Reading List
The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.
‘Noir, Japan’s Hard-Boiled Bittersweet Answer to Oreos’
Jake Adelstein (author of Tokyo Vice) on his blog Tokyo Paladin:
For decades, Japan’s Oreos weren’t made by Nabisco at all. They were produced domestically by Yamazaki Biscuits, under a licensing arrangement with what eventually became Mondelez International. This was, by most accounts, a reasonable arrangement. The cookies were local. The quality was consistent. Nobody was complaining.
Then Mondelez did what corporations do when things are working fine. The license expired, and Mondelez moved production of the Oreos it sells in Japan to China, exporting them to Japanese wholesalers and retailers. A cost decision. A spreadsheet decision. The kind of decision made in a room with no windows and a very good projector.
Sensitive Japanese consumers noticed quickly — the taste had changed. Into that opening stepped the Noir, inheriting the flavor the old Oreo had left behind.
Yamazaki Biscuits launched Noir in December 2017 as the successor nobody had officially asked for and everybody apparently wanted.
I have a great affinity for Newman-O’s, which I’ve previously described as “the cookies Oreos pretend to be”. Turns out though I’ve mostly sung the praises of Newman-O’s on my podcast and social media, not here on Daring Fireball. I love Newman-O’s, never tire of them, and will fight any man who argues that Oreos taste better. In fact, late last night, when a friend texted me with a link to this story from Adelstein, I was by sheer happenstance eating a few Newman-O’s. True story.
But now I’m fascinated by the existence of these Japanese rivals. A spite Oreo called Noir. They look and sound delicious, but they seem difficult to obtain in the U.S.
Photoshop’s ‘Modern User Interface’ Sucks (and Doesn’t Feel Modern)
Marcin Wichary at Unsung:
I’m angry. (Clearly.) We should all be angry in face of stuff like this. This is how people get fed up with software — because it feels unstable and deteriorates on its own without needing to.
I know I brought up that an existing power user base can be a huge pain in the ass, and I am a decades-old Photoshop power user. But this is different than other examples where the product needs or at least wants to evolve past its core audience or toward a different market. For Photoshop here, nothing I see indicates any change in course or clientele — and yet all of these good moments in UI that used to help me out no longer exist.
Plus, all those transgressions are solved problems. Those issues are not buried in pages of heavily litigated patents, or in seven collective brains of world-class interface designers whose driveways are presently occupied by cash-filled trucks sent over by frontier companies. This isn’t some long lost art that requires archaeologists to decipher. This feels like carelessness and laziness in face of basic UI engineering; in a likely internally-motivated effort to refresh the interface, the team threw an entire nursery worth of babies with the bathwater.
The before-and-after screenshots look like examples from a lecture on user interface design — if you swap them around make the new ones “before” and the old ones “after”. Better balance, better focus behavior, appropriate platform-native typography.
(Shades of Héliographe’s devastating critique of the history of the app icon for Pages: “If you put the Apple icons in reverse it looks like the portfolio of someone getting really really good at icon design.”)
Anthropic Executive, One Year Ago: Fully AI Employees Are a Year Away
Sam Sabin, writing for Axios one year ago:
Anthropic expects AI-powered virtual employees to begin roaming corporate networks in the next year, the company’s top security leader told Axios in an interview this week. [...] Virtual employees could be the next AI innovation hotbed, Jason Clinton, the company’s chief information security officer, told Axios.
Agents typically focus on a specific, programmable task. In security, that’s meant having autonomous agents respond to phishing alerts and other threat indicators. Virtual employees would take that automation a step further: These AI identities would have their own “memories,” their own roles in the company and even their own corporate accounts and passwords.
Unlike Anthropic’s ambitious prediction regarding the vertiginous rise in AI code generation, this one, I think we can say, has fallen flat on its face. This isn’t how companies are using AI — or at least they shouldn’t. But contra Axios’s year-ago headline (“Exclusive: Anthropic Warns Fully AI Employees Are a Year Away”), this wasn’t a warning. It was an advertisement — and exactly the sort of wink-wink-nudge-nudge software-brain “warning” that has tanked public sentiment regarding AI. It wasn’t an indication that Anthropic actually believed there would exist “fully AI employees” today, but rather that they wanted to build enthusiasm amongst the sort of ghoulish “let them eat cake” executives who really wish that they could “hire” fully AI employees.