#80: T9, the super rich, and this is fine.

This week has been tough. More layoffs, including some of my wonderful friends and colleagues.

If you’re hiring PMs, designers, developers, or anyone else, let me know. There’s some great people on the market.

💎 Word gems

Why the super rich are inevitable (The Pudding / Alvin Chang)

This is a great article explaining how money in a free market moves.

In a free market, one person ends up with all of the wealth – completely by chance. This is completely counterintuitive. If everyone wins half their games, everyone should end up approximately where they started, around $1,000. But it all starts to make sense when you're in the position of the poorer player. Your wager changes based on how much you can afford.

T9: Text on Nine Keys (Valid Concept)

I almost forgot about T9 keyboards until I came across this. Remember trying to type on your old Nokia by pressing each number multiple times until the right letter came up? Dive back into that brief moment in time where we all came to use T9 keyboards on our shiny new phones.

Young mobile users tended to be technologically savvy and dexterous enough not to be put off by the demands of multi-tap typing. Their use of “txt slang”, which adapted chat room shorthand and radically abbreviated words to fit within 160-character message limits, reduced the pain of multi-tap by reducing the necessary number of characters. In turn, learning this lingo has reinforced the use of multi-tap.

And, a fascinating Tumblr post about the origin of this meme.

💩 Cool shit

Written in Stone - A gallery of seals embedded in sidewalks.

Copy Dennis - I love finding a great portfolio site. This is a collection of ones heavily inspired by one originally made by the titular Dennis.

Magic Thumbnails - Generate YouTube-style thumbnails with AI.

Garden of Blogs - A collection of blogs in a whimsical emoji design.

Summer Afternoon - A stunning webGL experience in a procedurally generated 3D world.

Designercize - A design prompt generator. I think I love the UI of this site more than the actual content (although both are great).

Dateforce - “Salesforce, but for dating”. When I saw this I was outraged. It’s another example of everything gone wrong with tech. But I think it’s a joke. I hope..

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