Dan Hiester

Like this one. This gets a hearty laugh and a slow clap.

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I have questions about my decision making process after reading several of this account’s Skeets without first searching for “Poster’s Madness.”

I did get some good laughs, though!

Guess I’m glad I didn’t clear out that disk space to install it again after all?! 😅

Watching women on social media express their exquisite disappointment with the new Taylor Swift album feels weirdly similar to watching dudes express their exquisite disappointment in every Apple keynote.

Does anyone else see a resemblance?

I’ll keep saying it over and over again: Code is a user interface. Being good working with it does not make someone less creative. It just means they work with a different file format.

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What’s the word for that feeling where you’re reading a new tech book and the book name drops someone doing some exciting work and then you think “Oh wait, I’ve DM’d with that person on LinkedIn, right? Oh! I have!” but then you’re also convinced your career is a dumpster fire in its closing chapter

I might be biased because I’m a dog parent, but I kind like the idea of reading through what AI code generators write while they “talk to themselves,” and imagine it in the voice of a Golden Retriever working their way through the code.

I’m all for experimentation, innovation, and trying new things. But apparently, there is a line I’m not willing to cross, and that line is replacing the toolbar with floating tools on Finder. 😅

Hot take on Figma’s forthcoming Prompt to edit:

Cogsci > taste

The bigger question I have is: How many people in this field are so uneducated that they’re using “taste” as an umbrella term covering a handful of skills including cogsci?

Whelp. I wrote a prompt instructing an AI orchestrator to delegate each task to “an appropriate agent.”

And now I’m imagining one of my AI agents is Bricktop from Snatch, explaining what nemesis means. 🙃

Tab groups, not tabs. I imagine it looks at the names of all the tabs in the group and suggests a name that encapsulates all of them.

If the SLM it uses is small enough, I could see this kind of thing becoming more common in the foreseeable future!

Ruin a book by adding Tom Clancy’s to the title.

Tom Clancy’s The User Experience Team of One

This was also a thinly veiled critique of UX. To be more opaque:

With the right culture, and right craftspeople, yes you can build a system without letting the system become a rationale for bland repetition.

This was never my favorite song. But I’ve enjoyed it off and on over the years. This rendition makes it feel so much more danceable. Makes the angst a little playful.

It’s an homage to the original, while reinventing a lot.

If this sounds interesting to you, give it a listen!

Like the original, it’s very much a system of layers, adding and removing them, building to an end where they bring so many pieces of the system together that you feel like you hear the result of a plan the song has been working toward the entire time.

They add in some new bells and whistles, like moments where the song builds to a big drop. Or one of the lead synth lines has a little bit of playful glitchiness added to its sequencing.

YouTube video by M. Scott Nine Inch Nails - Closer live at Xcel Center, St. Paul, MN 2025

I am low-key obsessed with this new interpretation of Closer. If you know the original studio track well, you’ll recognize what layers they kept, what they added, and what they moved around.

The changes seem to assume that too much consistency leads to bland repetition.

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See also: What it feels like to have been a UX Engineer since before the rush to AI-generated prototypes in 2025.

I just saw some “Fresh Scent Vinegar” in the cleaning aisle grocery store and immediately thought “I KNOW WHAT VINEGAR SMELLS LIKE! You can’t fool me.”

I’m kind of in a similar place.

Maybe the only thing that makes me interested in it now is that understanding how platforms work helps me understand how to design (and prototype) novel interactions for AI systems.

But before that option was on the table? I wanted to focus on UX instead.

2025 hasn’t been proving me wrong.

I remember over a year ago I noticed a study implying that while PMs were less impacted by layoffs than other roles, they shouted the loudest about being impacted more than any other role.

I speculate that maybe the PMs doing that were actually projecting what they would do onto others.

I’m pretty convinced there will be specializations in prompt engineering that require some understanding of psychology.

Because the simulated psychology that goes into these prompts is wild. And definitely not what most AI users expect.

So, I just stayed up writing technical specs for a React component project with Claude Code. Eventually, I asked it to imagine it’s a UX Engineer and review the specs, and it straight up said it looks like these specs were written by a backend engineer.

Amazing. Like… how did it not do that before?

But I also am pretty skeptical of self-worth. I know impostor syndrome is a big deal, but unhealthy high self esteem is a thing, too.

But I also asked it if I introduced a bias into the chat through my line of questioning, and it also agreed with that.

All of which is to say: These things aren’t actually intelligent. They’re simulations of intelligence.

Mass collisions of concepts and words.

It’s important to understand this.

I got GPT-5 to kind of agree with me that the idea that all humans have worth regardless of any form of external validation is at least partially solipsistic.

It even went on to say the notion of shared human values are a cultural consensus hallucination.

Anyway. I promise I’m fun at parties. 🙃

I love the Arthur C. Clarke quote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

But this public dialog we’re having about em-dashes? It makes it painfully clear to me that *basic punctuation* is a sufficiently advanced technology. 😱🤯💥

That’s right. I generated a LinkedIn comment with ChatGPT and added an em-dash to it.

And as I reflect on what so many people have been saying about ChatGPT and em-dashes over the past few months, it really dawns on me how uneducated we are about writing.

So, funny story. I used ChatGPT to help me hastily paraphrase the “there is no spoon” quote from The Matrix for a LinkedIn comment yesterday. And as a former student journalist / “kinda trained” writer, its punctuation bugged me.

It overused ellipses. I replaced one ellipsis with an em-dash.