Jacob Medure

Most AI music tools want to make music for you. Over the weekend, I built one that helps you better understand yours. Talkback is an MCP and Ableton M4L device that lets you chat with your Ableton session. Kinda like a mix assistant. Talkback allows your llm of choice to makes contextual recommendations in line with your taste. It knows your tracks, your mix, your plug-ins, and instead of "make my mix better", it pushes you to think "brighter", "harder", "in-front of the drums in the mix." Available now. Free and open source. A gift from me to the younger me yearning to make the sound in my head come out of my speakers.

big if true 👀

Most AI music tools want to make music for you. Over the weekend, I built one that helps you better understand yours. Talkback is an MCP and Ableton M4L device that lets you chat with your Ableton session. Kinda like a mix assistant. Talkback allows your llm of choice to makes contextual recommendations in line with your taste. It knows your tracks, your mix, your plug-ins, and instead of "make my mix better", it pushes you to think "brighter", "harder", "in-front of the drums in the mix." Available now. Free and open source. A gift from me to the younger me yearning to make the sound in my head come out of my speakers.

i've distilled everything i've written on userinterface.wiki into a single skill file. 119 rules across 11 categories across animations, timings, ux laws, typography, audio, and more. npx skills add raphaelsalaja/userinterface-wiki

Same but dad

expand--compress

Put up my first not-a-side project pull request today at work. Wish me luck

@dexhorthy If you have profits, you show profits. If you don’t, you show EBITDA. If you don’t have that, you show revenue. If there’s no revenue, you show users. If no users, you show app downloads. If nothing, you show token burn.

@jasonfried @Tesla Pleassssse don’t be rivian.

The last car we bought was a @Tesla Model Y. Painless purchase process. No salespeople, no showroom, no upsells, no games, no haggling, no pressure. Just a personal choice on my own time, and a simple few-minute process handled entirely via a clear and straightforward app. The next car we're buying is from another brand. And holy hell, it feels like I'm going back in time. Salespeople, back-and-forth charades, pricing games, "when can you come in?" before the deal is finalized tactics, etc. And I'm still doing it all via email so I don't have to deal with the showroom antics. I've modernized the process as much as I can from my side, and yet it's the same old same old. They don't even feel like the same thing. In one case I'm buying a car with all the baggage that comes with buying a car. In the other case I'm buying a Tesla with none of the baggage of buying a car. This experience could make me lament this other brand, but what it really does is make me appreciate and respect the lengths to which Tesla has fully reconfigured the car buying experience. It's become effortless, like buying any other product. As it should be. A car is just another product. Bravo.

Before vs after 📷

In case you haven’t felt something stir inside you today

@rishimody wow seeing this in my dia browser the second I read this tweet is a wild experience. so impressive

Really proud of this one. Most AI products today sit around waiting for you to ask the right question. A more interesting world is one where your computer knows what you need before you ask for it.

@joshpuckett And just a bit more here….The personal brand, 1000 true fans thing seems like a really relevant pre end game as well.

Although less relevant today, it also matters how competitive a space is. Higher barrier to entry = higher design caliber expected (by the market) to compete. Less relevant cuz as software continually gets easier to make the bar for all products is super high. I think software will start to look a lot like fashion or music where brand becomes critical. A feature rich and polished product will be table stakes. Big asterisk here that this is only true until no one needs or wants or can pay for software anymore lol 🙃

I see a lot of discussion around taste and craft for designers, but surprisingly little about business models and how they impact your day to day work. This came up twice last week as I was talking to designers evaluating their next role, so I figured I’d write down some thoughts I often find myself sharing. ----- The business model of your company will, to a large degree, constrain and shape the work you do as a designer. It will set the metrics you optimize for, the efforts that get prioritized, and the instincts you’ll build over time. Many designers, especially those early in their careers, don’t think about this when choosing where to work. While ultimately your job is to design a great product that users love, there are many nuanced and predictable ways that you’ll be impacted by business models. Here are a few examples: Ad-supported products Your world will orbit around attention. Impressions, time on site, scroll depth, CTRs, ad managers. These are all the things that pay the bills, and that in one way or another you’ll be impacted by them. Ad placements and engagement loops are required, and will create somewhat constant tension between what’s good for the end user (who is not paying you) and what’s good for your business (and advertisers). SaaS Users often enter these products via trials or sales. But much of the work is everything after that. You’ll be concerned with things like activation, churn rates, seat or net revenue expansion, as well as onboarding flows, admin and enterprise management, and all sorts of compliance features like SOC2 and more. Marketplaces With these, you’ll be designing for two (or three!) very different audiences at once. Think buyers or sellers, riders and drivers, hosts, and guests. You’ll spend time working on trust and safety (reviews, verification, dispute resolution) and how to increase or solve for liquidity on your supply and demand sides. Tensions can often come from trying to improve one side’s experience in a way that doesn’t compromise the other side that most users will never see. Gaming Whether paid or free-to-play, much of the business of gaming is spending time on monetization and habit formation. You want to sell upgrades and digital goods and also get users to complete streaks and challenges and unlock rewards all in a way that doesn’t feel extractive or icky. E-Commerce Conversion is king. Everything revolves around optimizing funnels, reducing bounces and cart abandons, and obsessing about how you can take a user who is playing with options on a product detail page all the way through the checkout flow. ----- No matter the business model, your chief responsibility is simple: design a great product that your customers love. But a designer who spent five years in an ad-supported product has built a very different set of instincts and habits than one who spent five years reducing SaaS churn or balancing a marketplace. Neither is better or worse. They’re just different; and will emerge as slightly differently shaped the designer, whether they realized it or not. So when you're evaluating your next role, don't just ask "What’s the product and who is it for?” Ask yourself: "How does this company make money?" That answer might just tell you more about your day-to-day than any job description will.

Dialed!

painful return to america yesterday

Making music is so spiritually fulfilling. Even if u don’t make music for a living or feel like u aren’t ‘gifted’, I still encourage all yall to mess around with it a lil bit. Shit is just fun!

how do u fix openclaw internal reasoning leaking

First impressions of tokyo: - streets are phenomenally clean - i love it here