bandoti

Curious to see how this goes. It seems to me it’s hard to match reality—for example, books, book shelves, pencils, drafting tables, gizmos, keyboards, mouse, etc. Things with tactile feedback. Leafing through a book typeset on nice paper will always be a better experience than the best of digital representations.

AR will always be somewhat awkward until you can physically touch and interact with the material things. It’s useful, sure, but not a replacement.

Haptic feedback is probably my favorite iPhone user experience improvement on both the hardware and software side.

However, I will never be able to type faster than on my keyboard, and even with the most advanced voice inputs, I will always be able to type longer and with less fatigue than if I were to use my voice—having ten fingers and one set of vocal cords.

All options are going to be valid and useful for a very long time.

I recommend folks give “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” a read. Another good book is “Negotiating Rationally” (see below).

If the core developers/maintainers are putting in thousands of hours over several years, and a patch comes along, it is rightfully at the discretion of those doing 80-95% of the work.

But as negotiating rationally discusses, we value our work more than others—and there’s some emotional attachment. We need to learn to let that go and try to find the best solution, and be open to the bigger picture.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Negotiating-Rationall...

Seurat created beautiful works of art composed of thousands of tiny dots, painted by hand; one might find it meditational with the right mindset.

Some might also find laziness itself dreadfully boring—like all the Microsoft employees code-reviewing AI-Generated pull requests!

https://blog.stackademic.com/my-new-hobby-watching-copilot-s...

Agreed. I think engineers though following simple Test-Driven Development procedures can write the code, unit tests, integration tests, debug, etc for a small enough unit by default forces tight feedback loops. AI may assist in the particulars, not run the show.

I’m willing to bet, short of droid-speak or some AI output we can’t even understand, that when considering “the system as a whole”, that even with short-term gains in speed, the longevity of any product will be better with real people following current best-practices, and perhaps a modest sprinkle of AI.

Why? Because AI is trained on the results of human endeavors and can only work within that framework.

Here’s a few problems I foresee:

1. People get lazy when presented with four choices they had no hand in creating, and they don’t look over the four and just click one, ignoring the others. Why? Because they have ten more of these on the go at once, diminishing their overall focus.

2. Automated tests, end-to-end sim., linting, etc—tools already exist and work at scale. They should be robust and THOROUGHLY reviewed by both AI and humans ideally.

3. AI is good for code reviews and “another set of eyes” but man it makes serious mistakes sometimes.

An anecdote for (1), when ChatGPT tries to A/B test me with two answers, it’s incredibly burdensome for me to read twice virtually the same thing with minimal differences.

Code reviewing four things that do almost the same thing is more of a burden than writing the same thing once myself.

The thing is though, this story is a metaphor for life we’re living right now. Consider up in Canada the paper mills that were built near water streams, dumping mercury into indigenous people's food.

Many of which corporations exploited and/or mislead chiefs into believing the project would be safe.

Same premise, different package.

Given this anecdote I can imagine doctors having AI access to a network of the latest studies will certainly help better inform everyone.

Ultimately, doctors are the experts doing the studies, but AI being there to help will certainly add value.

Avoiding any percentage of misdiagnoses is a huge win and time saver.

Only time will tell! But it’s worth a try.

Personally, I don’t bother searching because I only consume the headlines, on other news sites too, come to think of it. There’s lots of interesting things people post but frankly I’d rather pay for a good book on any subject.

hides from the dreaded downvoters

I used to spend more time browsing when reading an actual newspaper or magazine. The discourse on opinion pieces and such is more thought out too—many people, myself included, post too quickly before thinking because we’re always on the go.

Something about the online experience consuming news is less satisfying. Perhaps a hacker out there can set up a print version of HN archives, and print it on a Gutenberg Press. :)

Lots of nice thoughts that I agree with. But there is a lot of value creation in AI as well, beyond building things.

For example, how can doctors save time and spend more time one-on-one with patients? Automate the time-consuming, business-y tasks and that’s a win. Not job loss but potential quality of life improvement for the doctors! And there are many understaffed industries.

The balancing point will be reached. For now we are in early stages. I’m guessing it’ll take at least a decade or two for THE major breakthrough—whatever that may be. :)

Please consider some folks might be new to A*, and perhaps even HN, so maybe this is the first time they’ve seen it! :)

Also, I have ten books on perspective drawing, and my understanding isn’t complete without all ten of them

Or, if I’m teaching a subject on A*, perhaps ONE of those articles conveys the materials best for my students.

Thank you for providing links to the others though! I’m sure it will be helpful for someone.

It seems the way to go would be to open source the SaaS code to ensure that longevity. The folks at Penpot have a good thing going with that—most people will use the SaaS offering but it’s available for self-hosting.

One of the difficulties of course is notarizing/signing the apps and so-forth. Perhaps some Web3 solutions could help as well.

OR, another option would be like what PICO-8 does (or flash I guess)—release the runtime and distribute the “carts” or apps. :)

Still, it’s pretty complex creating a trusted distribution network outside of SaaS. Definitely could work though it’s been done before!

[1] https://penpot.app/

[2] https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

This is too much for me now haha.

A restaurant menu contains hamburgers, hotdogs, meatballs. A UI menu is represented by abstract icons of the items contained within a restaurant menu.

Now I am starting to like the hamburger menu after all… perhaps more as satire though. :)

For what it’s worth, ellipsis is the best of the bunch, because it means the same thing as in the written language, and is concise enough to use as a button that suggests what the action does.

Well, actually the three bars are now two: the cool kids have replaced hamburger with a sausage roll.

See https://apple.com

I understand and agree to an extent with common use.

However, it stands that language is more specific and unambiguous—thus better suited to communicate an action.

There’s also the problem of the plethora of OTHER icons which use horizontal bars to cause even more cognitive load.

And then, there are many people who have not learned hamburger menu since childhood, and thus the burden is even greater!

Well, to put it in perspective, consider these three words:

Menu Settings Notepad

If these are actionable buttons, the message is encoded and decoded by viewers.

Three bars means what, exactly? There’s the cognitive load.

Interesting—I guess build quality and certain technologies that don’t change much makes supply-and-demand takes over.

Any symbolic visual takes time for our brains to decode. When compared to language which we’ve spent our entire lives decoding and which comes much naturally, the cognitive burden is much higher.

In addition the three bars are as mundane of a composition as you can get, so it doesn’t capture the eye well to begin with. Typically the eye gets pulled to more visually complexity.

But ultimately it boils down to the decoding idea—language is the ultimate “codec” of human communication.

The hamburger menu is a pet peeve of mine! It takes much less cognitive load to simply read the word “menu”.

Also, it used to be important when screens were nowhere near as wide but now there’s no longer any reason to use it the way it is.

Perhaps it is permissible on a busy UI with many buttons, but that job was taken by the ellipses, which also takes less cognitive burden!

Good premise for a cyberpunk novel. I recommend keeping the weird chins though, because plastic surgery makes anything possible!

I’m sure someone has done this, but it would be interesting to study the overall tech landscape and compare which technology has sort of retained its value, depreciated, or increased in value—and how long those phases take. Even as far back as things like cast-iron printing presses and such. I mean also value in terms of usage not necessarily monetary.

The cycles we go through where a new tech supplants an old one, people thinking it’s the way of the future, and the old processes maybe forgotten for a while. Some might come back, others completely obsolescent. Still others the old tech might be superior to new—but more expensive (like old hard-wood window panes) and not sustainable.

Nice I would like to explore KaiOS more. I have been thinking these days: what is the bare minimum people need today in a mobile digital experience.

Browser, phone, email/contacts, maps, payment, authentication, file manager, networking (NFC, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, cellular).

Seems like with the progression of web APIs and WASM, most of this functionality can live in the browser.

I think it’s time folks dust off their library cards :)

Or support an open source AI model.

I stopped using ChatGPT when it started littering my conversation with emojis. It acts like one of those overzealous kids on Barney.

I find as time goes on I am less-and-less excited about mobile releases. I’ve had a smartphone since the Google Nexus 1. The desktop experience is always better, and a good book is even more inviting.

Curious what other folks are feeling. A lot of these tools seem like useless frivolity.

Meanwhile, I have family who constantly get confused whether the iOS phone icon is FaceTime or the “real” phone; and I have to do multiple taps instead of one to make a FaceTime call—and Apple is busy making Liquid Glass, for what?

It’s going to be really interesting to see how this UI paradigm pans out. I think this captures a shift toward the extreme in responsive, fluid, convergent, whatever-you-want-to-call-it, design.

We’ve had books/scrolls for thousands of years, laid out in beautiful proportion, and now it has all melted in the oven!

It’s going to be really interesting to see how this UI paradigm pans out. I think this captures a shift toward the extreme in responsive, fluid, convergent, whatever-you-want-to-call-it, design.

We’ve had books/scrolls for thousands of years, laid out in beautiful proportion, and now it has all melted in the oven!

Thank you for the links I will take a closer look at XNU. It’s neat to see how these projects influence each other.

Another reason it matters is they might have done it differently which could inspire future improvements. :)

I like to read bibliographies for that reason—to read books that inspired the author I’m reading at the time. Same goes for code and research papers!

Thank you—I’ll give that a read. :)

Not sure about that Liquid Glass idea.

Ultimately UI widgets are rooted in reality (switches, knobs, doohickeys) and liquid glass is Salvador-Dali-Esque.

Imagine driving a car and the gear shifter was made of liquid glass… people would hit more grannies than a self-driving Tesla.