David Galbraith Profile picture
Sep 27, 2020 5 tweets 1 min read Read on X
Elon Musk is doing something even more interesting design wise, than Jobs did. Jobs imported decades old German modernist product design, which, unlike architecture, never really made it to the US, and applied Bauhaus modernism to software design. Musk is postmodern...
...in the best way. He's using retro cultural influences, Flash Gordon era rockets and Stealth Fighter like, origami style, car design from 70s Lotus, to deliberately invert the current norm and show that you can be playful with products that are much more ambitious than Apple's.
You can tell at a glance that this is real design in the sense of a human being making creative choices, rather than abrogation through focus groups under the euphemism of 'human centric design' (which is really the opposite).
And it's now shifting into a new gear at both SpaceX and Tesla, where the exterior of both rockets and cars were, until recently, conventional and most of the innovation was in the interior, getting rid of buttons and dials and replacing them with screens.
Postmodernism in literature and social science is largely toxic bullshit and unrelated to it's meaning in design. In architecture it ended up being tame but in product design, Musk could take it to a new level.

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More from @daveg

Apr 24
Everyone who has tried vibe coding knows that you can get 99% of the way there then hit a 'whac-a-mole' wall of introducing three new bugs for every one fixed. At which point manual coding is easier. Here is a work around.
1. Use reasoning models like o3 to create better one shot prompts to start with.
2. Include a test harness in the prompt structure so you can lock down things into unit tests.
Read 4 tweets
Mar 29
This is the simplest diagram I could do to explain what is happening in the world and why China has already won. Image
Before this, there was the mantra that 'software is eating the world'. It was true and the US beat Europe which failed to enter the digital era and build any dominant internet platforms. This was the best diagram that explained this. Image
But as the commanding heights of the new economy change from internal combustion engines to EVs, batteries, chips etc. China owns a majority of the manufacturing of everything. Image
Read 10 tweets
Mar 28
Ok, now I understand what's going through Vance's mind. It's nuts, but this is what's happening:
Their view is that Europe is 'pathetic' and that US is sick of picking up tab for Pax Americana in Europe.
In Ukraine they flouted the idea of mineral rights to subsidise support and get a sort of instant belt and road style access to rare earths etc. for repatriated manufacturing in the US, via tariff threats.
In other words it's a half baked plan to copy China (domestic manufacturing with control of supply chains) in a rushed fashion and through protection racket style coercion. Protection racket is actually unfair as the threat is genuinely from Russia not from US.
Read 8 tweets
Mar 27
AI creates network effects in production (software application production costs go to zero, running costs increase) - ultimately this means, infrastructure and energy, and we will need more.
But just like the telco/dotcom bust masked continued secular growth in the internet, there could be a dotcom style implosion of AI infrastructure (and this could be the first tremor).
Infrastructure overspend would be when new alliances form leaving redundancy, winners emerge driving consolidation or new more efficient architectures such as DeepSeek hinted at are released.
Read 8 tweets
Sep 21, 2024
What is wrong with our world, in one tweet.
1. The structural change that created the Reformation (bypassing churches control of books) was replacing one (scribe/priest) to many (congregation) with more (mass duplicated printed book) to many (congregation).
2. The structural changes of the internet are larger:
few (publishers, TV channels, newspapers) to many (nations) replaced with many (everyone has a channel on the internet) to many (everyone, regardless of borders).
3. Play this simple game (30 minutes and it will explain network theory without any jargon or tech knowledge requirements) and it will show that until the network (our world post internet) settles into a small world one (largely siloed communities where people can belong to more than one, connected by just a few individuals i.e. not like twitter, where everyone is connected to everyone), there will be instability as lies will propagate more than truth.ncase.me/crowds/
Read 5 tweets
Sep 7, 2024
As if it wasn’t clear already VW illustrates the giant, ticking time-bomb at the heart of Europe’s economic model.

The European economy is based on two things, industrial production and selling the past.
Selling the past includes tourism, where nice places have a history and the story increases the margins. Selling the past also includes things like fashion, perfume and luxury goods where the brand associations with history, also increases margins.
Industrial production is obviously about making things. But it is no longer about making industrial era things. Cars are a great example here. as although EVs look the same as the type of cars that Germany produces, the way they are produced and their business model and margins are totally different.
Read 12 tweets

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