Simon has an article on this

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/13/training-for-pelicans-...

That's easier said than done. Even if you don't directly use Google services, chances are that Big Data is still watching you on every website you go to. And if you have a mobile data plan, your service provider knows exactly where you are 24/7.

Yikes! It should not require the service provider to block PII, but at least someone plugged the leak.

Facebook does this as well.

Thanks for explaining how they do it BTW! I didn't really think about it. I just knew it was shitty.

I'm the lead for an internal tool for a non-technical team. We iterate so quickly that the team we're building it for was like "can you guys stop changing things so quickly? We can't keep up with where anything is." which was a fair assessment.

Agreed, but I think it's underrated because the trait could also get someone fired or laid off.

Yeah you don't walk into the job doing it. But once your position is secure and you've built some stuff to where you can make changes in 5 minutes that might take someone else a day, then you can start pushing back on craziness.

There's also an art to how you do it. It's important to build up trust that you won't tell the client something is impossible or really hard just because you don't want to do it. You try to explain to them how much complexity this is going to add, how that will make it harder to add new features in the future, and most importantly offer some alternatives that get them 90% of what they're trying to do. Most clients will appreciate that approach IME, especially if you've already thrilled them a few times.

This is one of the reasons I'm not so worried about Claude taking my job in the immediate future. But I am still extremely worried about the industry as a whole and by extension the future of the middle class.

Yeah I agree. I've worked with my boss in various capacities for the last ten years. When he says "can we do X" my answer is always like "we can do anything, the question is does the company want to allocate Y resources to get X done." Claude, being a yes-man, will always say "you're absolutely right!" to any idea you throw at it, not knowing (and, perhaps more crucially, not caring) if it's the right fit for your product/business.

I think part of the problem is that many engineers don't stick around long enough to build that rapport, which isn't a problem of AI in itself but is certainly exacerbated by it.

Hot take — Shift enter to submit should be illegal everywhere. If there's any key chord to submit, it should be Ctrl Enter.

I think I'd be OK with some inconsistency in how Enter works as long as the key chords are consistent!

I can kinda understand why ChatGPT and other chat bots do it. It's a chat interface. Most people chat with single line prompts.

Next door and social media apps, to answer your question, I'm sure a PM somewhere was able to prove that engagement increased if we let people share their thoughts immediately, and the PM got a tidy bonus because of this.

I would be OK if they put a checkbox next to the text input that let me choose whether enter sends or line breaks. I would be OK even if that lived in session storage, to remove the friction of a new Db column. Just give us the option!

Yeah this is insane. Maybe most users of chat bots are just sending one line prompts but I find that hard to believe users of Claude code are doing that more often than sending multi-line prompts.

I was recently doing some maintenance on my mom's iPhone SE and was quite shocked at how many random apps she had installed. Random forums, shopping apps, etc. Bespoke mobile app wrappers for simple web apps may be the new 'toolbar' or 'browser extension'