Notices by Anil Dash (anildash@me.dm)

@migratory I don't think there's any particular gender that's limited when it comes to "whimsical" naming of companies, but I understand your point.

So, I am writing a post about "why Bending Spoons picking up Airtable is everything bad in tech right now" — which questions do you want to make sure I answer in the piece?

@Luke yeah I’d just watched this, too. Gonna try it out.

@kevinbhayes @tastapod yes!

@Eggfreckles with an entire A18 in them!

@BenCotterill yeah I did too. Okay, gonna make one.

@njpozner @jsnell I currently have custom wooden brackets that a built which suspend a keyboard beneath my desk

I really wish Apple sold a standalone TouchID button. I know there's that crazy hack where you can rip apart a keyboard and just use the TouchID button, but that's nuts. Just give us the button so we can use TouchID with our own mechanical keyboards!

@jonobie oh sweet! Would love to hear more about how it works for you over time

@sayrer i actually don’t get that much into grammar, but I guess I should

My original post describing how to make better documents from a few years ago: https://anildash.com/2024/03/10/make-better-documents/ I see this new tool as being like a more high-level version of a spell checker tool, aimed at improving how teams communicate.

Most documents we encounter in the course of doing our work are somewhere between middling to terrible. A few years ago, I wrote "Make Better Documents", a simple set of guidelines for making presentations, reports, etc.

Now, I've turned that set of suggestions into a Better Documents skills.md file, an agent skill for those who use LLMs to help review documents. Naturally, it’s 100% free & open source, so I'd love for you to give it a try & let me know what you think.

https://anildash.com/2026/07/24/make-better-documents-skill/

@alec you can dial it up or down

If you’re a nerd & considering running the Apple beta for iOS, I can say that the developer betas have been the most stable and performant betas in *years* and the new AI features in Siri are very obviously animated by Apple understanding that the stakes could not be higher. It’s pretty good stuff.

@jwz all platforms will expand until they get a killfile 😭

@fahrni @lylo there’s definitely an aspect of tall poppy-ism to it sometimes.

@NatureMC @beep @michaelcoyote yeah a big part of the imbalance for me here is that it also lacks a lot of the stuff (uhhh… people of color, pop culture, immediacy) that enable me to have *fun* online. Nobody is riffing on the NBA finals and the NYC elections and Olivia Rodrigo’s album here in ways that are legible to me. So that lack of joy alongside an abundance of scolding is… tiring.

@tomhead you are right about this; I think it’s true most of the time. And in the abstract, I have empathy for it. But the net effect of being the target of it for a whole bunch of dudes is pretty dehumanizing. They aren’t actually responding to me as a person, I’m just a concept they’re using to launch into a performance they already had cued up. When that’s the most immediate and reliable reaction, a platform becomes unbearable.

@claudius @jackwilliambell yeah I think that’s the issue, I’m not *trying* to be an “influencer”. I _like_ talking to people and hanging out online. These kinds of behaviors I’m describing just make that impossible, because they won’t engage with me in a normal way. That’s the cause of the frustration.

@draNgNon yeah I think they mean well most of the time, it’s just… a pretty broken way of interacting with strangers. Some of what is so off-putting is that they’re clearly responding for the purpose of performing for others, not because they’re replying to *me*. That’s really dehumanizing.