There are huge consequences for not creating a design culture in your company. When employees align themselves with empathy, experimentation, and research, great things will happen.
If not, there will be a huge opportunity for your competition to make you obsolete, by default.
Between Gemini 3.1 and Claude 4.6 it's honestly wild what you can build. This feels like Google Earth and Palantir had a baby.
Made this with all the geospatial bells and whistles -- real time plane & satellite tracking, real traffic cams in Austin, and even got a traffic system working. Panoptic detection on everything.
Skinned the whole thing to look like a classified intelligence system. EO, FLIR, CRT. Got a bunch more stuff on the roadmap. This is fun.
You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts.
My short story “Ender's Game” was rejected by Ben Bova at Analog back when that was the top market for a sci-fi story. Ben gave me feedback. He thought the title should be “Professional Soldier” and he said to “cut it in half.”
But I knew he was wrong on both points and submitted it to Jim Baen at Galaxy. He sat on it for a year, and responded to my query with a rejection. There was some kind of explanation, but I don't remember what it was. I concluded at the time that Baen's comments showed that he had barely glanced at the story.
So … I got feedback both times, but it was not helpful. I looked at Ben's rejection again. What was it about the story that made him think it should, let alone COULD, be cut in half?
Apparently it FELT long. What made it feel long? Now, post-Harry Potter, I would call it the quidditch problem. I had too many battles in which the details became tedious. So I cut two battles entirely, merely reporting the outcomes, and shortened another. In retyping the whole manuscript (pre-word-processor, that was the only way to get a clean manuscript), I added new point-of-view material to the point that I had cut only one page in length. So much for “in half.”
But I already knew that my manuscripts did not need cutting — if it wasn't needed, it wouldn't be there in the first place. Even the battles were still there, but instead of showing them, I merely told what happened (so much for the usually asinine advice “show don't tell”), which kept the pace going.
Those changes made, I sent it to Ben again. I did not remind him of what he had advised me to do. I merely told him I liked my title, and said, “I have addressed your other concerns,” which was true. I figured he wouldn't remember what his exact words had been. My answer was a check. That revised story was the basis for my winning the Campbell Award for best new writer.
Did Ben's feedback help? Yes — but his specific advice was not right, and I knew it. On my next two submissions, Ben hated my endings, and I revised as suggested. The fourth submission he rejected outright, and the fifth, and I thought, Am I a one-story writer? I went back to Ender's Game and tried to analyze why it worked. Then, deliberately imitating myself, I wrote “Mikal's Songbird.” Ben bought it, and it received favorable mentions. I was afraid then that I had consigned myself to writing stories about children in jeopardy. But in fact I was writing character stories rather than idea stories. And THAT was how I built a career, not by self-imitation, and not by following editorial suggestions.
I did get wise counsel from David Hartwell on my novel Wyrms, but that was on a book that was already under contract, and it was story feedback, not style. I got wise counsel from Beth Meacham, too, on various books over the years — but again, only on books that were under contract. I also received appallingly stupid advice from the editor of my novel Saints, which temporarily destroyed the book's marketability; after that, I was allowed to go back to my original structure and save the book — now it's one of my best.
Editors don't know more than you about your story. They especially don't know why they decide to accept or reject stories. YOU have to know what your story needs to be, and take only advice that you believe in.
Your best counselor on a story nobody bought is TIME. Let some time pass and then reread the story. Don't even think about why it Didn't Work. Instead, think about what DOES work, and then write it again, a complete rewrite, keeping nothing from the previous draft. Find the right protagonist and begin at the beginning — the point where the protagonist first gets involved with the events of the story. Be inventive — the failed first draft no longer exists, so you're not bound by any of your earlier decisions. THAT is how you resurrect a good idea you did not succeed with on your first try.
This is really neat but it’s not a design tool as much as it’s a design _production_ tool.
The practice of design is mostly about what comes before production.
There’s no doubt in my mind that all parts of software production will become automated very soon. Writing code, making web pages, putting pieces of a design system together etc.
And that’s fine. I think few people actually enjoy this kind of production work. Wouldn’t it be better if we spent our precious time in life on what is more meaningful?!
At the core, the practice of design is methodical; like architecture, not like art. In a nutshell: We find constraints, form comprehension of the whole and propose solutions that honor those constraints. First after that do we enter some form of production phase, usually prototypes first, learn about some constraints that were hidden before, loop back, prototype and then build the production-grade “final” artifact.
These last few tasks are quickly losing value because AI tools can do it much faster (not yet better though) than humans. It’s simply just what has the best RoI for a business.
Some companies and individuals will continue to spend human time on certain parts of the “production line” as a market differentiator, but it will cost them a relatively high price compared to competitors.
Anyhow, I still haven’t seen a tool better than Figma that supports the actually-interesting part of the design process.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Figma focused their products on that, maybe separating “products for production” of “products for ideation & exploration.” The latter would obviously still leverage AI, but not to do the work for me but rather to support my efforts the way a therapist helps me live a better life (not living my life for me.)
The concept of teenagers, who are also mutants, who just happen to be ninjas, while ALSO being turtles is not something the 2020s could ever come up with. That’s a big 80s cocaine brain idea
Excited to share that we raised $2.1M to build the future of CX and back-office operations in financial services.
For fintechs and banks, customer service back-office work remains a maze of manual processes, including quality assurance, dispute investigations, and fraud and compliance checks.
At @RulebaseHQ, we built Coworker to work alongside CX and ops teams to:
- Review 100% of interactions for compliance and quality assurance
- Automatically file and track fraud and dispute cases end-to-end across CX, case management, and back-office platforms
- Proactively follow up with teammates and third-party partners to keep SLAs on track
- Flag compliance risks in real time and generate audit-ready reports.
Coworker bridges CX and back-office ops, automating the most manual tasks so nothing slips through the cracks and every customer issue is resolved quicker and more effectively.
A massive thank you to our investors, customers, and the growing @RulebaseHQ team for believing in our vision and being part of this journey!
Our round was led by @LorenStraub from @BoweryCapital, with participation from @ycombinator, @CommerceVC, @transposevc, and founders of t3 chat, Atrium, Cron (now Notion Calendar): @theo, @raphaelschaad, and more.
Incredibly grateful to have the support of the @ycombinator community and mentors, @dflieb and @koomen.
Thank you all for being incredible partners on this journey!
What do you think Genius and Duolingo would create if they had an African child? 🤔
Well think no further, episode 2 of our podcast is out 🥳 @SamuelBiokpo had a talk with our host @LongLiveDumi on about what he and his co-founder, Ore Sami, are building with @Lyric_Chief.
If you’ve ever wanted to really understand your favourite Afrobeats songs, this is for you, this platform explains and translates Afrobeats lyrics so fans can get the real meaning behind the music.🎶
In this episode, we talk about some really interesting things, like:
- Why most of their users are in Nigeria and the US, even though Afrobeats is made right here in Nigeria.
- How they spot and ride viral moments, like when the Ogechi remix blew up during Davido’s wedding, to get more people using the app.
- How parents use Lyric Chief to help check which songs are okay for their kids to listen to.
🎧 Watch the full episode here → https://t.co/ABZKZVCn7w
i often forget how many people failed conditional hypotheticals in english exams back in sec school.
explains a lot of the poor nth-order thinking all around us.