Rune Madsen

“A source that cannot be verified or remain consistent is useless.”

Shout this sentence from on high.

We ran a randomized controlled trial to see how much AI coding tools speed up experienced open-source developers.

The results surprised us: Developers thought they were 20% faster with AI tools, but they were actually 19% slower when they had access to AI than when they didn't.

I think a lot of what you said still applies, which is why we talk a lot about business value and less about process early on. Will shoot you a DM when I’m back from vacation!

@asier.xyz I’d actually love to chat at some point after the summer if you’re up for it. We’re doing really well, but I’m sure we could learn from your past experiences. Happy to DM if you’re open for it.

If you design digital products, I beg you to read these paragraphs 🙏

From @designsystems.international's [Product Design is Lost]

designsystems.international/ideas/produc...

‪@runemadsen.com‬ on the subtle ways design tools shape how we think and what we make. ow.ly/ntWU50Wn2C0

A good article from @runemadsen.com reminding us that our tools shape our creativity.

"the growing monoculture in digital design where everything starts to look and feel the same, not because of shared intent, but because of shared constraints"

When Figma Starts Designing Us / Design Systems International The subtle ways in which design tools shape how we think and what we make

"The goal isn’t for designers to adopt engineering practices, but to bring distinct perspectives through an interdisciplinary way of collaborating."
I really appreciated this little piece from @runemadsen.com. designsystems.international/ideas/when-f... (1/6)

Hey! Shoot me an email on r@designsystems.international 🙂

This is a much more eloquent way of what I've been screaming to anyone that will listen.

Figma is siloing so many designers in to a specific way of designing, in a field who's lifeblood is exploration, creativity & expression.

Our industry is so ripe for fresh, new (or a return to old!) tools.

Thank you for reading! I'm leaving for vacation today and just had to push this out before I go 😀

When Figma Starts Designing Us / Design Systems International The subtle ways in which design tools shape how we think and what we make

We've used Figma almost daily since the early days of @designsystems.international, and it's a core part of our creative process. Still, I've noticed that it's starting to change how designers work. I tried to unpack that idea in the piece below.
designsystems.international/ideas/when-f...

Wishing you all the best and lots of success with your next move!

Things are disastrous, but we’re hoping that learning together, celebrating public knowledge + the gloriously noncompliant, can be ✨✊❤️‍🩹🌱. We’re hosting our first zoom info session this Friday at noon ET; sign-up @ the bottom of the page:

Besøgte @marcelfard.bsky.social og @moltke.bsky.social i DRs radioprogram Prompt til en snak om AI og billeder. Lyt med her: www.dr.dk/lyd/special-...

asked a bot whether it would prefer to fight one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses

WELL

Bond’s wordmark for the world’s largest archipelago takes its shape from island formations The Helsinki-based studio’s destination identity for Saaristo pays homage to Finland’s wild landscape.

"The team spent countless hours scouring Google Maps, combing through the 40,000 islands one by one to find the studio’s geographical alphabet. Their efforts have resulted in a sculpted wordmark." This feels very Nina Katchadourian.

Chart: U.S. adults reporting a disability The number of people reporting a disability soared. Many Americans struggled with long Covid and reported cognitive issues like “brain fog.” Source: Census Here, adults refer to people older than 16.

Since the start of COVID, the number of people reporting a disability soared. Yet the majority of the world acts like COVID is over, and Long COVID doesn't exist.

18F did some of the best digital work in government. This is so sad.

I’ll be happy to share the slides with you. In case you’re interested, I’m also writing it into a longer article where I have a rough first draft. Will DM you 🙂

The Worst and the Dimmest It's not a coincidence that we're being led by the least qualified monsters available; it's a deliberate strategy. Facing the Worst - a series about directional alignment.

Those currently in power are “among the very worst human beings this 🌏 has ever produced—the most uncaring, the least intellectually curious, the most disconnected from their own humanity, the most gleefully malicious + deliberately destructive, with an all-consuming greed @ the ctr of their being”

I couldn't make up a better story to describe Microsoft than the fact that Azure Key Vaults (that is meant to store environment variables) does not support the use of underscore in variable names.

I really like this one too. Adding @alv9n.com because he would probably like to hear that we all love his work 🙂

OpenAI says it has evidence China’s DeepSeek used its model to train competitor White House AI tsar David Sacks raises possibility of alleged intellectual property theft

OpenAI says it has found evidence that Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek used the US company’s proprietary models to train its own open-source competitor, as concerns grow over a potential breach of intellectual property. The San-Francisco-based ChatGPT maker told the Financial Times it had seen some evidence of ‘distillation’, a technique used by developers to obtain better performance on smaller models by using outputs from larger, more capable models. This allows them to achieve similar results on specific tasks at a much lower cost. OpenAI declined to comment further on details of its evidence. Its terms of service state users cannot “copy” any of its services or “use output to develop models that compete with OpenAI”.

I'm so sorry I can't stop laughing. OpenAI, the company built on stealing literally the entire internet, is crying because DeepSeek may have trained on the outputs from ChatGPT. They're crying their eyes out. What a bunch of hypocritical little babies. Cry more, freaks.

www.ft.com/content/a0df...

The visuals in this piece are excellent.

I'm sure the authors are hearing from all the dudes who think they're economically conservative and socially liberal.

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Washington Post's traffic has gone from 22.5 million daily active users in 2021 to about 3 million in 2024, per Semafor.

damn lol

A photo of the book “Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned - The Myth of the Objective” by Kenneth O. Stanley and Joel Lehman.

I am writing an essay on why rigid planning is bad for designers, and I stumbled on this excellent book. It’s interesting to see how an initial observation from computer science became a much more significant idea related to the humanities too.

Excited to dive into this during the holidays

Alex Volko @altryne On the topic of our kids having AI friends (long) I got my 6 yo daughter an AI toy for her b-day that arrived for Xmas instead. She unpacked it all excited, I explained that this isnt like the other toys, that this one has AI in it (she of course knows what AI is, seen the things Ive built and interacted with them, chatted with ChatGPT and Santa mode, knows that daddy is "doing AI" etc). So a very interesting experiment happaned after @magicaltoys reached out and fixed the issue referenced below (very quick turnaround thank you) So...she played with this Dino, chatted with it, and the..learned to turn it off, and doesnt want it to talk anymore. She still loves playing with it, dressed it up, it now has paper shoes and a top that we made together, but every time I ask her if shed like to chat with it, she says no.

Don't think there is a better illustration of AI-in-everything-whether-we-want-it-or-not than an AI bro buying an AI toy for his child who played with it for a bit and then seemed singularly unimpressed with the AI and turned it off.
He keeps turning it back on, and she keeps turning it off.

Great!