Fighting brainrot & misaligned AI feeds Cofounder @retrodotapp Former Director of Engineering @instagram
Snowmass, CO
Joined March 2009
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Ryan Olson retweeted
efficiency, productivity, speed
we keep worshipping these words like they are what we live for
ship faster
merge more
manage more agents
compress every loop
remove every pause
turn every hour into output
but what is the point of endless production if there is no time left to think deeply?
not react
not optimize
not summarize
not clear the queue
think
to sit with a question long enough that your real intention starts to appear
to find the purpose underneath the motion
to ask whether the thing being accelerated should exist at all
ai could be a new canvas
a way to make strange things
personal things
impossible things
tools, worlds, poems, games, interfaces, films, languages, rituals
things that let more people touch the shape of their own imagination
but instead, so much of it is becoming slop factories
more content
more funnels
more tickets
more fake work pretending to be value
you can merge 2000 prs
you can manage 500 agents
you can wake up to dashboards proving that the machine kept moving while you slept
but what is the point if you only sleep 5 hours a day?
what is the point if you stop talking to other humans?
stop learning about the past?
stop playing?
stop wandering?
stop being surprised?
what is the point if your whole life becomes optimizing the system that is consuming you?
speed is not meaning
scale is not wisdom
automation is not freedom if it only makes everyone run faster
and where are we running?
toward what?
a world where every person becomes a manager of machines, and every machine produces more things no one had the time to truly want?
the danger is not that ai makes us lazy
the danger is that ai makes us endlessly busy
that it gives us infinite production before we have found intention
infinite execution before we have developed taste
infinite motion before we have learned how to be still
maybe the real frontier is not more speed
maybe it is discernment
knowing what not to make
knowing when to stop
knowing when the most productive thing is to sleep, read history, call a friend, play with a cat, walk without tracking it, or stare at the ceiling until the false urgency dissolves
tools should give us more life
not turn life into a tool
if ai is going to matter, it should not just help us produce more
it should help us become more human
more imaginative
more free
otherwise, it’s the same old factory
just without humans
Ryan Olson retweeted
I love Smash 64 but I wish I was in it, so I hacked the original game to run in the browser and put myself + 1000 others in
Upload yourself at smash dot fun
Ryan Olson retweeted
News is out on a round we closed a while back to keep growing Retro as the single best place to share your life with your friends.
We gotta make social media social again
Retro, a friend-focused photo-sharing app built by former Instagram employees, has raised more than $21 million in Series A funding.
spr.ly/6018B100s2
Ryan Olson retweeted
there are zero dynamic interfaces or apps that tailor themselves to the user that i know of
can someone enlighten me why ai suddenly changes this
just moving a single button will confuse an entire enterprise, when do we learn that feature discovery is the worlds hardest problem
Ryan Olson retweeted
“Retro feels like a living room, cozy-esque vibe and I think that’s how social media should be.” -@Johnmcelhone, Retro user
New social media apps are leaning into the ways of the old internet. And they’re growing.
In our latest documentary, @dagsen covers this wave of anti-algorithmic social media and asks whether it points to a healthier future online.
00:31 Surveying students about their social media habits
01:45 Speaking to Tyler Bainbridge, founder of Perfectly Imperfect, about the platform’s culture and its recommendation-driven social network
04:18 What is an algorithm?
04:56 Retro's founder helped create Instagram Stories
05:17 How does Retro work?
06:01 Is a non-addictive social media app possible?
07:10 Does social media bring you closer to your friends?
07:40 Dagsen’s take on social media
08:13 Speaking to users and employees of Perfectly Imperfect and Retro
Don't mistake motion for progress
I think we have lost some sense of judgment and moderation when it comes to product building currently.
The moment you turn something into a universally celebrated metric, whether that is token burn, prototype count, or percentage of agent-written code, you start losing sight of what actually matters.
I have felt the same way for a long time about overusing data and A/B testing to build products. The moment you reduce product quality or productivity to a metric, you stop shipping value and start shipping numbers.
A lot of what people are doing with AI makes directional sense. The missing piece is counterbalance:
1. AI should help engineers build better products. Leaderboards and adoption metrics can be useful as directional signals. They do not tell you what is being built, whether it is good, or whether it should exist at all.
2. Users do not care what percentage of your code was written by agents. They care about the outcome. Faster output is useful. Like usually, faster doesn't seem to add to quality, clarity, or stability of products. Power to build should not become an excuse to lower quality bars.
3. LLM-generated prototypes can feel like late-night whiteboarding sessions. They look exciting in the moment and feel productive very quickly. Then a few days later you realize the idea was shallow, distracting, or simply wrong. The same trap shows up in jumping straight to code and solutions more broadly. You may just be building the wrong thing more efficiently. Prototyping has its place. So do clear thinking, good design, and a real understanding of the user’s problem. In terms of activities or momentum, the main quest and the side quest can both feel productive but only one actually moves the mission forward.
4. Adding more to products is still dangerous as ever even if time or effort to add it has gone down. Every addition creates complexity, maintenance cost, and user confusion. New features should be pushed back unless they clearly show it should exist and how it improves the product.
5. Not everything needs to be an agent shaped. A simple scheduled task does not need a full LLM sandbox. Making something agentic because it feels current or impressive does not make it right-sized, correct, or effective.
The core ideas are:
- even if you can, maybe you should not.
- more power we have to build should not reduce our need to think, it should increase it.
Very excited to visit Taiwan next week! 🇹🇼
super excited to have the @retrodotapp team in Taipei next week!
come join us for a fireside chat w/ the founders @nsharp17 & @ryanolsonk!
link to the luma: luma.com/dw0ocvt7
Ryan Olson retweeted
if anyone who follows me is on the xcode team / at @Apple please escalate this.... signing is completely broken right now
Ryan Olson retweeted
One of the best metaphors I've heard is software is like sushi: consumers are always going to want the best.
It's fine that 7/11 now sells sushi, it's not going to impact Michelin chefs in Japan.
(Shamelessly stolen from @loganbartlett)
🔜 @iamseanleach crushed it on this one
Ryan Olson retweeted
computers and by proxy LLMs/agents should help us spend more time on life itself, not less.
build stuff that does that, not infinite slot machines.
Sitting today for 15 minutes with a pen and paper (iPad) was the best decision so far before starting work. Thank you, Mario @badlogicgames , for inspiring me to slow down and think. How do you zoom out to get a better perspective on what's going on? For me it's pen and paper.
