Riffing on the work started with Ask Rands, I’ve been spending the days before the holiday seasons polishing existing features while also building some new ones for the blog. Briefs If you’ve been watching the RSS feed for the past week, you’ve seen an increase in the number of posts. During the last major redesign… more
I continue to avidly build with the robots on a daily basis. One of the more continually helpful use cases is summarization. Plop in the long, useless marketing email from United Airlines and figure out if there’s something useful in my endless quest for airline status. The answer: it usually finds something worth my time.… more
Last Friday, Reddit had its worst day since its IPO, with a drop of almost 30%1. It didn’t matter that they beat their third-quarter estimates; what mattered most was a weak Q4 forecast and the quote from Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, “Our search referral traffic was down meaningfully in Q3, with the decline accelerating later… more
My observation of air travel is that if there is one significant impact on a flight, there are guaranteed two additional impacts. An example: if my gate changes at the last moment, it is quite likely that departure from the gate will be delayed, followed by a further delay on the tarmac. Unexpected changes in… more
Robot writing has no voice. That’s why you find it annoying. Like it or not, your brain is currently one of the best organic pattern matchers in the known solar system, and that means you can detect patterns. Like breathing, you just do this. All the time. You are not being triggered by the endless… more
A consistent by-product of periods of intense building (software, a book, a team) — really anything where I am heads-down focusing on the craft — is that all the utilities and habits surrounding building said craft get scrutiny. Why? Because small imperfections or inefficiencies stand out when my brain is in build-it mode. Put simply,… more
Having been robot-wrangling for a solid year now, I continue to feel like they give me superpowers. However, like all of us, I have a front-row seat to increasingly attractive garbage the robots are capable of generating at scale. I like to think that I am human enough to detect the slop, but the rate… more
I’ve used Claude quite a bit for both the upcoming new book and the next edition of Managing Humans. I wrote the entire book, but, as I’ve done for years, I’ve used the robots for editing, research, and data wrangling. When Anthropic announced they were going to do “text and image” watermarking, my eyebrow was… more
If everything is going to plan and your operating system is in dark mode, then randsinrepose.com is now dark for you. If you are a light mode person, you can click on the Moon in the upper right of the navigation and experience dark mode stylings. Click again to return. Why now? Well, I was… more
Appreciating typography is a study in paradox. The primary goal of well-designed typography is to help you read the words, not appreciate how the words are composed of letters and how each of those individual letters has been designed to convey a small bit of meaning. If you see the typography rather than read the… more
