Believer. Product Designer. Creator of @ZestIcons and https://teapawt.org/t.co/VqXFoUoAH1.
Raleigh, North Carolina
Joined October 2007
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- Following818
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John W. Long retweeted
Friendly reminder to go do some side quests, have fun, try things, and keep learning.
It's important to keep building your understanding of the world, find the edges of what's possible, and have new experiences.
AI is getting insanely good and your job is changing, but there's still value in providing your own spin on things (providing taste as others are saying) and pushing on problems/solutions harder than others would (applying effort, going deep).
The only way to build taste is to go experience lots of shit and learn what feels right/wrong. The best way to find problems worth pushing on is to go out and see what sucks and experience the pain yourself.
Most importantly, have fun! Model release timelines are compressing and the capabilities just keep getting better and better. Keep riding the intelligence and seeing what's possible.
John W. Long retweeted
Introducing SubQ - a major breakthrough in LLM intelligence.
It is the first model built on a fully sub-quadratic sparse-attention architecture (SSA),
And the first frontier model with a 12 million token context window which is:
- 52x faster than FlashAttention at 1MM tokens
- Less than 5% the cost of Opus
Transformer-based LLMs waste compute by processing every possible relationship between words (standard attention).
Only a small fraction actually matter.
@subquadratic finds and focuses only on the ones that do.
That's nearly 1,000x less compute and a new way for LLMs to scale.
John W. Long retweeted
We were a little slow on this, but we just got a technical blog post up with more details. Please take a look!
subq.ai/how-ssa-makes-long-c…
We have a model card coming next week, and we are happy to take requests for any specific details there.
I am happy to answer any questions here!
John W. Long retweeted
Code is an output. Nature is healing.
For too long we treated code as input. We glorified it, hand-formatted it, prettified it, obsessed over it.
We built sophisticated GUIs to write it in: IDEs. We syntax-highlit, tree-sat, mini-mapped the code. Keyboard triggers, inline autocompletes, ghost text. “What color scheme is that?”
We stayed up debating the ideal length of APIs and function bodies. Is this API going to look nice enough for another human to read?
We’re now turning our attention to the true inputs. Requirements, specs, feedback, design inspiration. Crucially: production inputs. Our coding agents need to understand how your users are experiencing your application, what errors they’re running into, and turn *that* into code.
We will inevitably glorify code less, as well as coders. The best engineers I’ve worked with always saw code as a means to an end anyway. An output that’s bound to soon be transformed again.
John W. Long retweeted
So, I'm looking for a job!
Internal or external consultant, devrel, training, team fixing, design, architecture. WFH or travel the world.
So, if you know any company that has a Dave-shaped hole, please email me. Some more about me on my site. Links below.
Many thanks.
John W. Long retweeted
Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke explains Goodhart’s law and why he doesn’t like KPIs or OKRs
“Goodhart’s law is real. The moment a metric becomes a goal, it’s no longer a useful metric… No metric by itself is a complete heuristic for a complex business. There’s a million different tensions in a company, and you can’t keep all of them in harmony by optimizing for one thing.”
For this reason, Shopify doesn’t use KPIs or OKRs. But as Tobi explains, this doesn’t mean they don’t value data and metrics.
“We are extremely data informed. We have invested enormous amounts of money and time into systems that give us basically everything at our fingertips… But what Shopify attempts to do is just not over-fit for what’s quantifiable.”
People love optimizing for highly-quantifiable things because there’s immediate gratification that comes from seeing a number go up. But Tobi thinks that the most important aspects of a product are rarely quantifiable:
“The overlap of the most valuable things you can do with a product and the things that happen to be fully quantifiable are like maybe 20%. Which leaves 80% of a value space unaddressable by the people who only look at quantifiable things.”
He continues:
“Shopify is comfortable with unquantifiable things like taste, quality, passion, love, hate… The sort of deep satisfaction that a craftsperson feels when they’ve done a job well is actually a better proxy if you allow it to be.”
They then have robust analytics systems that tell the company if something’s wrong or a new rollout breaks something.
“We think about it as a cockpit for a pilot. The decisions are still made by pilots, and we think this leads to better results… I think there needs to be more acceptance in business of unquantifiable things… And then metrics take a support function.”
Video source: @lennysan (2025)
John W. Long retweeted
Did Adam & Eve really exist?
How long ago did they live?
Here is the evidence from peer-reviewed genetics studies showing all humans came from one original couple, only 6-12,000 years old - perfectly in line with Scripture.
Thread🧵
John W. Long retweeted
It occurs to me that @Apple would be incredibly smart to release a communication device that did not allow social media. Not a device with software lockouts via screentime, a device that actually did not allow social media apps at all. A reduced app set, somehow hard-coded into the device. There is a huge market demand for this specific product.
We simply lack the self-discipline to not install these apps. Silicon Valley has figured out our weaknesses and how to make us addicted, and companies have figured out how to use our dopamine as a pathway to taking over our personal time. By blocking this, Apple would be seen as a benevolent actor in a sea of malicious tech companies.
Call it something catchy like:
The “Emancipation From Applications”.
As parent with teenagers, I have explored this space carefully, alongside all of dozens of thoughtful parents I respect, from all walks of life. I am familiar with all of the dumb phones, and know friends with many of the hardware solutions used to make social media inconvenient.
Increasingly, I know adults who want this product for themselves. It’s no longer just about kids.
The more I think about it the more I realize this would be a genius play on many levels.
I usually don’t say this, but please retweet this if you feel the same way. I want to know if it’s just me.
John W. Long retweeted
One of the most basic but powerful learnings of my twenties and thirties:
Be nice to people and they will be nice back.
Say the things you wish people would say to you:
"Wow, your parents must be so proud"
"Your kids are lucky to have a parent like you"
"That must have been hard for you"
"What did that feel like?"
Amazing how many deep friendships I've built using these phrases.
John W. Long retweeted
What if you could save time and boost revenue by getting subscription management native to your commerce solution? 💰
Now you can. Watch to learn how Elastic Path makes it fast and simple to offer subscribe and save and paid membership.
John W. Long retweeted
I've published 50+ shader tutorials so far.
Topics vary widely, including specific effects, math, abstract concepts, shader theory and algorithms
mini.gmshaders.com
I hope you find these helpful! I'll give someone who shares this a free subscription for full access
John W. Long retweeted
BREAKING: US Supreme Court effectively outlaws landing pages that look like Linear.
The court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, has found that continuing to copy Linear's style is "too trendy" and has deemed the practice unconstitutional.
The justices expressed concern that designers are being directly asked to design landing pages to look like Linear — or even worse, shown other SaaS companies that copied Linear, as reference.
"It does seem to me to be curious that designers are coming into these projects with great creative ideas, but the output ends up looking exactly like Linear. While it is difficult to prove what went wrong, it is clear that a direct violation of the constitutionally protected creative process is being violated." Chief Justice John Roberts said.
John W. Long retweeted
Fire up the Lambos and meet usePHP. Run PHP in React, with edge SSR. Extracts your PHP code, executes it in WASM, and injects the result into your React code.
ALT const php = await usePHP(request, h); <div> {await php` <?php echo "Hello world"; phpinfo(); ?> `} </div>
John W. Long retweeted
NEWS: Adobe’s plan to acquire Figma was one of the biggest stories of 2022, but the deal might not happen after all.
John W. Long retweeted
We launched @airboxrHQ on the Shopify App store six months ago and ~100 brands have used us since. But agencies could never use our platform, because we didn’t support connections to multiple @Shopify stores.
Well, now we do 👉
(1/4)
John W. Long retweeted
There's a lot of focus on the macro picture and headlines right now, but at the micro, there are amazing things happening everywhere.
John W. Long retweeted
Our NEW mobile first editing is live @unstackhq! If you're building landing pages, this is for you. Check it out (video in reply).
John W. Long retweeted
Had a call with the CEO of Unstack today (@grdeken).
He's building something huge.
Watch out for what's coming in Q1.
John W. Long retweeted
I spent an hour with an eComm email agency building a list of personalization playbooks using @klaviyo data on @unstackhq landing pages for retention marketing. I was blown away by the list of ideas that they want to test immediately. Here are three that stood out...
