According to Oyama, players in Japan and Asia tend to be quite vocal about what they perceive as “inconveniences,” while players in Europe and North America are more likely to view these same game elements as “friction” and welcome them.

Interesting finding that I am going to attribute to the prevalence of friction-free mobile gaming being a much bigger factor in the East Asian markets than the Western (American) market.

browser-based simulator of the Windows 98 disk defragmentation service.

Upon reflection, I've come to believe that quality software is not about how many features something has or how quickly it is built but rather how cared for it is by the designers, developers, and product people who work on it. There's an ineffable aspect to my favorite pieces of software where I don't think of it is as feature matrix but rather as an interface made by a human for humans that's a joy to use. And when you build software with AI, it leads to worse software.

Well-written and sobering. I know I always say this but it is ridiculous how common this feeling is within tech. I feel like I am having conversations like this on a nearly daily basis. It's fucking rough out here