I spent 7 years in the core team building the biggest app in Vietnam (70M+ users). I researched the Chinese app ecosystem heavily, especially WeChat. From what I've seen, most of the mess comes from business decisions, not from a lack of design skills or a different cultural taste. There are 2 different things here: the artistic side of the design, and the complexity of the information. The latter overwhelms the former. In China, and partly in Vietnam, companies want to build super apps. A super app is one application people use for every single purpose in their everyday life: messaging, payments, ticket booking, short videos, and hundreds more. When you have that ambition and try to fit in that many features, the classic UX rules get traded off, and many of them simply can't be applied. As a result, if you're used to the simplicity of Western design and how much it cares about information architecture, Chinese apps look like chaos. And they are indeed chaotic. No cultural explanation can change that. People do find it hard to find anything outside of what they usually use. But in my humble opinion, these are deliberate decisions, not poor design skills. When building a super app, you must optimize for cross-selling. When users use one service, you must get them to use more related (or even unrelated) services. What's the most basic design approach to achieve that? Yes: put everything on the screen, next to each other, near the one users just picked. Do it intensively and you create a mess. But that mess perfectly fulfills the original objective. Another thing that makes it harder: mini apps. Super apps open their platform to thousands of third parties, from big brands to small shops. Their interfaces are built by those partners, not by the super app's designers. There are design guidelines, but enforcing them is very challenging. Strict review slows down partners, while the platform wants the ecosystem to grow fast. And users don't see the boundary. To them, it's one app. So every low-quality mini app makes the whole super app look rough. That's why at many points, the design looks odd and low quality. So the nature of the ecosystem creates a different level of information architecture, which leads to a chaotic design on purpose. When you see that mess, it's very hard for you, who are familiar with and inspired by Western design, to call it good design. Even Chinese people see it as a mess. A mess is a mess, regardless of culture. At this point, I want to emphasize again that this is not a skill issue of Chinese designers. They have good designers, a lot of them. I've known many great designers from Tencent, the maker of WeChat. When we spot basic design issues like bad padding or misaligned elements, they are just... design bugs. Just like design bugs in Western products. No cultural difference turns bad padding into good design in China. Then let's talk about the artistic side of design. It's difficult, almost impossible, to make that mess beautiful in the common sense. Interestingly, they approach it in a different way: by bringing more cultural elements into the design. For example, most Western apps look the same throughout the year. But in Chinese, and some Vietnamese, apps, you'll see something special for every traditional event. The colors, the animations, the decorations... everything changes to celebrate the occasion. Think Google Doodles, but at a much larger scale. This is how they solve the artistic side of design from an emotional perspective. So culture does show up in these apps, just not as an excuse for the mess. There are many other examples of how they adapt their design. This is an interesting topic. I first touched on it in 2013. 13 years later, people are still questioning it and trying to explain it. Seeing it come up again today made my weekend.

Please, give him the Oscar 😂 It's just too good

Within the next 72 hours, we will see many new IPO experts start analyzing Ant case. Opus must be so tired analyzing the same file over and over again

It's quite clear now that something went wrong with the Claude usage limit. Interestingly, no one on my feed talks about moving to GPTs. People are patiently waiting for the investigation. That tells a lot about the Opus's quality.

Oh dear! - OpenAI can’t win the model fight. - So now their employees are picking fights with people from other labs on 𝕏. Bold move.

This is the only way to save my team now 🥲 Or maybe they should have Fable 6.0 as the next head coach 🤡 @ManUtd

This is the first time I’ve seen someone leverage Qwen’s open weights like this.

Opus 5.5 is still smart. But it burns tokens faster. Is it just me?

No model can bring this feeling 🎾

Worth reading. The social engineering on a real developer scares me

I challenge you to run this prompt. I bet you'll laugh your ass off and then rethink your life. "Based on everything you know about me, roast me and don't hold back. Say it in [your language] slang, but add way more [your language] swear words."

Later, when my children ask me why number 4 is bad and means DEAD in our culture, I will tell them the story about eMudhra ☠️

A garbage business. What do they expect social to react? "No worries, it's just a security issue that affect the whole internet, not a big deal" Such a garbage loser.

Why do they attack Internet Archive? Such a garbage

Make sense

Are you running on PHP? 🥲

All of these happen before Thursday. This week is so long. - eMudhra: Stupid CA private keys - PHP: Two unauthenticated remote code execution flaws in core - GitLab: Two CVSS 10.0 RCEs in nine days - Railway: Customer environment variables possibly accessed, some decrypted - LiteLLM: Version 1.107.0 shipped with infostealer and RAT - TiDB Cloud: Cloud database service breach disclosed Monday - Node.js: Four high-severity vulnerabilities in the runtime

This is insane.

Duet is different from other agents like Muse, Dot, or Grok. The waitlist is open for small businesses. You must enter your business name to join. It’s a small detail, but it shows they’re mainly targeting business use cases. Looking further at the demo, all the use cases are around business activities: managing, operating, and collaborating with your team. There’s no mass-market consumer use case like booking flights or arranging hotels. They even say it directly: personal errands like booking tickets aren’t quite as strong yet. Because it touches business data, a big part of the announcement focuses on safety and security. They even admit its limits openly: “This is an early version of Claude Duet, and it still might misread a thread or miscalibrate what’s urgent.” In a business context, that kind of transparency matters. It’s aligned with Anthropic’s current direction. They’ve been focusing on enterprise, and now they want to reach a larger market. A product for smaller businesses is a natural move. We might argue that all the other bots can do the same. Yes, that’s true if we only look at the features: always-on agents that have access to many tools, do the job for you, and proactively communicate with you. The point is how they package those features and position the product. That decides which audience they focus on acquiring. And in the long run, it shapes how people think about Duet. So on the product surface, they’re the 4th to join the race. But in positioning and market segment, they’re the first to go after it this clearly. Time will tell how far they go. For now, it’s an interesting game to watch.

So here is my prediction: Fable 5.5 WON'T release today! It's based on what people predicted in the last 7 days.

Spread this for a world without skeletons