WSJ seems to block the normal archives, but absent a gift link, this twitter referral seems to work:

https://x.com/lindsaywise/status/1956170542601421040

Both apps involved email for magic link features, but then both apps genuinely insist on harvesting your email for instantdb before you can view them?. Gotta love living on the post-shame internet.

I am a somewhat unremarkable product designer. I'm great at my job, but still just a guy in a chair doing the thing. And I've been using this advice for years. It has made an absolutely mind boggling impact on my life. I recently took a few years off (achievable in part thanks to the OG version of this post), and was worried about returning to the cooled-off job market thanks to all the doomers on here talking about firing hundreds of applications into the empty void. Very little has changed. The market is a bit tighter but still fine. Please do not let the other crabs convince you that the bucket is too greased to be worth clawing at. Patio11 has probably made me 1M+ over my career with his blog post. And it is not because I'm some mega genius. I am merely good enough at my job to be worth wanting on a normal team. If you aren't that, fix that. But 20-50% lift on the majority of offers is super, super, super achievable if you're able to recognize what employers value, and communicate your ability to meet those needs. Seriously. So frustrating to see how many people are here telling others this is BS and not to try. Fuck that. At least *try*.

Oof, i'll be donating big to help out. My partner's from here and i visited for the first time last year. Its fantastic. Half kitschy weird science stuff, but half genuinely fantastic maker materials at great prices. Salvaged air pumps, motors from GMC electric seats, super high load bearings, all kinds of stuff that is at the intersection of obscure, extremely useful, and difficult to get on Amazon, especially at a reasonable price or small quantity.

Anyone from the area should check it out.

Another vote for ableton. Also After Effects. Comparing legacy vs new (rush, etc) Adobe video editing UI is a good way to see both of these dynamics in action. I used to work on the UI kits for Adobe. We supported multiple densities for this reason.

Something you'll find in both ableton and after effects are smart, adaptable panel abstractions/conventions. Both have fairly rigid application frames and large distinct sections where discrete types of work happen. But they also have panels where things can get nearly to a free for all. Think custom video effect controls, or individual midi instruments. There are norms (knobs look and work similarly), but things can get totally custom as well (custom graphs, etc). Lastly, at the very edge (~1% of use cases), there are ways to escape the constraints of UI entirely. AE has a code editor for things like custom wiggle animations. Ableton has M4L (which subsequently supports JS and possibly some C, IIRC). You can get yourself into trouble here in ways you normally couldn't: it's possible to straight up break things.

Greedy whitespace nonwithstanding, the most pernicious modern UI trend you'll need to buck is the idea that your UI should be simple because it is for simple people. Sometime UI is cluttered because of sloppy design or bad abstractions. Sometimes UI is cluttered because it's meant to empower people who think and care about multiple things simultaneously. Modern UI trends will tell you not to serve a man a steak because a baby can't chew it. Serve steak, babies be damned.

I guess that was mostly about functionality, and only adjacent to density. For actual density: vintage (2016ish?) 538 tables, vintage (pre 2010?) stockkeeping and cashier UI. These are basically TUIs with just a hair more polish. * Much less text heirarchy. This means even line heights, which means easy dense grid layouts. Achieve contrast with boldness rather than size, side borders, inverted backgrounds, etc. * The opposite extreme: very big items for very big tasks. Wide touch areas for each food item that a server can rapidfire tap through, everything else tucked to the side. * Thoughtful truncation: grid layouts often ask that things overflow. Do they elipsis at the end? Do they drop the middle? Do they condense 3 pieces of information into 3 smaller pieces of information? Etc. * Prefer text to icons for all buttons, menus, etc. A tab menu of just text is easy to parse. Icons add noise, and non-text buttons force users to speculate instead of read. * Intentionally non-responsive panels. Having fixed sizes for sidebars, panels, etc makes it easier to reason about how subcomponents snap to grid, and greatly shrinks the workload created by having to allow for fluid item reflow.

I started out very interested. I tried the particle photon when it first came out years ago, and this feels like a spiritual successor, somewhat. Good demo video.

Various thoughts:

1. Consider defining best practices for solar and selling harder around that. I've got enough use for the board in hardwired environments, and can otherwise solve outdoor power issues, but having a recommended solution that I can trust to be solid would go a long way. "Using panel of X strength and battery of X capacity, get performance Y in Z conditions", etc.

2. I would probably preorder some of these, except the pricing is omitted. I have no idea how much these would cost. If they're 5 bucks, I buy a bucket. If they're 30, I buy a handful. If they're 100, I probably skip it. Etc. Withholding the price is a red flag, and I wouldn't share my email with an org that saw fit to withhold this info as the opening act. (edit: looks like the S1 is $55, so presumably this is more)

3. The LLM/agent aspect has no appeal. Assuming those costs are passed on to me / baked into every unit, the inclusion of AI is strictly downside.

4. It's not clear whether there are ongoing SaaS/storage/subscription costs associated with this, or what they would be. The FAQ suggests that forwarding data outside of the cloud will be restricted to enterprise-scale customers. This is also a red flag.

I think this can be successful in spite of all that. Particle definitely leaned away from hobbyists and into the larger ag-IOT market early on, presumably following money and stability. Totally understandable.

I guess my overall feedback is this: be upfront about the pricing and restrictions in a way that lets guys like me filter ourselves out upfront, instead of getting our hopes up. I've got a maker-tier budget, value data freedom, and am subscription-averse. It took me quite a bit of time and digging to uncover all the details in this comment, and I wish I hadn't spent the time. There are a ton of customers who are going to be totally cool with a $60+ board and a *0,000/mo contract for data forwarding. Court them directly.

Of course, I'd love to be wrong. If this is a $30 board with nearly-at-cost cloud storage and no REST data forwarding but yes bulk JSON download, then whoa, fuck yeah. Shout that from the rooftops too.

Either way, disambiguation would help.