Wireframes, like anything else, should be used to inform - not restrict. Concretely, individual articles should have the power to override or customize their pages and personalities - otherwise the website doesn't feel complete!

Our user interfaces are so homogeneous. Incredibly painful. No personality. A product should be showcased the same way it's used, not with splash pages and screens and screenshots. The strange full page trailers or Wall Street SVG human characters or whatever cute parallax scrolling animations need to go.

Where are these?

Like Alexander's system, we need to use a variety of different resources and specialists - in particular, the residents - to craft a city and continue to help it adapt. This practice of perscribing particular models and expecting the city to adhere to these models doesn't work - the city can't run the same way forever, for various sociopsychological reasons, and it will continue to adapt. To force some reductive computing model onto it is to leave people behind.

The city isn't a computer! It's far more complicated, and to claim that it's a computer would be a dramatic reduction of capability. This reminds me of Hypernormalization - it's this attempt to fit the city to a much simpler model, then convince everyone that this simple model makes sense and it works, but in truth the system is far more complex.

This reminds me of works like the mailing tube systems of NYC - the foundation of the city had all of these physical pathways designed to facilitate communication and transmission of both information and physical belongings! We should bring systems like this - for transporting physical data!

I don't want to be a mouse or have an interface to my city. The interface to my city is my face and my mouth, and I interact with it by walking through it and saying hello to the people around me, not by queuing systems on my smartphone to do X or Y or Z or whatever the hell. I should not have to own a smartphone to live my daily life. Technology should be invisible and not surveil me.

Like surveillance capitalism, apparently.

This intro goes hard

I love the idea of hearing a user physically occupy a server; what a beautiful form of presence!

Imagine using a computer that printed out its input and output to a physical piece of paper using a physical printer. That would be the dream of Xerox.

Valuable exercise - determine how students find information and what exactly they think or know.

Are we starting cults here? I'm really not sure if this is healthy...

Hero. Anyone can do anything.

Hell yes. Raise the bar. Make craft software. Make it better. Make it beautiful. Anyone can make any software.

This is a wonderful attitude. Obscure the past - ideas are the most interesting part!

What does broadcasting this appearance say about character? I think I'd rather be unabashedly open and compassionate. Clinging to everything is more exciting.

beast mode. the more i hear about this the more i want to go go go!

Criticism builds. Call friends out if they aren't doing their best.

Nobody should have to ever write code that someone else has already written.

What do we need to do to accomplish this?

This is a beautiful sentiment and it's already happening. I can't wait to see it succeed.

The internet as a service industry, or a consulting industry, or just a way to rent a friend

This is the crux of the issue. How do we reward authors and creators without aligning cost with idea?

Coworking spaces lol........

in other words - execution of an idea creates a product, and users use products, so users will pay for products; this isn't true for thinking itself, though

We still don't really have any idea, do we? So far, solutions revolve around: - collecting user data - advertisement - annoying magazine subscription fees like the pop-ups on this website - donations

The first two I would consider inhumane and combative, and the latter two fail to capture the majority of the value provided (and, therefore, either discourage people from using the medium to communicate their ideas or creating a strange limbo of popular poverty)

I need to do more. How can I get here?

I love real programmers. I will work with them forever

Where are the line numbers?

The machine rolls on : ) with bureaucracy too stiff to allow for progress. This is very reminiscent of tech work today!

Read more - I will certainly need this for class

What a closing line!

Nostalgia for the days that hard arts like mathematics were romanticised; as other papers state, the writing is so formal and rigid now. A product of the post-WWII structure and industrialisation of the scientific process, sure - but has this been healthy for society?

British descriptors and honorifics - "Head", "Porter", "Wrangler", etc. feel reflective of the disorder of the parliamentary system - they're at face chaotic but reflect rigid historical processes!

Isn't this what you want? I love the feel of competition in New York - walking around soho makes me want to make more money, dress better, feel cooler. The financial district makes me want to aim for the communities that get me in the towers. Bushwick makes me want to... um...

Cities provide a different kind of value after skill development. How do we weight meeting young and having children young? Are cities really the best facilities for this, or is it best to meet in a city then "build" (a home, a family) outside? The value of an extended social circle later in life - a strong community of practice that can be cultivated - in a city, with money, seems incredibly valuable to me.

is the best way to learn to build to do so without distractions? Is it important to have the physical space to build tools? How can this be reconciled with the compact efficiency (close to people, functional public transport, ease of access to commodities) that cities provide? Or is the point to make everything but what you make yourself difficult to access?

This is fascinating to me - Burke, by changing his name, assumed the identity of his work as his persona!

Why are Americans ugly? NYC's SOHO - and much of New York, including the financial district, Williamsburg, and most places in the southern part of the city - feel exceptional in this regard; the American tourists were easy to spot because their style and taste was so poor relative to the average resident of the spaces, and even among the visitors you could easily tell who fit and who didn't.

Does music sound better at the gym than at the club? How does the gym operate as a social space?

I sense better than clubs - club socialization is ephemeral, impulsive, hormonal, and difficult to hear or understand, while the gym is about self-improvement, admiration, mutual encouragement.

Ideal! Clothes should be used for everything... clothes should be lived in. Not sure about Rick's silk work, but a merino wool tee and some dryskin pants go a long way towards an outfit that's fit for every situation.

The welcome screen shouldn't exist... Why do we need to prioritize feature promotion (temp. adrenaline hit) over feature discovery (permanent benefit that rewards user ingenuity or navigation)?

Why do we provide incentives for unsustainable power and environmentally damaging cars like Teslas, but not to advance nuclear? Harnessing the atom is the only way we'll be able to scale to meet population demands.

Interfaces!

This is beautiful - to not only use romantic words in regular conversation, and to not only use them but to describe them concretely and with emotion, is a wonderful thing. I will adopt this.

We can only learn by using. The status quo for constructing housing is incredibly broken! This is not indifferent from dogfooding software - only by living with what we make can we learn to improve it.

Is it important for these spaces to be shared? Is it important for digital spaces to be shared?

Yes - it's impossible to design in isolation. We need immediate peers to reference and inspire us, people we can talk to and who can reassure us.

The pattern language is quite beautiful - giving users the power of a high level description language to apply to design, allowing designers, architects and other employees to implement the interface specified by a client. It's really quite simple to identify emotional and functional need by matching to some of a finite set of patterns, and then simple for the architect to identify a pattern as a need in the home.

This reminds me of home-made software and the imbalance of power that has been established between the user of the computer and the design of the interface; it's not at all true that people know what they want, or that one specific interface can be prescribed to fit all people. Rather, the user must have access to high level building blocks - or "patterns" - that they compose to make their computer a home.

We spend just as much time with our computers - if not more - than we do with our homes now, and I posit that the interface of the software plays just as pivotal of a role in the experience that someone has navigating their home. How do we build software that allows users to choose high level patterns and adapt their systems when choosing the patterns?

(An aside - it's insane to me that device manufacturers, especially new ones, are able to re-architect new physical interfaces for the devices but have to stick to the same software. This seems like the opposite of the dream of the computer; we're supposed to be able to run and change anything at any time, so why are we stuck using stock Android on every new device? It's so hard to build software that new innovations happen with hardware reinvention rather than software. This is insane.)

To own isn't just to design - it is to occupy

If one can't reach economies of scale, and rewards of industrial manufacturing aren't aligned with the rewards necessary to provide well-lived lives at a low cost, then the housing projects don't provide solutions! We can see this now with all of America's housing projects. Undesirable places to live make undesirable lives, and subjecting people to them is criminal.

1. Housing Shortage
2. Sterility of Mass-Produced Housing
3. High Price of Housing

A lot of the lack of fascination with science - hard research - today, disillusionment with research papers, and the existence of so many 'pop science' publications seems a result of this oversimplification. It's understandable that ideas can be beautiful without embellishment, but it's very possible to present ideas in clear and concise ways and add additional flavor - infusing writing with the passion behind these ideas and discoveries. Where has the wonder, the optimism gone?

Is it important to hold people who spread words with outsized influences accountable? How, and to what degree? How do we create external sources of truth to hold people accountable?

This stack of signals is present in any field and can impede progress. It's okay to be boring and make a bet in the past for a safer future!

This is a terrible argument!

1. Construct a definitional framework based on disproven hypotheses, like learning styles.
2. Insist that the other participant operates in this framework that is not well-defined, and refute their claims because they're handled by the definitions to be an exceptional case and not worth considering.

This is beautiful! I'd love to have such community social spaces available to host events. American facilities - and facilities everywhere, really - feel privatized, inaccessible to community members without means - but there are lots of reasons for people without means (like artists) to occupy large spaces and throw events!

Wild take from an academic, but they're correct about the hero evangelism here

Not sure if this is entirely true... there are ways to convert intelligence directly into market value, right?

Descriptive - but this is not what a BA should be!

How do we give people these tools? They've existed in small slices of potential - geocities, tumblr, etc. - but do not exist in broad strokes. Social media profiles don't cut it.

Should end users become coders? How can we improve the transitional experience of experts in other domains as they begin to use and customize software to fit their own needs?

Not exactly true - this work was living in research laboratories and technical demos rather than deployed as consumer software, and it is unlikely that the author was aware of these relationships - but it existed nonetheless!

This book looks beautiful - but I can't find it anywhere! How can I purchase it?

I love the book pages interspersed with lore of the author... the text is enriched by it, but without any direct connection drawn by the author, the user's left to speculate as to how Ann's childhood resulted in the strange work.

To be able to travel the world and collect library books or books to be sold is a wonderful dream. I can only dream of having the opportunity to collect such things in physical spaces. The future is the internet archive, though, and hoarding the contextless collections of PDFs that we can transfer instantly and for free around the world.

This is exactly what I love - the vision of the 1950s, the dream of the future, the endless technological optimism and forethought behind early science fiction, early speculative research, early government organisations focused on technology, and such. I want life to feel like this endless pursuit of future opportunity, happiness and success.

People should feel like they're living in the future. We get little inklings of this, but ultimately much of the technology we use is just as abrasive as it is beautiful.

This is fascinating! We have books designed to use the user - the reader - for manual computation?

How did this process work? Is this what I am - a conglomeration of all of these articles I'm reading on the internet? How do I become something more?

I love how the internet enables this, but somehow having a human in the loop with every request - reaching out to a librarian to consult the references to or of a current text - feels more gratifying, like you're taking someone else on this tree of an intellectual journey; they absorb little snippets and have some frame of reference of your train of thought, but never the whole picture.

Do this at random! Find things, search for them, and read them briefly. See what happens by breadth and identify subjects of depth.

Wow. This is for a tool that's in beta and has no determinism involved. There is a future here for tools like this to make a real impact.

It seems like there might be reason to shift from one code architecture to another, or some series of software design principles that are idiomatic in the target language but not in the source language, for fear of creating code that's not maintainable or easily understood by those familiar with work in the latter programming language. Does this matter if we're going to hide most of the work behind abstraction boundaries though?

How?

How do we validate that the code does the same thing? I'm not sure that manual review is sufficient - there are too many "gotchas" here. How can we bring in contracts, tests or other semi-verified methods of confirming that computation is accurate, operating in a (relatively) language agnostic way? Is this even possible?

How do we minimise the labor of the "developer in the loop" with these translations? To what degree can we automate porting to/from libraries? I don't think writing or simulating a compiler is so difficult here - large language models are just nondeterministic compilers of input text and corpuses of training data to output text, I suppose... how do we make them more deterministic, or verify parts of them, or make process improvements to them?

Do we really solve collective action problems by socializing everything? What does a solution to transportation issues that operates in the private sector - external to governments - look like? How is it funded if not with tax dollars?

Owning more things means taking care of more things, and taking care of things is a huge investment of time and energy. Public transportation lets me rely on others for maintenance and financially invest in a service that pays off for more people than just myself.

Except in major European cities - right?

This feels just like San Francisco and my experiences there - disastrous.

: |

If the specification is perfect then the specification is the product; it's just as prone to bugs as the product itself. We necessarily either allow undefined behavior or claim that the specification is a first implementation of the product, which is then re-implemented as the product itself.

Formal verification is vital for critical, core infrastructure and correct software

How do we expose these metrics to people themselves to provide these realizations without demonstrating the value provided - or lack thereof?

I want this but for tracking myself as an art project. Maya Mann(?) explores this!

if workers think their work is important they'll do the work need to provide extreme extreme endorphins and positive reinforcement money is an aside and doesn't matter after some amount

paul you need to go home and think about what matters

Removes bias from working processes - rather than who is more liked or respected, can look at more objective measures of productivity and excellence. Results often miss "glue" though - people who step in to teams to serve as vital communicators, filling information gaps and bridging the team together.

How useful is TikTok as a disseminator of information? I don't have enough knowledge of or experience with it to really know or understand. Wonder if tiktok recommendation seems to succeed where current search fails, or if we need new search systems to introduce "adjacent ideas" to current ideas and streams of thought to assist with thinking, framing, developing etc.

These analytics are fun - but iff they align with personal goals! Competition is so toxic.

No software can track perfectly - and none should be used to hold anyone personally accountable. Metrics don't align with stories!

How do we ensure that those with demonstrated interest can receive the education? What's the best way to disseminate ideas to the public with definitions and rigor? It feels like technology - new document formats that empower new kinds of internet wormholes, mathematics visualizations, and clarification of how some factors have been experimentally determined and "proven" will go a long way here.

How, though, do we accomplish this without looping those without the time to communicate outside of their communities of practice in the loop?

This is interesting! "Pop science" uses these handwavey phrases to distribute and democratize scientific innovation but in doing so loses much of the rigor that makes the ideas beautiful in the first place.

Clearly her life wasn't aligned with what makes her happy!

Healthcare systems and workers so often have to "clean up the mess" when our other governmental systems fail to care about and respect our people. The fact that operational changes to avoid so much downstream damage (and to improve the lives of people) haven't been made is at least in part a consequence of privatized healthcare.

If the US doesn't feel the cost of failing people earlier in the system in a material way (read: budget inefficiencies) they'll never "close the loop" or improve.

I love collecting on the internet! This is something truly inspirational.

figures

This writer (Mairead Case) is so, so lovely - I love the specificity of the vapid, consumerist examples here used to exemplify the insanity of the book. Great summary!

I want a website that feels like this

Learn more about PLATO! This is fascinating.

equally important is that this robot has agency greater than or equal to that of a human

• Myself Manifest - Margaret Chisman

What does this mean?

learn more about him!

Make an open source email client that provides this flexibility! Ultimately need some abstraction over communication systems like email or texting that's sufficiently flexible but adheres to the underlying protocols.

Build more snippets!

How can we build some application or protocol that communicates these social expectations? Would be cool to integrate a cooldown timer. gmail's reminder system is the closest approximation to this that I'm aware of.

Making a game requires constraints. Market conditions and unique opportunities supply the best constraints!

Game to dominate a market that hadn't been specced into before!

This isn't the way to build products! Identify the actual user and be honest about it. If it's just me then build something I will use; otherwise you'll pretend that the service is for people it's not actually for, then feel frustrated when the tool doesn't seem to align with those fake standards. Tools with specific technical stipulations that don't impact the end user in a measurable way are built for you and/or for learning.

What are these? I'd love to find out!

Would love to see this talk. How do we improve our software supply chain and ship sustainably and reliably?

My take is that it's usually fine to build most things in house against a small API surface.

Making an end-user company is a mistake from a technical, software engineering perspective because either you require a significant amount of engineering to re-build the high level interfaces that every company uses internally or you struggle to battle against an ever-growing API surface that you're programming against in addition to exposing a subset of that API to the end user to augment your own.

By contrast, streamlined systems are simple and elegant; they run in the background; they rely on interfaces that have been tried and true, and programming against those APIs often isn't as strict of a coupling as it seems. JS libraries become deeply embedded in work, but "boring" business processes typically program against Unix APIs that won't ever change.

This is the kicker. Halide wins on all fronts!

How do I avoid making decisions about what I'm eating? That seems absurdly difficult.

We emphasize that reframing the problem in a particular fashion is the novelty rather than some hard technical work that enables the solution. Hard technical work is often important and vital to accomplishing such reframing, but the reframing itself is what powers so many companies and initiatives today.

Why is this article important?

To assess the contribution of a quality systems paper to the literature and to the world, we assess prose and technical ideation and their impacts; these thought processes translate to making smart technical decisions, organizing priorities, and planning what to work on outside of academia.

I don't think I like this explicit highlighting. Like the paper analogue, it feels like something that users should do to augment existing documents (as I'm doing now with this annotation tool) rather than an assistive technology for reading. I should determine what's most important about the work, not the author!

It's their job to leverage prose and more subtle annotation to emphasize their points; by contrast, it's my job to decipher and distill novel information from the article - information that helps me accomplish some goal, build some additional mental context, or obtain some information to be used elsewhere.

I love the expressive annotations and citations throughout this page. The font and CSS are quite beautiful and do a great job of flattering the text and information without distracting you from the point. (For the most part: I find the references to papers to stand out more than the rest of the text, which is strange to me - the name of the processor and the citation are not the most important aspects of the article by any stretch of the imagination, and do not deserve the same highlighting as other facts and figures... further, the fact that links are highlighted in bright blue by default is a bit of a historical accident - we chose blue as the default link color to emphasize and advertise connections to other spaces, but in documents and prose that now dominate over basic web showcases, the body text is far more important than the inline citations and other characteristics that stand only to support existing content rather than to encourage people to navigate away).

Best text I've seen on a professor's professional site!

This is confusing to me. This is how things should work by default, because we know (do we?) that they're both pulling in the same stdio.h. Right? There is likely a case where different libraries depend on different versions and such, but ultimately if you're using external headers it's quite difficult to manage that in the background. Maybe manual escape hatch was better than some sort of structured package management approach here.

note to self

I want to learn more about this person! What's the best way to distribute social identity so that I could?

When will I have this attitude? Will I ever? This always startles me to read. At this stage in my life I feel like I can change the world in six weeks if I will it.

Floating point considered bad

What does this mean, exactly?

The point of poetry to me is that it is human and reflects the ideas and experiences of the person behind it, so to me "poetry by a robot" is meaningless...

TODO: look into algorithmic poetry in more depth! What is there to explore here?

On automating creative work; increasingly relevant now that we have AI systems like DALL-E, trained on the work of artists over thousands of years, that attempt to mass produce generative creative work corresponding to a text-based prompt.

What's my story? How do I best angle it?

This makes a lot of sense...

I can never live in a place like this

How ergonomic is (uninteractive) theorem proving within a comment form? Are there IDE plugins for this or do these functions result in some verifier runtime error?

Get out of the way!

Isn't this what is advocated for below when explaining how to compose a pluggable interface without callbacks? I feel like introducing a callback is fine.

Example code isn't cheap or quick - no matter how you represent it, this code sets the tone for canonical project use. If it's not properly written then (1) the library should be simple enough to make the canonical usage obvious, so you've messed up, and (2) you should spend more time using your library to understand how to make it both idiomatic and intuitive.

The real answer isn't to take screenshots of exports; it's to isolate software environments to preserve exactly the conditions in which the original work was produced, storing this information with the work itself. Example: storing a flake.nix and corresponding flake.lock file within a repository, reproducible so long as NixOS is around and runs on the system.

What is causing this?

Impeccable - Rubin makes it all happen. The ultimate product manager?

I want to feel like this.

Move to a position hat best fits and respects your capacity and work ethic, and continue to move into new positions. Demonstrate growth and continue to find it.

Rework ideas! Visualize things in different ways! Redefine roles. Ideally the best design or solution is the one that implicitly eliminates most of the problems.

Reminiscent of the mythical man-month - changing strategy is no different from adding additional developers, reorganizing the team, etc - and depending on your definition of strategy may encompass all of those things.

How can an environment like this be built? We must both respect the freedom of coworkers and constantly motivate one another towards a goal; to impart the incredible importance that doing more work has to the company. It's cool to romanticise work, actually, because work can change the world and improve the lives of people.

Slow software, by this definition, is both technically slow and design slow - if a design flow impedes the user from taking an action ergonomically, it's just as bad as if the program is not performant.

Unfortunately, most programs handle both incorrectly - they don't provide an ergonomic way to accomplish a desired task, and they introduce a ton of computational latency when trying to do so. Latency is bad! But design is lower hanging fruit.

Saves time and performance relative to attempting to compress the grain! Brilliant.

or "big ball of mud" - a software system without a perceivable architecture. (Wikipedia)

Explicitly obfuscating critical external access information - hitting a database, making a system call, pulling data from another URL - is an anti pattern that hurts the end user.

As a programmer, I need to constantly develop a threat model of the systems I'm combining in my program. Will this database invocation trigger an exception? What about this memory allocation? Can I safely send this packet across the network without disruption?

We need to model not only the actions themselves in our heads, but also two other things: the exceptional behavior that could come from our code and the performance implications of a particular action. If I don't know, then I can't program effectively.

The case can be made that performance doesn't matter until it's profiled, but some operations can be ludicrously inefficient - and those need to be explicitly noted.

It's so clear that this inconsistency is a public health hazard and incurs significant mental load - no different from the imperial system of measurement. Why is this okay?

If our platforms were easily modifiable by end users, we wouldn't have to - these communities are deliberately and consistently under-served by technology companies who will never find accessibility to be a priority in terms of the profit margin, so the only alternative is to allow end users to freely modify the user interfaces to the products they use - augmenting existing interfaces with desired features independent of large-scale market demand.

Government regulation to require specific product accommodations might be limiting - but requiring modifiability of interfaces to enable accommodating software development from third parties is another story.

What does our medical system really incentivize? Our government? I really don't understand the misallocation of resources here towards objects that aren't even locally optimal for their ideas

Today we have 'freemium' website services for this!

<3

How does it feel to sink a year of work into something that's scrapped and will never be used or seen? I can't imagine working for such a company for this reason. The scale and reliability are promising, sure - but to build something that will never see the light of day, to dream of and work on something for years that people will never use, feels soul-crushing.

Most powerful coder. The determination this takes is incredibly admirable.

This is really just global messages with DOM diff - difference between this and reactive model is that the latter listens for changes in data while the former explicitly sends messages upon user interaction to directly affect the displayed tree (rather than constructing a dependency graph from data and resolving it whenever a data transformation is committed by a user action)

1. User clicks button
2. New process is created
3. Debugger is started for new process to step through the running modification
4. Trace is printed to show program path
5. Result is displayed if unsuccessful from thread; as it's isolated, main system is unimpacted

The workspace is end-user modifiable in real time! This is the kind of flexibility we're lacking from most systems and tooling. Web apps don't present interfaces for modification in a transparent fashion (the console would work great if not for all of this transpilation/obfuscation business...)

Kansas is the earliest precursor to works like Miro, Figma, Docs, Notion, etc... as a live interactive environment that encourages collaborative work. This was the idea to fuse videoconferencing and real-time interaction with one another to the desktop, presenting all users with the same workspace and views for facilitating better real-time interaction between poeple over webcam.

They'll all break when we have a unifying theory : )

I wish these were truly interactive rather than just images - but in this respect I've been seriously spoiled by interactive demos. Strive to invest such a level of attention in my won work - all of my documents and essays on the internet should, to a degree, be interactive (but optionally so!).

Abstraction and design become more and more important! Unstructured play becomes more systematic and rigorous the more advanced that play systems become, but it's vital for this to happen naturally rather than prescribing it.

This is very hard to get right, and children learn this skill through trial and error; most adults I talk to working in engineering either don't have the proper foresight to design for extensibility or they're fascinated with structure and implement such a rigorous system before filling in the details with a product that actually works.

Related: the bigger the structure of the project, the less relevant the details of the system are and the more important and transferable the idea behind them becomes. Important to have a broad mission that we can satisfy with any technology and choose the most practical and enjoyable outcome.

Is this still true today now that children are influenced by smartphones and proprietary systems from such an early age?

Modeling the ideas and incentives of others to determine what they would want based on their mission and perspectives helps us fine-tune our own!

Life goals - software researcher, sports coach and part-time teacher. How do I get here?

This is the way to go - employees should be coerced into the office with benefits rather than explicitly required to be present. Working in-person vs. remote is a cost assessment like any other, trading time and attention with one group of people for another, and it's okay to offer amenities to alter this balance!

This is why we need to build towards proper coworking spaces, public and otherwise, that can to a degree offer potential for social interaction. I see a rule that requires an employee to spend time in-office as a restriction that keeps an employee at a specific office, rather than giving them the flexibility to mingle with other people with different careers, goals and work.

To me, the potential for interdisciplinary networking across skills and companies provides far more value than spending every day in a room with a bunch of software nuts (not that they're not fun to spend time with - but diversity of ideas is good!).

Goal for next year: avoid falling into this trap! Build social networks outside of work and augment them with coworkers, but don't rely on work for social purposes. Mentorship is very valuable, but it can be managed either remotely and within work capacity or through maintaining work relationships in person but without stipulations.

i want to cry

It's important to first understand how something was done and why before removing or shifting away from it; if the point isn't understood, the rework or reconstruction is likely to be just as bad - if not worse - because it will surely have an overlapping set of flawed and exploitable issues.

Good design!

If I want to express myself I should make it myself!

We build what demand exists for, which in America is a terrible local optimum - I have a car so I want a road! I have no public space so I want to own a private backyard! - etc.

I disagree with the America-centric view of this piece. It's absolutely correct that the US has homogenized too early and without culture or taste - we found so much money so late as we ascended to a world power in the past 100 or so years without setting real expectations for how a life should be lived to last. This is not to say that these same trends are not perpetrated basically everywhere in the world; new buildings, designs and businesses are homogenizing for the internet regardless of where they are or what they're doing, and the fact that American businesses have a disproportionate impact on the world stage is only part of the issue here. The internet is breeding homogenization far faster than any individual country's culture is able to.

I'm sorry to hear that someone feels this way! Eating is an opportunity to enjoy yourself three times a day, and we'll only ever be able to have a specific number of meals before death. Every meal should be valued and the food treasured. Please do not reach for the microwave next time.

Given the number of platforms that these logos are made for, companies are optimising their logos and brand names to display in a clear fashion on every and every platform.

The good: homogenizing logos emphasizes the words behind them. The bad: Everything looks the same! It's boring! Where is the expression of fashion design? Of design at all? What user testing told these people to look just like everyone else with a few letters' difference?

Is the issue the translation of the problem domain into such formulas rather than the formulas themselves? Ideally if we have some way of formulating an expression in a deterministic way s.t. it represents the problem that is also in our brains, surely we can find some satisfying assignment(s) within the constraints that classically solve the problems.

How do we avoid "being lazy"? In the thirty years since this opinion was written, "classical AI" - or deterministic symbol pushing - has seen little development and advancement, whereas neural networks and statistical methods have undergone a "winter" and an entire retransformation with the advent of GPUs and application of an incredible amount of computing power to training such systems.

What gives deterministic methods power here, then? How do we scale these to fit problems we haven't yet encountered?

Far easier to build a tight-knit, narrow system to solve problems than a loose, unproven system that can generalize. Expert systems are, most of the time, far too narrow-minded to generalize to unknowns.

That is, not coupled to neural networks or some abstract statistical methods, or to the symbol pushing of expert systems; rather, AI is a problem that has a variety of solutions, each of which suits different use cases. Example: NLP needs statistical modeling to keep up with the evolving nature of language and to accomodate slight variation in dialect. Routing problems require symbol manipulation tactics because we require a precise answer regardless of complexity, and symbols let us 'cheat'

This is what I've aimed to do with JOSS! These actions can and should be taken at 'edit time', rather than compile time or runtime. It's particularly interesting to see how the code will compile so that users can worry about optimisation if they so choose.

50 years later, they still do!

Narrative strategy is the practice of writing prose for marketing, proposing and describing ideas that are used for business purposes. It's important for these narratives to tell consistent stories, have consistent messages and personalities, etc - all drawing back to this mission or thesis that the business attempts to portray, even when this mission is evolving.

It's so, so easy to find solutions to problems that don't exist (classically: social inconvenience? let's make an app for that!) by approaching the world with a solutions-founded mindset.

It's in the interests of the shareholders to grow the company, but not necessarily that of the employees. I'd argue that the role of the employee is to sustain the underlying goals of the company by producing valuable work - and the job of the company management is to expand the potential of the company to do more and be more. To do this they hire more people to serve more roles or reallocate existing people to new positions.

Why we supposedly need this government and social contract - without a common power there is no place for industry or collaboration because there is no trust! Modern ideas of a "trustless society" fall flat in this way - there is no way forward without depending on community wellness and trust to accomplish work, no matter how hard computer libertarians work on doing everything themselves.

I wish this were viewable as an article.

Oh well: - Cameras - and thus facial recognition - is absolutely everywhere. They track people anywhere and everywhere. - 2.5 billion facial images stored at a given time in Fujian (a quite small province in China!) - Many of these cameras are present in private businesses in private spaces. - "Cameras should go in places where people fulfill their most common needs." - WeChat collects everything and can associate global data with local data. Trackers in real life imitate cellular and wifi signals to pick up cell and wifi pings, checking on phone communications. Many use proxies for real networks to indirectly track information. - Social Media -> Contact Company -> Device ID -> Look up position of device -> Apps installed, phone information. They look for Uyghur to Chinese dictionaries installed as apps on their phones to identify the minority! Frightening. T-Mobile is doing this as well... - China is collecting as much biological information - fingerprints, DNA, speech - from everyone, in order to analyze and track voice prints, voice recognition, etc. These are associated with personal identifiers, iris patterns, etc.; longer-term tracking solutions for people throughout their lifetimes.

Why do we decide to make it traumatic? Why is it important to imbue such manual labor in the pre-rigorous stage with examples and memorised formulae?

We don't need intelligence to facilitate people talking to each other > : )

I'm not sure how to feel about this! On one hand, this scales incredibly well today - we have to make all of these stupid manual customer service calls to robots, etc. Generally speaking, given that most companies have reasons to expose natural language interfaces to their problems (I may want to ask a bank a question about my tax circumstances, or how much money I have, or what benefits I'm eligible for, for example), it might make sense to expose entire APIs as simply speech act interfaces - that is, the computers can talk to one another in natural language just as easily as a human can! This makes it far easier to develop consistent interfaces, though you do lose lots of precision to the statistical models necessary to model language. (We need a predictive, statistical model because languages have edge cases, users don't always speak in a canonical fashion, and what the canonical fashion at a given time is changes over time - so we can't just bake some definitions in the model! It has to adapt).

Hey!!!

Computers are decaying...

https://danluu.com/input-lag/

This reminds me of my preferred approach to UI development. I can't get behind using design tools to completely architect solutions - I'd rather write the HTML myself and explore different elements, then pick the best ideas that emerge and continue with them! In this way embracing the idiosyncrasies of the web platform is a wonderful experience.

However, I'm not sure how we tolerate system specific peculiarities in other ways - it just doesn't make sense to rewrite every program for every device everywhere, which is why we have abstractions and standards. Business logic should always work the way it's designed!

Build technology that is acutely aware of its own limitations. How much memory does this program have access to left? How much power is this computer receiving? Will it run out of battery soon? Can we still serve this website?

Data like this can be presented to end users of the software - if broadcast over a server kind of system - or can provide immediate feedback to the computer - say, a scheduler - to decide what tasks to run when if there are many batch jobs to run queued in the background in order to optimize resource usage.

The question becomes, then, how to ensure all of this reading is done in a performant fashion and whether it's worthwhile to evaluate processes based on their resource consumption rather than performing some random OOM killing nonsense to preserve the device.

The best way to handle this really depends on the computer, but it's very clear that we can't morally build technology - or, specifically, write code - without acknowledging its resource consumption.

It's okay for documents to be documents and text editors to edit text without embellishment. I love turning animations off on my computer. They're "fun", but at the cost of what?

Why? I don't understand the fascination with it. I love squares. I love user interfaces that feel clean and straightforward and fine-lined and don't require processing my feelings at every single beziered corner.

I'm more used to interfaces like this - but they are unfortunately all I have been exposed to, really!

I do miss the old idea of opening a directory that contains some files with music in them and playing that music. A music streaming app is really just a file system browsing app that has tags (playlists) in addition to folders (artist, then album), file previews and live streaming of files from Spotify's computer to yours.

They actively work to deprecate streaming APIs. Why? I just want to use a silly ncmpcpp interface or a thing that lets me navigate lists and folders. Businesses should be allowed to do whatever they want with user interfaces, but they should allow users to make and choose their own user interfaces as they see fit.

I love the text formatting here!

Hovering is generally undesirable unless an action is triggered instantly - otherwise, it slows the user down! Hovering should only be used to hint at what a user could do with the item hovered - i.e. shading a button to make it appear clickable - it should never be used to allow a user to do things that they haven't been able to without hovering for some period of time.

Is HN a good place to provide feedback to iterate on products? It might be worth spending some more time on!

Why do applications change without informing the user?

I suspect that many of these "silly" or "fake" bug fixes are to cover up serious engineering errors - if the app admits flaws or faults, people will be less likely to use it going forward. Strict improvements are fine to post in "what's new", but bugs? Given that end users can't do anything about them, it makes sense to obfuscate them - not to avoid overwhelming consumers, but rather to save face and prevent loss of sales.

Sorry, but the angle here likely isn't to obfuscate changes from the user - at least in this specific message and others like it. It's to obfuscate frightening flaws from terrible software development practices from end users. (Sometimes, also, teams just don't know what was wrong but found a fix for it in a roundabout fashion - it crashes daily? cron job! - and I would honestly rather not know how often this is done).

The snacks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!