Matheus Lima sharing his thoughts on processing everything at 2x, just because you can.
Life happens at 1x. Every conversation you’ve ever had. Every walk, every meal, every meaningful experience. None of it comes with a speed dial. We’re biological creatures wired for real-time processing. When someone speaks to you in person, you don’t get to fast-forward through the parts you find boring.
There’s something strange about trying to shortcut how humans communicate. A podcast is just a conversation you’re eavesdropping on. The pauses, the rhythm, the way someone builds to a point. That’s all part of it. Speed it up and you get the words, sure. But you lose the texture.
Your brain needs empty space too. This is the part we’ve collectively forgotten. Boredom is a feature, not a bug. It’s where our best ideas — like starting this blog! — come from. It’s where you actually process what you’ve learned, make connections, have original thoughts. Constant consumption, even sped up, leaves no room for any of that. You need to be bored.
The irony is that consuming faster often means processing less. You’re optimizing for throughput when you should be optimizing for understanding. All those 2x podcasts blur together into background noise. What did you actually retain? What changed how you think? It’s empty calories. It’s fake productivity.
I have a theory about nostalgia: It happens because the best survival strategy in an uncertain world is to overworry. When you look back, you forget about all the things you worried about that never came true. So life appears better in the past because in hindsight there wasn’t as much to worry about as you were actually worrying about at the time.
Bryan Cantrill reflecting back on his days when he decided to become a software engineer.
When I entered university in 1992, it didn’t feel like the right time: the economy for new grads was very grim — and I knew plenty of folks who were struggling to find work (and accepting part time jobs that didn’t need a college degree at all while they searched for something better). I never doubted going to school, but I also have never taken a job for granted.
When I fell in love with computer science as an undergraduate and realized that I wanted to become a software engineer, it didn’t feel like the right time: Ed Yourdon had just written “The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer”, which boldly told any young computer science student that they were wasting their time — that all programming jobs would be done by cheap labor abroad. This argument felt wrong, but I was too in love with computer science to be talked out of it anyway.
When I decided that I was specifically interested in operating systems kernel development, it definitely didn’t feel like the right time: the conventional wisdom in the mid-1990s was that operating systems were done — that Unix was in decline and that the future clearly belonged to Microsoft. I ardently disagreed with this, and my conviction in 1996 brought me to the one company that unequivocally shared it: Sun Microsystems.
Gokul Rajaram explaining the difference between dashboard product and pipes product, and why it is important to identify early on which product are you are working on.
Every startup needs to make a choice: is their product a dashboard product or a pipes product?
Dashboard products are used directly and regularly by end users as their primary interface for accomplishing tasks. The goal for these products is to get customers to live in the product. The primary North Star metric for these companies is active users (daily / weekly / monthly, depending on the natural frequency of customer usage for the category). Facebook’s first product (aka Facebook :)) was a dashboard product.
Pipes products are used in the background to process transactions, data, payments, etc, and customers rarely interact with them directly after initial setup. The goal for these products is to for their customers to send as much of their data / payments / etc through them. Their North Star metrics is a volume metric (eg GPV). Databricks’ core product is a pipes product.
Companies can have both types of products in their portfolio. For example, ChatGPT is a dashboard product while OpenAI’s APIs are a pipes product. However, a given product has to determine which camp it’s primarily in.
Self–advocacy is possible only when autistic individuals are aware of their diagnosis and cognizant of their strengths and differences (Shore, 2004). Knowledge about their diagnosis helps create an empowering positive autistic identity (Cooper et al., 2017, Oredipe et al., 2023) rather than fostering an image of a broken neurotypical (Almog et al., 2024). An increased understanding of one’s condition among autistic adults is associated with enhanced self-understanding, awareness, and self-compassion (Crompton et al., 2020, Leedham et al., 2020), with opportunities to belong to a community by connecting with other autistic individuals (Hickey et al., 2018, Tan, 2018).Studies also suggest that the earlier individuals know their diagnosis, the greater the association with a more positive disability identity (Corden et al., 2021) and sense of self (Oredipe et al., 2023, Smith et al., 2018), while later knowledge of diagnosis was associated with experiences of grief for the pre-diagnosis years when autistic individuals struggled and blamed themselves for the challenges. (Leedham et al., 2020).
A more deliberate and thoughtful way forward is to talk about “AI” systems in terms of what we use systems to do, often specifying input and/or output. That is, talk about functionalities that serve our purposes, rather than “capabilities” of the system. Rather than saying a model is “good at” something (suggesting the model has skills) we can talk about what it is “good for”. Who is using the model to do something, and what are they using it to do?
Jason Fried explaining why obvious things need to be kept obvious even when the hard things become possible.
Much of the tension in product development and interface design comes from trying to balance the obvious, the easy, and the possible. Figuring out which things go in which bucket is critical to fully understanding how to make something useful.
Shouldn’t everything be obvious? Unless you’re making a product that just does one thing – like a paperclip, for example – everything won’t be obvious. You have to make tough calls about what needs to be obvious, what should be easy, and what should be possible. The more things something (a product, a feature, a screen, etc) does, the more calls you have to make.
This isn’t the same as prioritizing things. High, medium, low priority doesn’t tell you enough about the problem. “What needs to be obvious?” is a better question to ask than “What’s high priority?” Further, priority doesn’t tell you anything about cost. And the first thing to internalize is that everything has a cost.
I will be thinking about this every time I will be driving my car. I own Skoda Kylaq and my variant has automatic climate control. It seems that when automatic climate control became possible in cars, car makers thought users will not use the A/C controls anymore and put in fancy-looking-but-will-get-activated-or-deactivated-on-slightest-of-accidental-touch based controls.
Having touch based controls already makes it difficult to use while driving, but here the layout of the touch panel is so bad at times I take 1-3 seconds to figure out if the action worked or not.
Here’s how my touch based A/C controls look like (Figure 1). At first glance it everything seems to be present. But the moment you start using it, you realise how badly it is designed.
Figure 1: At first glance, it seems ok
Let me annotate and show how to use the touch based panel (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Yikes!
There’s a small display screen (#1) in the top-center which displays key information.
The buttons of recirculate internal/external air (#2), on/off A/C (#3) and automatic climate control (#4) are all toggle touch buttons. But touching them, doesn’t light them up. Instead that information shows up on the display screen.
Similarly, the touch bar for temperature up/down (#5) and fan speed (#6) doesn’t use the line to give out information. That also goes in the display screen.
But the touch button to set the direction of the air outlet (#7) is a multi option button with 4 options. Each touch enables the next option but I haven’t memorised all the options and their order. So cycle through them twice to find my option but the first time I am just getting the order. In the analog days a knob was used here and I understand its usability—and importance—now.
But the toggle touch button to switch rear window heater on/off (#8) has a small LED light to indicate its on/off status. Something that should have been implemented for all the other buttons.
All this has led me to set the temperature, confirm if automatic A/C is enabled and then start my drive. If this is what Skoda wanted from its users, then the obvious option here should have been to have a physical on/off button for automatic A/C control and a physical knob for setting temperature.
Awais Aftab provides a succinct explanation of autism, as per DSM-5, and how its diagnosis is based on a descriptive prototype rather than medical tests.
To be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder according to DSM-5, a person must have ongoing difficulties in social communication and interaction in all three areas: trouble with back-and-forth social connection, problems with nonverbal communication like eye contact and body language, and difficulty making or keeping friendships. They also must show at least two types of repetitive or restricted behaviors, such as repetitive movements or phrases, needing things to stay the same, having very intense focused interests, or being unusually sensitive (or under-sensitive) to things like sounds, textures, or lights. These patterns must have been present since early childhood (even if they weren’t noticed until later when life got more complicated), lead to substantial impairment in functioning, and can’t simply be explained by intellectual disability (or other psychiatric disorders).
To “have” autism is simply to demonstrate this cluster of characteristics at the requisite level of severity and pervasiveness. It doesn’t mean that the person has a specific type of brain attribute or a specific set of genes that differentiates them from non-autistics. No such internal essence exists for the notion as currently conceptualized.
Autism spectrum is wide enough to have very different prototypes within it. On one end we have profound autism, representing someone with severe autistic traits who is completely dependent on others for care and has substantial intellectual disability or very limited language ability. At the other end, we have successful nerdy individuals with autistic traits and superior intelligence, often seen in science or academia, à la Sheldon Cooper. (Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the Science journals and former UNC chancellor, for example, has publicly disclosed his own autism diagnosis.) This wide range is confusing enough on its own, even without considering other conditions that can present with autism-like features.
Autism cannot be identified via medical “tests.” It is identified via clinical information in the form of history, observation, and interaction, and the less information available or the more unreliable the information provided is, the more uncertain we’ll be. To have autism is basically a judgment call that one is a good match to a descriptive prototype. We can get this judgment wrong, and we sometimes do get it wrong. (There is nothing wrong with this fallibility as such, as long as we recognize it. Lives have been built on foundations less sturdy.)
Addy Osmani shares his 21 lessons from working in Google for 14 years. This lesson stood out the most for me.
14. If you win every debate, you’re probably accumulating silent resistance.
I’ve learned to be suspicious of my own certainty. When I “win” too easily, something is usually wrong. People stop fighting you not because you’ve convinced them, but because they’ve given up trying – and they’ll express that disagreement in execution, not meetings.
Real alignment takes longer. You have to actually understand other perspectives, incorporate feedback, and sometimes change your mind publicly.
The short-term feeling of being right is worth much less than the long-term reality of building things with willing collaborators.
What you should know about dramatic designs is there is always been a long-standing debate about whether they’re good for a company to do or not.
Dramatic designs can draw attention; they can create aspiration, but they can also age very quickly, which is why a lot of companies are a little leery of doing super out-there designs for production cars.
You do that for concepts because the concept is about attention and not production.
Therefore, if you look at, for example, the Polo—the Polo didn’t age a lot, but the Polo didn’t also look super fresh when it arrived. It looked like a nice, clean, fresh design, and it looked like that for a long time because it wasn’t a super dramatic design.
Whereas every time Lamborghini, for example, to go right to the other end of this, when they have to build a new supercar, they have to really push a dramatic design out because it is a supercar.
It’s not going to get produced in large numbers, but it’s that drama that is part of that brand’s design story.
But when you take it to production, which will sell a large number of cars, the risk is if it’s too dramatic, then in two years it’ll look like the last trend rather than today’s fresh car.
That’s why dramatic designs—it’s a trick; it’s a good trick, but it may not always work.
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