Month: September 2023

Musk’s process

I find Musk very off-putting to say the least. But I still think this processis worth considering. (From Walter Isaacson’s book)

  1. Question every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never accept that a requirement came from a department, such as from “the legal department” or “the safety department.” You need to know the name of the real person who made that requirement. Then you should question it, no matter how smart that person is. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. Always do so, even if the requirement came from me. Then make the requirements less dumb.
  2. Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn’t delete enough.
  3. Simplify and optimize. This should come after step two. common mistake is to simplify and optimize a part or a process that should not exist.
  4. Accelerate cycle time. Every process can be speeded up. But only do this after you have followed the first three steps. In the Tesla factory, I mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should have been deleted.
  5. Automate. That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that I began by trying to automate every step. We should have waited until all the requirements had been questioned, parts and processes deleted, and the bugs were shaken out.

Shop notebooks… with advice from Matt Kenney

I have no religion when it comes to shop notebooks. Not a type, nor paper or tech. But use “some thing” because not having anything at all will be a problem.

Your workflow will determine how the next step occurs. You may be prototyping something, and so there’s no notes to guide you. But at some point you will get to “nice” and you’ll want to build it “for real”. That would be the moment to take detailed notes. If you are working in CAD or a drawing app, it might be worthwhile to print out shop drawing and scribble some additional notes as you work. Etc. But these “sources of truth” are very helpful when questions and problems arise.

If I had one rule (snicker) it would be that your scribble paper, notebook, etc. assuming it is atoms not electrons should be graph paper. It was invented for just this sort of thing, take advantage.

Matt Kenny suggests the following…

  • Be as detailed as you possibly can. The more detail, the less work you’ll need to do to make sense of what’s written down.
  • Write in simple, clear statements and equations. A shop notebook is not a Faulkner novel or a Fields-Medal-worthy mathematical treatise.
  • Write down: dimensions, notes about materials, things you discovered that made construction easier, problems you encountered and how you solved them, and anything else that’s important to you.
  • Clearly identify which piece of furniture a note belongs to. A year from now you probably won’t remember.
  • Do not worry about how it reads or looks. If it makes sense to you and you can go back and make sense of it a month later, that’s all that matters. You will develop a style, organizing principles, etc. as you continue to work and fill up notebooks.

How Apple made the ultimate Snoopy watch: “You wouldn’t believe the minutiae”

How Apple made the ultimate Snoopy watch: “You wouldn’t believe the minutiae”:

That first meeting at the Charles M Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, California, was the Watch team’s first in-person meet-up after the pandemic, and what started as a two-hour drive north from Mountain View ultimately ended with plans for 148 unique animations that would be contextual depending on the time of day, local weather and activities. When you go for a swim, Snoopy dons his scuba gear and floats through your watch screen. When night arrives he’ll howl at the moon, and when you’re not up to much at all you can find him draped over his iconic red doghouse in a series of panels that are a direct lift from the comics. It all amounts to over 12 minutes of animation work that stemmed from an unexpectedly chaotic tête-à-tête.

“I’m typically a very organised person,” says Gary Butcher, human interface designer at Apple. “So I felt, ‘We’ve got a limited amount of time together and there might be some uneasiness, so I’ll print out 148 pieces of blank paper and we need to leave the room having filled out every one of those pages.’ By the end of the day, we’d not touched the wall of A3 paper, but had tons of sketches littering the table.”

[This. Is. So. Good!!!]

Snoopy watch faces 1 jpg

The Technology Facebook and Google Didn’t Dare Release

The Technology Facebook and Google Didn’t Dare Release:

In the last few years, though, the gates have been trampled by smaller, more aggressive companies, such as Clearview AI and PimEyes. What allowed the shift was the open-source nature of neural network technology, which now underpins most artificial intelligence software.

Understanding the path of facial recognition technology will help us navigate what is to come with other advancements in A.I., such as image- and text-generation tools. The power to decide what they can and can’t do will increasingly be determined by anyone with a bit of tech savvy, who may not pay heed to what the general public considers acceptable.

[Oy.facial re]

A look at Apple’s new Transformer-powered predictive text model

A look at Apple’s new Transformer-powered predictive text model:

Apple wants a model that can run very quickly and very frequently, without draining much of your device’s battery. When I was testing the predictive text feature, suggestions appeared almost instantly as I typed, making for a great user experience. While the model’s limited size means it wouldn’t be very good at writing full sentences or paragraphs, when it exhibits very high confidence in the next word or two, they’re likely to be good enough to suggest to the user.

[Making progress one little step at time…]

Google and HTTP

Google and HTTP:

The web is a miracle

Google has spent a lot of effort to convince you that HTTP is not good. Let me have the floor for a moment to tell you why HTTP is the best thing ever.

Its simplicity is what made the web work. It created an explosion of new applications. It may be hard to believe that there was a time when Amazon, Netflix, Facebook, Gmail, Twitter etc didn’t exist. That was because the networking standards prior to the web were complicated and not well documented. The explosion happened because the web is simple. Where earlier protocols were hard to build on, the web is easy.

I don’t think the explosion is over. I want to make it easier and easier for people to run their own web servers. Google is doing what the programming priesthood always does, building the barrier to entry higher, making things more complicated, giving themselves an exclusive. This means only super nerds will be able to put up sites. And we will lose a lot of sites that were quickly posted on a whim, over the 25 years the web has existed, by people that didn’t fully understand what they were doing. That’s also the glory of the web. Fumbling around in the dark actually gets you somewhere. In worlds created by corporate programmers, it’s often impossible to find your way around, by design.

The web is a social agreement not to break things. It’s served us for 25 years. I don’t want to give it up because a bunch of nerds at Google think they know best.

The web is like the Grand Canyon. It’s a big natural thing, a resource, an inspiration, and like the canyon it deserves our protection. It’s a place of experimentation and learning. It’s also useful for big corporate websites like Google. All views of the web are important, especially ones that big companies don’t understand or respect. It’s how progress happens in technology.

Keeping the web running simple is as important as net neutrality.

[Anything open is inherently better than anything closed. I tell you 3X.]