Espresso Shots 7-19-26

It's that time again for my weekly update, which includes a short collection of noteworthy finds, posts that inspire, as well as a few reflections from the past week or two. I'll aim to land these in your inbox by the weekend, in time to pair with your morning coffee (or your preferred cup of inspiration).

The Latest Drippings ☕️

• Infinite Choice Is the Curse of the AI Era, and You Already Hate It. Ok, breaking my 'limit talking about AI' rule a bit as it's just dominating the hype cycle these days, but Joan has a really good post this week on infinite choices which resonated with me on a different level. I've often thought that injecting artificial constraints was an important wall to raise to force new creative thinking: 'Don't bother spending time thinking about all the things; focus on thinking about the things that matter most.' In the age of AI, where taste and curiosity are required, the paradox of choice is going to explode with too many options. Maybe the concept of omakase, but applied to life/work/teams, is the path: 'In omakase, the Japanese tradition, the chef decides what you eat based on what's good that day. Omakase commands prices that would make a steakhouse blush because the chef strips away every choice. People pay more, sometimes dramatically so, to have fewer options.'
• The Lo-Fi Way I Broke My Scrolling Habit (Gift Link). Despite dumping Facebook and X a few years back, breaking the grip of the algorithm on Instagram is still a struggle for me. Scrolling has replaced entertainment, and I really need to think about how much of it I want to let into my life. 'For us millennials, the nostalgia for the early internet is easily commodified by brands and Remember when? montages, but there’s a reason we can look back fondly on an era when internet use was limited to a place and time: You could treat it like any other hobby, not the strange extension of your psyche that comes with having constant access to information, both important and inane, about everyone you’ve ever met in the past 10 years.' I kinda like the idea here of a scroll chair: 'I designated a single spot in my home where I could use my scroll phone: it has no SIM card, only Wi-Fi, and I’m allowed to use it as much as I want, as long as I’m sitting in the Scrolly Chair - a stripy armchair in my living room.' Interesting pattern here: through constraints, find freedom.
• The Bottleneck Might Be the Air in the Room. I've been using a CO2 monitor for the last few years on my desk, and it's been a useful tool to give insight into the air I'm breathing. 'I now travel with a portable CO2 monitor. Outdoors it reads around 400 parts per million. In a closed meeting room with a handful of people in it, I have watched it climb past 2,000. The photo here is a real reading: 2,143.' The research: 'At 1,000 ppm, performance dropped significantly on six of nine decision-making measures compared with a clean-air baseline of 600. At 2,500 ppm, seven of the nine fell substantially, some into a range they called dysfunctional.'
• What Training My Chaotic Dog Taught Me About Power, Control – and Human Beings. As the owner of an eight-year-old golden retriever who has recently started the new habit of barking randomly, I found this an interesting read. 'I’ve learned the hard way that the difference between a frustrating walk and an emotionally disastrous one is about something else altogether: whether or not other dog owners judge me. What we most crave, once control is in the balance, is not scientific facts or diagnosis, but kindness and understanding – things that only another human being can provide.'
• Thinking About Powerful Questions. A post for the commonplace journal on how to ask the right questions. 'Discovering strategic questions is like panning for gold. You have to care about finding it, you have to be curious, and you have to create an anticipation of discovering gold, even though none of us may know ahead of time where we’ll find it. You head toward the general territory where you think the gold may be located, with your best tools, your experience, and your instincts. And then you begin a disciplined search for the gold.'
• Notebooks and the Extended Mind. An observation that I've had (especially around the AI discourse) is that most chatter from vendors or media misses the more crucial aspects of any technology evolution and how to apply it: critical thinking, curiosity, and thinking in systems and how to apply that to shifting landscapes. I've been following Steven Johnson for some time now, as he's one of the few approaching technology with an understanding of language and the humanities. 'The core skills are not just about straight prompt engineering; they’re not just about figuring out the most efficient wording to get the model to do what you want. They also draw on deeper, more nuanced questions. What is the most responsible behavior to cultivate in the model, and how do we best deploy this technology in the real world to maximize its positive impact? All of those questions have been absolutely central to the discussion of AI for the past two years, but if you think about it, they were all questions that belonged to the humanities until the language models came along: ethics, philosophy of language, political theory, history of innovation, and so on.'
• After Forty Years, Still No Silver Bullet. I had never encountered Fred Brooks's paper, No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accident in Software Engineering, until now, but it's a great read. 'The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build. No other part of the conceptual work is as difficult as establishing the detailed requirements, including all the interfaces to people, machines, and other software systems. No other part of the work so cripples the resulting system if done wrong. No other part is more difficult to rectify later.' Hint: LLMs and AI haven't solved this problem.
• Inside Paradise Brew Werks: The First Vestaboard Note Array. I've always loved the sound and visuals of the old train station split-flap boards, which inspired me to splurge on a Vestaboard Note last year. I love this thing. Recently, they have introduced a new way to chain smaller displays together to form a unified experience. Check out the video from Paradise Brew Werks on how they built theirs. 'We have 12 notes making our array. And when all 12 were moving at once, that was pretty cool. The minute we got the music board, we asked the staff, you know, please come up with some stuff that you think is fun.' A reminder: fun isn't the opposite of serious, it's how we survive it.
• Good Tools Are Invisible. 'A good tool is and ought to be invisible; striving to make such tools is the goal of a toolmaker.' While this post is mostly around text editors, I think this is an interesting mindset to poke at. I've never really liked the AR/VR hype, as these tools are the complete opposite of being invisible. They're bulky and take you out of the moment. On the contrary - go for a walk with just your AirPods Pro and the watch. They melt away into a new type of invisible and immersive experience that is a personal ambient experience. Remember: 'The clearest sign a tool is serving you is that you stop noticing it—it becomes invisible. You don’t celebrate its flaws because you’re not turning them into a hobby, rather you just get mildly annoyed and route around them. You don’t defend it because nothing about your identity is riding on it. And you don’t mistake the feeling of cleverness for the fact of productivity, because you’ve bothered to check the difference.'
• How Successful Companies Go Blind. 'The ones who stay are comfortable. The work is predictable, the salary adequate, the internal game familiar, and the politics rewarding to whoever learns to play the game. Over time the comfort switches off their sight. What remains is fluency in cave rules and a steadily diminishing ability to imagine themselves outside.' This is why you need to continuously evolve, or die. Also, you need firestarters.
• Examples from Sci-Fi of Voice Interfaces That Stay on Task. Put whether you like Siri, OpenAI, or Alexa aside for a moment; conversational interfaces are super fascinating. Steven Johnson (who I mentioned earlier) is the reason why NotebookLM's 'podcast' mode sounds so ... human (read more about SoundStorm). A good read on voice interaction. 'They're so unbounded. If you're having a voice interaction with a computer or with a device, you could end up having a conversation about anything.'
• Art School Students and Bob Design Brand Refresh a 750-Year-Old London Market with Collaged Pictograms. 'How do you visually represent something that's been around for over seven centuries?' A really interesting look at how students refreshed a 750-year-old London market with collaged pictograms.
• Time Sensitive. I can't remember (sorry!) who referred me to this new-ish podcast, Time Sensitive. From their about page, it is 'a podcast featuring candid, revealing long-form conversations with extraordinary people about their life and work through the lens of time. Host Spencer Bailey interviews each guest about how they think about time and how pivotal moments have shaped who they are today.' I've downloaded a few episodes to listen to on my upcoming trip.
• 55 Is The New 35. Having turned 55 back in April, I instantly found this post alarming in that '81% of the world’s population — 70% in the US, 67% in Europe, and 81% of Latin America — are now under 55.' What was more interesting was where the age ranges spend their media consumption time. 'The 55+ audience spends a disproportionate amount of time and attention on Trad Media. They consume more television than all the other generations. However, when you zoom in on audiences under 55, you will note that the top-four most-used platforms are YouTube, TikTok, Netflix, and Instagram — with the exceptions of Brazil and Mexico, where national broadcasters replace Netflix in the top four.' A great closer to reinforce what I've been trying (with varied success) on what infinite choices does to us, and what artificial constraints we can introduce to reduce the consumption of empty mental calories.

Amor Fati ✌🏻