My note to my kids about AI went viral with many parents. I touched on the note this week while taping an NPR segment — the topic clearly hit a nerve.

• I asked lots of people why. Put simply, parents don't know what to say — and kids don't know where else to turn — with so much changing so fast. So here's another look at AI and beyond.

Hey kid, we gotta talk.

I want to be blunt — and insanely useful — in helping you navigate the uncertainty, fast change and new opportunity of the current moment. It's bolded because it's so easy to lose hold of hope and action, a dynamic duo. Don't. Ever.

First, a gut check. It's normal to be anxious. I see what you see: AI eating up work, phones eating up attention, politics eating up hope. That's a lot. It's real.

• For better or worse, you're living through history, with once-in-a-century changes happening in technology, politics, media and how you work. I can't sugarcoat reality.

I'm not here to lecture or scold. I want to provide a different, brighter way to think about this moment — and help you navigate it.

You're not behind. You're early. Nobody knows what the hell they're doing with AI yet — not your professors, not your boss and not your friends. They simply know what you do: This is big, perhaps discovery-of-electricity big.

• The people who'll thrive in the next decade won't be the smartest or first to master it. They'll be the ones who use it smartly for their specific job. That lane is still wide open. It can still be you.
• It's fine to be skeptical or even a little scared of AI. It's not OK to ignore it. It would be like refusing to use the internet.
• Start using AI for something other than searching for an answer or rewriting a paper. Don't ask Claude or ChatGPT to do the work. Ask it to make you better at the things you don't want to do. Do that every day for 30 days. You'll be in the top 5% of your generation.

Your major isn't your destiny. Yes, this is a tougher-than-usual job market. Yes, it's likely to get tougher as AI gets better. Yes, it will get more competitive to land your dream job.

• Whining or worrying about this does only one thing: It gives someone else a leg up. Most people take crappy jobs before finding good ones.
• Out-hustle your peers. Apply to more jobs than they do. When you get one, outwork them. Beat them to the office. Use AI better. Be the most competent person in the office and the kind of coworker others admire.
• The skills that compound aren't in course catalogs. They're writing clearly, thinking clearly, selling your ideas, handling hard conversations and learning fast when the thing you just learned goes obsolete. Do all of this and there's zero chance you won't eventually succeed.

Build a bionic brain. Use your phone differently. Find smart people on social media or YouTube with smart, practical tips for doing what you want to do better. Replace your daily doomscrolling with that content.

• Things aren't remotely as gloomy as your TikTok algorithm might have you believe. This isn't a get-off-your-damn-phone rant. I want you to realize the apps you use are engineered to convince you that life is worse than it is. They keep you engaged by pointing out what's wrong or scary.
• These are the simple facts: Violent crime is down. Your peers are smoking and drinking a lot less. More Americans are literate, housed and fed than at any point in history. We're curing cancers we couldn't touch a decade ago. You're living in the safest, richest, healthiest version of America — and being told every 30 seconds it's ending.
• It's not. This is a great country.

You control you. Those are the three most important words I can give you. Say them to yourself every morning. You don't control the economy. You don't control AI. You don't control the president, the algorithms, the job market or the group chat. But you control you.

• You control when you wake up. What you eat. Whether you exercise. Whether you pray, meditate or take five minutes to think. What you read, watch and listen to. How you treat the person in front of you. Whether you send the text, make the call, apply for the thing, show up for the friend.
• Every one of those is a decision. Every one makes you a little better — or a little worse. Nobody else is making these decisions for you.
• When it gets hard, control what you can control. AI can't do that for you. I can't do that for you. You can. It's quite liberating, even empowering.

Get engaged. Nothing makes us feel better than being with others and helping others. I'm not being cheesy or preachy, so don't roll your eyes.

• Throw yourself into action — and to people.  If you're truly so worked up about politics, don't vent. Volunteer. Vote. Use social media to spread smarts and sanity. Worried about poverty? The environment? Homelessness? Go make a difference. You can, even if it's small.
• Here's the pattern I've noticed in every successful or happy person: They showed up. They volunteered. They applied even though they weren't qualified. They said yes before they were ready. They just did things, anything, to create natural momentum in their life. 
• Worst case? You're too busy to fixate on the craziness around you. Best case? You change the world. And I'm right — again.

I'm not going to pretend the world isn't changing faster than it ever has. And no, I don't have all the answers.

• I know this: You're not alone. You're not crazy. You've got this.
• I'm rooting for you. Go make it happen.

📱 Let Jim know what you think: finishline@axios.com.

📈 If you're a CEO or on a CEO's team: Ask to join Jim's new weekly Axios C-Suite newsletter.

Get a grip

The post The Ghost of Microgravity in Astronauts’ Brains appeared first on Nautilus.

The hardest thing to write is less.

Anyone can generate words now. A prompt and a few seconds and you have paragraphs, pages, a manifesto. The machine never runs dry. Which means the words themselves have stopped meaning anything. Volume has become silence.

What’s rare—what’s difficult—is knowing when you’ve said enough. Cutting the sentence that’s technically correct but doesn’t earn its place. Trusting the reader. Trusting the idea. Trusting the white space to do work.

Brevity was always a discipline. Now it’s a statement. When everything around you is excessive by default, choosing fewer words takes courage. It says: I thought about this. I edited. I respected your time more than I needed to show my work.

The web taught us to fill space. AI finished the job. Content covers every surface now, every silence anxious to be noise.

Learn to be quiet on purpose.

The post The Courage to Stop appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

As someone who prefers using services via their websites, I’ve gotten terribly jaded lately. Almost everyone wants me, and by extension, you, to use their darn apps to consume content and off their web versions.

Whether it's the obvious social media apps or something as basic as parking, the app is the priority and the site the red-headed stepchild. And they aren't too subtle in the push either. It might be a modal covering half the web version with links to the App Store, an immediate popup after a bit of scrolling, or a header screaming “the app is 10x better,” but it's always there and it's always grating.

Let's not even go into the cases where the app is the only option to access the service. A minor annoyance for ordering food, but a major hassle when it's a public service or utility.

Why the Hostility From Both Sides?

On principle, I like control over what I see and how I see it. Apps are super limited; while in a browser, I can do a lot of very nifty things to improve usability.

A service lacks a dark mode? I can use any number of user scripts. Reddit introduced a gaming section in the sidebar? Two-second fix that I bundled into my extension [1]. Between userscripts, ad-blockers, and custom extensions, I'm basically a god, swaggering through my realm.

This control, or lack thereof, also explains the app maker's adversarial stance towards users. They are often a black hole of dark patterns, and they'd like nothing getting in their way. Apps make it easier for them to push notifications, collect intrusive telemetry, and keep you inside their walled garden. A better user experience is the pitch but securing better user retention is the end goal.

It's Mostly Just Text and Media

Most apps are just that. Text and media in a never-ending, all-consuming feed or a multi-page form, cleverly disguised by the user interface.

Excluding heavy 3D gaming or utilities that genuinely require deep integration with your phone's hardware (like accessing the LiDAR scanner for AR), what are we actually left with? A thin client whose main job is to fetch data from an API and render it onto native views.

Why do I need to download a 100+ MB app, give it permission to track my location, and let it run background processes just to browse through a restaurant menu, buy a ticket, or scroll through a list of posts? At the end of the day, it is almost always just JSON being parsed and rendered. Yet, companies insist on rebuilding their basic content as native shells just to claim a permanent square of real estate on my home screen.

The Apps Aren't Even Good

If a service is going to pull you out of the browser, it should at least offer a polished, native experience. But more often than not, the app you just downloaded is a compromise.

Anyone who endured the iOS-specific shader compilation jank in early Flutter apps [2] knows exactly how grating this can be (this specific bug was fixed 2023ish fwiw). Before they swapped Skia out for the Impeller engine, I had to capture and ship precompiled shaders with my apps just to stop the UI from stuttering the first time an animation ran.

The result is often the uncanny valley of user interfaces. It’s not broken, but it is subtly different, sometimes janky. The scroll velocity doesn't quite match the rest of the OS. The swipe back gesture hesitates for a few milliseconds.

Human brains are remarkably good at detecting when a system's timing is off. This is how the XZ backdoor was caught: an engineer noticed their SSH logins taking a fraction of a second longer than usual. It's not that unique -- my old FPS buddies could tell our server region just by firing a shot and feeling the lag. [3]

These micro interactions matter, because without that final layer of polish, the entire facade of a native experience falls apart. Not every app is like this, obviously, but enough of them are this way that it sours the entire experience.

The Enshittification Loop

When that full-screen modal pops up demanding you download the app to read the rest of a thread, users choose the path of least resistance. They download and they move on.

To a PM staring at an analytics dashboard, I'm an acceptable casualty, an inconsequential minority. If degrading the web version successfully funnels 80% of users into the App Store, that PM gets a promotion and a big pay bump. As always, actions follow the incentive. Our demographic is simply too small to factor into their quarterly metrics.

This is the enshittification loop in its full glory, working exactly as intended. A service builds its initial audience on the open web because it's frictionless and indexable. Once the user base is sufficiently locked in, the web version is deliberately hobbled to force everyone into the native app. Once you're inside the app, the walls close in: you are now a captive audience for a feed full of ads that your ad-blocker can no longer touch.

There is no financial incentive to maintain a stellar web experience anymore. The browser, once the great universal platform, is increasingly being reduced to a top-of-funnel marketing channel for the App Store. The depressing part of it is that the numbers prove it works.

[1] https://gosinkit.com/

[2] https://blog.flutter.dev/whats-new-in-flutter-2-2-fd00c65e2039 Search for "Preview: iOS shader compilation improvements"

[3] https://www.0xsid.com/blog/667mhz-machine

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