Addy Osmani (via Hacker News): User obsession means spending time in support tickets, talking to users, watching users struggle, asking “why” until you hit bedrock. I wonder how much this happens at Google and Apple these days. The quest for perfection is paralyzing. I’ve watched engineers spend weeks debating the ideal architecture for something they’ve […]

Bridger Beal-Cvetko and Daniel Woodruff, reporting for KSL News:

SB138, sponsored by Cullimore, R-Sandy, would make Android, the world’s most popular mobile device operating system, an official state symbol, joining the ranks of the official state cooking pot (the dutch oven), the official state crustacean (the brine shrimp), and the official state mushroom (the porcini).

“Someday, everybody with an iPhone will realize that the technology is better on Android,” Cullimore told reporters during a media availability on Wednesday, the second day of the legislative session.

But, he added, “I’m the only one in my family — all my kids, my wife, they all have iPhones — but I’m holding strong.” [...]

“I don’t expect this to really get out of committee,” he said.

(Via Joe Rossignol.)

Taegan Goddard, writing at Political Wire, in a post that pairs perfectly with Om Malik’s re: velocity bestowing authority:

The new Democratic argument isn’t about restoring guardrails. It’s about moving fast — and using power unapologetically — to undo what Trump has done.

New Jersey will inaugurate Mikie Sherrill as governor today, one of the party’s rising stars who steamrolled Republicans in November. She has promised to govern with urgency — leaning on emergency powers, acting decisively, and skipping the old incrementalism. This, she argues, is what voters now expect. She told The New Yorker that if Democrats don’t learn to work at Donald Trump’s pace, “we’re going to get played.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is even more explicit: “In order for us to correct the abuses that are happening now, we have to act in the same capacities that Trump has given himself.”

The only way to counter “move fast and break things” is to move fast and fix things.

Om Malik:

That’s why we get all our information as memes. The meme has become the metastory, the layer where meaning is carried. You don’t need to read the thing; you just need the gist, compressed and passed along in a sentence, an image, or a joke. It has taken the role of the headline. The machine accelerates this dynamic. It demands constant material; stop feeding it and the whole structure shakes. The point of the internet now is mostly to hook attention and push it toward commerce, to keep the engine running. Anyone can get their cut. [...]

We built machines that prize acceleration and then act puzzled that everything feels rushed and slightly manic.

Crackerjack essay. Malik is focused here on the ways we’ve changed media and how those changes to media have changed us — as a society, and as individuals. But I think it explains how the Trump 2.0 administration has been so effective (such that it can be said to be effective). They recognize that velocity is authority and are moving as fast as they can. It’s an adaptation to a new media age.

The Wall Street Journal (gift link; News+ link):

When President Trump arrived in the snow-covered Swiss Alps on Wednesday afternoon, European leaders were panicking that his efforts to acquire Greenland would trigger a trans-Atlantic conflagration. By the time the sun set, Trump had backed down.

After a meeting with Rutte on Wednesday, Trump called off promised tariffs on European nations, contending that he had “formed the framework of a future deal” with respect to the largest island in the world. [...] During an hourlong speech at the World Economic Forum, the U.S. president said he wouldn’t deploy the military to take control of Greenland. It was a stark shift in tone for Trump, who just days earlier had declined to rule out using the military to secure ownership of Greenland and posted an image online of the territory with an American flag plastered across it.

No need for panic. Alarm, yes. Panic, no. The TACO theory holds. Stand up to Trump and he’ll chicken out.