talksik

beautiful soundscapes

Dalton, from Ycombinator, giving his thoughts on hacker news culture

I like this take, though deadlines do force you to make some tradeoffs. That's the conclusion I've come to.

I do think people nowadays over-index on iteration/shipping speed over quality. It's an escape. And it shows, when you "ship".

Computer use is expensive. Take a look at this repo I found.

I was studying more about graphql, having used it for years. There has been many phases of critiques towards the technology/paradigm; however, there is something interesting about it's role in a world of agentic AI.

If queries can be dynamically written on the fly, we wouldn't need automation/agent to interact with the UI (as is the case with chatGPT operator or anthropic computer use). Instead, an intelligence layer for the frontend could dynamically query based on a graphQL schema and render with some basic html elements.

Thoughts?

I think every engineer contemplates this question: "how come it feels like everyone knows everything, and I'm just chasing to catch up"

Let me know if any of you would like to shape the product as pilot users: arjun@flowy.live

This is super helpful. Thanks @eltonlin.

Philosophy: building on current platforms limits solution sets and only gives you primitives that they thought of. I built 15+ variants of software versions tangential to flowy. It always limits experience. This doesn't mean everything should be it's own hardware. I just believe that human to human commz should be put higher on the hierarchy than, say your calculator.

Practical answer: we want to do cool things like "hover over keypad and say a name" and then you can talk to them. Only possible when we build the whole stack.

Thoughts?

You're right. We were trying to be too fancy. The scrolling is fixed now.

You're right. We were trying to be too fancy. It's fixed now.

You're right. We were trying to be too fancy. It's fixed now.

You're right. We were trying to be too fancy. It's fixed now.

Re focus: yep I understand. I guard my own deep work time very well.

Here are concepts of the protocol that we poorly explain on the landing page: 1. You tune into you're top-of-mind folks. This set of people is different for everyone and it changes project to project. But it's generally only 5-8 people. If your device is ON and you are not in another conversation, these people (and any combination of them) can get to you instantly. 2. Other people have to send you voice messages. 3. When you press the play button, you only go through all of your top-of-mind peoples' messages. Then there is a filter called "inbox" for "others". 4. If you press the flash button on the keyboard, you are OFF. Everyone sees a "-" for you. You don't hear anything.

So in aggregate, although it doesn't seem so at first glance, I built flowy so that there is less noise. We following "less is more" principle a lot more than it seems. It's just the sound of your people: no notifications, no fake AI voice assistant sound. This being said, I realize that we do not do a good job of articulating how everything works, so we will make a full demo video at the end of the year.

Founders/leaders of funded startups (<100 people) who feel like their teams are stuck and the right stuff isn't being done.

They pay thousands per employee on saas tools + remote office reimbursements + give iphones and cell plans to their employees. What flowy offers is (hopefully) priceless to them; that is, if the promise is fulfilled. They want to try it for a few teams for a couple months, and go from there.

IMHO, we underrate how much we invest in commz. Human to human commz is worth more than any computing tool. What is an organization without people collaborating? A band where everyone's playing solo. This is part of our philosophy :)

Founders of funded startups (<100) who feel like their teams are stuck and the right stuff isn't being done.

They pay thousands per employee on saas tools + remote office reimbursements + give iphones and cell plans to their employees. What flowy offers is (hopefully) priceless to them; that is, if the promise is fulfilled. They want to try it for a few teams for a couple months, and go from there.

I am with you on this. I went with this as I personally feel I don't want another battery device to maintain and charge.

I also want to make sure that those who use the keypad are 99% at their home desk because we can nail that experience better than building a mobile variant right now. I'm planning a mobile version (keyfob/earpiece) for the future that would cover a wider audience's needs.

However, perhaps eventually there will be a battery variant; from an engineering perspective, it adds complexity to make sure that it lasts and handles different environments. I thought about adding battery and giving customers a wireless charging pad so that it can just sit on it. But I told myself, for v1, let's just make it stationary just like mechanical keyboards; reliable, simple, minimal.

Hey, the target bag has all of my jumper wires for my development boards! :)

All jokes aside, I appreciate the simple and actionable feedback.

Yeah interesting things happen over time in terms of culture. Nextel got bought by Sprint and their ideology vanished.

Knowledge work, for example, found email and hung onto this. All of a sudden, we lost simplicity and are in this bubble of noisy "software interfaces" being the standard.

Perhaps it's just that newer generations don't know how things used to work, and the old people are retired or can't do much about it?

Love the insight. You are correct, the "workflow" is the essence. I call this the protocol, and I've spent thousands of hours on this alone.

I have different approaches on screen + commz combo that uphold flowy's product principles of keeping it lightweight, and augmenting human conversation. Your idea around this is really interesting; I agree that this is a "killer" feature if done right.

Our bet: flowy is what loom users have been reaching for, but haven't been given.

A new communication medium with a hardware device (walkie-talkie + voicemail). It is aimed at being a successor to email, standard chat interfaces, voicemail, calendar scheduling with zoom calls.

https://flowy.live

How do you build your own cellular network?

Ahh yes that is a really good insight about people with English as a second language. This is why I believe that the lowest hanging fruit are international teams, as they typically talk 24/7 in their native tongue and are not fond of typing in Slack from my discussions.

Still, I have seen that these folks still have presentations in English and with diagraming and such, they are able to articulate something that's more digestible than full on documentation. I think loom sort of videos would still be good for these people to diagram and demo things. We want to add something like this with video + screen broadcasting.

Yep speech to text won't be fluent with technical terms. I'm hoping it does 80% of the job, and then constantly improve it based on what you mentioned. Thanks for the suggestions! Perhaps starting with editable speech to text would be viable, while trying hard not to promote async communication to a point where people aren't conversing naturally as humans do but constantly stopping, editing and typing.

Thanks for this!

That makes sense, we need to try different messaging to hit it on the nail, but "walkie-talkie" seems to click as a decent initial introduction.

I totally agree. When I'm in flow state, I don't want anything to disturb me. Hence, I need a power switch, which is the power button in the widget. I'm a minimalist myself and having an off switch has been awesome for me, as compared to all of the configuration I have to do with Slack notifications to have it do what I want.

Thoughts on this?

Great point! Right on the dot!

We have live transcription and power search on the roadmap as this is a common objection. (audiobook vs. book argument)

Speech to text is pretty good these days, and it's 2023, we shouldn't be typing to talk in our opinion.

Search: "Play (or let me read) what Johnny told me about databases last month or so"

Me personally? When it comes to going back in a conversation, I prefer sitting back and listening at 2x speed about complex topics so that I can look across the room and think instead of staring at my screen reading essays.

Ahh it's okay, appreciate it! This is all great feedback in either improving product or messaging.

Fair point :)

We think the philosophy that flowy is built on is the only reason it will beat other standards that we have just lived with: We live in a distracted world. We used to shuffle paper, now we shuffle 20+ apps merely trying to say a few words to each other.

On the product side, we focus on how we can make this more like a natural human conversation. This results in reduced cognitive load and easier conversational flow.

Thank you! Every team is a small team, even within a big company, but you are right, small teams in international countries who need to move fast is the lowest hanging fruit at this point in time.

That would be cool! Thanks for the positive feedback, really appreciate it!

Great point! We are thinking of switching to usage based for startups at the start. A metering system so that you only pay based on what your team uses for that month in terms of our infrastructure costs, which should be minimal I hope.

Thoughts?