A large consumer coming in, driving up demand for water, and being willing to pay for it would be like the textbook example of competing over the water supply.
> "Unless the water providers are selling water too cheaply, what's the problem?"
Do you really not understand how coming in and making a bunch of people's water more expensive isn't popular with those people? You think the problem was that they had it too good with their cheap water and this is fixing that problem?
I can just imagine the conversation when they came up with that:
Boss: we need to transmit 1 bit of information indicating pressure loss from a spinning rotor blade to the main body of the helicopter. The blade spins too fast for electronics to work properly.
Engineer: What if we make the blades radioactive when they depressurize, then point a Geiger counter at them to detect if that happens.
Boss: ... where did you say you got your degree from?
I think it's the "so elegant" part that's wrong. It's not still being used today because it's so elegant. It's still being used today because the old helicopters haven't replaced it.
I think elegance has to do with the technology of the time. Some clever design that is cheaper/better than you would otherwise think possible given the era. There are probably many elegant aspects to Roman aqueduct engineering, but they would still get replaced with modern materials during a retrofit.
The puzzle pages also give pretty strong AI vibes to me. I think it just reminds me what I've gotten from Claude when I let it decide on design.
Some of the specifics that come to mind:
- the use of emojis instead of icons
- the text content largely sounds like it's written by Claude. This is a big one and it's everywhere: the names of the games, the descriptions, the status texts, basically every single piece of text that I've read.
- the fact that text is being used for some things at all feels a bit Claude-y, like the "Today's result: pending" status or "Vibes are perfected. Well done."
- a lot of the color scheme feels AI somehow. It's interesting, because it's not like the colors are wrong or anything, they somehow just feel like "default" LLM colors
Yeah it's definitely a mix of AI and me haha. The names, color schemes, and status texts are good callouts. The emojis I actually introduced to start to have a theme across games, though I didn't put them in the org chart game. A lot of the copy was written by AI, and then I didn't like the output and changed it.
I appreciate the feedback that it felt off. That's what matters in the end. Thanks for the taking the time to share this.
Does anyone have more context on how this would be used? Is this like an alternative to using a midi keyboard to control synths? Is the appeal of it that it is small and meant to be played one handed while your other hand does something else?
There are lots of pedals these days that are designed as performance instruments in their own right. Check out the Erica Synths Nightverb; it's all chonky knobs and it doesn't even have stomp switches. You'd never put it on your floor.
Storm Summoner takes a pedal with lots of parameters [that would normally be set-and-go] and gives it that missing live performance UX. Singers in particular could use the sensors to modulate their voices.
What excites me is the flag-based system described in the review video at 11:45. You can set up stuff to happen (launch an LFO?) in response to other things that happen, like a value crossing a threshold. That takes it out of the realm of a dumb controller, and we already have enough dumb controllers.
You configure a preset, then touch to change presets while playing instead of kneeling down. Its like a remote control for MIDI effects pedals. Probably more useful if you have complicated live setup with a long setlist filled with a lot of effects.
> "Unless the water providers are selling water too cheaply, what's the problem?"
Do you really not understand how coming in and making a bunch of people's water more expensive isn't popular with those people? You think the problem was that they had it too good with their cheap water and this is fixing that problem?
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