Hey everyone!

A few weeks ago, I quit my job. This is a first. To make that call without anything (besides emigrating) being lined up feels very odd. It took me about a year to make the call, but eventually it felt like the right thing to do.

The thing about working in massively growing companies is that inevitably, roles are diluted. For those that thrive on working as wide as possible, this can be…challenging.

As a requirement for generalism turns into one for specialism, it can make some people feel stuck. Ironically, I did find my specialism, but still felt like I’d perhaps maxed out my time. 6 years is a long period!

When joining a company, seriously think about the size of it now. Is that where you are too? Will you hit the ceiling very quickly? I appreciate this is a luxurious choice, so take with a pinch of Himalayan.

Have a great week,
Luis

📷 Look

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❶ The art of nostalgia

Via the medium of film (specifically Wes Anderson) this article explores what nostalgia means, why we hang onto it, the political implications, and why it sells. Although this is mostly for film lovers, it’s a great take down on our past, present, and future understanding of just who we are.

Read this article

❷ What has happened to taste?

Buckle up, creatives, this is intentionally going to make you feel uncomfortable. Normally, “taste” is a banned word, but this article is great and you should read it. It poses a question in particular which I enjoy: is it a commodity?

Read this article

❸ A theses on the literacy crisis

Not these as in academic, don’t worry this is a Substack article. Apparently, there’s a literary crisis, which does make sense because I can barely finish an article these days let alone a book. However, perhaps this isn’t a problem it’s just that the way we read is changing. Apparently, we’re reading more than ever before, just not in a linear way! Anyway, this article is great, read it all.

Read this article

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Bonus round

• [video] The hidden risk of staying in the wrong job. I wonder why I’m sharing this

🎧 Listen

AirPods: Why’s everyone fighting over the mysterious elements inside?

Alright nerds, get in line. Although this article is billed as being about the rare elements that make up AirPods (and most modern tech), it’s done in a light way. Just how do the economics of rare earth mining actually work? You’re gonna fiiiiind out. This entire series is great by the way, it’s by a journalist from Sky News.

Apple – Spotify

Have a great week,
@disco_lu

Hey everyone!

I was out for drinks with some friends last night and we got onto the topic of “read receipts” on WhatsApp, or messaging hygiene more broadly.

So I’ll ask you a question: if someone reads your message but doesn’t reply for a long time, is that rude? Do you do that?

The table was divided about this. My perspective is that it’s a subtle way of controlling the narrative, keeping people at arm’s length and manipulating social situations to bend to your schedule and not theirs.

Others just said it “wasn’t that deep”. As a sensitive guy, that’s probably true 🤣. The reality is that we’re all busier than ever, with a whack-a-mole problem when it comes to notifications on our devices. These are also increasing. More apps, more ways to be distracted, less time to breathe.

Where do you stand on this?

Have a great week,
~Luis

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❶ The wandering mind: A gift we squander

When was the last time you intentionally did nothing in order to try and free up mental capacity for a task? Daydreaming is often looked down on, as a way of calling someone lazy or lacking effort. We strive to always be “on”, pushing and pushing and pushing ourselves until inevitable exhaustion. And yet, pauses and “wandering” are essential for creative juices. Give it a shot this week.

Read this article

❷ Are we programming our own obsolescence?

It’s probably about time to start taking the state of our interaction with technology very seriously. It really isn’t healthy to be consistently and permanently told that all of your ideas are great, by a machine. This article presents a fantastic phrase for this: “hermetic story-bubbles”. We’re assuming progress is linear and always up, but what if it’s really not at the moment?

Read this article

❸ Sometimes, great writing makes me angry

This isn’t the headline, but I thought it sounded better! It’s a piece by author Philip Pullman about…words. How we use them, how we try to find alternatives to speak what’s on our mind in a cleverer way, how we can be intimidated by those with eloquence. It’s a fun read, enjoy!

Read this article

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Bonus round

• Surprise, surprise…social media is the opposite of social life. An article about being with actual people in actual real life and its importance

🎧 Listen

The Quantum Path to Consciousness

Something nice and light here 😳

It’s an interview with Hartmut Neven, the visionary founder of Google’s Quantum AI Lab, where they walk through the bigger picture of quantum computing. Kind of important right now!

Listen to this podcast (1 hour 18 minutes)
Spotify – Apple Podcasts

Have a great week,
@disco_lu

Hello from Stockholm!

I’m here for a few days on a work trip, one of many recently. I love flying, it feels like the rarest of rare moment in modern life where you can just sit with your own thoughts. A scary idea for some 🤣. But seriously, no Twitter scrolling, no notifications, no TV, just you and the window (I always try to book the window seat). The thought of purchasing wifi on a flight disappoints me too, it’s the only chance to be free!

Another perhaps strange thing I do is not have my 4G/5G active on my phone most of the time. Firstly, it helps keep distractions away. Secondly, we really don’t need to be online that much. Do we? I’m sure the text can wait.

Have a great week,
Luis

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❶ The shape of time

This is an in depth look at how human’s perception of time has changed over the centuries. From the ancient Greeks looking at time in a circular way, to the biblical introduction of a linear view. There are some lovely visuals as well as being super interesting!

Read this article

❷ The Original Attention Crisis

Apparently, when books were first starting to become mass produced people saw them as massive distractions to our days. Isn’t that nuts to think about now? People had to really think about how this new technology (?) should fit into their lives, when it should happen, and just how much of it was safe. Wild.

Read this article

❸ One situation after another

Feel like the world is just bouncing from one crisis to the next at the moment? You’re not really alone. We were all becoming dumber from 30 second TikTok videos, but now we’re being distracted by an immense overload of tragic conflict-based noise. Treating war like entertainment is truly hurting my head recently.

Read this article

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Bonus round

• When we experience music or dance together, our nervous systems can synchronize

🎧 Listen

Deep water

No, this isn’t about tech and that’s a good thing! It’s an investigative podcast series about the sport of freediving and the various scandals that it’s had over the past few years with doping. I really enjoyed hearing about the community aspect and just how dedicated you have to be to it to become successful.

It does exist on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, but you have to scroll through their feed to find it.

Listen to this series on their website
Spotify feed – Apple feed

Have a great week,
@disco_lu

Hello, I’m back!

Shortly after the last episode in October, I took a wrecking ball to my personal life and have since had arguably the toughest few months of my life. No sympathy required, but I thought I’d let you know why the newsletter has been somewhat low on the priority list.

On a positive note, I’ve done more thinking about well basically everything than I’ve ever done and feel a lot clearer not only about my life but also where we are in the state of things AKA the industry.

Living in the eye of the artificial needle means that most things can feel inflated to me, but what I have noticed recently is the bleeding out of I suppose mostly ChatGPT into the lives of the non-tech folks. My brother, for example, uses it to order his shopping list into which aisle the items live in.

Tech-washing aside, this feels like dust settling. Dust settling into a future we can almost wipe away from the surface with our finger, only to see that the surface doesn’t actually exist and our finger is owned by Sam Altman. The every enhancements, not the sweeping destruction of an entire profession.

For that reason, I’m optimistic.

Enjoy this week’s recommendations! They are from a much longer time span than usual, but I hope still as enjoyable.

Luis

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❶ Why everything became television

Damn, the title is so good it’s almost one my job for me here. I’m sure you’ve felt it though, every thing we do must feel like entertainment now, and “social has become less social”. It’s tiring.

Read this article

❷ Make something heavy

I love this framing. We associate quality with heaviness in the physical world (an oak table), but online nothing weighs anything. We want light, thanks to article #1. Make something with friction, something that lasts, something you’d put your name on.

Read this article

❸ Keeping a “done list”

This may hit a nerve, but do you wake up every day feeling behind on tasks already? So does the author of this article, who accurately describes that sense of task debt that we all have.

Read this article

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Bonus round

• Related to the first article: how to reclaim your attention

• From January, but I encourage you to watch Ben Affleck talking eloquently about AI

🎧 Listen

Mysteries of Claude

A story about Anthropic mostly, but the industry in a wider sense and just what on earth is happening. I’d encourage you to watch mostly because of the linguistic excellence of the guest, a journalist. They talk about government interference, safety, origins, and futures.

Spotify – Apple Podcasts

Have a great week,
@disco_lu

Hi everyone 👋

It has indeed been a very long time since I sent out this newsletter. January 2025, in fact.

I wanted this one to be different, I hope you can find something to resonate with.

There’s a number of reasons why I haven’t sent the newsletter in so long; some of them bureaucratic, some of them personal, some of them just related to what the world is talking about at the moment.

If you’ve been reading since the pandemic peak, you’ll remember that I had a note in the newsletter that said I would not talk about the pandemic. Similarly, I’ve desperately not wanted to talk about artificial intelligence but the reality is that the entire internet is talking about it…all the time.

This has made it very difficult to find interesting things that I would like to share with you that aren’t on that topic, and I just thought it would be better to not send anything. Flooding your inbox with more things about the same topic is almost the antithesis of why I started this, so wanted to stay true.

I was in Budapest this week and both whilst walking around the city, and in the taxi back to the airport, I noticed that there were AI generated advertisements and billboards outside shops and along the highway.

I was on my way back from a design conference and as you might imagine it was a little disheartening to leave the optimism of a conference talking about the future of design, only to be met with artificially generated rubbish as advertisement material.

Whether or not designers should be making adverts in the first place is separate question, but I think it’s important for us to understand that this is what we’re walking into; or maybe we’ve slept walk into it.

The sheets of blue light omitting glass that we carry around in our pocket, with an infinite amount of red notification badges desperate for attention, are only increasing in frequency and pushing our attention spans down into the dirt. As we spread our fatty fingers across the screens, we create yet more pimples to be popped, with our phones resembling more and more the face of an acne’d teenager. More software is being created, an despite the tools to create increasing in fidelity we don’t seem to be getting closer to quality. What we are exposed to is more trash, faster.

As a person who makes things and is deeply absorbed into the tech ecosystem, one of the hardest things to accept and observe is that pretty much everything that we’re using is becoming the same. Every software product or app that you use is eventually becoming a chatbot interface.

Just this week when logging the expenses from my trip, the expense software was of course a chat based interface. Because we obviously want to talk with our business expenses.

This then presents us with a dichotomy – in order for us to preserve our job roles, we must design for what is the requirement of the business. And as the business requirements all converge into a singular homogenous interface, we must adapt and oblige.

So the creativity that a designer enters the market for can become quickly sapped, as they realise that they are designing something that looks the same as everything else. The production worker feeling is real and I’m seeing it across the globe.

It’s one of the themes that kept coming up in the conference that I was attending. Attendees were asking how designers can balance creativity with artificial generation, and to be honest I’m not entirely sure.

I think that as makers, we must accept that the role is not what the role was sold, and we must adapt, which is why I think there’s an opportunity. As someone with a naturally skeptical mindset it’s challenging, but the opportunity here is to become the generalist that we know the market has always asked for. The opportunity is to widen our skills, becoming broader and more applicable to a business. To become people who are creative and technical and communicative all at the same time, which is logical on the surface but difficult to see you when you’re in the weeds.

What I would say as a slice of advice is to take every opportunity possible to spread your wings as wide as possible. Learn as much about all the adjacent disciplines as you possibly can, and use these tools to help you not just to fall into place but design things that matter.

To me, these new tools are useful for plugging gaps and skills I don’t have. I don’t see them as a way to replace what I’m already strong at, because to me that is a sign of laziness; and lord knows we don’t have space for that in this climate.

Search for what skills you don’t have, whether that is writing or engineering or researching. This is where the opportunity lies, and we have the capacity to really develop skills further instead of sitting down and allowing something else to replace our entire job in a flash.

The good news is that nothing is over. Things are changing, slowly but then all at once. We’re still early, and have an opportunity to wax up the board before jumping into the wave.

This mini essay was, perhaps surprisingly, written in a voice note as I was walking out from my plane as I landed at the airport. Whilst it may feel raw and fresh, I’m assuming this is what has been bubbling around in my mind for the past 9 months, and the key reason that I haven’t sent this newsletter.

I hope you all have a great week, and I’ll speak soon.

Luis ~ @disco_lu

Happy 2025 everyone!

This past week I’ve been in Las Vegas with the team planning for the next year. Firstly, yes I lost money in a casino. Secondly, it feels like a different planet and I’m glad to be home.

The week was personally one of reflection, where the company focus shifted away from what I’ve been personally driving towards. This is scary! But also an opportunity to widen the skill set, rather than deepen it.

A colleague explained to me that “this is just the industry we’re in”, and although that is challenging, it’s true. We can’t sit still for too long in tech, because the seasons change and the winds spin in different directions.

Perhaps it’s time, given the industry’s horizon, that we all reflected on what we look like this time come 2026.

Have a great week!

📷 Look

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❶ The internet is TikTok now

Videos, videos, videos. Scroll, scroll, scroll. That’s basically every app now, isn’t it? Even LinkedIn has videos and recommendations, and an algorithm that you can’t escape. Do we want it? Does that even matter now that TikTok is at risk?

Read this article

❷ Silicon Valley’s obsession with AI looks a lot like religion

The headline of this article pretty much explains everything about it, but I want to call out this excellent quote within the piece from a Rabbi: “I’ve always said there is no God. I never said there wouldn’t be one in the future.” Are we there yet?

Read this article

❸ The light in the abyss between us

A more poetic article than I normally share, but this is a beautifully written one about the human condition. Specifically, how we each see and feel differently what on the surface is the same. For example, seeing colour differently, or how we all experience cold and heat.

Read this article

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Bonus round

• What the f*@k are we doing anymore? A writer’s perspective on social media

🎧 Listen

Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin

Sharing something with Bezos (buy your books from bookshop.org) almost violates this entire newsletter’s premise, but I enjoyed listening to this even if just out of curiosity. It’s a very long episode, and starts after 8 nauseatingly boring minutes of adverts, but he speaks well and I would definitely recommend putting it on as background to cooking or working. His story is genuinely fascinating – he was a child farmer? – and I’m sure we can all learn something from his grit.

Spotify – Apple Podcasts

Have a great week,
@disco_lu

It’s that time of year where we are probably thinking backwards to assess how we found the previous 12 months. I’m lingering around the idea of (professional) happiness, and specifically what has or does make me happy. The past few months have been turbulent, but as the waves break onto the shore of 2025, it’s been a strong year.

I could probably reflect on the history of this newsletter as a way of assessing that question for myself. It started 9 years ago next month, and the past 2 years have been less frequent than the previous 7, where I published every Sunday (unless technically unable) without fail. This may be a failure on a commitment, but inspiration comes from desire and not rules.

Where I find happiness is in scratching itches, and this as well as other projects that I fumble around with on the sofa at night are where I feel free. I often describe mini projects as “messing around”, but they are pretty much the chance where I have creative control, and can operate more on feeling than metrics, briefs, or user requirements.

And you know what? They are done in my personal time, but provide immense happiness into my professional life too. Some may note that this straddles workaholism, but I would call this healthy obsession.

What’s your happiness?

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❶ The year creators took over

Remember the attention economy? Well, we’re all paying attention now aren’t we. Information doesn’t come from trusted sources, it arrives in our ears via the manosphere, the Rogan-sphere, and they are Hauk Tuah’ing all the way to the bank.

Read this article

❷ How WhatsApp ate the world

This week, a viral tweet lambasted WhatsApp for having 150 designers. Because, what are they doing? It turns out that we Westerners are clueless. The app powers businesses across the planet to pay for taxis, buy groceries, market to customers, oh and you know message one of the 2 billion users it has.

Read this article

❸ The writes and write-nots

This article argues that the ease at which people can outsource their writing to a large language model threatens the act of writing entirely. We may enter a world where those that can write do, and those that can’t use an external tool to do so, and it’ll be obvious, and it’ll be mediocre. Although, they say perhaps this isn’t a bad thing.

Read this article

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Bonus round

• For those in design or tech, I’ve been writing quite a few articles over on my Read.cv profile

🎧 Listen

Elon’s Spies

So it turns out that Elon Musk allegedly makes heavy use of private investigators to track people and control narratives across the globe. This podcast series looks into a few cases, from the guy who saved those children from a Thai cave, to Amanda Heard, focusing on how Mr Musk dominated the story with a little help from some extra eyeballs.

Listen to this series
Spotify – Apple Podcasts

Have a great week,
@disco_lu

Hey everyone!

I’m just going to paste in a few lines verbatim from Wikipedia to tell you how I’m feeling about the past few weeks across the globe:

The paradox of tolerance is a philosophical concept suggesting that if a society extends tolerance to those who are intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance, thereby undermining the very principle of tolerance. [Source]

Stay safe and have a great week 🙌🏻

Luis

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❶ A digital twin might just save your life

Whether it’s a factory manager in their office watching the efficiency of the floor through a screen, or testing virtual planes inside virtual wind tunnels in production, the idea of the world we know it also existing in a simulation isn’t science fiction anymore. We’ve already made it, it just might not look like what we thought it would. This extends all the way from the company to the individual, to the point where we might exist as our entire selves inside a simulation to see how we respond to the world.

Read this article

❷ The death of search

Google was supposed to be the forever company. Surely, nothing could replace verb-ing your way to knowledge? In less than a few years, the tech industry at least has still been using text inputs to gather knowledge, but from other sources. This is both phenomenal and scary, as the entire fabric of the web is essentially sitting on the foundation of search, SEO, and advertising revenue. How will we transition away from this without watching it all crumble?

Read this article

❸ We need raw awe

The world is becoming more isolated. And we’re choosing to do it. This article introduces a phrase I hadn’t heard before: ‘tech-vexed’ – “the gradual yet relentless seduction of computerised life”. Isn’t that sad. We live in a world that’s more predictable when it’s online first, we’re less surprised and less caught off guard. I guess this is a call to go outside more and see people.

Read this article

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Bonus round (apologies, this is a self promo week)

• For work stuff, I’ve started to write articles over on Read.cv. It’s a really lightweight way to get my “loose thoughts” out, and doesn’t have the gross bloat of Medium

• My podcast 8px Radio is back, with one live episode and 3 more coming

🎧 Listen

Information and social order
This is an interview with the author of Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari, where they discuss why people who are experts in the literal sense are in fact typically directed by those that are experts in fiction and order. In plainer terms – scientists and engineers who know the science are told what to do by the CEO who wants to twist the narrative in the favour of profit.

Spotify – Apple
(47 minutes)

Have a great week,
@disco_lu

Hey everyone,

When browsing Google Fonts a few weeks ago, I noticed that the example text looked different 🕵️‍♀️

It used to be “the quick brown fox…”, but this time, it looked like the below:

You’ll notice it is very much not the bog standard text anymore. At first, I thought Google had been hacked! But after…Googling it, I realised that it’s the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, cool.

But, is it cool? Or is it a political statement? From what I can see, there was no feature announcement about it, and it just kind of arrived. Reddit suggests two years ago, but I’m quite sure as it’s new to me.

Anyway, I’m rambling. Should corporations offering font services be politically charged?

Enjoy the issue!
Luis

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❶ Taste is eating Silicon Valley

The sentiment of this article is pretty simple – there’s too much choice in software, and your differentiation must come from branding, visual design, or a richer story. I’m not too beat up about this, I do think we have too much software, and talk about it ad nauseam to anyone who will listen.

Read this article

❷ What is privacy for?

There’s some linguistic artistry in this article. It’s centrally about the blurring lines between on/offline and our ability to focus, but at the same time acknowledging that we’re doing a lot of talking on the subject but very little action is happening. This line in particular was delicious: “there is an algorithmic quality to our grievances with algorithmic life”.

Read this article

❸ Please don’t make me download another app

The title speaks for itself here, and it’s painful. How many apps do you have on you phone? I’m willing to be 50. That’s frankly insane, isn’t it? Every single shop or service is creating more apps and software and login details and passwords and favourites and emails and urgh.

Read this article

🎧 Listen

Are we now too impatient to be intelligent?

I’m breaking my own rule here a bit by sharing a video instead of a podcast, but you don’t really need to watch it, so it still counts. It’s a talk by Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman at the advertising agency Ogilvy. Firstly, he’s a brilliant speaker, but his point here is that speed isn’t the be all and end all of success. The value of something relies on it being done slowly! Rushing causes mistakes, and mistakes cause headaches.

Watch / listen to this (31 minutes)
YouTube

Have a great week,
@disco_lu

Hey everyone,

I took a proper European summer break this year, hence the exceptionally long time between newsletters.

As I’ve slipped back into work, I’ve noticed something within the tech industry which feels particularly magnified at the moment.

From what I can see and hear, people get into tech because they have creative itches to scratch. They want to build “user centric interfaces”, or show high levels of craft in a shiny new product. The reality is that this is not the average day job – far from it.

What we then end up with is a majority of dissatisfied and creatively dehydrated workers who either job job every few years to search for the next artistic fix, or spiral into thoughts about leaving the industry altogether and working in a cafe (pro tip: you would not enjoy that one bit).

This has a knock on effect of the word “creative” and the work produced conflicting and grinding against each other to a scenario where portfolios…suck. Product design is unfortunately a lot of boxes, tables, and forms, but this isn’t what people get into it for.

We need to look hard at the definition, and expectations, of creatives roles within tech to understand what it is we’re doing here, in an attempt to protect and provide for current and future satisfaction in something we spend 9 hours a day doing.

Have a great week!
Luis

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❶ Goldman Sachs and pop culture

Who knew that investment banks were interested in inflating the truth of the zeitgeist to make a big buck? Well, turns out they’ve done it with AI to absolutely no one’s surprise. This is an article ripping Goldman to shreds about their impact on the industry’s success, or lack of.

Read this article

❷ Avoiding harm in technology innovation

Innovation is typically paired with breaking things, fast. MVP culture and getting the product out the door is great in theory, but when you’re dealing with sensitive or potentially harmful technology, this can be disastrous. This article provides examples of this, as well as a framework for avoiding harm when innovating. I’ll leave you with an alarming quote:

“manager [are] not routinely encouraged to question the ethical implications of the products they are developing”

Read this article

❸ Why generalists own the future

This is generally the sentiment in tech, as jobs become broader with the technological enhancements we have at our finger tips. I personally don’t know if this is true at scale. Perhaps at smaller companies, but that’s always been the case. What I think is going to change is that people become more specialised in the types of companies they work for. E.g. “I’m a startup designer”.

Read this article

🎧 Listen

Dare to be basic

This touches on the opener when I was writing on our day jobs often being quite…boring. They mention that a lot of work they produce isn’t “special”, but perhaps that’s fine? This quote made me laugh:

 “Few people have the courage to admit their life and work isn’t that complicated.”

Listen to this podcast (25 minutes)
Spotify – Apple

Have a great week,
@disco_lu

Hey everyone, it’s been a while!

Seeing as AI is almost certainly eating the world*, I’d like to offer you two poorly thought through, but hopefully entertaining metaphors for what I feel is going on.

One – Force Majuere
If you have never watched the movie with the same name, I’d encourage you to, but here’s the clip I’m referring to:

Here, tourists at a ski mountain resort watch as a controlled explosion causes an avalanche. At first, they grab their phones, record it, talk about how powerful it looks and admire the beauty of its uniqueness.

As the avalanche advances, they notice its danger, and how it’s not just a pretty picture; it’s there to clear them out.

The tourists are us, the camera phones our efficient knowledge worker demos of its greatness.

Two – Fois gras
It’s delicious, isn’t it? The process to get there is not. We’re the ducks being stuffed, our output commoditised and our investor plates stacked full of the goods.

Have a tasty week,
Luis

*My promise to you is to not talk about AI unless I find it absolutely necessary to share an idea

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❶ The real hallucination problem

Every time a new AI thing launches, we all rush to see how bad it is when trying to generate stuff. But, as this article suggests, perhaps those aren’t the hallucinations we should be worried about? Allow me to paste a paragraph:

Some of these firms are, in no uncertain terms, trying to rewrite the rules of society by doing whatever they can to create a godlike superintelligence…Others seem more interested in using generative AI to build tools that repurpose others’ creative work with little to no citation.

Read this article

❷ How do you fix a problem like Elon?

This is a long read, so buckle up, but is a great insight into just how difficult Twitter’s CEO Linda Yaccarino’s job is. Her decisions are undercut, and she’s effectively playing a game of “corporate Whac-A-Mole”. Devastating given how much I use the damn website.

Read this article

❸ How game designers secretly run your life

A few learnings here: firstly, dice used to be referred to as an addictive drug. Second, we’re wired to challenge uncertainty and lose interest when things become…certain. Third, apparently Snakes and Ladders was invented to teach us about karma.

Read this article

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Bonus round

• “A bad system will beat a good person every time.” Fantastic post about process

🎧 Listen

Genesis, or how weird the crypto world is

I added my own flair to the title, because it wasn’t doing itself justice. This podcast was honestly fascinating. The host finds themselves at a Bitcoin convention in Miami, and describes just how bizarre that micro climate is. The “Bitcoin rappers”, the dark corners of the internet, the digs at Wall Street, and how Peter Thiel (yes, that one) speaks about it on stage.

Listen to this podcast (1 hour 6 minutes)
Spotify – Apple

Have a great week,
@disco_lu

Hey everyone!

It’s been a while, and that’s because it’s been a wild few weeks for me.

I was in San Francisco 2 weeks ago for work’s annual conference, where we packed 13k people into a conference centre. I then flew directly to Singapore for another conference, only to test positive for Covid the morning after I arrived.

Singapore to me was the inside of a hotel room, I felt a bit like I was in a Sofia Coppola movie. Would not recommend two 16 hour flights to sit in a hotel.

Despite this madness, I was still affirmed that you really cannot replace the feeling of seeing online friends in person. I met people who I’ve known for years on Twitter, but until that moment didn’t really know them.

A 2 minute conversation can spark so many ideas. It’s so easy for people to just be an avatar, a handle, or a reply in a thread.

Have a safe week,
Luis

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❶ Before Smartphones, real people were playing Google

I remember this. Back in the 2000s, you could text a phone number (118 118 in the UK) and receive answers to anything. Not only was it a fun late night thing to do with friends, it actually worked. And even funnier is that it was run by real people sitting in call centres, frantically either Googling answers, or using encyclopaedias to get you what you needed.

Read this article

❷ LinkedIn’s AI career coaches will see you now

LinkedIn is rolling out chatbots and AI features to help you bot your way to success. Firstly, this is horrifying. Secondly, are we surprised? They are owned by Microsoft (cough, OpenAI, cough), and if you’re not AI-ing as a business, what are you even doing? I look forward to the plagiarism.

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❸ You’re trying to do too much

This article changed my perspective a little bit. It presents the idea that even well intentioned activities – going to the gym – are extra. What will be reduced in order to fit this into your life? Or will you just stack it on top of everything else, and likely feel less happy, free, and in control as you were before?

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🎧 Listen

That other guy

There are three reasons I’ve picked this podcast. Firstly, it opens with a very funny story about NBA star Michael Jordan and his lifelong vendetta against a college teammate who was picked for the team over him first. Secondly, there’s a segment about two men who have an anonymous rivalry via the running app Strava. Third, there’s a very scary section where an AI voice reads its own poetry and it’s the most existential thing I’ve heard all year.

Spotify – Apple

Have a great week,
@disco_lu

Hey everyone,

I’m many, many weeks late, but something that I haven’t stopped thinking about since Apple’s released their new iPads is…hey, they aren’t a product company. They are a marketing company, convincing you that marginal improvements are worth thousands of dollars, every single year.

Since then, I haven’t been able to stop looking at every company like this, and it’s hurting my brain. Are you genuinely offering a service, or squeezing the lemon for every last drop?

As people in the tech industry, we all have a central desire to offer great user experiences, offer life changing solutions to users, and try to make a positive dent. But perhaps that’s all a facade.

I’m feeling…positive 🤣

Have a great week!
Luis

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❶ Worldless Places And The Reality Of Fictions

This is a pretty dense philosophical analysis of capitalism’s ability to be a universal truth yet have no distinct meaning. It is culture-less, yet accommodates every culture. It is/was the beginning of the future and the end of everything we knew to be unique. It goes into way more depth than this, but this is enough of a taste.

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❷ Chaos and cause: Science, or a butterfly’s wing

Would you say a roulette wheel is predictable? Probably not, but assuming the butterfly effect is accurate, wouldn’t the conditions of the spin be something maths could solve? Putting Isaac Newton’s laws against John Keats’ mystery, this article looks at chaos theory and tries to understand whether it’s actually true or not.

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❸ Are the posthumans here yet?

As in, robot humans? Yes. Apparently the first person to get a chip implant happened in…1998! They can control lights and doors, which is perhaps a little underwhelming. This is a short article, but a look into the future, which a lot of people are very willing to embark on.

Read this article

—

Bonus round

• Can everyone kindly shut up about AI

🎧 Listen

Should this creepy search engine exist?

Facial recognition isn’t new, and none of us would be surprised to know how big a business it is in the security (or tracking?) space. But, there are rafts of search engines swimming into view that take it even further.

One in particular, discussed in this podcast, has indexed so much of the internet that it can identify you in photos you didn’t even know you were in. For example, the background of other people’s photos shared at cafes, gigs, or just in the street. We’re not safe!

What’s creepier, is that this one in particular was developed almost entirely by a single person working out of public cafes.

Listen to this podcast (60 minutes)
Spotify – Apple

Have a great week,
@disco_lu

Happy Sunday everyone 👋

Listening to a podcast earlier I was stunned by a quote (I’m paraphrasing):

Ambition is seasonal

It’s true. You can’t be ambitious, inspired, creative, or productive 100% of the time. Perhaps it’s accepting that, like the seasons, this feeling comes and goes, it’s the focus and delivering when it does spring up that is the important part.

Have a great week,
Luis

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❶ This irresistible revolution

What’s the first thing you do when you wake up? I’d bet a lot of answers would be “reach for my phone.” This article is about the quiet but consistent takeover of our lives by digital. A quote in this article stands out: “we have our phones. Our phones have us”.

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❷ What colour do you see?

This article is at its core about the differences we all have in perception, from colour to the ability to clearly visualise an object in our minds. Apparently not everyone can do this by the way. Remember that blue/black, white/gold dress viral thing a few years ago? Scientists didn’t know that this perceptual difference even existed until that moment. Thank god for the internet, huh?

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❸ The diminishing returns of having good taste

Not long ago, people built entire identities on their ability to hoard information, mostly in a cool or hipster way. “The best organic Colombian coffee bean supplier? Here you go.” With information moving so fast and so freely now however, information’s longevity is reduced to days or weeks, rendering that all important “taste” almost null. Is everything the same now?

Read this article

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Bonus round

1. Music versus lyrics. Do they operate independently?

2. The worst year in history

3. New episode of my podcast Design & Whine is coming out today, where we talk about inspiration

🎧 Listen

The making of TikTok’s “sonic logo”

Firstly, this podcast episode introduced me to the idea that a sound could be called a logo. In this case, it’s that bloopybloop noise that you hear at the end of every single TikTok video aka the greatest marketing idea that’s ever happened. TikTok were the first social media company to do something like this, and its inbuilt virality paid off big time. This podcast talks to the creative team who made that 2 second audio clip, and they explain their process to get there.

Spotify – Apple (25 minutes)

Have a great week,
@disco_lu

Hey folks 👋

I posted something the other day with some napkin career advice which seemed to resonate with a few people, so in the interest of advice number 6, I’m going to paste the post right here! (original)

Have a great week,
Luis

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❶ The phone-based childhoods of now

This topic keeps coming up, which means it’s something to take seriously. Mental health and life satisfaction in those born after 1996 is practically on the floor, and the theory is that the batteries with screens we carry around are responsible. We’re in a position to do something here, I just don’t think we know what yet.

Read this article

❷ The problem of AI ethics

The title sums this one up pretty well, but it’s a smart analysis on why this is such a hard topic to tackle, due to the ever-changing nature of what we’re dealing with. If it changes every 3, 6, 12 months, how can we work on any semblance of global ethics?

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❸  Schopenhauer, and the futility of desire

I loved the writing in this article. At its core, it’s a person in their 40s hitting that mid-life crisis, but it more widely discusses the human condition and how we feel a need to distinguish between stuff we complete, and stuff we don’t; as if it defines our every cell. This is all via the 19th-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.

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Bonus round

• Silicon Valley’s gold rush roots

• Inside the secret cities that built the atomic bomb

🎧 Listen

Where’s my flying car?

Where are those flying cars that were supposed to be here in the future aka now? Who would even use them, would they be safe and actually practical? Imagine how many vehicles would be flying around in the sky not on roads, sounds chaotic.

Spotify – Apply Music (54 minutes)

Have a great week,
@disco_lu

Hey everyone 👋

I’m back from a few weeks in India, and to the surprise of probably nobody, the food was consistently excellent.

I’ve been thinking about tech hiring a lot recently, in the way that it’s pretty broken. For the creative side, there is such a heavy reliance on people to prove their worth via presentations and “case studies”, which cater incredibly well to particular experiences.

The reality is that a vast majority of creatives aren’t proud of the work they are asked to do, but are stuck in the machine of case study management, trying to fudge narratives for other people’s ideas.

As a result, people are often forced to work on their own side projects in order to create that pride that lacks in the formal workplace. This is a broken rhythm, and I think there’s an opportunity to fix it with a shake up of what job applications look like.

I might make something.

Have a great week,
Luis

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❶ 20 years of Gmail

Do you remember your first email account? Was it an embarrassing one? I remember starting out with Hotmail, but then flipping over to Gmail to feel in some way more professional. Here’s a zippy article talking about just how much impact Gmail had on email.

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❷ Who cares about tech regulation?

It’s pretty juicy, because when we think about true innovation it can often mean rule breaking. Uber is the clearest example to me, where they bulldozed their way to success, which wouldn’t have been possible in a more regulated market. I don’t think regulation is a bad thing by the way, but we have to figure out how both innovation and regulation can be true.

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❸ The power of changing your mind

This is a discussion on propaganda and the in/ability for us to change our perspective based on our surroundings and state of mine. I do firmly believe that a willingness to change your mind is a superpower, effectively taking “growth mindset” to level 11 is a way to keep the engine of learning moving at high speed.

Read this article

—

Bonus round

• Spotify’s annual music economics report aka how much are artists earning?

🎧 Listen

…has left the chat

This is a podcast series about private social media, specifically messaging groups like WhatsApp. We’ve all become accustomed to joining infinite groups on these apps, with floods of messages to wade through. What cultures have been created with chat, how are we adapting to this level of information overload? I really enjoyed this series, I think you will too. P.s. there’s some nostalgia in here when they talk about MSN.

Listen to this podcast series
Spotify – Apple Podcasts

Have a great week,
@disco_lu

Hey everyone!

I’ve been chatting with peers recently a lot about the idea of obsession.

There seems to be a circling acerbic discussion on this here internet about whether jobs are just jobs, or jobs are something you need to dedicate your entire world to.

Where I think both fail is that we don’t really ask anyone about their preference. Someone who is happy to leave work at arm’s length is great, but not in an early-stage environment where you may fail in the next 3 months.

And vice versa, a hustle-bro stands out like a sore thumb everywhere, but mostly in environments where safety and security is the primary objective.

I believe that because we spend so much time in front of our computers, we can often do ourselves a disservice by not being truly interested in what it is we’re doing.

I call this obsession, you may call this something else, but without that feeling of “I’m trying my best here”, it feels really hard to see anything as worth our time.

Teams fail with a lack of interest. This is where great minds decay.

Have a great week,
Luis

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❶ Marking the Web’s 35th Birthday: An Open Letter

This post was written by the “founder” of the internet, Tim Berners-Lee. He wrote one 5 years ago, and this one seems to be a deepening set of concerns. He clearly sets out that there’s an issue with power concentration on the internet, “which contradicts the decentralised spirit I originally envisioned”. He also calls out the challenges of polarising content, particularly in such an important election year. Have a read, feel inspired (or concerned 🤣)!

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❷ Are we watching the internet die?

Hmm, this seems related to the previous one. It’s a great long read about Reddit’s planned IPO and the decline of user generate content. This IPO is where a few investors will walk away with tens of millions of dollars despite Reddit never actually turning a profit (isn’t this insane?). This statement says it all, really: “We're at the end of a vast, multi-faceted con of internet users, where ultra-rich technologists tricked their customers into building their companies for free”

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❸ Why we reject new ideas

Back when computers were introduced, people developed “computerphobia”, rejecting the notion of this shiny new thing. I personally have AIphobia, but that’s a story for another time. There’s some really nice framing in this article/interview, where they suggest that new ideas are contextual. What’s old to you may be new to me, so how does that impact how we talk about it?

Read this article

—

Bonus round

• Irony 🚨 – Mastering the art of small talk

🎧 Listen

Nick Cave: Loss, Yearning, Transcendence

This is a really honest and deep discussion (and a little sad!) with musician Nick Cave, where he talks about how has tried to handle the loss of his sons, what that has meant for his spiritual beliefs, and how life is different now. He talks about how grief and empathy are deeply connected, and his lens on the world has changed significantly. “I didn’t plan to be on this podcast” felt like quite a powerful statement for me.

Listen to this podcast (63 minutes)
Spotify – Apple

Have a great week,
@disco_lu

Hey everyone,

It seems that “I’m feeling burned out” is becoming more and more of a common response when people in my (tech) circles describe how they are feeling.

I’ve been trying to figure out why it feels more common for a while. Maybe we have the language to describe it now? Maybe workplace pressures have increased? Maybe the state of the world is weighing on us?

An alternative view is that now we all work from home a lot more, with a positively distraction-free environment, we’re able to fully understand the futility of a lot of what we do at work.

Is it the case that software makers are realising that meetings are generally a waste of time, endless iterations of pixel-pushing have no significant impact on your self worth, and sitting in one spot for 10 hours a day truly is a terrible experience?

Was the office distraction enough to keep these feelings at bay?

Let me know what you think,
Luis

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❶ The text file that runs the internet

This article is a jump into the world of robots.txt. If you’re not aware, this little file lives on basically every website, and is a set of instructions for crawlers, created as a concept by those that pioneered the internet. The challenge now though is that big, shiny, wonderful AI is coming in and wreaking havoc with this as well. Why is this important? This teeny file was a handshake amongst internet creators and consumers, but tech now is all consume with no such niceties.

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❷ How to talk about deadlines

This is a bit more work-y than the usual articles I share, but I loved it. It’s a practical look at deadlines, how much they suck, and what we can do to make them better. There is advice both for individual contributors and managers, with examples of how to course correct if things aren’t so smooth on your team.

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❸ The paradox of goals

Are you a goal setter? Or a “let’s see what happens?” type? This article presents a term I haven’t heard of before – the “arrival fallacy” – which describes how even when we hit our goals, we’re not guaranteed to be satisfied. That 5k you just ran will probably just make you want to do it again, faster. They also introduce the idea to change from linear goals to cyclical ones 🤔

Read this article

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Bonus round

• The evolution of flight in nature

• New episode of my podcast Design & Whine is out, about design process

🎧 Listen

What are we going to do about all these cats?

Weirdest podcast title ever? Yes. Fascinating episode? Also yes. This is a bizarre but entertaining discussion on how cats are apparently now being treated as invasive species. It’s mostly because bird populations are in serious decline, which is a bit cause for concern. It’s a great listen, honestly.

Listen to this podcast (51 minutes)
Spotify – Apple

Have a great week,
@disco_lu

Hey everyone 👋

I updated my iPhone this week and an app called Journal was automatically installed. Thanks Apple for another app!

Apparently, Journal is a way to “reflect on everyday moments and life’s special events”, and is stuffed with machine learning features to try and help you remember stuff from photos, notes, anything else they are tracking.

Although this sounds cool, I’m a little concerned about the digification of our entire lives. I went to a gig last night and couldn’t see the band because of all the phones recording the whole thing. We overload digital to-do list apps with high priority things that we never end up completing. We take disappearing photos of our lives right..at..this…moment, only to forget that we did it or who we’re sharing our every waking moment with.

This doomsday “tech is bad” thing seems to be a bit of a trend recently in my openers, but I’m starting to feel like hey maybe let’s explore through our own eyes rather than the lens of a glass brick.

Have a great week!

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❶ The internet is about to get weird again

This article compares the year 2000 with 2024, and how the largest companies in tech are at risk of losing relevancy as consumers seek personality and trust. We want a new search engine that isn’t Google, we’re fed up of Apple’s high charges on apps within its store, and Twitter is…Twitter. I even see this with the desire to break the grid and design software that feels more personal within the community.

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❷ Google’s true moonshot

This is a deep dive on Googe’s (missed) opportunities and how it approaches competition. From their loss against Apple with regards to maps, to the antitrust lawsuits, to their artificial intelligence woes. Their real big opportunity? “Ok, Google”.

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❸ How big is YouTube?

An impossible question, perhaps. This article estimates there are approximately 13bn videos, which is nuts. The article is a look at how they analysed all the videos. It’s a bit technical, a bit nerdy, but I enjoyed the read and I think you will too.

Read this article

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Bonus round

• Maps of the London underground, showing you how far beneath street level each station is

• The year the millennial internet died

• The theory of modern exclamation (!!!!!!)

🎧 Listen

Who should be in charge of AI?

This episode was released back in December, but is as relevant now as it was then. It’s a discussion with Casey Newton, where they discuss how and why tech companies are structured the way they are now, with boards of directors, CEOs, managerial levels etc. It’s a central “who should be in charge?” question, and when it comes to intelligence it becomes even harder to answer. The consolidation of power into a few people is a pretty weird concept, and this podcast does a little history dive for us to show where it all came from.

Listen to this podcast (54 minutes)
Spotify – Apple

Have a great week,
@disco_lu

Happy nearly the end of the year everyone 👋

As the year has closed, and the build up of tension from an intense period has whirred, I’ve found myself looking to disconnect more and more. Or, I should say specifically, a disconnect from distraction.

It’s been a pretty simple switch, but not using my headphones on walks or on my commute to the office has felt quite transformative.

Hey, you know what, I’ve been able to actually hear my own thoughts rather than be plugged by a podcast or music in every waking empty second.

Give it a shot, keep your headphones in your pocket the next time you head out for your morning or afternoon walk, and see what ideas come into your mind.

If I don’t see you again this year, make it count ✌️

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❶ Reciprocal otherness

This isn’t the usual kind of article, as it’s more literature focused than tech, but I think you’ll enjoy it. It’s a discussion about the author Simone de Beauvoir’s work, and specifically her investigation into what it’s like to be “othered”. Firstly, as a woman, but also politically and culturally. Enjoy!

Read this article

❷ The techno-optimist’s fallacy

This is a juicy one. Has the internet, overall, been a force for good? Has software ultimately made the world better, or are we just more entertained and addicted?

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❸ How Twitter broke the news

This is a nice long read, with lovely illustrations too, about how for a solid decade Twitter was essentially the place for everything. News, sports, scandal, it was all viewed on the bird. How did it pip Facebook and others to the post, and what the heck happened to allow itself to implode so violently?

Read this article

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Bonus round

• Why scientists are making transparent wood

• Social media is not heroin (a loooong study)

🎧 Listen

How to waste time

This podcast is a similar sentiment to the opening section of today’s newsletter. It’s a discussion between co-hosts about how they treat their free time. It opens in a funny way with one of the hosts explaining that she struggled to wait 4 minutes without feeling a crushing and immense amount of boredom. Sound familiar?

Spotify – Apple podcasts

Have a great week,
@disco_lu