Steve @ fasterandworse @awful.systems

I write things on my blog sometimes https://fasterandworse.com/

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Microsoft launches ‘vibe working’ in Excel and Word

A new Office Agent in Copilot chat, powered by Anthropic models, is also launching today that can create PowerPoint presentations and Word documents from a “vibe working” chatbot.

I'm quite sure a part of my last job loss was due to my open refusal to use AI, which extended to my criticism of the use of AI-generated code being added to a codebase I was expected to manage and maintain. Being careful is seen as friction now, careful is translated as slow, no matter how much time is spent fixing things broken by shitty generated code, fixing is seen as productivity more than careful production is.

My new video about the anti-design of the tech industry where I talk about this little passage from an ACM article that set me off when I found it a few years back.

In short, before software started eating all the stuff "design" meant something. It described a process of finding the best way to satisfy a purpose. It was a response to the purpose.

The tech industry takes computation as being an immutable means and finds purposes it may satisfy. The purpose is a response to the tech.

p.s. sorry to spam. :)

vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ollyMSWSWOY pod: https://pnc.st/s/faster-and-worse/8ffce464/tech-as-anti-design

threads bsky: https://bsky.app/profile/fasterandworse.com/post/3ltwles4hkk2t masto: https://hci.social/@fasterandworse/114852024025529148

"businesses and employees"

the business pays for it, the employees "use" it.

the business measures the value by how many employees they can remove.

if the business is measuring "productivity", how are they doing that? Is it jira tickets? Is it timesheets? are they measuring quality? Is it starting to seem like you're trying to pick up water with your fingers?

if you pretend that ai ceos are actually doing marketing the trajectory is right there staring you in the face

new rant from me about how boosters asking critics to admit that AI is "useful" is not the win they think it is vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRcBCji6XvE audio: https://pnc.st/s/faster-and-worse/94cb1cda/useful-is-nothing

here's my beat for beat commentary on the WWDC25 event icyi. https://bsky.app/profile/fasterandworse.com/post/3lr6tm62rpc2h

David pulled it all together perfectly here. It's amazing how well it fits the hook model, whether they intended it or not

New webbed brief from Heydon

https://briefs.video/videos/introducing-webbed-sites/

very much agree with this

Great piece by Jacob Silverman about the growing shittyness of the day-to-day internet experience

https://archive.is/20250419163054/https://www.ft.com/content/5d06bbb4-0034-493b-8b0d-5c0ab74bedef#selection-2009.350-2009.663

Can we find a way back to an internet that puts people in lucid conversation with one another, where books are published after they are written, where anger and insanity aren’t the dominant modes of thought and the defining editorial values are more meaningful than a chumbox of clickbait nonsense? I’m not sure.

ICYI I posted a new vid/pod this week and an accompanying thread about: Everything Is Work Now — Tech products have a work/life balance problem

• Vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_os9Pp3AYW4
• Pod: https://pnc.st/s/faster-and-worse/7cdb9dc1/everything-is-work-now
• Thread masto: https://hci.social/@fasterandworse/114352163970046171
• Thread bsky: https://bsky.app/profile/fasterandworse.com/post/3lmykmxv6qs2w

Here's my audio/video dispatch about framing tech through conservation of energy to kill the magical thinking of generative ai and the like podcast ep: https://pnc.st/s/faster-and-worse/968a91dd/kill-magic-thinking video ep: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLHmtYWzHz8

aw thanks

ICYI here's me getting a bit ranty about generative ai products https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5MQb-uNf2U

how much is templated now? reckon it'll be 3hrs every time?

I get where you're coming from but we're talking about two completely separate layers of abstraction.

If you define data as a material, which you can, then software is going to be a very good means for working with data. It'll be the best!

But for that to happen you have to have decided that data is the key to whatever purpose you are aiming to satisfy. You're saying that all purposes are a matter of data manipulation.

I don't actually say that software cannot be a product, I say that it can't be categorised as a product in itself. As in, it doesn't make sense to have "furniture products, exercise products, data products, surveillance products, and SOFTWARE products" - that doesn't mean something made out of software can't be a product.

BTW I'm not claiming this is novel, in fact I know it's not. I'm also not taking it personal, feedback is why I post this shit.

I don't know what part of my post you are responding to

thanks! I'm glad it sparked this response

and every step of the way, I can customize what I’m doing to fit my own needs.

Is a key thing here, hey. It's also important to be able to pull things in as you need them and be aware of how those things put a load on your computer. So then it's important to be able to take them out 100% as well.

I know this is kind of how stuff works but it's the kinda that is the thing for me. One of the design goals of my project is that 100% of what is running is 100% of what is needed at that time

Just to add, this video doesn't say much about the actual idea in detail. I have plenty more to say about that. It is more philosophical groundwork to lead into an upcoming video about the thing itself

I hate how much firefox has been growing to this point of being the best, by a smaller and smaller margin, of a fucking shit bunch