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Ben Kraal

@bjkraal.bsky.social
126 followers 318 following 210 posts

Experience Designer, Researcher & Strategist. Former design academic but really a sociologist. Probably reading or thinking about cars. Brisbane, Australia www.benkraal.com

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Ben Kraal @bjkraal.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Listening to a podcast interview with a well known (in certain circles of social media) designer. They design developer tools. They’re saying “if you’re designing government forms you probably don’t need to know what the database looks like.” But you absolutely do!
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Katie Martin @katie0martin.ft.com · 25/09/2026
I have blamed The agents That hacked Your website And which You probably Reasonably thought I controlled Forgive me I am rich And unaccustomed To taking responsibility
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Ben Kraal @bjkraal.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Turns out if you wear button-fly fatigues and go through a body radar scanner at the airport a large bearded man gets to goose you in public.
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Ben Kraal @bjkraal.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Teams (OSX) will deliver a notification with full text rendered, and then have to re-load the whole message, seemingly from the server, to show the same message in a thread. Efficient.
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Ben Kraal @bjkraal.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Extra special shout out to the guy watching what seems like English-language telenovela (sounded like “Real Office Ladies of Your Midwestern City”) clips without headphones on the train this morning.
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Ben Kraal @bjkraal.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Am I remembering wrong? In the before times a full rich day was one where I had 3-4 meetings. Now I have six back-to-back 30 min meetings before midday.
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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
Look at you. Worrying about the gay agenda. Meanwhile this entire time your car has had a trans mission.
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FT @fucktheory.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Imagine being talented and beautiful and rich and famous and still the most noteworthy thing about you is how good a person you are.
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Ben Kraal @bjkraal.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
Cammisa on the LS400. youtu.be/i15Ii4yetLM?... I knew they were brilliant and obsessively engineered. But not “differently tuned Nakamichi stereos for the cloth and leather interiors” obsessive. I don’t have space for a 40 year old luxury car, but maybe @drewpasmith.com does?
youtu.be
The Lexus LS 400 Happened When The Government Tried To Protect Detroit — Jason Cammisa Revelations
YouTube video by Hagerty
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Ben Kraal @bjkraal.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
Is it boring to say 911s? Not that they aren’t good, just overrated.
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Ben Kraal @bjkraal.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
After seeing Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi mentioned (hyped, not just mentioned) in several unrelated contexts, I read it. Yes. I get it. If you like books, you will like it. You should read it.
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Fred Davies @dr-fred-davies.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
0.000001% of female athletes are transgender. 1/15 female athletes will be sexually assaulted by a male coach. Shouldn't he be promoting a complete ban on male coaches in women's sports? Of course not, because he actually doesn't give a shit about women's safety.
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Ben Kraal @bjkraal.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
I am not a space guy but from what I understand it’s pretty bloody hard to hit the moon on purpose. How do you hit it by accident? Is this like how people crash into the only tree next to a dead straight country road?
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Ben Kraal @bjkraal.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
Because reasons, we have 24 eggs that will expire by Tuesday in the fridge. Between scrambled eggs for the boy for breakfast and Japanese omelette with lunch, I’m -4. Donna Hay’s recipe for lemon meringue pie uses 11(!). Let’s go.
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Ben Kraal @bjkraal.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
“Prefer” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in the headline. What O’Shea, the CEO is saying is that more people are going to “digital channels” first and they have a 20% drop in calls. The questions of “why” and “are people getting their enquiry answered” are unresolved.
Screenshot of text from the article:

But Chris O’Shea, the company’s chief executive, insisted that the changes were being made because customers preferred to take their queries to digital channels rather than people.

“AI isn’t driving these particular job reductions; that’s mainly due to changing customer behaviour,” he said. “What we’re seeing just now is over 90% of our customers actually use digital channels in the first instance, and we’ve seen a 20% reduction in customer calls, so this simply reflects the changing customer behaviour.
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Ben Kraal @bjkraal.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
This is an illustration of “the illusion of explanatory depth”. I use this as a warm up activity for medium sized workshops, often after saying little more than “we are here to explore ‘X’. But first, please draw a bicycle.” About 5-20% of the room can draw a bicycle. So?
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Yvonne Lam @yvonnezlam.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
paging @ruthmalan.bsky.social
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Ben Kraal @bjkraal.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
Seeing as @drewpasmith.com called me a Citroen pervert the other day, I feel obligated to share this m.facebook.com/marketplace/...
m.facebook.com
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See posts, photos and more on Facebook.
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Brandon Williams @stupidartpunk.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
Omph
okayayecee 21h
&threads
Why do y'all have 2000 revisions for human designers but accept the first piece of trash A.l. spits out?
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Ben Kraal @bjkraal.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
I’d like to apologise from Australian for our terrible “ban teenagers from the internet” idea that is propagating around the world.
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Dr David S Anderson @dsaarchaeology.bsky.social · 27/05/2026
As an anthropologist, I endorse this message!
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Ben Kraal @bjkraal.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
Has the Pope read the sci-fi classic “Don’t Invent the Torment Nexus”? Because I have* and there is a sub plot about the Church being the thing that inoculates you against insanity caused by over exposure to tech. *I might be confusing it with Snow Crash where that is _definitely_ a sub plot.
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Ben Kraal @bjkraal.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
A white 996 Turbo is the most boomer of all Porsches.
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Richard Littler @richardlittler.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
Kind of Blue. Session #2 of 2 recorded on this day in 1959. "A defining moment of twentieth century music" #MilesDavis #jazz
LP: Miles Davis - Kind of Blue (front)LP: Miles Davis - Kind of Blue (rear)
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Ben Kraal @bjkraal.bsky.social · 12/04/2026
In about 2010 I bought a $100 Microsoft/Nokia smartphone that had a faster processor, more pixels in the screen, more storage space and more RAM than the computer I used in 2000 when writing my comp-sci Honours thesis. And it was a better digital camera than the Kodak DC3400 I had then, too.
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Ben Kraal @bjkraal.bsky.social · 05/04/2026
Tampa, FL
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Alice Grundy @alicektg.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
Just 1 example of the kind of thing unis are getting for their massive spend on consultants. ANU spent $6k on a "non-significant meeting" with a reputation management firm at which apparently no one took a note. That's more than a tutor gets for a semester's work thepoint.com.au/opinions/260...
thepoint.com.au
ANU spent $6k on a 'non-significant' meeting. Then why do they pay tutors even less for a semester?
Last year the Australian National University (ANU) was getting some bad press, so they engaged a company called Bastion Reputation to help with the media fallout from restructures and the heavily crit...
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Ben Kraal @bjkraal.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
I am 180+ days overdue on this terrible AI-voice over bad PowerPoint compulsory internal training. It’s also full of impenetrable HR jargon.
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Sheryl Weikal says Prosecute ICE @leftistlawyer.com · 30/03/2026
Right wing tech bros: we love Star Trek but it's too woke nowadays. Too preachy. Kirk's show wasn't like this. Average TOS episode: AI is bad and should never be allowed to run a society. Also, make peace because nationalism kills and every life form must be respected equally.
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Maureen L. Hartman @mlhartman.bsky.social · 26/03/2026
Repeat for as long as they’ll go with you to the library….
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Ben Kraal @bjkraal.bsky.social · 24/03/2026
Snow Crash is absolutely biting satire. It’s not aiming to be aspirational. Teach critical literacy to technology students!
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Ben Kraal @bjkraal.bsky.social · 08/03/2026
If you like that ⬇️ may I introduce you to Genevieve Bell’s 2006 paper “No more SMS from Jesus” www.dhi.ac.uk/san/waysofbe...
dhi.ac.uk
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Ben Kraal @bjkraal.bsky.social · 07/03/2026
Project managers: “I have added people to this project that is late, as recommended in Fred Brooks’ classic ‘adding people to a late project makes it later’”
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Ben Kraal @bjkraal.bsky.social · 07/03/2026
Project managers: “I am following the waterfall software development model from Winston Royce’s 1970 paper ‘Do not follow a waterfall model for developing software’”
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Ben Kraal @bjkraal.bsky.social · 07/03/2026
Spectacular thread. The maddening thing about this all is that Winston Royce wrote about this in 1970.
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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 06/03/2026
Vibe coding broke people's brains because they had a bad understanding of the software design process. The pop culture model goes something like this: start out with a sketch and then render that same idea in progressively finer detail. So when tools could "skip" to high detail, people went WOW.
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Alex Hanna @alexhanna.bsky.social · 06/03/2026
What coders lose by relying on AI. From our event with the University of Washington Office of Public Lectures. (with @emilymbender.bsky.social)
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Waldo Jaquith @waldo.net · 28/02/2026
I keep trying to write clever blog entries with Deep Realizations about government tech, while failing to document the simple, fundamental truths that guide my work. So here's one of those fundamental truths: government simply has to hire people who understand how technology works.
waldo.jaquith.org
One neat trick for buying software that isn’t trash.
I have lots to say about how to ensure that major software projects go well, but it all boils down to this: hire people who understand how technology works.
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Kelsey Hightower @kelseyhightower.com · 19/02/2026
Why learn to code when you can use an LLM and pay a subscription fee for the rest of your life.
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Vincent Driessen @nvie.com · 18/02/2026
I wrote a few words last night. nvie.com/posts/15-yea...
nvie.com
15+ years later, Microsoft morged my diagram
How Microsoft continvoucly morged my Git branching diagram.
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Ben Kraal @bjkraal.bsky.social · 17/02/2026
Got pitched yesterday on a “research platform” that has a lot of AI in it, to the level of “it can do synthesis”. Me: I don’t trust that. LLMs only do form, not meaning Salesperson: for normal LLMs I agree that’s true, but ours is specially trained for qualitative research Me: yeah, ok
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Dan Hon @danhon.com · 16/02/2026
Put your hand up if you received the ELIZA vaccine at a young age and are now immune to chatbot spiraling
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Kathleen Bachynski @bachynski.bsky.social · 16/02/2026
“The Trump administration “is telling American manufacturers, ‘You guys go build gasoline cars again,’” he said. “The Chinese government is telling its manufacturers, ‘You go build the advanced vehicles that are going take over the world.’”
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Ben Kraal @bjkraal.bsky.social · 14/02/2026
Mazda - just coming in to the peak of their bubble-era power. FC RX-7 and HC Cosmo/Luce. Capella/626/MX-6 turbo with 4WS. Familia/323 (GT-X!) *and* MX-5!. I'd argue a more complete and interesting lineup than 80s BMW.
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aliii✨✨ @gigixmelo.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
Context:
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Ben Kraal @bjkraal.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
It’s always a good day to be reminded to always be punching nazis.
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taylr @taylordahlin.com · 27/01/2026
brass solidarity band performing “stand by me” in the streets of whittier next to alex pretti’s memorial. the crowd started chanting “the people united will never be defeated” so they incorporated it into the song. i love minneapolis
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Steve Farrugia @fasterandworse.com · 02/11/2023
AS A: Employee I WANT TO: Not use this software but I have to SO THAT: I don't get fired ---------------- The enterprise SaaS user story
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