VirtuosoVidit Turns 20!

This blog just completed 20 years of active writing. Over time my writing has shifted to my professional blog more often, and this is in general a scratchpad of ideas and thoughts and anything not technology. I will write a more detailed VirtuosoVidit at 20 blog post sometime in the future. But I did a "What all I've been doing for the last 19 years" post last year, so you can read that for now.

Here's what the earliest available archive of my blog looks like.

The beginnings of a generalized preference framework.

Why do we like what we like? What forms our preferences, dislikes, or any number of emotions we attach to tangible and intangible things. This is the heart of the question I want to ask for the next few months.

Reading suggestions welcome.

Productivity Crash

I have been extremely productive for the last 3 weeks. Getting a lot done really quickly. But somehow my productivity just crashed Wednesday evening. And hasn't been back up since. I don't want to work for a while, I can. Being productive is weird. Somedays I am deeply motivated, others I just want to sit and watch movies.

Missed posts: What have I been upto this week

So why am I missing so many posts. What's up, why is the blog post momentum suddenly slowing down. Well, I have been working on updating my app for iOS 26. And I started a redesign project at that. So the whole process has decidedly taken way too long and too much time. for me, which is why the blog posts have become a formality for the last two weeks.

That said, the update is live now and I'll be back with more fun stuff.

Blogger doesn’t have an app!?!

This is gonna be a short meta (not the company) post, but I just discovered that Blogger doesnt have an iOS app anymore. That's a shame. A well built blogging app can make it easy to publish content on the web. What we have right now in the name of a web app is too janky.

Some thoughts on the way smartphone addiction is presented and portrayed

Got sent a video recently on how we need to get away from our phones. And got reminded of the frequent patterns that come up with the attention economy critique. These almost-PSAs are problematic for one major reason. Instead of telling people why the smartphone attention economy is designed the way it is, and what makes it addictive and what are its consequences (much like what the anti-nicotine ads have done); these videos focus on targeting the person using it. All the blame is put on the user. It's their fault that they're on the phones. It's their fault they're being driven to slot machines.

This is unfair. Most consumer Smartphone apps are "designed" to keep people hooked on to the app. Using deceptive patterns and habit loops to carrot and stick the user into staying hooked to the apps is somehow not a problem worth addressing but somehow people falling for it, is. It's a classic case of victim blaming.

Most screen time software is also designed on the same pattern of negative enforcement. Punishing the user with screen time limits vs actually encouraging healthier habits. There are three ways to solve an addiction. Take away what someone is addicted to; replace it with a less harmful addiction; encourage healthier habits and strive for long term lifestyle changes. Somehow design solutions for smartphone addiction are restricted to the former two, and not on the latter part of encouraging healthier habits which is shame, because it's the only type of solution genuinely treating people with respect rather than deriding them for their choices or habits.

Why do I care? I wrote an entire thesis trying to solve the problem using the "encourage healthier habits for long term lifestyle changes".

This blog is 19 years old!

Woohoo! VirtuosoVidit is 19 years old today. It was my first blog; primarily started it to have a "website" of my own, to feel like I made something on the internet too. I was 11 years old then and had no idea how to write articles and blogs. But it seeemed cool so I tried. Can't believe this thing's still on.

Recently I realised, I haven't shared much of my life on this blog in the last 19 years. So here's a recap.

Starting 2007, when I took the next natural step after writing blogs; i.e. writing and designing a full blown magazine for school students. I then designed games, and apps, completed my undergrad in between that, got a life changing scholarship, presented to Tim Cook, burnt myself out, learnt how to bake Pizza, and most recently graduated from UC Berkeley.

Nobody is reading anything

Getting someone's attention in 2025, is an uphill task. Over the last twelve months I have redesigned my portfolio, I have written 10+ blogposts on my professional blog, I have started to put out content on LinkedIn, Instagram and whatnot, I have burnt myself out writing things.

But I have not gotten readers. Across the total of 7000 views this year, people generally don't even spend a minute on my blog posts, which on average take about a couple of minutes to read. That's just one data point. My impression is, we're looking at attention spans of less than 20 seconds; for everything. Portfolios need to leave an impression in less than 10 seconds. Posts need to be short. Even Social media content needs to be like a sentence and a really striking picture.

Which then makes me question, where is the room for deep dives. Real content with real research. How does one bring that forward. What's the answer to actually following a process in the age of a 6s attention span?


One of the reasons I started doing really short posts on this blog was this. I wanted to put out something. Just anything without worrying about who reads them.

Clanker is a unique slur

In the last few weeks the Clanker a Star Wars fandom slur used against the robots in the franchise, has become popular for its derogatory nature and imminent robophobia, that will come once robots start coexisting with humans. In short, If robots become sentient, and if robophobia is rampant, and if humans want to express their hatred towards a robot, a slur they can use against them is "clanker". This is a lot of ifs.

Sadly the tech community loves making wild assumptions about the future of consumer technology. A few years ago it was the Metaverse and VR (one of the wildest theory I heard at the time was that it's gotta be successful if enough people put enough money into marketing it, we all know how that went), Right now it's robots. People look at LLMs, People look at its "human-like" capabilities, and people go "Ah! Robots are coming soon". That's not happening. Humanoid Robots with sentience are not a thing of today, they'll not be a thing for a long time (maybe ever), for the simple reason that machines can't mimic human-to-human interactions as they lack any affordance of shared context. But I digress.

You can't use a slur against inanimate objects. They don't have sentience, so they're not being insulted. So Clanker is really just a made up slur, for a made up future, it's someone's figment of imagination that people have decided to collectively play along. Or is it?

Well first, most of English is a figment of someone's imagination that people decided to collectively play along. Words have meanings because someone decided what something means, and everyone in power agreed. Slurs are no different. But this power goes further back. Robots don't have sentience unless we don't collectively start thinking and acting towards them as humans. Sentience is as much about a person's feelings towards the bot as it is about the bot's feelings towards the person. If a person strongly feels something about a bot, that feeling is just as valid to the person as it is about any other sentient being. So if they feel extreme hatred towards the bot, it's a real feeling, that should not be ignored. And if that feeling manifests in a slur, the differences between that and a slur against a human are smaller than you think.

Both slurs are about a person's feelings towards something or someone. Slurs are problematic because they're a symbol of extreme hatred. They're more about the person giving them than the person on the receiving end. They're a mirror to a person's feelings. So is Clanker problematic? It's a reflection of a person's extreme hatred towards a technology.

"You're incredibly talented"

I have heard this phrase so often now, it's stopped making sense to me. I don't know what talents I possess that I have been rejected by every company I applied to as a Product Designer / Prototyper. Some days are more difficult than others. :/

Workflow for writing large blog posts

Follow up to previous post. Here's my workflow for writing bigger blog posts. Takes about two weeks to make them, and it's a lot of getting ideas down into something readable. So yea, when folks read my posts it means a lot.

What it takes to write a Big Blog Post

Slightly meta post today. Posts of the Day are easy. I just spend 5 minutes on them and that's it. But bigger posts, they take a lot more effort. I first do rough drafts, then I created a post outline, write down the post, then I design the graphics for each of the elements in the post, combine it together in a post, create social media assets, and then publish and share it with folks.

It's a lot of painstaking effort and usually with minuscule rewards. But I am determined to share my learnings.






The Post in Question is published on my other blog here.

The feeling of nothing is sufficient

In the last 8 months, job hunt has been stressful yes, but it’s the feeling of “no matter what I do, no matter how hard I try, it’s just not enough” that’s stuck with me and it’s soul crushing.

There's always a deadline, I am always last minute to it, because I have been doing so much else, yet at the end of the day, It seems like I am not doing enough to fulfill my goals.


P.S. Attended the second tiat place event at the Internet Archive today, and it was refreshing to go out and meet more creative technologists. But more on it later. This is foreshadowing tomorrow's post.

Go small and build communities

Philz is about to be sold to a private equity firm and this is not a one-off occurance. All popular local-coffee roasters from SF in the last two decades that raised a bunch of money, have met a similar fate. They were great, they became popular, they grew, they raised money and then couldn't grow enough so are now being sold to bigger more evil companies.

This is what I call the indie to medium sized sell-out arc. It doesn't just happen in the world of coffee, it happens everywhere there are indies. Indie software comes to mind, which has the same arc. Food is the other obvious one.


To me the problem exists with the notion of infinite growth. This very American idea of "Go Big or Go Home". What if that's not the right approach. Not everything needs to keep growing to the point where it either controls everything or sells out to someone else who does. I also hate this phrase because it's often used as a way to tell me how my own work as an indie is insignificant and will never be as big as the likes of big players. So what do we do to fight the demon of "Go Big or Go Home"?

We "Go Small and Build Communities". What does that mean. Here's my proposition:

Resilience Lessons

Was on a walk this evening and stumbled across this plaque that sits right in front of my old Applied Resilience classroom, the Cal Memorial Stadium (Yes, that class used to take place in one of the small rooms on the ground floor of the stadium).

What a great quote to be in front of a class that's literally trying to teach resilience. A great reminder for me too. Sadly the class is no longer going to happen in the stadium, but I feel this plaque and the stadium were the spirit of that class. What's a better reminder than sports that failure is inevitable, and so is the redemption that follows that.

Also, reminded me of my dad, he was a very resilient person; saw and overcame many failures in his lifetime, and sometimes it'd be his words of encouragement that would be enough for me to overcome my own struggles. Miss him every day.

Provocation

When you have a new idea, you're bound to have provoke people. You're bound to get a strong reaction, because it's new and unheard off; so people don't immediately know what to say to it. Sometimes I feel it's important to have that, because the opposite of this is no interest, indifference, i.e. the idea having no impact at all.

And it's not necessarily a bad thing, it's a very natural thing. When people hear new ideas, there'll always be some that connect with it, there'll be some that disagree, and then sometimes there'll be people who feel attacked by the idea and a strong visceral reaction to it. Such a strong emotion to me is the validation of the idea. For something that results in such strong an emotion, is actually forcing people to think about things, including their axioms and assumptions. To me that's a win, if what you've got to say, is a result of well researched, honest, and disciplined practice.

Perks of daily public transport commute

Just finished a book in less than 7 days. This is the fastest I've been reading in a while. I've read 8 books this year, and gonna start my 9th book tonight. IMHO, that's just been possible this year because I have spent so much time on BART and Caltrain this year. Commuting for work, commuting to network, commuting to save money. Public transport is great for just sitting and reading.

Atlantic Hotel's the name of this book, written by João Gilberto Noll and translated by Adam Morris. IMHO it's an "OK" book, it tries to be dark and mysterious, when it's really just a meandering tale spoken from a first person narrative. I liked how the first person narrative is followed in such a disciplined manner. Sadly, don't have much opinions on this book. Good read, may make for a fun crime caper, but I wasn't particularly blown away by it.

Almost Gray Scale

Fascinating how almost all of these images (barring the fourth one) are naturally shot without any filters and yet appear gray scale, with just about a hint of color. I really enjoy taking pictures that have a lot of natural patterns.

The idea of Making and Learning vs Learning and Making

I was at an event this Thursday, and an idea struck me. I think the people who make first and then learn have a greater chance of innovating and making cool products than the people who spend a lot of time learning, and then making.

Don't get me wrong, I still value the desk research and user interviews in the process of making something and they remain important parts of the design process. But here's an example. How would you design a UI for a mythical ambient computer that doesn't exist yet. Let's say it's got a projected display. It sits on a desk and it works as a study companion. Design Thinking handbooks will tell you to follow the double diamond process before you put pen to paper, you must do the user research, you must conduct interviews, you must follow the heuristics, you must do X, Y and Z.

Here's the catch. None of this exists for the said platform yet. Now what? Well you make something and then test if it's working. You gotta start from Making and not learning when doing something radically new. You have to be humble enough to make big changes if it's not working. But it's important to follow your instincts, and put your idea to paper, even a sketch to me is an act of making. And then you must show it to the people who will use it, learn from them, adapt to their needs. And that's how you build out something new. Double Diamond fails here.

The biggest problem with the Double Diamond is the lack of trust in a designer's instincts and knowledge. Ideas aren't isolated, they form from a variety of experiences, it's important to acknowledge those experiences to truly understand a problem and possible solutions. Pretending we know nothing about something doesn't help. Starting with a sketch, a paper prototype, an idea of how the solution looks like doesn't hurt anyone. Show it to people you're designing for, then dive deeper into the problem.

Having something to begin with is so much more effective for learning than just mindlessly meandering in different directions. The risk with such meanderings is a) Spending too much time researching and too little making. That leaves less room for iterative learning, and b) conforming to our own biasis.

Just my two very rough cents. Make first, and then learn. But learn for sure.

Pain au Chocolat

A couple of years ago, I was in Europe, and had the opportunity to have one of the most delightful breakfasts I've ever had. A Pain Au Chocolat at this vegan cafe in Zürich (Roots), and it's the best Pain Au Chocolat I've ever had.

Two years on, I've been to Europe once more, and I've spent some time in US. I have not been able to find better vegan Pain Au Chocolat (Pronunciation Tip: | pan oh shoh-ko-lah |) anywhere.

Just thinking about this today, as reminiscing the delightful breakfast, as I was craving for one and struggling to find anything that comes close to it.