Monthly Archives: June 2025

John Oliver vs. AI slop

AI/ML

“What a fun way to celebrate the destruction of our shared objective reality!” :->

But honestly this is a really insightful, hilarious, and eye-opening tour through the charms & many, many discontents of our new world:

Google steps up virtual try-on with Doppl

AI/ML, Try-on

As I’ve noted previously, Google has been trying to crack the try-on game for a long time. Back in the day (c. 2017), we really want to create AR-enabled mirrors that could do this kind of thing. The tech wasn’t quite ready, and for the realtime mirror use case it likely still isn’t, but check out the new free iOS & Android app Doppl:

In May, Google Shopping announced the ability to virtually try billions of clothing items on yourself, just by uploading a photo. Doppl builds on these capabilities, bringing additional experimental features, including the ability to use photos or screenshots to “try on” outfits whenever inspiration strikes.

Doppl also brings your looks to life with AI-generated videos — converting static images into dynamic visuals that give you an even better sense for how an outfit might feel. Just upload a picture of an outfit, and Doppl does the rest.

AI brings people to tears—of joy

AI/ML, Photography

Several years ago, MyHeritage saw a huge (albeit short-lived) spike in interest from their Deep Nostalgia feature that animated one’s old photos. Everything old is new again, in many senses. Check out Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian talk about how touching he found the tech—as well as tons of blowback from people who find it dystopian.

Greg the Stormtrooper

AI/ML

I’ve heard people referring to the recent release of Google’s Veo 3 as the ChatGPT moment for video generation—that is, a true inflection point at which a mere curosity becomes something of real value. The spatial & character coherence of its output, and especially its ability to generate speech & other audio, turn it into a genuine storytelling tool.

You’ve probably seen some of the myriad vlogger-genre creations making the rounds. Here’s one of my faves:

Jawas gone wild

On classic cars & the feeling of craft

AI/ML, Design

John Gruber recently linked back to this clip in which designer Neven Mrgan highlights what feels like an important consideration in the age of mass-generated AI “designs”:

I think that was what mattered is that they looked rich, they looked like a lot of work had been put into them. That’s what people latch onto. It seems it’s something that, yes, they should have spent money on, and they should be spending time on right now.

Regardless of what tools were used in the making of a piece, does it feel rich, crafted, thoughtfully made? Does it have a point, and a point of view? As production gets faster, those qualities will become all the more critical for anything—and anyone—wishing to stand out.

An incredible PM role opens up on Photoshop

Miscellaneous

This could be an awesome opportunity for the right person, who’d get to work on things I’ve wanted the team to do for 15+ years!

We’re looking for an expert technical product manager to lead Photoshop’s foundational architecture and performance strategy. This is a pivotal role responsible for evolving the core technologies that power Photoshop’s speed, stability, and future scalability across platforms.

You’ll drive major efforts to modernize our rendering and compute architecture, migrate legacy systems to more scalable platforms, and accelerate performance through GPU and hardware optimization. This work touches nearly every part of Photoshop, from canvas rendering to feature responsiveness to long-term cross-platform consistency.

This is a principal-level individual contributor role with the potential to grow a team in the future.

“Tell me about a product you hate…”

Idle Philosophizing

I interviewed many hundreds of PM candidates at Google, and if things were going well, I’d ask, “Tell me about a product you hate that you use regularly. Why do you hate it?”

This proved to be a great bozo detector. Does this person have curiosity, conviction, passion, unreasonableness? Were they forced into coding & now just want to escape life in the damn debugger, or do they have a semi-pathological need to build stuff they’re proud of? Would I want them in the proverbial foxhole with me? Are they willing to sweep the floor?

Unsurprisingly, most candidates offer shallow, banal answers (“Uh, wow… I mean, I guess the ESPN app is kinda slow…?”), whereas great ones explain not just what sucks, but why it sucks. Like, why—systemically—is every car infotainment system such crap? Those are the PMs I want asking the questions, then questioning the answers.

——-

Specifically the car front, as Tolstoy might say, “Each one is unhappy in its own way.” The most interesting thing, I think, isn’t just to talk about the crappy mismatched & competing experiences, but rather about why every system I’ve ever used sucks. The answer can’t be “Every person at every company is a moron”—so what is it?

So much comes down to the structure of the industry, with hardware & software being made by a mishmash of corporate frenemies, all contending with a soup of regulations, risk aversion (one recall can destroy the profitability of a whole product line), and surprisingly bargain-bin electronics.

Check out this short vid for some great insights from Ford CEO Jim Farley:

“A surrealist design engine no one asked for”

AI/ML, Illustration

A while back, Sam Harris & Ricky Gervais discussed the impossibility of translating a joke discovered during a dream (“What noise does a monster make?”) back into our consensus waking reality. Like… what?

I get the same vibes watching ChatGPT try to dredge up some model of me and of… humor?… in creating a comic strip based on our interactions. I find it uncanny, inscrutable, and yet consequently charming all at once.

The new Flux rocks for image restoration

AI/ML, Photography

Please tell me Adobe is hiding off screen, secretly cooking up magic. Please…

Meanwhile, you can try it yourself here.