> Gemini leverages native video understanding for direct analysis, while Local models reconstruct understanding from individual frame descriptions - resulting in dramatically different processing complexity.

For people like me who haven't dabbled much with AI video processing and have no intuition for it, could you clarify the drawbacks of such a local-only approach vs what Gemini offers? I don't mean the performance or power/battery impact (that part is clear), just in terms of end-result and quality what the practical differences are.

I'm in the only-100%-offline camp here but would like to know what I'm missing out on since I won't even try Gemini here.

For whatever it's worth, as an European, I will emphasize this as one of the most frustrating facts and the largest barrier to me having any serious form of respect for the EU. I have no doubt there's honest and good people there, but in my country it's well known that fuckups just get to "retire" and get out of the spotlight by shifting to EU positions. Not only does this devalue the EU, but also the original country itself, since politicians have less fear of career-ending consequences. It's a lose-lose situation for the collective.

I can only hope that experiences in my country do not reflect Europe as a whole.

I will say that some outsourcing phases/efforts would definitely not be possible with Sketch though. It's one thing when we as a company all have company-provided Macs, but another when remote hiring/collaborating.

My hope is that at least with Penpot I can submit a PR if I am motivated enough. With Figma, I've done all I can.

The reason why I ditched Sketch (even though I loved it) was because Sketch had quality control issues over time and they started messing with my work, even losing some of it (cloud saves). The frustration grew over a longer period of time until I lost all hope and just had to admit that it was a lost cause. I peeked at Sketch's changelogs for a year and saw only bugfixes and no features. I assumed it was dead; either way the chapter was closed, the entire company shifted to Figma.

P.S. which is not to say that Figma is in a good state now, or that I don't feel history repeating itself.

I could be out of the loop a bit, but I see that this spec is also still a draft. As somone who'd love to evangelize and implement design tokens internally, when do you see this stepping into the spotlight in a meaningful way? Is there a roadmap of some kind that's available to the public?

If I'm working on a backend system and have a (frontend) framework in place, I might easily skip Figma IF I have enough confidence that the approach/pattern/solution is the right one. If not, or if the particular UI is quite challenging, I would usually sketch things out in Figma until I can resolve the most important questions/design challenges. I would not bother making a high-fidelity design in this case.

If I'm working on a highly visual/presentational project, then Figma is my go-to, since code would be super slow and limiting if I want to explore various approaches and ideas. Especially I wanted to be a bit more creative with the presentation. However, I would probably design less than usually needed. Also, when coding this design, I would *not* consider my own Figma project to be a pixel-perfect representation of every single value in terms of font-sizes, spacings, etc. I would use a code-oriented system/approach and make sure everything comes close to the design. Certain details would be tweaked by eye in code as well if I feel they need visual adjustments. I suppose I also intuitively know which areas need more (pixel-perfect) attention and which are flexible.

And then there's exceptions and hybrids to all of these. I may want to polish a particular backend UI piece for whatever reason (Figma-first), or I might want to prototype/create a proof of concept for a complex state management, transitions, etc. (frontend-first) before making portions or all of it pixel perfect in Figma.

As I'm designing an app I don't want just click & drag visually to get some eye-balled spacing or size value. I want a design system with consistent spacing rules. Design tools enable this somewhat but the token standardization is pushing this much further. For example: there's already a hub/API for distributing design tokens to other services. I've seen a live demo of Specify[2] pushing token changes from Figma to a GitHub PR or creating JIRA task during a design token talk from a token w3c group member.

And it's not just about design -> code. If these tokens are standardized, design tools themselves (among others) could have a standardized way of transferring designs.

Heck, even Utopia could embrace this at some point to provide you an alternative view/workflow for your already standardized design tokens.

[1] https://www.designtokens.org/

[2] https://specifyapp.com/