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Dan Hiester

@majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social
654 followers 261 following 412 posts

Lighthearted takes on UX, creativity, and other goofy things—by a technology wunderkind who grew up to be a product designer, and former agency developer. Was really into Poppins before it went mainstream. Currently in Seattle.

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
One of many reasons I started an “embellished retro” first person shooter game engine as a passion project: I think it’s ridiculous that players have to sit through long compile times so companies don’t have to provide builds that are ready to go. This Stream review of Borderlands 4 sums it up:
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
I heard somewhere long ago that Bing is actually an acronym for “Bing Is Not Google.” And there used to be a time when I would say, “Damn right it isn’t.” But these days? I feel like we can safely joke around that “Gemini Is Not Google” and maybe even have a more impactful point.
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Has anyone else been picking up a vibe lately where the questions and comments you get from people make it feel like even side projects are expected to have paying customers? Like if you aren’t doing that, then you’re doing it wrong?
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Just realized that if one catchy slogan sums up so much of what I think about AI it’s this: There is no I in team, but there is an I in AI. On so many levels. So. Many. Levels.
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
So, a while back I started working with AI to build a game engine for boomer shooters. Not a one-shot “hey fable make a game” kind of thing. A renderer written in Rust with a curated list of technologies for retro styled FPS. No real content yet. Building features first. And features are landing!
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
A while back, I decided that if a lot of people are using AI to push out of their technical comfort zone and into mine, then I should use it to break out of mine, too. So I started building a game engine, inspired by Quake. One feature at a time. Today was foundations for moving platforms!
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 13/06/2026
I feel like Claude just did that thing Leslie Nielsen did in Airplane where he explains what a hospital is and then says “but that’s not important right now.”
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Reposted by Dan Hiester
Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
danah boyd recently argued that social media (as we knew it) is mostly dead; what we have now is parasocial media: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... I agree. Networked social media is disappearing, replaced by a new logic/structure of content creator, creator-centered community, & algorithm.
journals.sagepub.com
Social Media Is Now Parasocial Media - danah boyd, 2026
When practitioners used the term “social media” to describe the internet tools that emerged in the mid-aughts, they were giving a name to the kinds of platforms...
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
I’m pretty sure the YouTube ads algo thinks I’m a woman because I keep watching videos of Nine Inch Noize playing Coachella and now I am even more confused about how our culture encoded gender identity than ever. 😂
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 02/05/2026
I know that we truly don’t have any clear definitions of what constitutes AGI, but here’s a random thought: Forget AI that takes everyone’s jobs. What if there was AI that could fix Daikatana? Can Daikatana even be fixed? And if AI could do it, would that mean AGI achieved?
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
I think I’m pretty mild mannered about the strength of my opinions nine times out of 10. I think design dot md shows a deep lack of understanding of how the systems we build actually work. Design tokens absolutely should be codified. But they belong in a deterministic system, not probabilistic.
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 19/04/2026
I’d like to think if I was a staff writer on Bob’s Burgers, I would have pitched Bob doing a special falafel burger called The Straight of Humus
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 18/03/2026
One unexpected challenge of enshittifcation is I can’t tell if I *still* haven’t had a fever in years or if I actually do have a fever but the last thermometer I bought was simply just unreliable because it’s consumer grade tech, and if I want a good thermometer I need to steal from a museum.
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 08/03/2026
Ryan Gosling was on SNL and they didn’t even mention Papyrus or any other typographic trend. I think that settles it. AI has killed design in 2026. #sarcasm
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 02/03/2026
I got into quitting ChatGPT for Claude before it went mainstream.
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 12/02/2026
I briefly caught a glimpse of a post that started “I hate the term vibe coding,” and my brain went straight to imagining John Leguizamo in character as Tybalt, saying: “Vibe coding? Vibe coding. I hate the word. As I hate hell… all AI… and thee.”
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 11/02/2026
The ability to create an app, in and of itself, won’t carry the same meaning it used to. What will slowly start to matter: The ability to make complexity feel simple. #SoftwareDevelopment #AI #ProductExperience
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 04/02/2026
If you’re a two or three trick pony, and one of those tricks is gatekeeping? AI is gonna eat you alive.
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 02/02/2026
Question for AI abundance type folks: In that vision of the future, where AI and robotics produce almost everything and no jobs exist for humans anymore, how does electricity get paid for? How does it become available to humans who can’t pay for it?
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 20/01/2026
In some ways, I feel like LLMs are a thought-provoking simulation of an ADHD brain. They go on tangents. They make random connections between disparate-seeming topics. When I build something involving a sequence of steps, they tend to have a hard time “seeing” the steps—they’re kind of time blind.
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 15/01/2026
So wait. Disney bought Fox, so Disney owns Family Guy Disney signed a deal with OpenAI letting users user Disney characters in Sora videos But I can’t generate a video of Stewie asking Brian “So how’s that vibe coding going?” because guardrails. Clearly the AI bubble is about to burst. 🙃
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 12/01/2026
Lol I’m not sure how, but after a few days of fast and furious vibe coding, Ghostty (terminal emulator that’s engineered to be snappy and lightweight) was taking up over 1gb of RAM. Sometimes life has ways of telling you to take a break, I guess.
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 11/01/2026
In about 24 hours of vibe coding, my new project went from 3,800 lines of code to 18,000. The question / experiment now is have I done enough due diligence to get architecture contracts written carefully enough for this to hold together as I get closer to the use cases I’m excited about.
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 04/01/2026
Alright, y’all. I connected Claude to a sandboxed Teamspace in my personal Notion. My emotional support bot can read my todo list, and write notes on tasks. 2026 is gonna get weird.
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 02/01/2026
I asked Codex CLI, running a max-tier model, to do some web searches on where popular coding agents store their agent rules. I don’t want to approve it crawling the entire web so I’m giving it one-off approvals… but **it just keeps going**. Look, decision making is hard, okay? 🙃
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 29/12/2025
I randomly decided to ask ChatGPT to generate an image of what it thinks I look like based on what it knows about me—partially as a test of myself, and seeing how much I’ve shared with it. Here’s the thing: It accurately depicted the hair I *wish* I had. 😂
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 27/12/2025
When I see someone say AI consistently”AI writes better code than I do, let’s be real, so I don’t even need to review it,” I feel like they just owned themselves.
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 24/12/2025
When I use things like Claude Code or Cursor to make web apps, I’m not *truly* vibe coding. I know the platform to well. So to challenge myself, I decided to try vibe coding a video game in Rust. So far, it feels like it’s not going lightning fast like I would expect, but I’m noticing something…
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 16/12/2025
I’m that guy who goes to AI meetups and says things like “I mean, PhD degrees do not have a cumulative effect, right?” Anyway. I swear I’m fun at parties.
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 02/12/2025
Friends don’t let friends vibe code global application state. #iykyk
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 20/11/2025
I might need to stop weighing in on conversations with designers about vibe coding. I’m so much deeper into the engineering skill set that they are, that these conversations make me feel a little like Buzz Aldrin making a bad dad joke about the moon and saying “I guess you had to be there.“
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 14/11/2025
So, here’s a thing I said today: “This salary range (for a 6-month contract for a mid-level UX Designer role located in-office in Seattle) is actually low enough to qualify for housing support from the city government.” This was the budget the client’s stakeholders aligned on. I passed.
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 11/11/2025
After years of proficient em-dash usage, I think I’ve finally come to accept that most of the time, in sentences that have only one em-dash? The em-dash could just as easily be a period. Instead of making a run-on sentence, we could make it a two-sentence paragraph.
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 02/11/2025
I always try to reflect on whether something is a bad idea or just a bad implementation of a potentially good idea. Agile seems like it died the same fate in the corporate world that UX did. www.instagram.com/reel/DQeoSHa...
instagram.com
transformationprincess on Instagram: "Does this match up with what your experience was? #corporate #agile #it #projectmanagement #digitaltransformation View all 200 com…"
Does this match up with what your experience was? #corporate #agile #it #projectmanagement #digitaltransformation 
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 28/10/2025
The fine print at the bottom of the screen says no endorsement is implied… but I don’t knoooowwww… I certainly feel like an endorsement has been implied here. 🙃
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 26/10/2025
Proof that language around tech is just made up as we go: www.instagram.com/reel/DPj2rS9...
instagram.com
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 20/10/2025
I’m starting to consider that maybe I don’t need to make a big effort to maintain relationships with people who like to complain about “late stage capitalism” but also tell people in their community who are down on their luck “you don’t need a support system you just need to get a job.”
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 12/10/2025
So, uh, (1) I thought enterprise b2b already *was* a circular economy and (2) increasing efficiency within the existing circular economy is going to cause headcount to crater, forcing a shift away from per-seat licensing (which has already started). Am I wrong? youtu.be/kcICMXz_n3Y?...
youtu.be
AI's circular spending problem? Activate CEO Michael Wolf on the circular AI economy
YouTube video by CNBC Television
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 06/10/2025
I have questions about my decision making process after reading several of this account’s Skeets without first searching for “Poster’s Madness.” I did get some good laughs, though!
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 05/10/2025
Watching women on social media express their exquisite disappointment with the new Taylor Swift album feels weirdly similar to watching dudes express their exquisite disappointment in every Apple keynote. Does anyone else see a resemblance?
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 28/09/2025
I’ll keep saying it over and over again: Code is a user interface. Being good working with it does not make someone less creative. It just means they work with a different file format. www.instagram.com/reel/DOytI_s...
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 21/09/2025
What’s the word for that feeling where you’re reading a new tech book and the book name drops someone doing some exciting work and then you think “Oh wait, I’ve DM’d with that person on LinkedIn, right? Oh! I have!” but then you’re also convinced your career is a dumpster fire in its closing chapter
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 18/09/2025
I might be biased because I’m a dog parent, but I kind like the idea of reading through what AI code generators write while they “talk to themselves,” and imagine it in the voice of a Golden Retriever working their way through the code.
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 18/09/2025
I’m all for experimentation, innovation, and trying new things. But apparently, there is a line I’m not willing to cross, and that line is replacing the toolbar with floating tools on Finder. 😅
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 16/09/2025
Hot take on Figma’s forthcoming Prompt to edit: Cogsci > taste The bigger question I have is: How many people in this field are so uneducated that they’re using “taste” as an umbrella term covering a handful of skills including cogsci?
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 02/09/2025
Whelp. I wrote a prompt instructing an AI orchestrator to delegate each task to “an appropriate agent.” And now I’m imagining one of my AI agents is Bricktop from Snatch, explaining what nemesis means. 🙃
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 28/08/2025
Ruin a book by adding Tom Clancy’s to the title. Tom Clancy’s The User Experience Team of One
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 22/08/2025
This was also a thinly veiled critique of UX. To be more opaque: With the right culture, and right craftspeople, yes you can build a system without letting the system become a rationale for bland repetition.
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 22/08/2025
I am low-key obsessed with this new interpretation of Closer. If you know the original studio track well, you’ll recognize what layers they kept, what they added, and what they moved around. The changes seem to assume that too much consistency leads to bland repetition. youtu.be/J1Jppq1Fe0c?...
youtu.be
Nine Inch Nails - Closer live at Xcel Center, St. Paul, MN 2025
YouTube video by M. Scott
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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 20/08/2025
See also: What it feels like to have been a UX Engineer since before the rush to AI-generated prototypes in 2025.
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