diiaann

Reminds me of the Paul Graham essay on Silicon Valley. Looks like Ken decided the easiest thing was to partially move Carnegie Mellon.

"Observation bears this out: within the US, towns have become startup hubs if and only if they have both rich people and nerds. Few startups happen in Miami, for example, because although it's full of rich people, it has few nerds. It's not the kind of place nerds like."

"However, merely creating a new university would not be enough to start a silicon valley. The university is just the seed. It has to be planted in the right soil, or it won't germinate. Plant it in the wrong place, and you just create Carnegie-Mellon.

To spawn startups, your university has to be in a town that has attractions other than the university. It has to be a place where investors want to live, and students want to stay after they graduate."

I rage quit the Boox because the page turn buttons were the same for both landscape and potrait, which meant that one direction was illogical. There were user patches but it just made me so annoyed that when a friend expressed interest in mine, I just gave it way. Maybe it's fixed now but so damn infuriating.

Glad to see other kobo enthusiasts. I love the Kobo style buttons.

I go to Europe enough that I ditch the universal adapter and get a European ubs-c wall plug. A little more maximalist at home to store but more minimalist while traveling.

It became clear to me that just a little bit of socializing during the work day goes a long way.

I have a partner that I live with but he often works long hours in person so I can sympathize with someone living alone.

With remote work, I hated the feeling of having every human interaction be very transactional all day. As a result, I felt more pressure to make plans during the weekday with remote counterbalance how completely some days felt.

In the office, you'd usually have some friendly chatter, running into people in the hallway, getting a snack, or waiting for a meeting to start. And most of the time, that was more than enough to not feel a sense of malaise.

After reading the article, my first thought was it is both Finney and Back posting under Satoshi. Others may have been involved too but not necessarily posting.

I think I’m a target customer? I don’t think this is rev for me but I think in the future I could be sold. I own an a7c because I value compactness. I was just in New Zealand and a lot of times I was pretty happy to take photos on my phone. As my purpose was to just be able to take an image in my head and translate that to an actual photo. There are definitely some shots that I needed a bit more technical setup which was great with the a7c but I really didn’t need nearly so many of the bells and whistles. I also don’t really want to have to edit in RAW, ideally I get a good enough image that I can just transfer to my phone and post straight to Instagram with little work.

User research IFYKYK

I think both phone call and Zoom call are worse than an automated email because 1) I have to find the time to be available for both and 2) More often than not I want to process in private.

A short, but still personalized email would be my preference. An offer to do a phone call or Zoom would also be humanizing but not necessary.

The endless debates wear me out. Sometimes I just want the engineers to just do. It's labor for me to tell someone their idea is bad, both mentally and emotionally. At the beginning of the relationship, you have to engage in that labor to get people to trust you. But if it continues to break down, I try to figure out why and it's usually because another designer/PM were flippant in their choices.

About three years ago I joined a company that was on Sketch after working at a Figma company. I thought I was pretty tool agnostic but after starting work, I quickly realized how awful the Sketch workflow is.

It's awful collaborating and sharing files with Abstract. More and more plugins were unmaintained. And with the growth of WebGL, Figma was actually far speedier than Sketch. Sure if you're 1-2 person shop or a really big company with lots of specialized Sketch plugins, Sketch might be fine but on any other team are better off making the switch.

I completely agree with the above poster that Invision was trash at any real prototyping. When it came out, Axure and Justinmind had already had sophisticated control flow logic. It did have a sleeker commenting system and most people I knew were too lazy to make more robust prototypes.

The only thing that's tough about this approach is you work hard at physical therapy but still you end up being the percentage that still needs surgery. Then once you get surgery you have to start all over again. I delayed ACLR personally because of a multi ligament tear and the toughest part was the burnout of starting back up again after surgery.

I graduated from a HCI program and the problem I continue to see is we turn to UXR in all situations of indecisiveness and not necessarily when it makes sense. UXR is best applied to situations when you have little room to be wrong. It also matters what you are trying to research, not everything lends itself to being researched. In Silicon Valley these past years, companies could be afford to be wrong all the time, whether it was because of overall usefulness or the fact they could afford to throw developer resources.