Rachel Cantor

Twenty years ago, I was studying media production at Quinnipiac University, spending countless hours digitizing Mini DV tapes to edit videos with emerging software. At the time, this technological leap seemed magical. I no longer needed to shoot scenes perfectly and in chronological order, a necessity when making movies with our mom’s VHS camcorder alongside my brother and sister. We didn’t have access to film cameras or knowledge of manually splicing footage, so this was a revolutionary change. The future had arrived. Fast forward to 2024–see what I did there?— and we now have the ability to generate videos instantly without filming anything at all. Just as utilizing nonlinear editing software once felt magical, AI-generated video feels like a dream realized. That being said, I can’t help but feel uneasy about the impact on future generations who will (maybe not?) work in this field. Undoubtedly, we’ll see some of the most exceptional content ever produced, at virtually no monetary cost. But at what cost to creativity and human development? Trying and failing has always been a crucial part of pursuing success. What happens when success is guaranteed? Why try at all? Perhaps I’m being too philosophical, or even too shortsighted. What do you all think?

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so what is your move gaes

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How Composer Helped Me Find a Market Bargain Today... My latest video breaks down how my AI-powered Composer algos turned a potential loss into a portfolio win (for today). Watch how algorithmic trading spotted an undervalued TQQQ opportunity. ⚠️ Not financial advice! Check it out: https://lnkd.in/gCFGSMTb #AITrading #Investing #StockMarket #StockTrading

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Had a chat with Eric Meyer and Brian Kardell about CSS masonry, does it belong in the grid spec or not? With a bit of a discussion about how and why we ask for developer feedback on CSS. https://lnkd.in/d3C-_dwq #css

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This is not just any "hey, we are looking for a dev" post. This might be one of the most exciting engineering roles we have ever hired for. Let me explain why: I have the great privilege of being the product lead for the exceptionally brilliant Rendering Engine Team at Miro. Several months ago, we took a bold step to revamp our foundational rendering technology from the ground up, setting an ambitious vision far beyond what Miro is capable of today. Building a highly performant rendering engine for a product like Miro is not trivial though. You are dealing with an infinite 2D canvas with potentially thousands of multimedia objects, all while multiple people collaborate in real-time. We want professionals & creatives to spend the majority of their working days in Miro. Unfortunately, every lag when panning a large planning board, every jiggle effect due to low FPS when zooming out from a large planning session, and every slight delay when selecting hundreds of multimedia objects not only results in lost time but also slight frustration. It's that small, annoying feeling that something felt slightly slow, slightly not instant, slightly irritating. A products performance is not just about the time you lose; it is about the feeling this product gives you. On the other hand, we all know the feeling of delight when you do something complex in a product, and it happens instantaneously. That feeling that no matter what you do, no matter what workload you throw at an application, it will be responsive, fast, and instantaneous. This is what we envision: A rendering engine that continuously surprises you with its snappiness, making work feel light and delightful. We are looking for someone who is as equally annoyed by these issues as we are and wants to take the lead in solving them. We aim to build a rendering engine that raises the bar for what people consider possible on a web-based canvas. A computer graphics professional who wants to take on the challenge of working on a renderer that powers the day-to-day work of millions of users and some of the most creative and innovative companies in the world. If you work in the field of computer graphics and want to contribute to the heart of a product that aims to amplify collaboration and creative work, give it shot. Feel free to DM me for more information or directly apply below:

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An informative email from FoundingFuel.com this morning on how pirated software was slowly eliminated from government workplaces... Pirated software Good morning, That pirated software is unacceptable is now drilled into our heads. But this wasn’t how things were. Harish Mehta describes how things got here in his book The Maverick Effect: The Inside Story of India's IT Revolution. “One of the reasons China failed to compete against India’s software services industry was its lack of respect for IP. To this day, China suffers because of its weak IP protection laws. Their undocumented philosophy, probably unofficially encouraged, has been to copy, replicate and mass-produce. It was important that India, in contrast, developed trust around IP. NASSCOM members included both software products and software services businesses. When I took over as chairperson in 1990, even though software product revenues were minuscule and we had only a handful of software product companies, one of my big initiatives was to protect intangible software from piracy. In the EC meeting, we decided that a good start would be to seek modifications to copyright laws. We sought an appointment with Vittal at the DoE. The agenda was to check the rise of software piracy. But when we visited the DoE office, we were shocked to see that their accounting department itself was using a pirated copy of Lotus 1-2-3, the leading spreadsheet application before Microsoft Excel. We appealed to Vittal to start by cleaning up the government. Vittal was amused…. We eventually convinced him, and once he was on board, he pushed heavily for our fair business practices initiative. Vittal sent out a circular to all central government offices across the country, clearly stating that no government office could use pirated software. Change in the government can be tedious. Also, Vittal’s circular didn’t really have any legal authority; it was a suggested guideline. Yet, it sparked a process that changed everything….. Slowly, all central government offices phased out pirated software and replaced them entirely with licensed versions. The state governments followed suit. Soon everything was legit. Even as Vittal’s circular began hitting government offices, we began our actual work: the effort to improve protection under India’s copyright laws. At that time, it was estimated that 75 per cent of the systems in India used pirated software. The amendment we had lobbied for was historical in the sense that for more than thirty years, there had been no action to strengthen this law and include software in its ambit. It sent out a powerful message across the world: India was serious about the software business and protecting IP.” Have a good day!

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This is a good review. Notable that Roblox appears to be reserving the right to change its privacy policy to potentially advertise to U13 in the future. Not addressed though is the fact that state and federal laws increasingly considering U18 the new U13. Roblox might be able to make a good amount of ad money in the next few years, but the movement of U13 standards to the U18 point seems inevitable these days, which means that revenue has a major deadline on it. https://lnkd.in/eADebWih

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Something amazing happened to me last night, and it's an experience you can also have. I highly recommend all tech folks give it a go. https://lnkd.in/eKYb5PiN Go to AI studio on your phone, choose "stream realtime" from the left menu, then "Show Gemini" and start walking around your house and asking Gemini about what it sees. Mind boggling. It can see my Christmas tree and estimate the number of lights. It can provide insightful commentary and analysis of the art on my walls. Able to even decipher abstract art. It can understand the context of rooms and areas (ie: it knew it was in a backyard when I walked outside) Most importantly, it was deadly accurate. About pretty much everything. Guessed the age of my youngest son. The satori moment for me was when I picked up a fairly unique object I have, a 100-sided bronze die, and Gemini identified it and knew the number of sides. And also noted that it was an interesting object. General purpose computer vision and reasoning, mixed together. Now, combine with some wearable XR, and what we have is...well, it's a new level of what humans will become. Because all we really experience in life is the projections on the cave wall within our heads. But now we will have not only other humans, but also external intelligences to validate and expand on those projections. This is a moment when you realize that all the genAI and LLM chat-based tricks up to this point were just the opening chords of the song - we're not even to the first chorus yet. #AI #aistudio #computervision #XR #plato

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To all my fellow dev leaders, what's something you've learned through your growth that you didn't realize early on? For me, it's been empathy and simplicity. As a dev leader, you're often asked to provide simple answers to complex problems and give estimates of when they'll be ready. This makes up a significant part of the job. To build trust and clarity, you need to empathize with your clients' needs (both internal and external), fully understand the customer need, and platform or service you're delivering on. This ensures you're delivering value and maintaining trust. I've learned to say "I understand" more than I've uttered "are you crazy?!". When I was a junior developer, I tended to overcomplicate problems to justify my expertise. But as I grew and learned from mentors, I realized most people want to know three things: Can it be fixed? When can it be done? What do I need to do? Like a car repair, they want clear, straightforward answers, not technical jargon. With that, rather than outright reject a new feature or revision simply because I didn't want to fix the problem or undo work I've done — I've learned to see every bit of feedback as an opportunity to enhance features and bring things closer to the customer's expectation — a valuable insight in building great products. In delivering, I'm not always perfect (I've learned to be imperfect) and often rethink my approach, but to me this represents growth and persistence. It's about striving to deliver the best results and meeting expectations. Sometimes we have answers right away, but I find my trust goes further when I thoroughly think through the process, even if it means rethinking within reason to ensure we're meeting every expectation above and beyond. This isn't about inefficiency or indecisiveness; it's about delivering the best possible results. So, what's something you've learned on your journey in dev leadership?

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Something I wish I had known years ago: 80% of success is preparation; 20% is execution. 1. Build your network before you need it. 2. Start creating value now—content, relationships, or ideas. 3. Leverage tools and platforms available to you today. I’ve seen firsthand how preparation opens doors that panic never will. Prepare. Execute. Thrive.

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A hint of self-reflection, a pinch of contradiction, and a glimpse into how it's shaping my flow #buildinpublic https://lnkd.in/eya-xaxg

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There are hidden decision makers in your org. I don't mean a shadowy cabal of hooded figures or secret board room schemers. I mean that you may have accidentally delegated your resource decision making to someone else. At worst, it may be happening partly or entirely by inertia and without strategy. If you're in the planning mode, ask yourself: - While you're yes-anding all those project proposals, have you given thought to what you're saying no to? Have you made it explicit, or are you just allowing implied "no" happen when stuff doesn't show up on a roadmap or slide deck? - Are you competing for scarce resources (engineering, analysis, design) with others? Who's deciding which wins? If you're not helping to decide, it means someone's doing it without you. - Are you being realistic about how much can get done? If not, your de facto result may be that only the first half (or less!) of your planned projects will get done this quarter/half/year. Just like your personal finances, you can't budget properly unless you measure where your energy/time as a team is going. If you don't know, it's dead certain that some of your org's lifeblood is draining away into less strategic, non-vital or even trivial stuff. Bring those decisions out of private DMs and implicit assumptions. Make it clear what the team priorities are. Bite the bullet and actively say "no" to some projects, despite the urge to avoid directness and clarity. I promise you that your actually deployment of people and time will become clearer, and you'll be able to focus better together as a team.

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I learned a lot from Guillermo Rauch (Vercel CEO). Both from personal conversations and from watching him build Vercel. Here are the top 4 lessons I’m implementing while building Grafbase: 1) Focus on the developer experience Back in the early 2000s, we spent a lot of time building commodity infrastructure in-house. Then in 2008, Heroku came around and everyone was excited about the new possibilities. A few years later, the “Frontend Revolution” happened and companies like Netlify and Vercel did to frontend what Heroku did for infrastructure. But no one had started that revolution for the API layer yet. And that’s where my initial inspiration for Grafbase in 2020 came from. So, you could say that Grafbase is my 20 year-old dream finally coming true. 2)  Listen to your customers and iterate quickly with them As a customer, I’ve always appreciated companies that listened to us and acted fast on our requests. This is not unique to Vercel, but we’ve made this a core value of ours. One customer of ours requested Redis support for our rate limiting feature and the ability to “hot reload” their configuration. We listened to that feedback on a Friday, and they were using it in production by next Wednesday. I genuinely believe that listening to our customers and iterating FAST is how we win. 3) Simplify everything Back in 2020, Vercel used to be called ZEIT. And they didn’t just have a different name, they also had support for Docker files (which was kind of controversial back then). They quickly removed that feature as a way to remove one more barrier to entry. We took inspiration from that and always tried to find ways to further simplify Grafbase and make it accessible for more people. 4) Listen to your idols, but also go your own way when it makes sense We used to have a fully managed, serverless database as part of Grafbase. But last year, we dropped support for it and instead chose to go all-in on GraphQL Federation. The decision was somewhat controversial, but it had to be done. GraphQL Federation is what our customers wanted, and SaaS is not the only way. Now, we’re dealing with a new set of problems as we need to re-architect parts of our platform to enable complete self-hosting of Grafbase. Our investors are exceptional founders, but I learned that we sometimes need to go our own way, too. – What’s one of your biggest lessons?

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The Advisory starts with the context for its guidance, acknowledging AI’s “opportunities,” but emphasizing its risks. The Advisory lists a series of consumer harms from AI, including that (1) “consumers are harmed when AI does not function as intended or does not meet minimum quality and efficiency standards,” (2) AI developers “continue to market and sell AI systems knowing these shortfalls and that they may cause harm to consumers,” and (3) “AI systems are being deployed in ways that can deceive consumers and the public.” #ai

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It's a new Gregorian calendar year and I have been working on a major overhaul of the A11y Quick Check codebase. Included in this update for version: 2501.2025.01.01        Comprehensive Fieldset and Legend overhaul: Ensures <fieldset> and <legend> elements comply with HTML standards by checking for correct structure, accessible naming, appropriate placement of <legend> as the first child, duplicate <legend> elements, proper handling of the disabled attribute (including nested <fieldset> scenarios), valid roles and attributes, and meaningful content for assistive technologies, while providing detailed feedback for any issues detected.        Dynamic <hgroup> validation: Ensures <hgroup> elements dynamically handle and validate all roles and attributes (excluding `id` and `class`), verify the inclusion of at least one heading (h1–h6), and generate detailed, meaningful feedback messages reflecting the exact attributes present in the <hgroup> element for compliance and accessibility.        Enhanced aria-label validation: Ensures elements with <aria-label> are appropriately validated by checking for conflicts with prohibited roles, empty or missing labels, and proper role assignments, while providing detailed feedback messages for valid, invalid, or warning cases to improve accessibility compliance.        aria-details enhancement: Removed incorrect references to WAI-ARIA 1.3 for the caption role.        Enhancements to unordered list: Added validation to ensure nested <ul> elements are correctly identified as valid when within a <li> element and flagged as invalid otherwise, with descriptive messages like Valid: <ul> nested within a <li> element" or "Invalid: <ul> cannot be nested directly within a parent element other than <li>.        Enhancements to ordered list: Added validation to ensure nested <ol> elements are correctly identified as valid when within a <li> element and flagged as invalid otherwise, with descriptive messages like Valid: <ol> nested within a <li> element" or "Invalid: <ol> cannot be nested directly within a parent element other than <li>.        aria-description enhancement: When the aria-description is empty, only a warning message is displayed to the user, indicating the issue, without showing any valid or invalid state messages, making it clearer that the attribute is empty without suggesting a valid description is present.        Messages: enhancement to the message generated container, ensures the "Close message" button does not unintentionally trigger links, buttons, or other interactive elements, improving usability and preventing accidental navigation or actions. With several 5 star reviews, this tool is a useful addition to your accessibility testing toolkit. Install A11y Quick Check from the chrome Store https://lnkd.in/g9iN3k_Q #Accessibility #A11y #InclusiveDesign #WCAG #A11yQuickCheck

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One of the most important things I’ve learned so far building for communities on Twitch: Most devs (both Twitch and third party) think they are building for your community. But they’re not. They’re building for your content. And so what’s happened over the past several years is we have all collectively duped ourselves (creators, devs, and platforms) into believing that content growth = community growth. If you’re a creator I’m sure you’ve heard “just focus on making good content.” And over time we’ve grown to believe that is how you grow a business, a brand, and a community. Don’t get me wrong, you absolutely can build all of those things on good content alone. But there is a reason there are millions of creators pushing out content and only a fraction of them are able to go beyond part time. Content =\= community. Content is just a variable. Among many. But community… That is when you have something truly meaningful. And building a community is even harder than just making content. Let alone making content and building a community at the same time. Anyone can whip out their phone. Do a live stream. Take a photo. And there are thousands of tools to help you make that content better. But very few people can build a community of other people that engages with you *and each other* every day. On top of making good content. And part of the reason so few can pull that off is not because people aren’t talented or community building is too hard. It’s because there is virtually no support, innovation, or tooling to help creators build community And more importantly: There is nothing to help communities build themselves. It drives me crazy that so little has changed here over the past decade. THAT is why I’m building Gyld. Because I believe that those of us who care about community building have been desperately underserved. And it’s time for that to change.

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I'm at around the halfway point of the 2nd draft of a sci-fi novel using Gemini 1.5 as my writing assistant. We've stopped to do a comprehension check, doing raw comparisons between my 1st draft and the 2nd draft the AI has been processing. Gemini was able to read two 75k-word documents, compare them against each other and against the rest of my 1st draft and all notes, and then demonstrated a nearly flawless understanding of not just the book itself but all of the invisible concepts that govern the story. Then I asked it if there was anything else I could provide that would help it do even better in the future, and it asked for artwork so it could better describe my concepts in text. This would include architecture types, sci-fi tech, drawings of the various alien species, etc. All of which I can make for fun while playing with an image generator AI. Come to find out you can accidentally make a graphic novel while writing a book.

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