Matt Fuller

The software market is saturated. Tech companies sold investors a promise of near-endless growth in exchange for billions of dollars. There are only so many things we need computers to do, though. It’s harder than ever to get new customers.

Desperate to show good news only in the boardroom, tech executives and their cadre of managers show few qualms about using any means to hit their fantastical growth targets. Informed by incompetence, they make their move: suck their customers dry.

Apple’s standalone Touch ID keyboards are only sold in silver and black, even though lovely, colored models are sold with iMacs. Getting a purple shade meant turning to eBay. Unboxing the keyboard caused me to start doubting myself.

At the tip of the AI companies in California are countless antisocial people who find vulnerable relationships with other people deeply uncomfortable.

Anna Tong in Forbes (paywall) • Apple News+ posits what AI bros are buying from a cohort of hot, nerdy escorts in Silicon Valley.

If money flows to you faster than it can be consumed, you are capturing societal wealth.

You have not created that value on your own. You have reached financial terminal velocity.

A person can only take so many first-class flights, eat so many Michelin-starred dinners, drive so many luxury cars, live in so many homes at once, or sport so many fashion accessories.

In 2026, that watermark probably hovers between $10 and $20 million per year. Our wealth redistribution rules got eroded to allow individuals to capture far more than that.

Now Jeff Bezos can strap Katy Perry to the tip of his rockets and blow up billions on a random Thursday. Quel gâchis.

In the wee hours of the morning on May 21, 2021, our tiny team huddled around a table and pushed a few buttons to launch Breeze Airways’ first route network, our app, and our website.

Breeze Airways sales launch command center on May 21, 2021
I’m second from right.

We made ourselves several promises on sales launch day about how our airline would do things differently. We definitely didn’t get these ones right.

Everyone deserves great wifi in the sky when their airplane is equipped with it. We know when your flight’s wifi sucks, and we do our damndest to make sure it doesn’t. I pinky swear.

Fewer than 1% of flights have an actively disrupted connection at any point in time, and less than 0.1% of flights above 10,000 feet have connection disruptions. More on why that altitude matters later.

When your flight’s wifi isn’t working, here’s what’s probably going on.

There’s a quiet, consistent pattern with digital platforms: once a platform scales, owners optimize for rent extraction and make it more expensive no matter how “efficient” things started out.

AI tools are heading down the same path. To keep rent seekers honest, we need designs and use patterns that resist the “always more expensive” trajectory.

A few concepts of budget-friendly social infrastructure for AI could help keep our costs sustainably lower. Small prototypes could begin bringing them to life.

Memories of my computationally haphazard youth surged while I read Sam Henri Gold’s essay about the MacBook neo.

[The Macbook neo] is not for the people… who already have the MacBook Pro, who have the professional context, who are optimizing at the margin. This computer is for the kid who doesn’t have a margin to optimize. Who can’t wait for the right tool to materialize. Who is going to take what’s available and push it until it breaks and learn something permanent from the breaking.

My boyish curiosity could outpace my Mac’s processor daily, igniting a life-long practice of pushing my machine to its limits and expanding my knowledge. I may need to get a MacBook neo and discover just how far it can take me today.

JavaScript developers working on multiple projects might need to run multiple Node versions. nvm makes that easy, but picking installer defaults can make every new shell session load slowly or cause node/npm errors when using coding tools like Claude Code or Cursor. Let’s restore some sanity to our environment.

“You’re invited. Be sure to come at 4:35 p.m.!” my 7-year-old told his three siblings. He pressed handwritten invitations for our “GALLERY OPENING” made from scrap paper into their hands. It was a few minutes before the event time listed for our formally informal affair. My son was enthusiastic about the photos we had just hung together in the hallway of my kids’ favorite stuffed animals: the bears.

My kids have imagined a whole universe around their plush toy bears; many of these personalities carry names derived from IKEA’s endearing Djungelskog toy. Minutes later, my son would sit on my shoulders and pull back a taped-up pillowcase to unveil the stars of our new hallway gallery.

Right as my son hollered for everyone to come upstairs for the ceremony, my youngest yelled from below, “DAD, I NEED YOU!”