need to remind myself of. Sometimes you have days where you are low and feeling down. And when it comes to selling, it can be very easy to find yourself in that state after a rejection. A quick watch of an episode like this can be all you need to get back into it and fire on all cylinders again.

A few tidbits I enjoyed from Ryan:

  • Follow up relentlessly. Most people give up far too early and lose sales for this reason alone.
  • Follow through on your commitments and promises.
  • Think about your day in minutes. Treat those minutes as the most valuable currency in the world and spend them wisely. A 30 minute meeting can often be a 15-minute meeting if you're being honest with yourself.
  • Building relationships from a cold start can be easier if you remember the two Cs: find something in Common, and give the person a Compliment.
  • In full Serhant Netflix cheese style, you can't go too wrong if you spend most of your working day "finding business, keeping business, and doing business".
  • And finally perhaps the most pertinent to anyone selling a product or service they have proudly made:
Don't sell the bed, sell the dream.

This is perhaps the most cliché-filled piece I've written in a while, but Ryan's enthusiasm and energy really worked on me.

I hope you enjoy the show!

Is writing the least impressive skill of AI?

I’ve found myself using AI less and less for writing. It struck me that written prose is simultaneously the most used and the least impressive application of AI today.

For me, writing is a way to process and develop my thoughts. The very purpose of writing is to clarify my thoughts in the same way that the purpose of going to the gym is to strengthen my muscles and encourage me to exercise.

Aside from that, I feel dishonest and almost ashamed to expect a reader to read anything with my name on it that was not written or edited by me.

No one will notice

We are unfortunately swamped with AI slop on all channels and in all platforms, including the physical world. Cafe menus, charity posters, and naff product packaging are not immune to the AI slop disease.

I’m not an AI hater, though. AI has enabled me to create more and better software than I would have dreamt possible just a few years ago.

I’ve benefited from countless new features, products, and services that simply would not exist without AI and agentic coding.

And as much as it kills me to admit it, AI has even started to get pretty good at some design tasks like icon creation and user interfaces.

There are also huge steps forward in voice (both text-to-speech and dictation), as well as video creation and editing.

Writing: where it all started

However, this whole AI era started with OpenAI launching ChatGPT. An incredible chat experience that purely operates with text.

So why is it that now, with the ability to create entire apps, movies, and images, written text is still so obviously… inhuman? Surely written prose should be better than anything by now, given its had the longest to develop.

No matter how hard I try, no matter how much context I give it, no matter which model I use, I cannot get AI to create an article or a post that I would want to actually read. I always need to make changes.

The whiff of AI

The more you use any of these tools the more you can so easily spot AI usage.

Let’s leave the em dash out of it. I have always used and loved the em dash so I refuse to drop it. Regardless of whether that makes the reader think I’ve prompted my way to everything I write.

But the written tells that really stand out to me: the “it’s not this, it’s that”, the word “quietly”, and the oddly specific mention of a day and time in the week “this feature is what saves you when you forget to take the dog out on a Thursday morning”.

Aside from those tells though, it’s the sense of dishonesty, and lack of authenticity, and lack of human judgement.

It’s the hope, or even assumption, that the reader won’t notice and won’t care.

It just stinks

We'll decide later

You can’t build on top of “we’ll decide later” but you can build on top of “done”.

— Jason Fried of 37Signals.

I had this quote swirling around in my brain today. I love the writing of Jason Fried — since Getting Real back in 2006, he's inspired me to build software and build online businesses.

This relates in many ways to my recent piece on how decisions tend to be made by one person, and perhaps flies in the face of yesterday's piece on how it's perhaps too easy to build these days.

The truth is, when building anything, decision making is hard. You rarely have all the information you want, and making some decisions too early can set you off down the wrong path.

However, I believe strongly that there is an art to building good products. It is not a science, even though an appreciation of science can help. And making decisions on a product — especially one built by a small team with hundreds or thousands of customers — is an extremely non-scientific endeavour.

The allure of deciding later is a strong one — it feels more comfortable, it kicks the problem away for today, and it has the appearance of keeping your options open and giving you space to think.

But deciding later of course has a cost.

It's like when you buy a piece of flat-pack furniture from IKEA: there are some items where you don't want to tighten all of the screens and all of the bolts immediately, because some of them may need a little shuffling. And the whole piece benefits from a little flexibility while you're assembling it.

But at some point, when you're nearing completion, you want to tighten all the bolts, and get the cupboard as robust as possible. Nobody wants a cupboard with half-turned bolts and screws — it'll fall apart and quickly become useless.

Are you skirting around some loose bolts and screws in your product? Isn't it time to tighten them up? If not, what information or decision are you waiting for, and how can you get that sooner?

Granola voice typing

I’ve been a fan of Granola for some time. It’s an AI meeting transcription tool that truly reaches the all-too-rare bar of “it just works”.

On Friday I saw they introduced a new feature, Voice Typing, so I had to give it a spin.

Granola has earned its place as one of the best (I’d argue the best) AI meeting note-takers. It sits in the background on your own device rather than sitting as an awkward robot attendee on your calls. It doesn’t make a fuss. And the notes it produces are brilliantly succinct and accurate.

Granola does meetings really well. So I was naturally curious to see them step into an adjacent area: how much of their expertise in meeting transcription would carry across?

What’s in a name?

To begin with, even the name of the feature is good. Voice typing. It’s not transcription, it’s not “speech-to-text”, it’s typing, with your voice.

You could argue those are all the same, but from my usage over the last few days, I’d argue they’re not.

Fast, accurate, free. Pick three?

Most of these services tend to fall into one of these buckets:

  • They’re fast and free, they work on device (relying on an Apple Silicon Mac), and they’re quite inaccurate.
  • They’re premium, with a cloud backend and a larger model to improve accuracy, and ultimately quite slow.
  • They’re a hybrid that is more accurate but still slow.

I’ve used the Mac’s built-in dictation. I’ve used Whisprflow, and I’ve dabbled with Fluidvoice (an open source option).

“Slow” is relative, as all of these services claim to be faster than actual typing. But I am yet to use a speech-to-text transcription service that feels, ultimately, as efficient as typing. Because while the response back may be fast, the errors force me to re-read and edit almost every sentence.

Granola’s voice typing is really fast and it seems to be extraordinarily accurate. And when it does make an error, the user experience for learning corrections you make is so intuitive and slick that it’s almost fun to catch one.

Exciting while it lasts

There’s an argument that all of these tools sit in a category that isn’t long for this world. That before-too-long all of this will be Sherlocked and done entirely on-device and it‘ll be an OS-level feature.

That day may come, but for now it’s a rapidly evolving playful battleground. And for me, Granola just stole the playful productivity crown.

Go try them out

While I didn’t write this as an ad (more as a piece of admiration) I do have a referral link. If you sign up here you can use Granola for free, and you’ll get your first month of premium for free.

Heck, if you’re worried I’m

Is it too easy to build?

I was struck using Claude recently to ideate on a concept that it was so keen to build me something I had to resist.

Spending a lifetime building software I've found that building has gone from being one of the hardest parts to one of the easiest.

I'm immensely excited about the state of software development — for small teams and individuals, we can do more than ever.

But while it has become so much easier to build, it doesn't mean that everything that can be built should be built.

In a healthy team, when building was harder, more time consuming, and more expensive, it forced a level of thought and rigour on the decision and planning of every feature and certainly every product.

Now, though, building is trivial, fast, and almost free. So almost anything can be built almost instantly.

That's not always a good thing!

My recent discussion with Claude last week involved ideating on various methods to help me with managing our pipeline of prospects and customers for EcoSend. The responses from Claude were very helpful — with useful insights on industry-standard approaches for following up, pipeline stages, and overall pipeline management.

But Claude was all-too-keen to jump straight into building me a whole system for managing everything. A new dashboard, a new data store, a new structure, a new set of views.

Most of my time working with other people in a team has taught me that simplicity is extraordinarily difficult to maintain. And that you're continuously fighting tool fatigue. More more more is always the answer. Until you're drowning in tools and systems that no one can fully make sense of.

Every tool requires learning. Every tool needs to connect to another. Every tool must be maintained. Every tool might expose a new security threat. And in a team, you just need to multiply all of these issues by the number of people you work with.

For many individuals, the new power to build dashboards, websites, and apps is incredibly exciting and empowering.

But for anyone building a team, and in many cases, for the individual too, there is a hidden cost to every new system and tool. And that cost can be far more than the monthly price tag on the plans page.

So next time Claude is pushing you to build a new tool or system, it might be worth asking first: do I need a new tool? Or do I just need to sit and think?

I'd be willing to bet the latter might not hurt, regardless of the ultimate answer.

Friday finds #5 — tools and links for your (spooky) weekend

Last week, I shared a selection of my favourite iPhone Duo apps. This week, we have a few more and some other treats. No tricks.

Chromagraph Camera

A camera app for the iPhone, by filmmaker Rian Johnson (Knives Out, Glass Onion, and Star Wars: The Last Jedi).

According to MacRumours, the app has exploded in popularity just a day after it launched, and:

Chromagraph shoots RAW photos and processes them using techniques Yedlin developed for his films, giving pictures a distinctive treatment of colour, contrast, and grain. It also adds halation, a soft glow around bright areas. Users can adjust the look with controls for colour, tone, and texture.

The app is not free. It's actually charged up front. I must say it's quite refreshing to see a paid app rise to such popularity.

Get Chromograph on the App Store

Fineliner

Marco Arment of Overcast fame released a new app that makes it easy to draw on your iPhone. It's fun and quirky and even allows you to draw and create your own interface for the app itself. Especially fun and useful if you have an iPhone Duo as it supports the Apple Pencil.

Get Fineliner on the App Store

Pool App

I came across Pool which is an interesting concept for an app — it takes your iOS screenshots and proposes to make them easy to find and use later, pulling out information like which app they're from, and other helpful metadata. I like the idea, and I went as far as to install it, but the app doesn't explicitly say what it will do after giving it full unfettered access to your photo library, so I held off giving it a full test.

Learn more about Pool

Sundrop

Speaking of apps built on top of your camera roll... If you like the "Memories" feature of the Photos app on iOS (where you get heart wrenchingly beautiful reminders from past holidays and other moments with your loved ones) then Sundrop is that on steroids. It does some fun stuff like showing you snaps of your children as they grow up. It appears to be a delightfully enjoyable app for anyone with a young family.

Learn more about Sundrop

Tiny Computers

Possibly the best app and enough justification alone to spend $2,000 on an iPhone Duo. It's a library of vintage laptops (and not just Apple ones at that) you can use in miniature on your iPhone Duo. I'll take the iBook G3 please.

Get Tiny Computers on the App Store

So there we have it. Five fun apps, no tricks, all treats. Hope you like these, and if you see any apps I should try, please let me know!

Happy Halloween, have fun being spooky!

Boredom breeds creativity

When I look at the times I’m most creative, I’ve noticed they often follow a moment of boredom.

The walk home from the train when I’ve left my AirPods behind.

The short window in bed before I fall asleep where I don’t have any screens.

The morning walk with the dog and nothing and no one else.

I’ve taken this to extremes before. A year or two ago I did a weekend retreat where phones and all devices were banned. I wanted to write a book after the first day.

And I think back to my childhood and school days where phones were not as prevalent as they are today. I would draw hundreds of pictures in a week.

It’s so hard to be creative when you have a screen in your face — when you have an endless vortex of the world’s information steaming into your eyes. Not just your phone, but your iPad, your computer, and your TV. And heck, even the radio.

Devices have a place for making our ideas come to life. And can transforming quaint ideas into unimaginable realities.

But rarely do ideas start with a screen.

If anything, for me, the best ideas tend to start when I’m as far away as possible from one.

Next time you're bored, resist the temptation to turn to your nearest screen.

Creativity awaits.

Buy the why

There's a famous TED talk (and book) by Simon Sinek that was all the rage in the early 2010s.

Sinek's whole message was:

People don't buy what you do they buy why you do it.

Here's the ~20 minute talk if you want to watch it — it's worth the time to get a sense of what Sinek means and to see some of his examples:

Whose why

I have always thought Sinek is a good speaker, and a tremendous writer.

But while this message has something compelling about it, it has always sat a little uncomfortably for me.

For a while, I wondered if the issue was me. Surely I can't think Simon Sinek — New York Times best-selling author and world-renowned expert on such matters — could be wrong?!

But the issue with this concept, for me, has always been around the “why”.

Consumers absolutely consider “why” when making a buying decision. But from everything I've seen, people rarely give a damn about why you do something.

People buy because of why they want something.

It's the nuance of just a word, but I believe it changes everything.

TiVo as an example

Sinek seems to reinforce my point here. In the talk he uses TiVo as an example of a business that didn't figure their "why" out and failed in the market, despite having a great product.

In the talk he's suggesting people would have bought TiVo in droves if they understood why they would want it. Not because of some glorious raison d'être of TiVo itself.

First-hand experience of the nuance

We find this ourselves with EcoSend. We have a clearer answer to "why we do what we do" than we've ever had for our work on GoSquared, or other projects. While this is compelling to some, it pales in comparison to being explicitly clear on answering "why does the customer need this?".

Answering that is just categorically more important, and without it, you're stuffed. And I've got the battle scars to show for that...

Yes, this applies to Apple

Today, Apple released the new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display. It's a ridiculously long and ugly name if you ask me, but the two biggest new features are that it has a touch screen and a glowing Apple logo (again!) on the back. Lovely!

The missing piece for me, from today's MacBook Pro announcement, and for the HomeView announcement, and to a lesser extent the iPhone Duo announcement, is the clarity of the why.

Why do I need this product? Why do I need a touch screen on my laptop? It may not be for me, but why does anyone? And is it worthy of the trade-offs? Does it actually make sense? Why does this product exist?

I don't mean to hate on the new MacBook Pro. Far from it. It just seems that many businesses

If you get the eyes right, nothing else matters

It's a busy time in Apple land. At certain times of the year, not a lot happens. Right now, it's hard to keep up.

There are new products hitting us on a seemingly daily basis like the iPhone Duo, HomeView, and the imminent first-ever touch screen MacBook Pro.

Not only are there new products galore, but there are also historic milestones worth reminiscing about.

Last week marked ten years since the introduction of Portrait Mode — Apple's clever approach to making portrait shots of people's faces look more like professionally taken photos.

The feature gives photos an artificially narrow depth of field, so that the subject is perfectly in focus, while the background is soft and beautifully blurred with a bokeh effect.

It does this without actually having the information of a proper big lens SLR camera (and very few people would like a phone with a hefty huge lens sticking out the back of it!) so the effect must be artificially created in software.

I found this X post from Johnnie Manzari about the creation of Portrait Mode fascinating. As with many wonderful inventions and innovative ideas, the feature didn't come from science or technology or art or design alone — it came from a combination of all of these and more.

There’s a saying in painting that if you get the eyes right, nothing else matters. Inspired by this principle from oil painting, the idea was to make sure we never got the eyes wrong.

We brought in a machine learning block to find the eyes, and draw a mask layer that protected them, then paired that with the disparity depth map. Counterintuitively, the solution was not to decrease the amount of blur, it was to increase it.

The additional blur that we could add once the eyes were protected allowed us to hide the artefacts that were created by bad depth calculation.

I never knew about this saying from the art world, but now I think about it, it makes so much sense. It also explains why many of my drawings at school didn't quite look right!

I love this story — it shows that even with the most brilliant, cutting-edge technology, to find the best answer for today's challenges we sometimes need to look back at the masters from hundreds of years ago.

One of my favourite Portrait Mode photos: Harvey. And they said it wouldn't work on pets!

Be the best customer of the day

I really enjoyed this quick piece from legendary writer and marketer Seth Godin: Hospitality in the Mirror.

In it, Seth argues that the best hospitality comes to those who most deserve it.

For too long, the entitled customer has demanded emotional labour without offering support or sustenance in return. It’s exhausting and unfair, for both parties.

When you’re the best customer we’ve had all day, it’s likely we’ll be the host you’re hoping for.

When I'm at my best, I try to be a good customer — at the local shop, the café, checking in to a hotel, or messaging someone on the customer support live chat.

I tend to do this because that's how I was brought up — to be kind to your fellow human. Smile and the world smiles back at you.

But as per Seth's post, I do believe that I tend to receive far better service because of this.

At its most basic, it's smiling, making eye contact, saying please and thank you, and asking the other person how they are. And genuinely listening for an answer.

Of course, you can be an even better customer than that, but supposedly basic manners can go a long way.

On the flip side of this, I find it rather irritating when I try to be a very good customer, and I receive very poor customer service. The human-to-human connection is broken when the "human" on the other end turns out to be a robot. Or the order is forgotten after multiple reminders.

This short post made me think more about how I can be a better customer, and how we can be better hosts.

25 years of the iPod

Screenshot of the iPod Easter egg on the Apple website

Apple introduced the iPod 25 years ago.

I didn't know what an iPod was back then, and I was barely into computers at all.

But by 2003, when the third generation iPod came out I absolutely knew, and was fortunate enough to get the device. I felt so fortunate, and I couldn't see how I would ever need another device to take with me for music listening. All my music? In my pocket? And it looks this cool!?

It makes me feel quite old to see the iPod now viewed as some sort of vintage device. But I am thrilled to see Apple celebrating it in such a fun and quirky way — if you go to any wrong URL (causing a 404 error) on the Apple Music website, you're greeted with an interactive original iPod. You can use the click wheel to navigate, and you can even play songs from a selective catalogue of Apple-blessed songs.

Is this a sign of Apple remembering how to have fun, now that John is in charge? I think so, and I am very much here for it.

Thoughts on iPhone Duo

‘Different’ and ‘new’ is relatively easy. Doing something that’s genuinely better is very hard.

— Jony Ive

It's day one of the iPhone Duo, and I made a visit to the Apple Store in Covent Garden to try it out.

I have chosen not to buy the new iPhone Duo for a variety of reasons, but I'm fascinated by the device. Please don't consider this a review — rather, it's a few notes and impressions from a geeky and interested observer.

The Duo is, in my opinion, the most interesting iPhone since the original was unveiled some nineteen years ago. Apple has rolled iteratively with an ever better version of the original idea in 2007. Until the Duo.

When unveiled, the device looked stunning, so I have been very keen to see if, in practice, the hype is real.

Craft

Apple has done a phenomenal job with the integration of the software and the hardware. Obviously, this is to be expected, and it's a line Apple themselves has touted since they were making computers in a garage.

But with the Duo, you just can't help but appreciate how much Apple cares about this stuff. Look at the Duo next to any other foldable device on the market and the level of care and craft is night and day.

The thing feels high-end. Luxurious. Futuristic. Clever. And in many ways, obvious. There are so many thoughtful details that are truly delightful. It's clearly a device that has had a lot of care and love poured into it by many incredibly talented people.

Compromise

Every year, when Apple introduces their new Pro models, they inevitably tout "this is the best iPhone we've ever made."

Before the Duo was unveiled, many rumours circulated about it being called the "iPhone Ultra".

Ultra implies something more than pro: the ultimate. The best.

The iPhone Duo is categorically not the best iPhone Apple has ever made.

In fact, I'd argue it's the most compromised iPhone Apple has ever made.

While I find it exciting to see Apple breaking free from the standard "candy bar" iPhone shape they've had since day one, there is no denying that to make a phone foldable involves making some difficult choices.

Cameras

The cameras on the iPhone Duo are clearly not as good as the best and latest Pro iPhone models.

To begin with, from a distance you can already see there are only two lenses on the iPhone Duo compared to three on the Pro. In addition to that, the cameras themselves are not as good as the latest Pro models in terms of the quality of the lenses, the image quality, pixel count, and more.

While I may not be able to always perceive those differences, I find it very reassuring when getting a new iPhone to know that I have the absolute best camera I could possibly have on me at any one time.

Having said

Friday finds #4 — iPhone Duo edition

If you've been following my writing over the last few weeks you might have noticed I am trying to keep to a very regular posting schedule. Every Friday I've been sharing links to cool things, usually apps for iOS, Mac, and the web.

A few recent issues:

  • Friday Finds 1 which includes the most radically crazy way to delete apps from your Mac.
  • Friday Finds 2 which includes a site dedicated to past (imperfect) predictions of how key technologies will transform society.
  • Friday Finds 3: which includes a Swiss government website to help you prepare for Doomsday.

But this week, it's all about Apple's latest little gadget, the iPhone Duo. I will assume you are aware of this device as Apple has done a teeny little bit of marketing about it.

While I'm not buying one (which may come as a surprise to anyone who knows me as Apple's #1 fan), it doesn't mean I can't appreciate the work developers have done to bring beautiful and useful apps to the new device.

Here are a few apps that have caught my eye:

  • Things. I have been a user (and fan) of Things for a very long time. They're the ultimate definition of what it means to be a great Apple developer. They of course have a beautiful and well-considered update of the todo app ready to go on day one.
  • Flighty. If you fly a lot (or at all) and you don't have Flighty, you need to change that immediately. It's one of the best iOS apps, period. And of course they're ready to go for Duo on day one.
  • Fantastical. If you want more than the built-in calendar app on iOS, then Fantastical is the app you are looking for. They've been developing Fantastical for as long as I can remember, and they've built one of the best reputations for being great developers for Apple platforms. Fantastical is of course ready for the Duo already.
  • Check the Weather. I only came across this today but it's an old app that has received a big update. If you like to know the weather like a weatherman, then this is worth a look. Beautiful large weather maps and it makes great use of the extra screen real estate of the Duo.
  • Quiche Browser. This is an alternative browser to Safari. I love how thoughtfully designed, minimal, and yet utterly customisable it is. An incredibly thoughtful browser app that is ready for Duo on day one. Update: I got this wrong, it’s coming soon! Still great for all non-Duo iPhones today.
  • Monzo. I have to give Monzo a shout-out for being, what I can only assume, the only bank to be ready for iPhone Duo on day one. So many people have joked that "your bank will only get around to supporting iPhone Duo for the next model", but most banks aren'

A Vonnegut errand

When reading John Gruber's review of the imminent iPhone Duo this morning I stumbled upon an interesting phrase he used: "a Vonnegut errand".

What on earth is that? I thought. I couldn't help but follow my curiosity to find out.

Fortunately, Gruber linked the phrase to an explainer about Kurt Vonnegut purchasing an envelope.

Kurt Vonnegut, if you haven't heard of him (admittedly, I hadn't!) was a very successful American author.

While it would be easy to quote the whole piece (and tempting, given the website is chock full of ghastly ads), the premise is in this screenshot of a Facebook post that went viral:

Screenshot of a Facebook post about Kurt Vonnegut purchasing an envelope

To quote from the article directly:

David Brancaccio: There's a little sweet moment, I've got to say, in a very intense book — your latest — in which you're heading out the door and your wife says what are you doing? I think you say — I'm getting — I'm going to buy an envelope.

Followed by this:

Kurt Vonnegut: Oh, she says well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.
I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know…
And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all anymore.

Ultimately, Kurt's summary is "We are here on Earth to fart around".

What a wonderful thought for the day — I suspect many of us could do with a little more of this approach to life lately.

Invert, always invert

Invert, always invert

— Charlie Munger

I read these words a while back but never gave them much thought.

Only recently while reading more of Charlie Munger’s essays (via the wonderfully crafted Stripe Press book Poor Charlie’s Almanack) did they become clearer.

The whole idea is an incredibly simple framework to help you reframe a problem: just ask the opposite of what you are trying to figure out.

For example, instead of asking “how do I become healthier?” You could ask “how would I get really unhealthy?”

Or instead of “how do I become rich?” you could ask “how would I become poor?”

The simple reversal often is easier to answer. We seem to naturally be good at answering the reverse of the question.

The benefit of this is that it gives you a good list of habits, approaches, and actions to avoid.

By actively avoiding the negative factors, rather than exclusively relying on doing the good stuff, you might just give yourself a better shot at achieving what you want.

Infinite dopamine-fuelled todo lists

Recently I wrote about how alarmed I was to see how much time I had been spending on social media.

I deleted most of the apps, but every now and then I open one of the sites in my browser. Then I lose a few minutes.

Now I am more conscious than ever about how much they suck me in — losing track of how much time they steal from me.

It's endless. The only way to stop is to interrupt the flow somehow.

Social media is unlike most other experiences on our computers.

You email inbox has a finish line.

Your actual todo list has a finish line.

Newspapers had a finish line.

But Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Twitter, YouTube and the rest — none.

They're infinite.

One of the best ways to avoid getting sucked into the endless vortex is to set a limit with Screen Time (or similar) to kick you out automatically after a little indulgence.

The best way, though, is to not start in the first place.

“Vibe coding” is a category error

The phrase “vibe coding” has bothered me for some time.

It’s usually said with a smirk. Usually by experienced engineers.

And that was appropriate for a while. 2024-25 were full of crypto-bro levels of fanfare fuelled by big egos building small apps in days.

Most of that was hype was unwarranted.

But we're in 2026 now. The slow boil has reached us.

What is now possible with AI has evolved unimaginably.

We've moved past "vibes", yet the term “vibe coding” has stuck.

Empowerment isn't a "vibe"

To many, the term implies that what’s happening is casual. Loose. A founder waving at an LLM and hoping something compiles.

But “vibe” massively undersells what’s really going on.

For someone like me — not an engineer by training — being able to build working software isn’t about vibes. It’s about empowerment, velocity, momentum. It’s about user experience. It’s about customers and satisfaction.

Your product is a conversation with the market.

I first heard this quote from Des Traynor on the Cheeky Pint podcast with John Collison and it’s really stuck with me.

For years, the path from idea to implementation looked something like this:

Have an idea → explain it → write a spec → justify it → debate it → prioritise it → design it → refine it → debate it more → build it → test it → ship it → get feedback → repeat back to step 1.

Every step added latency. Not just time — cognitive drag. Social drag. Justification drag.

Not to mention, the very number of steps, the time consumed by passing through all these steps, and the very thought of even going through these steps, meant many ideas were never even attempted.

It may sound harsh, but I've seen it in so many teams: engineering is where good ideas go to die.

Now? If you're set up to embrace the world we're in, the journey is radically transformed:

Idea → build → test → refine → ship → improve.

And that is not a cycle that happens in months, weeks, or even days. It's a cycle that can happen in hours, if not minutes.

Speed of iteration isn’t a "vibe"

Forgive me for linking to another Stripe founder, but I have long found Patrick Collison's "Fast" page immensely inspiring: examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together.

Iteration speed is leverage.

When building something new, the most valuable thing is rarely elegant code, a beautiful user interface, or following a set process or doing things in a certain way.

It’s really simple: all you really care about, to begin with, is whether the thing you are building is actually valuable.

Does this flow make sense?

Is this interaction clear?

Does this feature solve the actual problem the user has?

Before, for any product manager or designer or non-technical founder, exploring those questions meant being away from the product.

Drawing, writing, designing. You would do a lot of work in places that were not the actual

The complete book of self-sufficiency

On my recent holiday and a trip to Barter Books (my new favourite place), I picked up a second-hand book: The complete book of self-sufficiency, by John Seymour.

It’s a big book filled with illustrations and information and I haven’t read it fully yet.

But so far I’m captivated.

There is a lot of talk about preppers lately. There are many wondering how we can be more resilient to the changing world — climate, supply chains, price fluctuations and more.

There are people questioning how much plastic we have in our lives.

There are people wishing for healthier diets, and improved gut health.

There are people who are desperate to save money and reduce their expenditure.

This book has some answers and ideas for all of these topics and plenty more.

I will share more as I explore some of the ideas and techniques here.

Wish me luck.

P.S. If you’d like to get this book yourself you can get it on Bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Built to last

Many projects don’t seem to prioritise longevity very much these days.

Think how many buildings built over a hundred years ago are still standing, still cherished, and have great uses.

How often do we build buildings today to those standards? It seems, not often enough.

I don’t know why. I’m not a qualified architect. But I suspect it comes down not to designers or materials, but budgets and policies and priorities.

What if it came down to pride? Not being told or due to requirements, but because you want to?

It used to be impossible to build cheaper or take shortcuts. Now it seems to be the default.

But the default doesn’t have to be the only way. And pride doesn’t have to cost more.

Friday finds #3 — tools and links for your weekend

I hope you enjoy these, too, and if you have found (or made!) anything decent lately, please let me know.

  • Worse on Purpose: a site that keeps track of famous brands (and their owners) and whether they're still worth it or have declined in quality (also see enshittification).
  • Flowstate is a service that transforms handwritten notes into digital formats that can be used in the tools you already use.
  • Want to become a little more resilient and self-sufficient? Want to prepare for Doomsday? Here's a Swiss government website that shows you exactly what to get, in what quantities, depending on the size of your household and how long you want to survive for.
  • Uplock is a lovely native iOS and Mac app for securely saving everything but your passwords — think passports, ID cards, private documents, and more.
  • Want to own Stanley Kubrick's directors chair? It's going up for auction along with a few other collectors pieces soon.

Enjoy the weekend!

Decisions are made by one person

It's bugged me for a long time — the process of decision making.

Sometimes I think I'm quite bad at making decisions and I take too long to make them.

That's absolutely true at times.

But when in a team, there is sometimes a sense that decisions are made by a group. You get together as a team and collaborate to make a decision.

If the team is healthy, you collaborate and you listen and you give each other time to share thoughts. Great ideas and suggestions can come from anywhere.

But decisions… those can be harder.

In reality, most teams are not purely democratic, so decisions are rarely ultimately made by the team as a whole. They are made by a person on the team.

Often, all too often, in a team, things fall down because it isn't clear who the person to ultimately make the decision is.

Sometimes it's because the person who makes the decision isn't qualified or doesn't have the right information.

Sometimes it’s to do with the health of the team — the psychological safety of putting your neck on the line. Toxic cultures can make decision-making a more political or emotional challenge than necessary.

But from what I've seen, often it's because the person who needs to make the decision isn't aware that they are the ones who need to make the decision in the first place. There is ambiguity and misunderstanding within the team.

In startups and small businesses, often one of the few advantages over bigger companies is speed — you can move more quickly than a thousand-person behemoth because you can strip away the politics and bureaucracy and risk aversion that larger organisations tend to accrete.

You don't have a lot else: you have less money, fewer people, and less time. Which is why speed is not just advantageous but necessary.

While there's a lot of information and tooling around building and designing things faster, there's relatively little about making decisions faster and more effectively, even in a small team.

It could be the difference between life and death. Sometimes a decision doesn't just wait for hours. It waits for days, weeks, months, if not years.

Figuring out how to change this is a constant endeavour of mine. And I believe primarily it starts with making sure it's clear who makes the decision. 

Inevitable criticism

It's worth bearing in mind that very rarely does anybody get criticised for not making a decision.

It's very easy to criticise a wrong decision being made, because you can usually see it play out on a given time horizon.

A decision not being made though: in most companies this can be invisible.

The very absence of something makes it hard to pin down. You rarely see the negative impacts of indecision directly. But you ultimately pay the price.

Which is why a culture where decision-making is

Barter Books

I've discovered my new favourite place, possibly in all the world: Barter Books.

It's a second-hand bookshop, one of the largest in the UK.

It's in an old train station, for a railway that was controversially closed down in the 1960s.

They have a log fire, arm chairs, a model train set, and a delightful independent cafe serving traditional English food and drinks.

Notably it's also the epicentre of the famous "Keep Calm and Carry On" poster.

It's heaven.

Use the goddamn product

Being customer obsessed is easy to say, but extremely hard to consistently do.

Whether you run a five star hotel or a SaaS business, the best way to understand how to make your product or service better is to experience it as a customer would.

Yes, it's crucial to gather customer feedback, to actively seek their feedback, and to execute on improvements based on what they tell you.

And as a software business you can instrument your app with metrics and tracking so you have every datapoint you could ever dream of.

But I'm convinced that customer feedback and metrics can only take you so far. No matter how direct and open your customers are with you, they likely will never tell you everything that could make your offering better.

And, the act of responding to customer feedback inherently means building something and waiting for feedback to improve.

You can make your offering better without a single piece of user feedback by doing something simple: use your service yourself.

For a software business, you should sign up for your own product. And you should use it on a regular basis.

And I don't mean "use" it in the sense of testing. Of course you want to make sure a few common workflows always work. I mean really use it like a user would — to carry out an objective, under realistic conditions.

In EcoSend, we've fixed hundreds of things that users have never (and I suspect would never have) told us about. Does that mean those issues don't matter? I believe they do — they all add up to an experience, whether vocalised or not. They're not show-stopping issues, and they're not necessarily bugs. They're quirks, things that could be more obvious, flows where we can save the user a click, or guardrails that help the user avoid a mistake.

I love making these kinds of improvements — they often go unnoticed, but they add up to an experience that feels more robust and reassuring, and at times delightful.

It's this approach that leads to good software. No matter how much AI is used in software creation, the process of using your own product cannot be outsourced.

The best software will always come from countless iterations based on feedback and refinement. When you are a user, you can run so many more of these cycles without users ever needing to tell you.

Do nothing

It’s amazing how intelligent it is just to spend some time sitting. A lot of people are way too active.

– Charlie Munger (American investor and philanthropist, business partner of Warren Buffet)

Some people call it meditation.

But that term can conjure up all manner of associations that don't help.

It's not about becoming a Buddhist, or tending a zen garden.

What I need more than anything every now and then is some time and space to just shut everything out. To do absolutely nothing.

I'm not talking about making time to read. Or write. Or run. Or podcast. Or catch up with a friend.

I'm talking about truly doing nothing (except breathing).

The modern world makes this close to impossible.

If you take your phone away, perhaps you still have a smart watch. You take that away and your iPad or laptop might be in close reach. You take that away and you may have a smart speaker or a TV on in the background.

And if you take all of those away, then your brain might be so accustomed to stimulation that you immediately reach for something — anything! — to distract. A book, an old magazine, a newspaper. Heck, even a cereal box will do.

And then, even if you remove ALL of that, if you live with someone else, or work with others, you might just find that your attempt to do nothing is interrupted again. On the basis that "you didn't seem to be doing anything so..."!

Doing nothing in modern society is not easy.

But I think it's more important to try than ever.