jmbwell

One characteristic that differentiates contemporary design from all our grandparents’ houses is transience rather than permanence. Design immediately following WWI was largely about calm and comfort; the emergence of the den, cottage-cozy, spaces for reading, listening to the radio, etc — stability, calm, people wanted everything the war wasn’t. Immediately following WWII was different in different parts of the world but especially in North America there were all these industrial manufacturers wanting to sell The Future, and you get on the one hand gleaming kitchen-forward spaces and two car garages and rooms for entertaining. Less built-in bookshelves, more built-in HiFi. And on the other hand, the sort of refuge or counterpoint, more integration with nature, more natural materials, exposed timber and vaulted ceilings and giant windows, frank lloyd wright. And in all these cases, the ideas were rooted in stability and permanence. The space was designed for its uses and its inhabitants.

More recently, it’s less about the buyers and more about the sellers. Design is optimized for flipping, which means fast market movement, which means generic. Yes there is always cookie-cutter, especially in postwar housing boom. Modern markets have just embraced that more fully. Offices don’t embody the tenants identity, or if they do it’s the same as all the other companies “in the space.” Everyone wants to look like Google, at best, otherwise it’s about commodity layouts, finishes, and styles… platforms for cubicles and bulk furniture purchases that can be amortized over the lease. Housing is similar… design for a family that will scatter once the kids leave home and the parents retire elsewhere. Or the inverse… design for Airbnb until the owners are ready to retire and move in or sell off. In any case the inhabitants are a secondary consideration to returns on investment. Design is a cost center to a financial concern.

Unless you’re rich enough not to care about any of this, in which case there’s finally time and space and money for design, but none of it really matters

Yeah this is all very regional too. Row houses in London and brownstones in New York or whatever won’t have front lawns as a function of density, but may have back yards or gardens, which may or may not be a function of producing your own food, which is all tied up in different experiences of war, while certainly countryside estates are for form more than function, while post war housing in the midwestern US was in part a build-on-your-lot market with houses literally ordered from a Sears catalog…

There’s definitely more to the story and there are myriad factors.

I guess I mean treat it as a clear first class feature. Right now most browsers treat it as an arcane error. I’m thinking more “This is the first time you’re connecting to this site. Do you trust it?”

And later if something changes, then they can do the whole DOING SOMETHING NASTY! thing, which is effectively the experience today

I don’t know much in this space, but I find myself wishing there was a dead simple self hosted CA solution and also that trust on first use (à la ssh) was A Thing for self-managed root certs in client implementations. TOFU is such an elegant, good-enough solution for these use cases. Fixed deployment is always still an option, but in this day and age it feels so much like we are unnecessarily still dealing with solved problems

I’m so almost here. The thing holding me back is projects that don’t do their own migrations reliably. Through no fault of their own, perhaps, though at this point I would argue LLMs should eliminate any good reason not to have alembic integrated or something. And even Home Assistant is bizarrely averse to fully automated system wide updates. Updating system and core and addons all independently is bonkers. But yes, the simplest implementation is often the best

I just caught myself thinking Pantos shouldn’t have answered the phone. Not in a blame the victim way, more in that never answering the phone is just good opsec at this point. The phone, the door, just don’t talk to a cop without a lawyer. They don’t come to you to be helpful to -you-.

Except in this case in a broader sense, we know about something we wouldn’t have otherwise

Who benefits from all this brilliant deal making who doesn’t already have plenty of money? If we are going to invent money out of paperwork maneuvers, you’d think we could invent a way to fund healthcare and schools.

I might argue that generating and decoding an actual NTSC signal, as the OP project does, would be true in ways that a generative model based on all of that would not be.

I sincerely appreciate this fidelity to fidelity

One of my favorite artifacts of the pre-platform era of the web. Valuable stuff presented clearly … all clearly handmade with care. Not a monetized journey conversion experience in sight

Exploring and at times debating is how we figure things out and share ideas.

What’s pointless is doing so in pursuit of winning rather than understanding

There’s the other direction too. You only get a couple toggles, and something you actually need is behind both, so you can’t not get all notifications

I find this really effective. Also, “ask me questions about this one at a time until I say to stop”

I’ve also moved all mine to Europe. There are ample alternatives to us-based commercial cloud.

The regulatory environment is different, so it’s worth understanding the ramifications as far as what’s expected of you if you’re operating in a different jurisdiction. It’s nothing that can’t be handled, but some may find they have to care about things they haven’t before

It’s a great exercise for shoring up independence from extractive providers

Maybe I should have AI write up an article too. Honestly, it’s not just rare, it quietly matters

Indeed. Understand the principles, you can work with just about any tool

I’ve been finding it difficult to hand things over to an LLM completely, and I wonder if this is part of it. I’ll let it help me organize at the beginning, and then I’ll have it come through and refactor or review, but the crafting part is where I want to spend my time. I love hitting tab but it seems like every time I do, I get this sensation like I’ve sort of time-warped into the future by a few seconds, and I wonder what I’d have written if the LLM hadn’t done it for me. At which point I’ll never know.

Great for generating volumes of output. Less great for going into a flow state and coming out with something that looks like I made it, something that I see my hand in

And yeah, maybe it’s because I never quite get into a flow state when I do it this way. Hmm

The language of drama and import without meaningful substance. Words statistically likely to be used in a segue, regardless of the preceding or subsequent point. Particularly effective when it seems like you’re getting let in on a secret. Really fatiguing to read

A writing teacher once excoriated me for saying that something was important. “Don’t tell me it’s important, show me, and let me decide, and if you do your job I’ll agree”

I don’t know how a completion can tell when it needs to do this. Mostly so far it doesn’t seem capable

It does seem like an LLM’s ability to see a constraint and just say “I’ll write a quick helper to work around it” kinda wrecks some older-world assumptions. We know how to deal with remote human attackers, remote bot attackers, and to some extent local human attackers, but local self-coding bot attackers lately needs more attention than it used to. It’s not even the same category as malware

I’ve been guilty myself of building containers where everything runs as root on the assumption that the container was the relevant domain

If LLMs are involved, I can’t tell whether OS level security is suddenly more relevant, or suddenly utterly obsolete

I understood it to mean, GitHub is being crushed by LLM/AI/Agentic code review and submission, not GitHub’s code itself

What I’m not seeing here but I am seeing with the Linux kernel is, most of the automatically submitted code is irrelevant or not useful

(Maybe that’s what you were getting at, apologies)

These days, I’ll take Mad magazine

I struggle not to have a cynical take these days. Of course he cared about the ROI. The ROI is access to an underserved market, a halo effect, a new community of adherents, a new reason for customers to cross the moat into the ecosystem… a modest investment with a durable long term return in multiple categories.

I appreciate that it’s a win-win for Apple and for its customers, and I firmly believe that accessibility features serve everyone eventually. I’m glad that there are some billionaires who also see it that way.

I guess I just wish we didn’t have to rely on rare cases of billionaires finding it in their own best interest to happen to serve the rest of us. Especially when the actual accessibility work and everything else is actually done by a whole class of people that never make headlines just for leaving their jobs and being replaced.

“Brand” and “branding” is arguably the most important thing -not- mentioned in the article. The commercial incentives to differentiate are powerful enough to kick a lot of UX out of the way.

Now that all we do is “experience” a “journey,” it’s more about the user doing what the app wants instead of the other way around

macOS is slightly more consistent among apps that use system controls, but the more custom the app, or the more React Native or Electron it is, the less predictable it is

Infuriatingly, some apps try to be smart — only one line, return submits; more than one line, return is a new line, and command-return submits; but command-return on just one line beeps an error.

Years of muscle memory are useless, so now I’m reaching for the mouse when I need to be clear about my intent

So much is solved when developers just use the provided UI controls, so much well-studied and carefully implemented behavior comes for free

I get it. I also know customer service is a pretty low paying job for something that involves being yelled at all day

I get as frustrated as anyone, but it’s not the fault of the person whose job it is to take my call.

I remember once on the phone with Comcast I just explained the situation and jokingly said look, if it helps, feel free to tell ‘em I’m yelling and screaming. The guy laughed. An engineer called me an hour later with a firmware update for my modem.

Sometimes there’s no winning. But sometimes it helps if you can put people on your team

Yes, and this has been the case for years. Cnet, ZDnet, PCmag have been user-hostile since long before AI summaries. Pop-ups, “before you go,” back jacking, all the worst.

The Verge is a surprise because it is relatively new and was relatively free of this crap for a long time.

They’re all just empty brands now. They totally caved to advertisers, and now only advertisers care about them.

I dare say AI’s popularity is a symptom of all this more than a cause.

This. The truth is still putting on its shoes and all that

I note that Ken Fisher did post an editor’s note, Benj did publicly own up to it, and all of this was mentioned in the article.

In writing code, as in writing poetry, the mechanical labor is 5% writing, 45% editing, and 50% reading. But the only thing that makes it yours is you.

Color schemes voluntarily added by the user to an app like vim, great.

All the more reason for developers to keep the app itself responsive to the user’s environment by default.

Don’t bake in elaborate visual choices. It’s a usability thing first and a style thing somewhere much farther down the list.

Keep it simple from the factory. Don’t get in the way of customization. Let the user’s environment do the work of adapting it to the user.

I think fantastical isn’t totally inaccurate, and I’m not being snarky (for once). The personal observations and sometimes colorful language has been something I like about Ars. Benj in particular, with his warm tributes to BBSes. Or Jim Salter’s very human networking articles. The best stuff on Ars is both technically sound and rich with human experience. “Fantastical” taken to mean something like, capturing the thrills and aspirations that emerge from our contact with technology, seems fair I think.

I’ll be interested in finding out more about just what the hell happened here. I hardly think of Benj or Kyle as AI cowboy hacks, something doesn’t add up