Steve Farrugia

Steve Farrugia

@fasterandworse.com

Experienced user Australian in Amsterdam I talk about product design Words: https://fasterandworse.com Videos: https://youtube.com/@fasterandworse Audios: https://pnc.st/s/faster-and-worse

1.7K followers179 following5.6K posts

Steve Farrugia reposted

Replying to @davekarpf.bsky.social

Roose does a very nice job signaling in the second paragraph what sort of book this will be. He decided to write it the night after partying with ketamine-snorting effective accelerationists. He isn’t e/acc himself, but he hangs with that crowd and accepts their premises as newsworthy,

Something I try to illustrate with these annoying threads is that design is not business, but business is a constraint on design. The responses "it can be an advantage to be faster" are not unexpected. It's the implication that they are *part of* design that is incorrect.

Steve Farrugia@fasterandworse.com

"quick prototyping" is a myth created by ai centrists

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If I don't explicitly say I'm talking about design and/or products *in general* it usually results in responses and QTs that hinge on my points being specifically about software

Steve Farrugia reposted

Replying to @freya.bsky.social

I guess the answer is either "our boss wants results faster" or "I've never enjoyed development, I just want to skip to the end"

Steve Farrugia reposted

Replying to @fasterandworse.com

you can't automate prototyping because you can't automate design because you can't automate invention

Steve Farrugia reposted

Something I try to illustrate with these annoying threads is that design is not business, but business is a constraint on design. The responses "it can be an advantage to be faster" are not unexpected. It's the implication that they are *part of* design that is incorrect.

Steve Farrugia@fasterandworse.com

"quick prototyping" is a myth created by ai centrists

Steve Farrugia reposted

Replying to @abstracttesseract.bsky.social

I was asked to comment on a student project, essentially a recommendation engine. I asked how it determined the recommendation based on user answers. He said the app did it. I asked what logic it used. He was baffled by the question, and the follow-up of how he knew the recommendation was any good.

Something I try to illustrate with these annoying threads is that design is not business, but business is a constraint on design. The responses "it can be an advantage to be faster" are not unexpected. It's the implication that they are *part of* design that is incorrect.

Steve Farrugia@fasterandworse.com

"quick prototyping" is a myth created by ai centrists

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If you can think of design from a starting point of absolute freedom of exploration you will start to see how many layers of constraint are assumed to be normal elements of design.

If you read this thread and think "x programming language is popular for rapid prototyping" or "a ui component library is great for a quick prototype" you've already assumed that software is the best material to satisfy a purpose. You're operating under design constraints.

Steve Farrugia reposted

Replying to @doriantaylor.com

like having had to do a fair bit of both engineering *and* design (and a nonzero amount of philosophy i suppose), • engineering is about going from zero solutions to one solution • design is about going from ~infinite solutions to one solution

Something I try to illustrate with these annoying threads is that design is not business, but business is a constraint on design. The responses "it can be an advantage to be faster" are not unexpected. It's the implication that they are *part of* design that is incorrect.

Steve Farrugia@fasterandworse.com

"quick prototyping" is a myth created by ai centrists

View full thread

If you think that prototyping can be automated or sped up, you're assuming those constraints are part of design and not conditional constraints on design.

Something I try to illustrate with these annoying threads is that design is not business, but business is a constraint on design. The responses "it can be an advantage to be faster" are not unexpected. It's the implication that they are *part of* design that is incorrect.

Steve Farrugia@fasterandworse.com

"quick prototyping" is a myth created by ai centrists

There is a basis of design which is to find the best way to satisfy a purpose. That basis is then subject to constraints which limit how that purpose can be satisfied, how much time can be spent on it, and what materials are available.

Steve Farrugia reposted

Replying to @spavel.bsky.social

Folding screen technology is so undercooked that it has Gordon Ramsay seething, and the user experience of these phones is dogshit, but Apple has gone ahead anyway because investors demand "innovation" But the innovation is just copying Samsung

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Sure you'll find new problems, but you'll have a stable foundation and more chance of a highly polished final product. This all sounds slow and laborious and, in a corporate setting, competitive urgency will usually be forced onto this process, but it's not an argument against the process itself.

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it's *prototyping*, not *a prototype*. There is a *final prototype* which means you've worked it all out, but that's when you need to assemble the real thing.

Steve Farrugia reposted

The elite hate us being educated, us educating you, you educating each other, and you having time to do this. Stop granting that it's the university that is elitist inherently: it's been made that way for a reason. Some more points below also on the marriages between patriarchy, AI, capitalism...

“Palantir cofounder and CEO Alex Karp states ‘AI will undermine the influence of highly educated, often female voters and give it to working class men. We have feminine energy running our cities and our courts,’ he complained.”

Steve Farrugia reposted

Replying to @sinisterbulb.bsky.social

I recommend reading this book! See this extract where she says that we cannot avoid our duty by claiming excuses like that we do not "deserve" the duty. I also recommend it to everybody in this thread.

> ‘We cannot continuously tell you what our science means; what it will be good for; because we simply don’t know yet. Science needs time – Bear with us, while we think.’ Resisting consensus always exposes us to sniggers, but I will expose my position even further by daring to defend...

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Steve Farrugia reposted

Guillermo Del Toro dropping another one liner that’s exactly how I feel about AI slop, the “punishment” is built in

Steve Farrugia reposted

Replying to @fasterandworse.com

AI is an inherently corrosive additive to any existing pre-AI product because it's either forever a broken slot-machine or on a trajectory that makes any task-specific UI skin completely unnecessary.

Steve Farrugia reposted

AI is a product that depends on it staying broken enough to require task-specific UI products while simultaneously requiring the belief that it is constantly improving and infinitely capable.