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This piece started from a simple observation: every generation has the same panic about new media, but we never ask why the panic is so predictable. The Australia ban is just the latest iteration. Before TikTok it was video games, before that MTV, before that TV. We keep regulating the technology without examining the incentive structure underneath. What interested me was the recursive problem—the very capacities you'd need to see this pattern (sustained attention, ability to connect dots over time) are what get degraded by the pattern itself. I'm not arguing for or against the ban. I'm arguing we're having the wrong conversation. And that might not be an accident. Curious what patterns others are seeing that I missed.

was gonna read this, but realised I didn't have to:D

yeh, the illusion of management control is a tricky beast to defeat.

interesting take, many A-list devs I have observed like some structure, it just has to be the right structure.

I guess the guardrails of process are to help focus the more inexperienced. the less you know the more framework you need.

Many IT departments aim for SpaceX-level process engineering—elaborate architecture reviews, multi-year transformation roadmaps, and platform teams—despite serving relatively small user bases. The result is slow decision-making, meeting overload, redundant tools, and organizational friction that slows delivery, even when the technical work itself is solid.

The alternative might be a “drone-first” approach: simple, standardized processes that prioritize speed, clarity, and measurable outcomes. Focus on quick wins, eliminate unnecessary approvals and redundant teams, and adopt a meeting rhythm that tracks decisions and follow-ups in the very next session. It’s less about frameworks and more about efficient, adaptive execution.

Is a drone-first mindset the right way to streamline internal IT teams, or are there trade-offs we’re overlooking? Curious what others have tried.

Yeah, this is a sharp take — the SQL analogy nails how over-specifying prompts kills creativity and pushes outputs toward the median. What’s missing, though, is the emotional side of prompting. It’s not just about keeping things ambiguous, it’s about feeding the model something alive enough that it can reflect something real back. Mix that technical precision with human messiness and you start getting insight, not just casting a wider net.

The AI slop epidemic has a simple cause: people are asking LLMs to create instead of using them to amplify. When you prompt "write me a poem about loss," you get generic output because there's no complexity to work with—garbage in, garbage out. But when I fed Claude my raw, messy 33-post Bluesky poem and asked it to unpack what I'd written, something different happened. Like rubber duck debugging, the act of articulating my fragmented ideas to the LLM forced me to see patterns I'd missed, contradictions I'd avoided, emotional layers I couldn't access alone. The LLM didn't create anything—it amplified what was already there by giving me a structured way to externalize and examine my own thinking. The more entropy (complexity, density, messiness) I provided, the more useful the output became. LLMs aren't steam engines that create energy from nothing; they're amplifiers that can only magnify what you feed them. If your AI output is slop, check your input first. The breakthrough isn't in the model—it's in learning to articulate your problem densely enough that the solution emerges in the telling.

it's corporatism, ref Mussolini

what, the land of the free, whover told you that is your enemy

Ambulate was made to address your needs - a central place to plan a trip.

You are exactly right about offline being key! Routes are downloadable to your devices. A future feature is to export the whole trip itinerary and maps to pdf for offline use.

The github repo is:)

Yeah, for adding markers to a city map I think being able to search by address is important. Thanks for sharing.

Works on iOS 17 with Safari, Chrome and Firefox.

What OS and browser where you using?

The guy in the vid says he hates walking, so not the target audience:D

Ambulate is GPLv3, source code at https://github.com/oliverfields/tripplanner2.

It depends on Firebase for authorization and a S3 bucket for storage.

Copy dotenv.local_example to .env.local and add relevant info, then use npm run serve, to run locally.

Nice idea to merge trip plan and photos:)

The concepts seem at first glance to be similar, but I think the main difference is that Ambulate emphasizes creating a map that can be used for actual navigation along side the itinerary (plotting routes and adding map markers).

Wanderlog seems to be more about organizing the overall activities, where the travel activities are just points on the itinerary, e.g. get a flight from A to B.

Copyright is updated, thanks for pointing that out!

Nice app, I like the free form way of creating an itinerary.

Seems that the main difference is that Ambulate supports manually plotting routes/uploading GPX routes and annotating the map with markers.

Often times in the back country the points you want on the map do not lend themselves to looking up by name.

If you mean Ambulate, just click on the map and choose Add Marker.

Thank you, improvement is deployed to production:)

Thanks for the feedback:)

Currently all changes need to be manually saved by clicking on the blue Save trip button on the top of the itinerary. I'll give it some thought.

Sharing trips is indeed a very cool feature that is high up on the todo list.

Auto generating routes is also a great idea, I'll look into it, cheers!

There are certainly a lot of powerful route building tools out there.

Ambulate supports importing tracks/routes GPX files, such that route planning could be done in e.g. Gaia or CalTopo and then exported as GPX and finally imported to Ambulate.

On a similar note all routes in Ambulate can be exported as GPX, so they can be imported to other tools e.g. navigation apps or GPS devices.

AFAIK neither Gaia or CalTopo have public APIs, but they both seem to support sharing in some form, perhaps it is possible for other applications, like Ambulate, to access routes directly saving the the GPX export/import steps? I'll add this as a issue for further investigation, thanks!