Reeeeally into this IG trend

shipping is a form of user research. once something is live, you learn what people notice, repeat, misunderstand, ignore, or unexpectedly love. no amount of internal debate gives you quite the same signal.

after hosting 50 people at home this weekend: a full house really does feel bigger than an empty one

a really fun update for pro users!

i swear parents have a different gear that only kicks in after bedtime. the house is closed, nobody needs anything from you, and suddenly you can get an absurd amount done between 7 and 10pm

i studied Vedanta and the Bhagavad Gita when i was younger, and two ideas i learned then have become much more practical to me as an adult than they ever felt at the time. the first is about inputs and outputs. On any project, personal or professional, you can be obsessive about the inputs: how you show up, your preparation, judgment, and the effort you put in. but the outcome is never fully yours. learning to really believe that has saved me a lot of stress. the second is equanimity. Early in my career, i was devastated when a launch didn’t go as planned or i didn’t get the promotion i wanted. But what’s interesting is i was never equally euphoric when a launch went great or i got the promotion. the bad had so much more power than the good. after enough years of work, you realize neither should make or break you. And I say this to everyone who’s had an emotional conversation with me: nothing is ever as bad as or as good as it seems. i still care a lot. i still want the launch to work and the growth to happen. i just try not to hand the result more power over me than it deserves.

years ago my husband and i made this silly little DONE slack emoji during a weekend when we were both working way too much. it’s somehow followed us into different companies and become weirdly popular. one of my favorite tiny things we’ve made together @anandr__

exaggerated alignment exercises are how bold ideas become perfectly acceptable ones

every time i uninstall instagram i’m struck by how much better actual catching up feels. which is strange because so much of social media’s original promise was community. Part of the problem is that instagram fills your head with updates from people you never chose to catch up with, while giving you highly curated versions of the people you actually care about. in real life, catching up is messy and reciprocal. someone tells you the great thing, then the thing that’s going badly, then you spend 20 minutes on a completely unimportant story. you leave knowing them better and they know you better too. online, i can know where someone went on vacation, what their kitchen tiles look like and what their child wore for halloween without either of us having spoken in a year. To me, that’s a strange approximation of closeness. i keep wondering what social technology would look like if we optimized more explicitly for community and the feeling of being known. reddit is interesting to me for this reason. at its best, you’re not following a beautifully curated person. you’re repeatedly showing up around a shared interest, problem or obsession. people talk back. there are inside jokes, regulars, disagreement, and (underrated) there’s context. Out of all the platforms I’ve been on, it feels much closer to how communities actually form. we’ve gotten incredibly good at helping people know more about more people. i’d love to see what we build when the goal is helping us know a smaller number of people better.

love design that looks touched by a human hand. paint splatters, handwriting, imperfect texture. weirdly rare now

the thing i love about intelligent UI in @ChatGPT is how naturally it shows up in everyday questions. asked about the weather this week and realized how much more useful this is than reading another paragraph about the forecast

my dream for FSD (in addition to being driven around) is being able to send my car places without me. basically Uber Connect with your own car. oh the errands i would outsource

nothing makes you see your own house more clearly than telling a bunch of people to come over next weekend

😻

i remember my grandmom getting so overwhelmed by paperwork. wish she had something like this to help her through it

my hot take on why more women don’t listen to tech podcasts: they overindex on information and underindex on relationship. if i’m giving you an hour of my day, i want to feel like i’m hanging out with people i know, not sitting through a Q&A. long-form audio is an intimacy medium.

make a game, build halloween costumes, and buy your fashion obsessed dog a new vest on chatgpt now!!!