Issue #17

Personal recommendations & curiosities for cool products. (Note — I do not earn affiliate fees of any kind on these links.)

Kikkerland
Whimsical products for the home

Kikkerland makes well-designed products for the home. Founded by a design-loving Dutchman, these simple little products offer a mix of whimsical and functional at affordable prices. Established in 1992, Kikkerland collaborates with independent designers from around the world as well as the handful of in-house designers on their team for an assortment of items, ranging from inventive children’s toys to kitchen bag clips to alarm clocks. The studio holds over 150 patents. You’ll find their products in catalogs of well-curated home goods stores around the world. Here’s this brand’s backstory in Format magazine with Kikkerland’s founder Jan van der Lande.

Field Notes
Notebooks for the frequent noter

Hard to believe that it’s been 9+ months and 17 issues of this periodical, but I haven’t included this one before. Field Notes are notebooks and memo books that are durably built, and perhaps the best marriage of utility + form in the realm of notebooks. The concept is inspired by memo books used by farmers. Every quarter, they create limited editions of these notebooks around different themes. You can usually buy them in packs of three — steno pads, dot-graph paper and more. I never travel without one, just in case I have an epiphany worth remembering — sometimes, I’ll note an idea in my Field Notes, then copy it over to the Future space in my Solarday. In fact, I believe the very first original sketches of Solarday were inside one of these. I usually find these notebooks stocked in the permanent collections of museum / gallery shops, or design-forward goods stores, which is the best place to buy them if you’re outside the USA (as shipping costs can add up.)

Good Time Mints
Organic mints made in Canada

Good Time mints are organic mints made in Canada. These mints contain no artificial sweeteners, flavours or colours. Each mint has 1g of sugar. While I don’t care whether a mint is organic or not (it’s a mint, ffs), I love how these mints taste and the box they come in. When I was 19 or 20, a friend introduced me to Altoids, and while they are more like the Kleenex of mints and I still like those, I’m always on the lookout for nicely packaged, simple mints in retro metallic boxes. I particularly like that these are made in Canada. These are my go-to mints right now, and I believe I originally discovered them in a store in either Prince Edward County or Bayfield, Ontario (both solidly beautiful places.)

A figment of history.

A simple artifact this week from my 2009 archives. I wrote that line down as the kind of company I would want to build someday. Looks like it was written just before midnight. Bands work on trust, commitment and authentic, shared desire to make good music. It’s a collective expression of creativity.

These days especially, people are starting companies with nefarious motives — “let’s capitalize on this trend, raise a bunch of money and get rich.” No wonder it doesn’t work out for them and they end up losing a bunch of their investors’ money (many of whom are also in it for the wrong reasons). I don’t think any successful music band in history has started with those intentions. Bands impact listeners and culture in ways most companies never will.

This is why I think this innocent epiphany my younger self had is worth holding on to. Just thought I’d share it here.

Free-form thoughts.

Life in a small city

A couple of months ago, we moved permanently to a small city in Perth County, Ontario. It’s one of those places where people are still nice, and they like to do things. Here, life doesn’t seem to revolve around a narrative that’s dominated by the drudgery of work, traffic, awful headlines, and everyone in constant burnout due to a “no breaks” (or “brakes”, if you will) lifestyle. Instead, life is composed of smaller moments like taking a stroll to the river, buying fresh produce that’s locally grown, getting to know who your neighbours are and what they like to read, walking over to the town for a soft-serve, not waiting for equipment at the gym, a cyclist stopping by to say “how are you liking your new home? welcome to the neighbourhood. see you around”, going to a book reading organized by the community’s arts & literary group, and the list goes on.

Now, I was born in a city that had a population of about 10 million that year, which has grown to well over 30 million people in this decade. Naturally, most of my life, I gravitated to places that were bustling with chaos. Anything less than that felt too quiet and almost eerie. Decades later, I live in a city that barely has 35,000 people. I couldn’t have predicted that. But it feels as homely as ever — I’ve never appreciated the small moments of daily life as much as I do here now.

What you truly and authentically value evolves over time, with age, a changing world, and what you allow yourself to experience. I can’t stand the lifestyle of large cities anymore where everything feels like a transaction and people are constantly obsessed with their own stress, where ambition is dangled in your face as if it’s the ultimate (and only) benchmark of someone’s worth, while relaxation somehow has also become some kind of humblebrag of the socioeconomic exclusiveness of what you did.

Early this morning, our handyman stopped by to give me a keepsake that belonged to his family — a metal hacksaw made in Sweden by a company that’s been in the business of metal cutting since 1862. Why? Because I might need it for odd jobs around the house. He knows very well I’m not very handy (he believes I can be), but by now, he also somehow knows I appreciate well-designed things. It’s a joy to live in a county that folks like this call home.

Brunello Cucinelli’s capitalism

Om Malik was a legendary tech journalist who passed away this year. In the late 1990s, when the internet was still nascent, Om was publishing his thoughts on tech online. He was one of those people whose writing was simple, devoid of buzzwords and consultant-speak, who understood not just technology but why people use it. While there are a handful select few in tech who I can say embody those attributes in their writing (for e.g. John Gruber of Daring Fireball being one of them - here’s his heartfelt tribute about Om), as far as I know, he was one of the earliest and few Indian-origin tech journalists at the time. As an Indian-origin person myself who discovered Om Malik’s writing in the late 2000s, that was inspiring. I wish I had met him.

Someone in my network (Jason Fried, the CEO of Basecamp) shared this old interview Om Malik did in Italy with Brunello Cucinelli, creator of the eponymous Italian luxury fashion brand. It’s pretty rare for someone in tech to interview a fashion designer, let alone an iconic one like Cucinelli. After reading it in its entirety, it almost reads like a treatise on a different, more refreshing form of capitalism altogether that is built around work-life balance, one that perhaps is much needed now more than ever.

Here is the interview, and some of my favourite excerpts:

Om: Now we have a world that is changing. The idea of “brand” is kind of amorphous, and you don’t really know who stands behind that brand. I wonder if you have any thoughts about it.

Cucinelli: I wanted the brand to have my face. I wanted the product to convey the culture, life, lifestyle, dignity of work. We are a listed company, and I wanted to manufacture a product with dignity. I wanted a profit with dignity. Because the press all talk about the moral ethics of profit. Why can’t we have a dignified profit then?

Would you buy something from someone if you knew that the person, by making this product, has harmed or damaged mankind? No, you would not buy it. You wouldn’t even buy it if you knew that the company had staggering profits. Our cashmere blazer costs $3,000 retail, but the profit must be dignified. It needs to respect the raw material producer, then the artisans, then those working for the company. The consumer also needs to be respected. Everything must be balanced.

We need a new form of capitalism, a contemporary form of capitalism. I would like to add “humanistic” to that equation.

…

Om: There’s a lot of talk of manufacturing revival in the United States. Do you think it is feasible? If it is, what are the lessons from Italy that the U.S. can take?

Brunello: I think that there is a trend toward going back to manufacturing there. People want to buy a “made in the U.S.” thing. You want to buy a French champagne, but you also want to buy something from your own country.

We have to rebuild the basis of all the skills. For example, the schools for arts and crafts. We have to start rebuilding. In order to do that, we need to give moral and economic dignity back to this kind of craft. Say you are a tailor. If you earn $1,200 a month, you are sort of ashamed to say that that’s your trade, because that’s the culture. We have to do the opposite. It should be that if someone sees you are a tailor, they say, “Oh, you are plying a very great trade, the tailor.” That’s the moral dignity I’m talking about.

This interview is from 11 years ago.

Yet, most entrepreneurs in America still don’t think this way. Instead, what we have at the moment is quite the opposite — a re-emergence of the “9-9-6”, a toxic and exploitative way of working that many AI founders with a Master’s in Assholery, usually from Harvard or Stanford, seem to so easily embrace without hesitation across North America.

Aside — an AI founder who interviewed me in 2024 for a design job actually called himself “an asshole founder” during the interview (red flag #1: glamorize being a jerk). He had double degrees from Harvard & Stanford (red flag #2: elitism). I got the job but it didn’t last long — I figured it was because I kept calling him out on his bullshit, pushing back on his hollow arrogance, while he countered my pushback with “I ran teams for Zuckerberg” (red flag #3: name drop billionaires with a not-so-great moral track record as mentors.) Out of curiosity, I looked that company up recently — they’ve since pivoted to “AI for sales outreach”… hardly a surprise.

Brunello Cucinelli doesn’t sound like an asshole. He lives in a small medieval town in Italy with a population of less than a thousand. He sounds humble. He didn’t go to Harvard or Stanford — he dropped out of engineering at age 24. And he doesn’t lack ambition — his company did almost 1.5 billion € in revenue last year, with over 60% coming from their own retail stores, more than double of what they did when that interview was published. But most of all, I know for a fact they make simple, classy apparel (that I naturally do not own considering the price point.)

Fable 5 is the new junior designer

I’ve been using Fable 5, Anthropic’s new model re-released to the public after US Government lifted its export control directive specifically on this model. It was originally shut down by the administration due to “national security implications”. I made a mention of Mythos in Issue 014 while it was unreleased back in May. Mythos is still unreleased to the wider public.. but Fable 5 is a “Mythos-class” model.

Fable 5 does feel like an order of magnitude better than previous models. It has gotten a lot better at software engineering and thinking. I tested its design capabilities this month. This is the first-ever model I’ve found since the launch of LLMs that makes you think “oh, huh, this is actually not bad”.

By now, I’m pretty used to Fable 5 and I feel like I’ve stretched its design capabilities to its limits. Although, you can spend millions of Fable 5 tokens (priced at $10 per million input tokens, and $50 per million output tokens) and many many hours designing something, I felt that it was half as good as what I can come up in 30 mins of sketching and thinking. But, I can say with conviction that it’s 10x better in design capabilities than the older models.

In fact, Fable 5 (in a Claude Code harness) is the first model that feels like a capable junior designer. You end up commending its thought and grunt work like you would to a beginner’s mind trying to learn the craft despite you knowing that the solution they’ve come up isn’t going to cut it. And unlike most junior designers, it’s like it has read and seen all the great works on design and has great coding chops.

What that means for human junior designers feels kind of dire. Post-Fable 5, I think we’ll be in an era where if you want to become a designer or are right out of school, the only way to do well would be to become a senior one through a mix of your own projects, reading & writing, and collaborative work. Or you’ll have to just convince someone you know to give you a chance — even then, they’ll be doing you a favour, because it’d be a lot cheaper for them to just pay for Fable 5 tokens. Sad, but true.

Meanwhile, the AI mania

I read an excellent article recently from Nikhil Suresh taking a big swing at the spectacular levels of bullshit and outright corporate lying behind the AI mania of today that plagues most mid-to-large institutions of today. The whole article is brilliant, and I suspect I will read it a few times over the course of this year, as things get crazier, but here’s an excerpt:

There have been several occasions where I have seen someone, apropos of nothing, blurt out almost word-for-word “AI is changing everything”, only to concede moments later that their organisation does not currently use LLMs for anything, and indeed, that they cannot name a single thing that has changed other than they get some use out of ChatGPT (frequently the free-tier). In one extreme case, I have seen an executive confess that they had never even used ChatGPT or any AI tool in their life, immediately after producing a technical strategy for an organisation with $2B+ in revenue which was entirely centered around AI.

This guy knows what he’s talking about, unlike most people who have now become LinkedIn evangelists of AI with little clue about how any of this works, or have their net worths so deeply invested in AI that you can’t trust the legitimacy of their opinions on AI.

On top of everything that’s happening, I think this is the only article I finally needed to read to have conviction that this a massive bubble, and once it bursts, it’s going to create one of the most prominent destructions of wealth the world economy has seen. Writer of all things Apple, John Gruber appreciated the essay too.

Unfortunately, economies are such complex machinery that if you have the largest financial institutions, pension funds, governments, most of the ultra-wealthy (“rich folks” as my 6 y/o niece calls them) all in on some madness with little skepticism, as a peruser of the financial system, there is no way to escape the pain as a (unless you stuff ALL your cash under a mattress.)

The technology is real. The hype is way, way out of proportion. Whether the crash will be bigger than the dot-com bust of 2000/2001 or the financial crisis of 2008, that’s TBD.

But I do know that the most peaceful time to build things for the long-term will be after the crash (when is the question), and I personally can’t wait for that time. Of course, while I am still building Solarday, and other small things, I have barely started to scratch the surface of what I want to build.

(Note that none of this is financial advice, so do your own research.)

Why was there no Subgrid for 8 weeks?

Writing a periodical newsletter is hard. Particularly, in this era. There is so much nonsensical AI-generated content out there and enough unsuspecting readers who consume that content (especially on mind-numbing Sith-like networks like LinkedIn) that it’s easy to question yourself whether your thousands of human-written words are making things worse or better.

As you can tell from some of my tidbits above, I am living, one day at a time, in a new city, in a new space, with newfound energy. And I’d love to document it more in writing. But, there’s a balance between how much personal interesting day-to-day happenings I can write about and share vs. living up to the promise of keeping this newsletter design-focused.

Also, there is always this dilemma — should I write this newsletter today, or work on a new build for Solarday, or do other work (or “get a real job” like some say). This newsletter goes out to a handful of folks, while Solarday has thousands of customers around the world who I know for a fact are waiting for the next release.

But, thanks to encouragement and kind words from a friend and subscriber of this newsletter, I mustered up enough energy to write some of what’s been brewing in my thoughts into words today.

While I likely won’t be able to write Subgrid every week, I do love writing here, and perhaps a couple of times a month is the cadence I can follow as a discipline.

Thanks for being a subscriber, nonetheless.

—Siddharth

~ That's it for this edition. The world is cooked. Live well, still. ~