Tootfinder

Already posted this years ago, but still keep thinking a lot about this seemingly trivial quote/insight and more generally what it means to build futures, not just the future, whilst choosing different lenses of the past and present as selective references/tools for aiming at, achieving (or even avoiding) said futures:
"Fredric Jameson establishes that in postmodernism we have experienced a weakening sense of historisity such that what is, what was, and what will be all exist as…

A generation of PMs made a career out of copying ideas from other apps they've seen into their own app. Today, AI (which has seen every app) can do this 100x faster than any of them.
The only problem is that doing this was always pointless
This week's issue of the Product Picnic newsletter breaks down this problem and surfaces some tools for thinking in workflows (or just plain thinking) rather than worrying about atomic features.

Thoughtless features never add up to a thoughtful product
Your first idea for how to solve a problem is most likely to be a low-impact hack. Delightful user experiences require a higher level of thinking.

Poolside launches Laguna S 2.1, an 118B open-weight model built for agentic coding and long-horizon work, that it says competes with larger open models (Iain Martin/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2026/…

American Open-Source Labs Think They Can Beat China’s Best AI Startups
Chinese open-source models like Kimi and Deepseek are now dominant AI tools. American startups like Thinking Machines, Reflection AI and now Poolside are trying to challenge that.

The Signal Rail: A Deterministic Motion Grammar for Communicating Conversational Agent State in Terminal Interfaces
Matteo Grella
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10689 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.10689 https://arxiv.org/html/2608.10689
arXiv:2608.10689v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Terminal interfaces to conversational agents report rich internal state (listening, thinking, executing tools, awaiting input, failing) almost entirely through text, while the motion channel beside it, the one peripheral vision monitors without reading, carries a single bit: alive. We present the Signal Rail, a one-row terminal status instrument that gives that channel a grammar. Four ideas govern it: spatial semantics (input, processing, and output zones, with direction as meaning), a motion grammar (one kinetic rule per state, never color alone), determinism (frames as a pure function of explicit inputs, golden-frame testable), and honesty (no invented progress or activity). We contribute a 45-section normative specification and a reference implementation inside a working full-duplex local voice agent driven by real signals.
toXiv_bot_toot

A generation of PMs made a career out of copying ideas from other apps they've seen into their own app. Today, AI (which has seen every app) can do this 100x faster than any of them.
The only problem is that doing this was always pointless
This week's issue of the Product Picnic newsletter breaks down this problem and surfaces some tools for thinking in workflows (or just plain thinking) rather than worrying about atomic features.
#UX #Tech #SoftwareDevelopment

I’m thinking about a concept for the processing side of research data that complements ROOT, which focuses on resilient technologies.
My current working idea: SHAPE — Stage · Handover · Automate · Preserve · Evaluate.
Not the qualities of tools, but how workflows are structured, connected, automated, documented, and checked.
Thoughts?
ROOT the tools. SHAPE the workflow.
ROOT: #RDM #OpenScience #FAIRData #Reproducibility