The case for making only Figma prototypes breaks when you see that Figma's prototyping system is inherently incapable of representing and capturing the behaviours of probablistic systems(like ML models, LLMs, CV models etc). At best it can capture one state out of a myriad. This severely limits the ability of a designer to effectively model and design the behaviours of such a system. That limits their effectiveness as a communication/bridge builder between engineers and designers.

It is easy to create (on paper) great experiences that AI systems wont be able to reliably adhere to. Solving the AI adherence/alignment problem is out of scope for this discussion but the argument is that there is a lot of potential benefit in using quickly codeable "sketches" that give designers and engineers an artefact to anchor around.

HOLY SHIT I JUST SAW LANGGRAPH STUDIO

This changes everything. being able to 'play' with agentic architecture itself opens up avenues for problem solving beyond what a "Figma prototype with API calls" could achieve. Ik, you were not the only one thinking about supercharging figma protoypes with Plugin led API access to AI.

Vice versa, excluding/absolutist political institutions and extractive institutions re-enforce each other as well in a vicious circle.

As builders of technology we must ask ourselves what kind of economic and political institution building are we contributing to. What kinds of technologies promote more inclusiveness and which ones lead to extractive institutions.

This I feel is also deeply linked to my discomfort in working with companies I feel are morally questionable in their impact on the world. Towards the end of college I had a very strong notion about not working in companies that are primarily attention extractive(Youtube, Tiktok etc) and instead wanted to work for comoanies that provide tools that helped you do whatever you wished to, but better and faster(Samsung, MS, Atlassian). After working in the AR/Metaverse domain while at Samsung, seeing no useful usecases beyond gimicks, I decided this was not for me. Moving to Nutanix (IT infra company), seemed like a far more interesting choice for various reasons amongst which was the fact that they are building technology that acts as the infrastructure layer to run software. As I then understood it, creating the plumbing of the internet felt like a much better use of my time and talents than slinging vapourware.

A few key examples come to mind:

Inclusive

1. Tools: Tools enable people to perform actions that were not available to them before. They lower the barrier to entry, they make production cheaper/faster, they
2. Open Source: Enshrined in its very nature is the idea that because of its marginal distribution/creation cost, computer technology is freely reusable and distributable. By providing the building blocksThis leads to more participants in the economic arena.
3. Nutanix: Feels like by trying to commoditise the server market as well as the cloud market, it is opening up options for anyone to manage large-scale infrastruture on non-propreitary x86 hardware and by allowing free movement across cloud for your data and apps, it is opening up the field by preventing the extractive tendencies of the cloud(data egress charges and whatnot). Maybe these kinds of open policies are only here while we are the challengers and will be replaced by extractive business practice evantually, but that is a future problem ig. ATM we dont even stop customers from migraing their entire stack off nutanix I believe.
4. ONDC: Is probably the biggest free market play enabled by the govt to compete against e-commerce and food delivery platforms. It is essentially commoditising marketplace platforms by providing a free access to suppliers, buyers, and delivery partners. It is a great example of a politically and economically inclusive institution.
5. UPI: UPI is setup as a free to use instant digital inter-account payment system. This infrastructure has led to the creation of a booming fintech field in india and enabled countless B2C brands to break free of the proprietary Visa/mastercard/others payment fees. It has also provided unprecedented access to digital payments for consumers in India.
6. MOOCs: Open access to vast amounts of learning

Extractive

1. Large scale data collection: It is being used to undermine the right to self determination/free-will in some ways.
2. E-commerce manipulation:
3. Social media: Inducing hatred, self loathing, fear, disharmony. By expliting users to create content, they are effectively monetising the efforts of its vast user base and selling their attention to advertisers. Marketplace for buying and selling attention. Where what the user gains is questionable when compared to what other parties involved gain. (Soshana zuboff talks about it too when asking how much does the user benefit in terms of features when google processes their data vs how much does google benefit. There's a diagram also in the book)
4. AI? It has taken all of the internet and content from authors, artists etc. Is it providing a net benefit to humanity? Jury's out ig. Also just realised that by technically scraping all of the internet, AI companies are essentially violating people's "Right to property" since I doubt that they ever consented for their IP to be used in this manner. It is similar to all the examples in the book about the elites taking over vast swathes of land to produce/grow benefits for them and nothing for the natives/labourers etc. In that sense nothing has changed really. The elite in a system continue to take whatever they wish and a truly inclusive political system shouldn't allow it without appropriate payment/recourse.

I also wonder wheather it is technology itself that is more inclusive or extractive or the business practicies within which it is utilised. Might have to dig further into the affordances of various technologies to figure that out(Similar to the argument Tarun referred to about making guns vs knives. One is clearly meant for killing while the other has myriad uses)

Other interesting reads:

• The Cathedral and the Bazaar
• NTNX 10 year Retrospective document
• Gwern's article on Commoditising your compliment https://gwern.net/complement
• Zuboff Surveillance Capitalism

Maybe another way to think about this could be to talk about "are you helping incumbents deepen their moat" and therefore be more extractive

OR, are you performing creative destruction by reducing/decimating previous moats with tech means. Nutanix destroys previous moats(Hardware vendors, hypervisor platforms, cloud vendors) but hasnt started building its own moat yet. Charging a "fair amount" for your own work is not the villain. It is imporetant to realise when the power to price something transfers from market forces into the hand of a monopolistic business. Zero to One's core argument is to pick fields/problems where there is potential to be a monopolist leader since markets with competetition eat into profitability.

Make tech that demonopolises markets! Fight monopolisation by commoditising compliments or sharing access to tools available to monopolists.

In no particular order they are:

• Advait's Bday Card - inspired by our conversations about web 1.0 aesthetic
• The Zoom Button - inspired by the pandemic
• The Arc Prank - inspired by MIT hacks
• Hackathon project - footmat
• The Wii remote that acts as an air drumstick
• Advait's US-going-away-present

Other ideas that I havent worked on yet but I want to bring into existence:

• A Water manufacturing machine - Burn Hydrogen gas to create chemically pure water to which we add minerals and aeration to make it potable
• A Harry Potter payments wand
• An extension to the Zoom button which is a rotating warning light a la cop cars/industrial warnings
• A Large pay telephone converted to a smartphone 'replacement'

Talk about Tom Sachs and his ideas that make believe building can be real if you pursue something seriously enough.

These 'artefacts' have no need to exist other than because they can, and I believe they should. If nothing else, to give me the joy of creation. I guess my therapist would argue that I dont need permission to do things or justify doing things. But I guess, yet, here I am, giving myself permission to continue building 'useless' things. Because guess what, they do have use, it is to give me joy!

I feel that it is far more sustainable to aim for fulfillment. Fulfillment comes from setting a goal, working towards it and achieving it.

I think it also ties into the love for process vs the love for the outcome. If you are outcome-oriented, happiness ends up being tied in with achievement.

The love of process lets you find meaning in the doing of things rather than the result. Results are often contingent on many more factors outside out control or ability.

Levels of buying:

1. Food
2. Shelter
3. Trips
4. Cars
5. Real estate
6. Yatch
7. Ideas - Investing in startups/people/etc

Note: This game wont allude to slavery because it will have people of all colour gender etc. Or could be rethemed to Zombies or some suitably abstract choice

So as a core mechanic, the players would buy "Bodies" at a certain price. These bodies will contain various "organs" such as Heart, Brain, Kidneys, Livers, etc. Depending upon their particular "Bag" they can get a bunch of bodies that have organs worth different amounts because of quality etc.  An alternative to this is that all individual organs are commodity but the market demand/pricing determines how much a particular organ is worth at the moment.

The market can be a randomly generated demand led model. This can potentially be clubbed with a mechanic where if you open up a body for an X organ, you might have to sell the other organs off for little money and or ruin the demand for other players. So you will have to balance, your organ supply and when you sacrifice the bodies to get the parts.

Other ideas include being able to buy a "refrigerator" of sorts that lets you store organs and ride out of price fluctuatuion.

Another upgrade can be to allow people to mix humans and make new Organ bags. Some of these new people could have very strong hearts/4 kidneys, great hair etc. They can be sacrificed to yeild that one thing, and the player doesnt incure a new loss from the loss of unused organs.

Different domains of life: romance, friendships, career choices, economic choices, can be looked at as situations that come with their own set of meta rules and strategies that make sense within that framework (I also take this moment to clarify that these games are not all similar or zero sum). They range throughout from competitive; co-operative; semi co-operative.

Competitive - Dating a monogamous person(starting to date them). Not a great example, will come back to it.

Semi-coop - career progress, Politics

Coop - mutually meaningful friendships/strong relationships

(Though not to forget) - life differs from games in a significant way: games are usually inconsequential, while life choices/strategies may or may not be seen as such depending on the way one approaches life.

Unlike games, at the start of play, the rules to a particular engagement might not be clear. And the ‘game’ of life, contrary to its name is not really a game. It doesn’t start with rules, the players don’t know that they are entering the magic circle. They are thrust into situations (often unwillingly) and are expected to thrive/survive.

Games come with a few kinds of elements:

• Resources: Enable you to have more choices. Your special abilities, money, time, networks etc are all a resource you can tap into.
• Choices: Let you decide what to do with those resources
• Players: Other people participating in the game
• and Rules: Dictate how the choices we make lead to outcomes

Resources

Resources are something we understand intuitively but I want to go into a few kinds and the benefits they offer. They are of two main types, exhaustible and inexhaustible.

1. Exhaustible resources are the kinds of resources that reduce on using. Money, energy, time
2. Inexhaustible resources are things like skills, intellect, networks

1. Based on your choices, you might want to treat Resources as interconvertible to some extent

• Money -> Time: By buying the service of others(Househelp, Deliverypeople, ) and thus freeing yourself of doing that labour.  
• Time -> Skills: Getting better at playing the guitar, doing origami, and writing code by investing time in practice
• Effort -> Fit body: Going to the gym/working out is an easy example of converting effort into bodily health.

2. You unlock more Rules (read recipes) of interconversion as you discover more of the metarules.

• like it is possible to learn to fart musically(idk if its true, but I'd very much like it to be)
• Finding out that a certain coding class offers better rates of learning

Sometimes these discoveries are also fascinating and heartbreaking:

• It is not very hard to train babies to have perfect pitch but very hard to pick the skill up as an adult.

Players

Career Paths

Chapter: There are two types of career paths

My close friend Advait posits that there are two types of career paths. One that’s musicians/artists/researchers/entrepreneurs and the other that is most people in corporate jobs etc.

The key distinction is that people who want their own work to be seen as their own are often on the artist track. They have narcissistic tendencies towards their own work. This attachment to the fruits of their labour makes them pursue career paths where the possibility of such works being solely credited to them is the norm.

The other group is okay with letting their work exist without their names attached to it. An important clarification here is that ‘the quality of work’ is an independent dimension and can broadly be separated from the attachment to the work. There are people who would not care about their name on the products but are excellent at what they do. They can be passionate, driven and excel in their domains without needing to be plastered all over it

It is entirely about how people derive meaning in their lives. Some people want to be known for their work while others don’t care either way. If work forms a significant part of identity then it is likely that a person might be more inclined towards the ‘Rockstar path’.

Info box: Don’t tell anyone you like them over noodles. Nobody looks great doing that.

PS: or a taco/Sub

There's no dearth of research on how addicted we are to our feed based apps and there is no shortage of anecdotal evidence either. Everywhere I see, everyone is always on their phones. I feel that having such a convenient escape allows you to ignore the pertinent thoughts from yoir head and lets you to lead an alternate life if seeing the world.

Rishabh [2022-6-16 13:28:57]
Why not? The idea is that we put together our Random discussions in a form that we can document and revisit over time with improvements in our knowledge and thinking.

Rishabh [2022-6-16 13:43:57] Testing 123

Rishabh [2022-9-28 17:14:15]: