provocations
provocative ideas, musings, and statements to mull on
sari and
provocations
I'm not surprised at all. Building good consumer products is insanely hard and takes lots of time and iteration.
We don't necessarily need to constantly interact with people “around” us on the web. The sensation of being in the quiet companionship of someone else, like reading next to them in a cafe, is what we're missing. The sense of ambiently sharing space – of being co-present – while engaged in other activities is a staple of shared public spaces that we're still figuring out how to design in the digital realm.
Our current “multiplayer” experiences draw too much attention to the multiplayer-ness. The other people around you demand attention. They move. They flash. They point to exactly what they're focused on, drawing you away from your own focal point. We are missing out on a fuzzier, softer sense of the shared web.
My philosophy re startup speed has completely changed over the last few years.
I grew up at Uber, professionally, which held speed as the absolute, ultimate goal.
Now, I still value speed, but hold quality as the binding constraint.
agree w/this point. speed gets less important the more competitive your market is. when the market is already full of crap you really need to rise above the rest
Not all questions seek answers, some seek journeys.
Figma acquisition shows how hard it is to turn money into software. You'd think for $20B you could build something as good as Figma yourself, but you can't. Software is art.
If you want to create the common sense that comes from twenty years of being in the world, you need to devote twenty years to the task. You can't assemble an equivalent collection of heuristics in less time; experience is algorithmically incompressible.
Ted Chiang • Exhalation: Stories
Expanded supply creates expanded demand, which in turn feeds even more supply. Over time, people learn. They discover more about what's aesthetically possible and more about what they like. Exposure changes tastes.
Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style
“If you can see a thing whole,” he said, “it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives … But close up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful earth is, is to see it from the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is f... See more
andrea and