David Demaree
@demar.ee
210 followers 220 following 760 posts
Information artist. Owner & principal @bitsandletters.com, a design & product consultancy. Nerdy about fonts, design systems, coffee, and keyboards. Alum of Google, Adobe, Stripe, Webflow.
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demar.ee
One of many ways I’m weird: I have never been one of those tab hoarders with 9,000 open tabs and a mortal fear of losing their precious tabs. Tabs are not precious to me, and I find the state of affairs where tab labels are no longer visible abhorrent.
demar.ee
These 3-4 companies are basically passing a trillion or so dollars back and forth between each other in a massive shell game to convince us there’s massive demand for technologies that nobody wants that don’t even work half the time
demar.ee
If I sometimes seem less than existentially worried about whether AI will permanently reshape human society, creativity, and our relationship with the natural world, it’s probably because I’ve known about this mess the whole time
carlquintanilla.bsky.social
NVIDIA and OpenAi:

Concerns that their “increasingly complex and interconnected web of business transactions is artificially propping up the trillion-dollar AI boom.“

@bloomberg.com $NVDA 👀
www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...
demar.ee
One very important lesson learned about selling to enterprises: _always_ keep proposal/SOW language in Word docs. Not fancy PDFs. Not even Google Docs.

Word docs.

If their legal department needs to red-line and demand changes, they will expect to receive something they can open in Word on Windows.
demar.ee
This is a stretch but the ways genAI has been used to improve quality on things like transcription, image background removal, basic Photoshop-ish editing like blemish removal — those are nice. Workflows like the thing in Descript where you edit video by editing text — also nice. Boring and nice.
erikahall.bsky.social
What's striking is I can't think of an instance when anyone pointed to anything new & *good*, like "GenAI helped us produce this. Couldn't have done it without those tools."

Must be something, right?

With the early web I was like holy shit this swiss physics lab can publish directly to the world.
demar.ee
Before you consider asking a large language model for puppy content, spend 2-4 hours looking at www.instagram.com/vixbull?igsh...

(It’s a couple who breed French bulldogs and post a lot of tiny bat-eared potatoes)
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demar.ee
This is the kind of “productivity” and “creativity” AI is “unlocking.” No shade on this lady who wants puppy poems, but like, we didn’t have AI-generated puppy poems before and we got by. There are puppy accounts on Instagram, puppy shows on Animal Planet, even — believe it or not — puppy *books*.
demar.ee
OH in the waiting room at my wife’s OB/GYN: “…you can tell AI to write a poem about a puppy in a library, and in 5 seconds it’ll come up with something beautiful! It’d take me two hours to write something like that!”

(I doubt this lady previously spent any time writing poems about puppies before)
demar.ee
This highlights how fucking weird it is that, in a world with far too much human-crafted, sometimes shitty content, the AI people think what we need is _more, cheaper, even shittier content_
chappelltracker.bsky.social
Crazy how fast I scroll past any video with a Sora watermark. Sorry but I already have enough content to deal with
demar.ee
I genuinely think AI works better for me because I don’t *want* to be talking to it, so I never hit these annoying-sounding long conversation safeguards
demar.ee
Obviously, the best way to avoid giving Meta any free data with their luxury smart glasses is not to buy them. But if you want them anyway — say, because they’re Ray-Bans that can double as headphones for dog walks — you can just not enable the AI crap, and there’s also a physical on-off switch.
demar.ee
People who haven’t worked in these companies wouldn’t know this, but they’re “leadership” because they don’t actually manage anything and “princes/lordlings” is considered rude in this context
demar.ee
If there's one thing you need to understand about design in huge companies, it's that leaving good things alone is rarely an option. Some design or product VP's master plan depends on replacing something useful and recognizable with (waves hands in frustration) whatever _this_ is
tomwarren.co.uk
Microsoft’s new Office icons are now available in TestFlight versions of Excel, Word, and PowerPoint on iOS
demar.ee
Sometimes Liquid Glass™ is fine, other times it's like someone used a Kai's Power Tools filter on important parts of your desktop
demar.ee
Some folks are using AI for incredibly stupid things
Reposted by David Demaree
merriam-webster.com
We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.
demar.ee
Two more great things about modern discourse:

1. Whereas early social media had people talking about lots of different things, today everyone talks about the same things. You can scroll just a couple posts and get caught up, or keep going to _really_ fall into a rage pit.
Reposted by David Demaree
jasonv.bsky.social
Absolute all-timer sentence in today's @nytimes.com
"some legal experts have called it a crime to summarily execute civilians" says today's New York Times, continuing their long tradition of whitewashing fascism
Reposted by David Demaree
macnult.com
bro you look like you drop common items
demar.ee
I love how in current online spaces there is no space to breathe and think between “I have 10/10 ironclad beliefs about everything and everyone who disagrees is my enemy” and total brain-dead silence
demar.ee
Spending tomorrow at @sanity.io's Everything *[NYC] event in Brooklyn. Schedule looks very, very Sanity — talks about custom apps and content operations, plus art, DJs, and great food.

If you're gonna be there too, come say hi! I'll have some Y2K-themed @bitsandletters.com stickers.
demar.ee
Quick question: How do you know when your website has gone from helping your business to hurting it?

Spoiler: it happens gradually, then suddenly. 😱

I shared some thoughts on this pattern I see constantly in our work on the @bitsandletters.com blog: btslttrs.com/bsky-first-...
demar.ee
Trying Google Gemini 2.5 Flash "Nano Banana" 🍌 image prompts to turn an unkempt Sunday morning selfie into a "professional" headshot, then a YouTube thumbnail, then a _smirky_ YouTube thumbnail 😱
demar.ee
I haven’t looked closely yet but I think what happened is that I need the special I’m-a-real-business DNS records on any subdomain that might possibly send email, and if those don’t exist email sending can silently fail or go in _everyone’s_ spam box for _weeks_.
demar.ee
Was checking my spam folder to see if a particular invoice ended up there, discovered three messages from my website contact form sent last week that I'd never seen.

Email is the worst technology. Honestly, if I'd had the form send to Slack, SMS, or a random Notion page, it would've worked better.