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Metamuse
By Adam Wiggins, Mark McGranaghanTechnology
Metamuse episodes
- 29 // Thinking in probabilities with Taimur Abdaal
Probabilistic modeling is useful for answering all kinds of questions, from assessing financial risk to making engineering time estimates. Yet spreadsheets are poor at this job, which is why Taimur and his colleagues are building Casual. Taimur talks with Mark and Adam about ranges as an intuitive way to estimate; the usefulness of Monte Carlo simulations; and the role of math in dating cave paintings.
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Show notes- Taimur Abdaal
- Casual
- Not Overthinking
- Airtable
- Drake‘s equation
- line of best fit
- “not even wrong”
- Flatland
- Monte Carlo simulation
- R
- closed-form solution
- RoboCup
- Slack (management book)
- queueing theory
- The Principles of Product Development Flow
- tail risk
- expected value
- gambler’s fallacy
- distribution shapes e.g. bell curve
- fan chart
- Samo Burja of Bismark Analysis
- meta-analysis
- preregistered studies
- confidence interval
- false positive, false negative
- onboarding episode
- A/A testing
- carcinization
- combinatorics
- two-tailed test
54 min - 28 // Learning from games
Video games are often on the leading edge of technical, design, and social innovation in the software world. Mark and Adam discuss what productivity tools can learn from games including the culture of performance; tools like Twitch and Discord; and end-user programming via scripting and modding.
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Show notes- Seattle cherry blossoms
- episodes with Rasmus Andersson and Andy.Works
- Serious Play
- “death march” in game development
- developer experience
- esports
- Age of Empires II
- Counter-Strike
- FEZ; Papers, Please; Baba Is You
- Core-A Gaming
- Playing to Win
- the metagame
- the Olympics
- Nvidia
- frame rate counters
- Nintendo Switch
- Makepad
- code folding
- Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL)
- Cyberpunk 2077 and everything is securities fraud
- Duke Nukem Forever
- No Man’s Sky and launch controversy
- Mass Effect, Horizon Zero Dawn
- Muse onboarding
- scripting, modding, skinning
- tower defense
- A Small Matter of Programming
- My Life as a Night Elf Priest
- World of Warcraft
- free-to-play (F2P) games
- Team Fortress
- Valve
- Left 4 Dead
- Steam
- Valve employee handbook
- Candy Crush, Wooga, FarmVille
- Twitch
- Justin.tv
- CGP Grey on Twitch
- American Truck Simulator
- Among Us, US congressperson livestreams
- consumer surplus
- Discord
- T90
- Zero Punctuation, Girlfriend Reviews
- Game Maker’s Toolkit
- Metroid
- Nintendo Power magazine
- haptic feedback
- Batman: Arkham Asylum / detective mode
- Tetris max-out score
- four-minute mile
- speedruns
- Twitch paid subscriber emotes
- Myst built in Hypercard
- Strider, Angband, rougelikes
- Lucas Pope, Return of the Obra Dinn
57 min - 27 // Playful software with Rasmus Andersson
Design and engineering polymath Rasmus Andersson joins Mark and Adam to talk about his new project, Playbit. Play as a means of discovery and learning; virtualization as an underexploited technology for making safe playspaces for programming; and whether macOS will still exist in ten years.
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Show notes- Rasmus Andersson @rsms
- Playbit
- What counts as a weed?
- maskros flowers
- “write access to your entire worldview”
- Jason Yuan on fidgitability
- Virginia Postrel on work vs play
- Rust
- Roadster in space
- foam roll
- “Adamisms” e.g. make it real
- Hobo
- Go, Go by Example
- slow hunch
- malleable software
- xorg.conf
- convention over configuration
- macOS notarization woes
- Chrome OS
- sandboxing
- GPU
- time-sharing
- write once, run anywhere
- macOS virtualization, Hyper-V, KVM
- Linux namespaces
- Ruby gem: bundle
- root user
- An app can be a home-cooked meal
- Replit
- Dreams
- The Cathedral and the Bazaar
- Macromedia Director
- demoscene, BBS culture
- MOD trackers
- Gameboy DJ performance
- Raspberry Pi
- flip displays
- teenage engineering
- Alfazeta flipdots vendor
1 hr 22 min - 26 // No data moat with Balint Orosz
When you pay for software, are you paying for the data storage or the interface? Balint is the founder of Craft, a writing app designed for iPad. He chats with Adam and Mark about design conventions for multimodal input; why import/export is so important; and how to have humility about how your product fits into your customer’s life.
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Show notes- Balint Orosz of Craft
- Budapest: bridges, parliament building, castle
- Making computers better
- Skyscanner
- Markdown
- Mac Catalyst
- retina displays
- homeostasis
- multimodal input
- Craft on data ownership
- Ulysses
- I/O
- TestBundle format
- best of breed
- Instagram
- DSLR cameras, RAW format, Lightroom
- bidirectional links
- Excel
- low floor, high ceiling
- iOS share sheet
- SVG
- JSON
- Visual Studio Code
- Google Photos going paid
- churn
- Small Giants
- Office 365 revenue via Microsoft 2020 annual report
- bootstrapping
56 min - 25 // Time-based notes with Alexander Griekspoor
Agenda is software that encodes an unusual philosophy for note-taking. Alex of Agenda joins Mark and Adam to talk about being an indie developer; note-taking as a technique for calming the mind; and the benefits of community and learning tools socially.
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Show notes- Alexander Griekspoor
- Agenda
- easter egg
- Papers
- biology wet lab
- R, Jupyter, Matlab
- CodeWarrior
- open loops
- Parkinson’s law
- Drew McCormack
- Agenda community
- Zettelkasten
- deep dive on notes tools
- search engine optimization
- localizations by Agenda community volunteers
- authentic marketing
- “cash cow” business model
49 min - 24 // Small Giants
A “small giant” is a company that chooses to optimize for mojo instead of growth. Mark and Adam describe how Muse was inspired to follow this path, designing the business model, team makeup, and funding source accordingly. Plus: a digression into tender offers and the fine points of US tax law.
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Show notes- Partnership, freedom, and responsibility
- Adam Wulf
- Small Giants
- S&P 500
- Clif Bar, Whole Foods, Union Square Cafe
- Startup = Growth
- existence proof
- Signal, Panic, Vanguard
- index funds and ETFs
- Chef’s Table
- meme stocks
- Delaware C-corp
- Harrison Metal
- career capital
- revenue-based financing
- maker vs manager
- VC Math
- tender offer
- stock buyback
- dividends
- TrustCommerce
- growth stocks vs income stocks
- foundations: Mozilla, Apache, Processing, Wikimedia
59 min - 23 // Collaborative creativity with Nikolas Klein
Tools for collaboration are changing team culture. Nikolas Klein has been a part of this shift in his academic work and on the product design team at Figma. He joins Mark and Adam to discuss creative collaboration including how guardrails can increase comfort with working collaboratively; changing mindset from “my ideas” to “our ideas”; and screensharing as an intimate act.
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Show notes- Nikolas Klein @nikolasklein
- time logistics for teams spanning US and Europe
- Sketch Runner
- Artifacts
- Schwäbisch Gmünd / Hochschule für Gestaltung
- CLUI
- Shopify design system / Polaris Telescope
- Figma
- hypergrowth
- user redesign of Figma comments
- sea shanty TikTok
- remix culture
- bisociation / Arthur Koestler
- hammock-driven development
- Sketching User Experiences
- OBS Studio
- ring light
- Zoom Studio
- Figma cursor Halloween costumes
- Designer News reaction to Figma launch
- people who understand the capabilities of software
- The Dream Machine
1 hr 8 min - 22 // Brand
Brand is not just a name or a logo—it’s the character of a company and its products. Adam and Mark discuss the memetic and emotive elements of branding; brand as tribal identity; and Muse brand values like thoughtfulness and curiosity.
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Show notes- Brand New
- history of the Heinz brand
- logomark
- Richard Branson / Virgin
- Pixar
- Nike / the Swoosh / Just Do It
- 37signals
- Tarsnap
- Sabaki
- the Muse newsletter
- The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding
- FedEx business biography
- memetic
- Notion illustrations by Roman Muradov
- Cragistlist and brutalist web design
- proof of work
- typography of Apple, Inc.
- packaging design on 99designs
- Harley-Davidson
- consumerization of IT and Bring Your Own Device
- BlackBerry, corporate VPNs
- administrative legibility
40 min - 21 // Listener questions
How to prototype advanced gestures; how to organize your Muse boards; and how to spot good ideas. Plus, a peek at the long-term Muse roadmap.
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Show notes- Ferrite
- listener questions thread
- Balsamiq, Framer, Origami Studio
- Make it real
- infinite canvas memo
- reductionism
- spatial reasoning
- Growing ideas with Andy Matuschak
- retrospective
- Paul Buchheit
- Slow Software
- self-hosting
- End-user programming
- Minecraft redstone
- MySpace customization
- Figma plugins
56 min - 20 // Thinking in maps with Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Maps can visualize space, time, biological processes, social graphs, and much more. Anne-Laure of Ness Labs talks with Mark and Adam about the multi-thousand-year history of map-based thinking, and how we can use maps in our own creative work today.
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Show notes- Anne-Laure Le Cunff @anthilemoon
- winter solstice
- Algerian food
- Ness Labs @ness_labs
- mindful productivity
- the Dunning-Kruger effect
- How to Be Idle
- Thinking in maps
- Cassiodorus
- Babylonian map of the world
- the map is not the territory
- The Invention of Nature
- Alexander von Humboldt’s Chimborazo map
- Disney business process map (1957)
- Krebs cycle
- floppy disc save icon
- D3.js
- Parametric Press
- Connected Papers
- digital object identifier (DOI)
- babies using touch gestures on magazines
- heads-up display (HUD)
- Scapple by Literature and Latte
- focused mode and diffuse mode / Barbara Oakley
- affinity maps
55 min
About Metamuse
From the publisher's feed
Tools for thought, product design, and how to have good ideas.