Full Width 
Shortcuts 
Sign Up 
Log In 
Articles 
Reading List More from Daniel De Laney
The way I used to design UI was to sit with paper sketches, or Figma, or a React prototype with no back end. Imagine every failure mode. Design beautiful flows for each. I slipped into this mistake while working on LanWhisper, a voice dictation app. I designed for the failure modes I could imagine, drew the flows, and shipped the app. Then real users hit failure modes that I hadn’t anticipated. For example, the AI transcription model can return hallucinated text even if the input audio is empty. I had imagined that if the model returned text at all then the app was working. This failure wasn’t in my carefully designed list of ideal failures. Whoops. The problem is that a representation of a system only contains what you put into it. The failure modes it shows you are exclusively the ones you already thought of. This is the same mistake as designing for users you’ve never talked to. Designers know that’s a trap. The same logic applies to the systems we design: imagined systems aren’t a substitute for real ones. When designing non-trivial systems, imagination is no longer your best source of truth. The system itself is. And increasingly, designers can build it themselves. Do. Build it, instrument it, surface every piece of state. You can see and feel how the system works instead of projecting the ideal behavior onto some drawings you linked together. Your list of ideal failure modes isn’t real.
Have you ever gotten to the end of a long work day and realized you’re no closer to your goals? I have. Sure, I was doing a lot of stuff. But I wasn’t pausing to ask whether I was doing the right stuff. Or whether my approach was working. Or if I was spending the right amount of time on it. My fingers were moving but I wasn’t really thinking. So I needed a reliable way to interrupt my “unproductive productivity” and actually think. The obvious solution was a timer. Unfortunately, if you use timers a lot, you learn to dismiss them reflexively. And it’s really easy to forget to set the next timer. A week later, I’d realize: “Hey, that timer idea really worked, I should get back to that.” And then I didn’t. So I built a new kind of timer. It does 2 unique things: It asks what I’ll focus on. It gradually blurs my screen if I don’t set a new timer. When it asks “What will you focus on?” I answer in a word or two, start the next timer, and keep working. Having to name my intention keeps me fully aware of my trajectory. If I’m in danger of drifting, it’s obvious. And if I avoid thinking for long enough, my screen starts getting harder to see. If I’m making great progress on something that doesn’t require much thinking, I can set the timer for a longer duration, maybe 30 minutes. But if I’m working on something more open-ended, I might tighten the leash all the way down to 3 minutes. Then I can’t get off track. Unlike a regular timer, I can’t fail to set the next one. If I don’t answer it promptly, the screen gradually becomes less readable until I do. If I wanted to avoid answering, I’d have to make a conscious decision to close the app. I’d have to decide to be less productive. I never do. This small intervention has worked beautifully. Not only am I catching unproductive divergences earlier, I’m noticing fewer of them over time. It seems to be training me to do more and better thinking. It’s not a replacement for a journal. I love journaling, but that takes more than a few seconds, and there’s a lot of benefit to reflecting more frequently. If you’re running macOS, Intention is available here. I use it every day, and I think it’s the superior way of working. Process Tools like Cursor and Claude Code have dramatically changed the way I approach the design process. In the past, I would have sketched some potential solutions, put together a clickable prototype, and user tested that. But how much does that user test actually test? A traditional prototype in Figma or the like is paper-thin. I’m testing much less than the full experience. Now I can sculpt functional software as I go. That means I can build something, really use it, notice opportunities to make it better, and implement the changes I’d like to see, all in the same working session. This fast and robust feedback loop means better software. That said, sketches are still faster. I’ll bounce back and forth between sketching and building as appropriate. It’s far more practical to draw usable imagery than to generate it. The dock icon is drawn by hand in Figma with the pen tool and layer effects. The candle in the dark serves as both a metaphor for the app’s purpose illuminating the way forward, and an allusion to meditative practice. Why does this menu bar application appear in the dock? The answer is in the riddle of keyboard focus. An app that steals my keyboard focus every 3 minutes would be impossible to use, so instead the appearance of the timer window in the top right of the screen gently reminds me, and the gradual blurring of the screen gets more insistent over time. But the app does not take keyboard focus itself. This balance is what makes the app work. So I need a fast and intuitive way to switch to the timer window when I’m ready. Cmd+Tab has to work, and having the app appear in the dock enables that. Inspiration The visual inspiration for the branding is the early 1600s Caravaggio painting Saint Jerome Writing. The aging scholar Jerome, remembering the nearness of death, absorbs himself completely in the most noble work he can find to do while ignoring everything else. This is our task.
I’m the person my friends and family come to for computer-related help. (Maybe you, gentle reader, can relate.) This experience has taught me which computing tasks are frustrating for normal people. Normal people often struggle with converting video. They will need to watch, upload, or otherwise do stuff with a video, but the format will be weird. (Weird, broadly defined, is anything that won’t play in QuickTime or upload to Facebook.) I would love to recommend Handbrake to them, but the user interface is by and for power users. Opening it makes normal people feel unpleasant feelings. This problem is rampant in free software. The FOSS world is full of powerful tools that only have a “power user” UI. As a result, people give up. Or worse: they ask people like you and I to do it for them. I want to make the case to you that you can (and should) solve this kind of problem in a single evening. Take the example of Magicbrake, a simple front end I built. It hides the power and flexibility of Handbrake. It does only the one thing most people need Handbrake for: taking a weird video file and making it normal. (Normal, for our purposes, means a small MP4 that works just about anywhere.) There is exactly one button. This is a fast and uncomplicated thing to do. Unfortunately, the people who have the ability to solve problems like this are often disinclined to do it. “Why would you make Handbrake less powerful on purpose?” “What if someone wants a different format?” “What about [feature/edge case]?” The answer to all these questions is the same: a person who needs or wants that stuff can use Handbrake. If they don’t need everything Handbrake can do and find it bewildering, they can use this. Everyone wins. It’s a bit like obscuring the less-used functions on a TV remote with tape. The functions still exist if you need them, but you’re not required to contend with them just to turn the TV on. People benefit from stuff like this, and I challenge you to make more of it. Opportunities are everywhere. The world is full of media servers normal people can’t set up. Free audio editing software that requires hours of learning to be useful for simple tasks. Network monitoring tools that seem designed to ward off the uninitiated. Great stuff normal people don’t use. All because there’s only one UI, and it’s designed to do everything. 80% of the people only need 20% of the features. Hide the rest from them and you’ll make them more productive and happy. That’s really all it takes.
An objective, external world is a non-falsifiable assumption. The prevailing theory is that our subjective experiences correspond to an external reality. However, they may simply be subjective through and through. That which we claim to be evidence of external reality is actually subjective experience, which may or may not have an external and objective cause. Any test devised to prove objectivity is evaluated within subjectivity and therefore does not require objectivity to explain the result. Some object to this, claiming that the consistency of experience is best explained by an external world. However, consistent experience does not require any external mechanism, let alone the specific one we have assumed. Claiming that belief in an external world is simpler is like claiming that belief in God is simpler; in truth we are inventing something vast and complex without evidence and agreeing not to question it. This is not science, it is a substitute for epistemic humility. Much as dreams appear consistent while dreaming, that which we consider waking experience may not actually be as consistent as we believe. However, questioning this is unproductive reasoning because it undermines the value of reason itself. We must assume our experiences are rational and consistent, or else give up thinking altogether. Experience is the only reality which is detectable. Whatever experience is, it is real and directly perceptible, unlike objectivity. Claims that experience is an illusion presuppose an objective world to which experience does not correspond. Pragmatic truth is supportable, correspondence is not. If an objective world can’t be proven, neither can we prove that knowledge does or does not correspond with it. That which produces a consistent effect in experience is useful in influencing experience in the desired way, therefore science is useful. Materialism is religious faith. Just as we once invented a spirit world to help explain our experiences, we invented an objective world for which there is similar quality evidence. Both are assumed to explain experience, yet neither is directly known. The assertion that matter gives rise to experience is no more compelling than the assertion that experience gives rise to matter. The assumption of an external world has zero explanatory power, as consistent experience does not require it. Materialism is superior to classical religions in that it responds to pragmatic truth, but it still accepts unsupportable metaphysical claims and regards them as unquestionable. By contrast, noting that we have experiences does not require extrapolation or invention. Modern civilization is optimizing materials, not experiences. Focus on economic metrics has allowed us to make tremendous progress in reducing starvation and otherwise improve the experience of the least fortunate. Nonetheless, the subtle error of conflating material improvement with improvement in well-being has consequences. In advanced societies, increases in abstract indicators of material wealth like GDP have been accompanied by negative changes in consciousness: stress, social disconnection, and increased suicide. The materialist assumption that improving external conditions will always trickle down to better experiences is demonstrably unreliable. Often, this assumption results in methods which improve economic indicators by reducing experiential well-being, and in these cases it is worse than nothing. In addition to misallocating its priorities, modern civilization also conditions people to feel powerless over their own well-being. As materialist structures (corporations, governments, economic systems) become more dominant, individuals are increasingly absorbed into mechanisms designed to optimize external conditions rather than subjective experience. People come to believe that their quality of life is dictated by forces beyond their control. The best way to improve experience is to optimize it directly. The only rational goal is maximizing satisfaction. Long-term positive changes in consciousness are what is best in life. If a person achieves material or hedonistic aims but is unsatisfied in the long term, they are having a negative experience and are working against themselves. Secure, nourish, nurture, and build yourself and your community. Seek what is satisfying and aesthetic—that which feels good and true and beautiful. Unlike materialist assumptions, this requires no external faith, only a direct commitment to improving the reality we actually experience.
Code forces humans to be precise. That’s good. Computers need precision. But it also forces humans to think like machines. For decades we tried to fix this by making programming more human-friendly. Higher-level languages. Visual interfaces. Each step helped, but we were still translating human thoughts into computer instructions. AI was supposed to change everything. Finally, plain English could be a programming language. No syntax. No rules. Just say what you want. The first wave of AI coding tools squandered this opportunity. They make flashy demos but produce garbage software. People call them “great for prototyping,” which means “don’t use this for anything real.” Many blame the AI models, saying we just need them to get smarter. This is wrong. Yes, better AI will make better guesses about what you mean. But when you’re building serious software, you don’t want guesses. Not even smart ones. You want to know exactly what you’re building. Current AI tools pretend writing software is like having a conversation. It’s not. It’s like writing laws. You’re using English, but you’re defining terms, establishing rules, and managing complex interactions between everything you’ve said. Try writing a tax code in chat messages. You can’t. Even simple tax codes are too complex to keep in your head. That’s why we use documents—they let us organize complexity, reference specific points, and track changes systematically. Chat reduces you to memory and hope. This is the core problem. You can’t build real software without being precise about what you want. Every successful programming tool in history reflects this truth. AI briefly fooled us into thinking we could just chat our way to complex software. We can’t. You don’t program by chatting. You program by writing documents. When your intent is in a document instead of scattered across a chat log, English becomes a real programming language: You can see your whole system at once You can clarify and improve your intent You can track changes properly Teams can work on the system together Requirements become their own quality checks Changes start from clear specifications The first company to get this will own the next phase of AI development tools. They’ll build tools for real software instead of toys. They’ll make everything available today look like primitive experiments.
More in technology
Going through a collection of old parts, CuriousMarc encountered some ICs that he couldn't identify. He opened up one of these ICs, and I studied it under the microscope. After some reverse engineering, I determined that it was a logic chip that implemented four NAND gates using old-fashioned diode-transistor logic (DTL).1 The chip turned out to be the ST680A, a member of the Signetics 600 series of chips from 1965. In this article, I discuss the circuitry in this chip and how diode-transistor logic works. The die of the ST680A under the microscope. Integrated circuits can be packaged in many ways. One of the most popular is the plastic DIP (Dual In-line Package), a black rectangle of epoxy with two rows of metal pins. This type of package was invented by Signetics: "Introduced in late 1965, the 600 series was the first integrated circuit family to be offered in a solid, plastic, dual in-line package (DIP)." Earlier integrated circuits were packaged in round metal cans or in small flat-packs. In 1965, engineers at Fairchild invented the DIP, which had two rows of pins on 0.1" spacing. Unlike the surface-mounted flat-pack, the DIP had pins that were inserted into holes, making manual or automated assembly quick and easy. Because the pins of a DIP were on a regular grid, rather than the circular pattern of a metal can, circuit board design and manufacturing were also easier (details). The first DIP chips had ceramic packages. The plastic DIP, introduced by Signetics, was much cheaper and became very popular. An advertisement for the Signetics 600 series. From Electronics, March 21, 1966. The plastic DIP is less popular with me, however, because it is harder to open. With a ceramic package, I can simply tap it with a chisel and pop it open, but that doesn't work with epoxy packages. An epoxy package can be dissolved with nitric or sulfuric acid, but I try to avoid dangerous acids. Instead, CuriousMarc used Antoine's hot air decapping method. Unfortunately, the hot air technique doesn't always work. In this case, tiny bits of epoxy were stuck to the die, obscuring the circuitry. I used a few drops of boiling sulfuric acid to clean the die. (I'm okay with sulfuric acid in tiny quantities.) The die on its metal frame. The photo above shows the silicon die on its metal frame, the lead frame. The golden blobs are where the bond wires were attached to the die. You can see the doped silicon regions that form diodes and bipolar NPN transistors, as well as 16 resistors in the center, forming serpentine paths. Most chips have a passivation layer—a thin layer of silicon dioxide—over the chip. Inconveniently, this old chip didn't have a passivation layer, so the acid also stripped off the metal layer. (A few remnants are visible in the upper left.) Without the metal layer, I had to guess at how the components were connected to form logic gates. The die has very faint color differences where the silicon was protected by the metal, so that helped. Eventually, I came up with the diagram below, showing how the metal layer was probably configured. This wiring reveals that the chip implements four DTL NAND gates, which I'll describe in more detail below. One puzzle was that the chip has two unused diodes, indicated with question marks below. The metal layer for a quad NAND chip. I desaturated the image to make the labels clearer. Transistors, diodes, and resistors In this section, I'll explain how the patterns in the image correspond to components of the circuit. The silicon die is doped with various impurities to form regions with different electrical characteristics. These regions appear red or green under the microscope due to thin-film effects. As a result, the chip's transistors, diodes, and resistors are visible. The chip is made from bipolar NPN transistors, which have a completely different construction from the MOS transistors in modern ICs. In an NPN transistor, the current from the collector to the emitter is controlled by the current through the base. The collector is a large region of N-type silicon, silicon that is doped with atoms such as phosphorus or arsenic. Since these elements have one more valence electron than silicon, they give the silicon more negative charge carriers, so it is called N for negative. The N-type silicon happens to appear reddish. On top of the collector, the base is a thin region of P-type silicon, which appears green. This silicon has been doped with atoms such as boron or gallium, which have one fewer valence electron than silicon. The missing electrons form "holes", which act as positive charge carriers. Finally, the emitter is N-type silicon, on top of the base layer. These layers work together through semiconductor magic, amplifying the base current. Two NPN transistors on the chip. The second transistor is a larger output transistor. The chip's output transistors are slightly larger so they can sink more current. In the transistor on the right above, note that the collector contact wraps around three sides of the transistor. The emitter is also larger, with an L-shaped contact. According to the datasheet, each output transistor can sink 2.5 mA of current. The chip uses many diodes since it is diode-transistor logic. The structure of a diode is similar to a transistor, but without the emitter. In a diode, current flows from the cathode (P-type silicon) to the anode (N-type). A diode and a resistor on the chip. The chip uses 16 resistors, located in the middle of the die. A resistor is constructed from a long, thin region of doped silicon. Since silicon has moderately high resistance, a long strip of silicon acts as a resistor. Most of the resistors have a serpentine layout to fit a long resistor into a smaller area. These resistors consist of P-type silicon (green) in a "tub" of N-type silicon (red). The tub is connected to the positive voltage supply; since current doesn't flow from N-type silicon to P-type silicon, this isolates the resistors from each other. Operation of a DTL gate Logic gates can be created in many ways. The earliest integrated circuits (such as the ones in the Apollo Guidance Computer) used Resistor-Transistor Logic (RTL), where logic gates were constructed from resistors and transistors. In March 1962, Signetics announced the first family of commercial Diode-Transistor Logic (DTL) integrated circuits (details). By using diodes on the inputs instead of resistors, DTL provided better performance than RTL. However, DTL soon became overshadowed by TTL (Transistor-Transistor Logic), which was faster and used less power. (If you built digital circuits a few decades ago, you're probably familiar with the popular 7400 series of TTL chips.) The diagram below shows how the DTL NAND gate works. If both inputs are high, the current from the first resistor flows through the base of the first transistor, turning it on. The transistor amplifies this current, passing a much larger current from the transistor's collector to the transistor's emitter. This current goes through the base of the second transistor, which turns on the second transistor. The second transistor passes an even larger current from the output pin to ground, pulling the output pin low. The DTL NAND gate with both inputs high. The schematic is from the datasheet. This circuit is considerably more complicated than the DTL gate on Wikipedia. But if one of the input pins is pulled low, the current from the resistor goes through the diode instead of the transistor. The first transistor turns off, and without a base current, the second transistor turns off. The third resistor pulls the output high. Thus, the output is low only if both inputs are high: a NAND gate. The DTL NAND gate with an input low. I'll point out a few features of this circuit. The diodes on the inputs ensure that one input doesn't affect the other input. The diode in the middle raises the voltage on the first transistor's emitter, so it requires more voltage to turn on, reducing the sensitivity to noise. The output uses a resistor to pull the output high; more advanced circuits use another transistor. When the output is low, the third resistor is still "trying" to pull the output high, which is wasting power. Moreover, the resistor limits the output current, so the high output is fairly weak. In some DTL families, you can get gates with different values for the output resistor, so you can select the tradeoff between wasting power and having an output that is too weak. If you've used TTL integrated circuits from the 1970s, you know that chips usually have power and ground on diagonal pins: ground on pin 7 and power on pin 14. (Putting power and ground diagonally opposite both helps die layout and circuit board layout.) Much to my surprise, I found that the Signetics chips predate this standard and have ground on pin 1 and power on pin 8: still diagonal, but the wrong diagonal! The diagram below shows how the four NAND gates are wired in the chip. Pinout of the 680A quad NAND gate. From the databook. Three chips from one die When I examined the die under the microscope, I figured out the circuit, but I was puzzled by two extra diodes, as if two NAND gates had a third input that wasn't used. The explanation is that Signetics used the same silicon layout for at least three different chips, applying a different metal layer for different functionality. This saved money since it's much cheaper to produce a single optical mask for the metal layer than a complete set of new masks. Signetics sold semi-custom ICs to customers, using an approach called variFEBS (Variable Functional Electronics Blocks). This approach used a custom metal layer on top of fixed silicon, providing custom circuits without the cost of a full mask set. These circuits didn't sell well, but Signetics used the same approach for standard ICs. Pinout of the 670A triple NAND gate and the 616A quad NAND gate. All three chips have some similarities, such as using pins 2 and 14 as outputs. From the databook. One IC with the same silicon as the quad NAND gate is the 670A chip, which has three NAND gates, each with three inputs (above left). The diagram below shows how the silicon can be wired to provide this functionality. The hypothesized metal layer for the 670A triple-NAND gate. The layout for the triple chip above is a bit tricky because the top gate has inputs on both sides of the power (Vcc) pin. This creates a layout problem because the power and ground metal runs vertically to the resistors, blocking metal wiring from one side to the other. The solution is a "crossunder", a region of silicon that allows a signal to pass under the metal layer, connecting the inputs on the left to the rest of the circuitry on the right. This crossunder is visible near the top of the chip. Another chip with the same layout is the 616A dual NAND gate, with five inputs on each gate. Since this chip has 10 inputs in total (compared to 8 on the quad gate), this chip uses the two "extra" diodes that I spotted. If that isn't enough inputs, each NAND gate has an expansion input; by connecting external diodes to the expansion input, the gate can be made as large as desired. The hypothesized metal layer for the 616A dual-NAND chip. Some history The history of Signetics is closely tied to Fairchild. The story of Fairchild's founding is well known: in 1957, eight engineers—the Traitorous Eight—left Shockley Semiconductor and created Fairchild Semiconductor. Hundreds of companies (the "Fairchildren") were started by engineers who left Fairchild. Signetics was one of those companies, formed in 1961 and said to be the first company to exclusively design and manufacture integrated circuits.2 Signetics announced its first product in 1962, a NAND gate that cost $125 (over $1000 in current dollars).3 Not surprisingly, sales were weak. Signetics soon ran short of money, so in 1962, Corning Glass invested $1.7 million for 51% ownership of Signetics. Corning Glass may seem like a strange investor, but Corning was more of a high-tech company than you'd expect, making components such as resistors and glass capacitors, and later creating fiber optics. Moreover, in the early 1960s, integrated circuits were the hot area (much like AI now), and everyone wanted to get involved. In 1963, the Department of Defense pushed for contractors to use integrated circuits in new products. Riding this wave, Signetics became the leading producer of integrated circuits.4 However, Fairchild soon introduced a series of DTL chips that competed with Signetics. The Fairchild 930 series was faster than the Signetics chips and less than half the price, so Fairchild took much of the market from Signetics and dominated the IC market. Signetics also produced analog integrated circuits. Signetics is probably best known for creating the 555 timer chip in 1970, said to be the world's most popular IC, with billions sold.5 Signetics was acquired by Philips in 1975, and then Philips Semiconductors was spun off as NXP (Next exPerience) in 2006. NXP is currently the #10 semiconductor manufacturer worldwide, so the heritage of Signetics lives on. For more, follow me on Bluesky (@righto.com), Mastodon (@[email protected]), or RSS. Thanks to CuriousMarc for providing the IC and thanks to TubeTime for finding the databook. AI statement: Despite the presence of the em dash, no AI was used in the writing of this article (details). Notes and references After I had reverse-engineered the chip, TubeTime found datasheets for it, making my reverse engineering unnecessary. (See the Signetics Condensed Catalog 1969, Utilogic II Databook 1971, and Utilogic 2 Databook 1972.) We must have been unlucky with our original web searches since we didn't find anything. But this way you get to see what's inside the chip :-) The Signetics ST680A IC in its package. The large circular depression marks pin 1. From the date code, this chip is from 1971. ↩ For more Signetics history, see Signetics Founding History, written by Lionel Kattner, a co-founder of Signetics. He states that the company name was inspired by the words "signals" and "networks", as well as the high-tech suffix "-netics". ↩ See History of Semiconductor Engineering, page 156. ↩ The book Making Silicon Valley describes the history of Signetics. It has a negative view of the Corning investment, saying that Signetics executives "Van Poppelen and Kattner dissented on the grounds that Corning was not a good fit for an integrated circuit company. In their view, Corning was a staid Eastern firm, ignorant about semiconductors and antithetic to the ways and culture of the electronics industry on the West Coast. Their view later proved to be correct." ↩ The 555 timer was created by analog IC wizard Hans Camenzind. If you're interested in analog circuits, you should read his book Designing Analog Chips, which you can download for free. ↩
A great deal of effort has gone into understanding the regulatory burden on housing construction, and the extent to which it contributes to high housing prices.
Yes, that's right! Today we're at the aquarium. Welcome back to yet another watchTowr Labs blog post. You can begin preparing your comments now. What Is A Barracuda, And Why? Must We? Barracuda’s Email Security Gateway solution (ESG) is no stranger to love, for
You have an idea. Maybe it’s a smart home device that solves an everyday annoyance, a robot you’ve been sketching for months, or an experiment that becomes something bigger. Now comes your first major decision: what hardware will you use to bring it to life? With so many development boards available, choosing the right one […] The post What will you build next? Arduino Black Friday deals are here appeared first on Arduino Blog.
