mbaytas

immediately ordered the book

fascinating checkout flow

Improving model capability with more and more data is what model developers do, over months. Structure and prompting improvements can be done by the end user, today.

In fact I think this is a ripe space for opportunities to build new institutions that provide value.

The value of college is not only education, but also community.

We are seeing, and will continue to see, many new online and IRL ventures that provide community and learning to young people, which will serve them much better than colleges.

Buildspace (https://buildspace.so/) is a beautiful example.

I think college is broken. But my question is whether it’s broken and useful or broken and harmful.

A better question IMO is: Is college more useful than the alternatives?

College is a huge investment: tens of thousands of dollars, plus 4 years of full-time work.

When I went to college in 2007 (not in US, but I digress…) it made sense to go in for a 4-year degree because there were no alternatives. Coursera, Udemy, etc. did not exist. YouTube was just born. And to start with, we didn’t even have broadband in my house or school, that could stream video.

It’s a very different world today. The opportunity cost is too great. Even without being a Thiel fellow, there are many alternatives to what you can do with 4 years of your life that will set you up for success – not only educational opportunities but also starting a business, freelancing, etc.

Exciting! A few years ago, as an academic design researcher, I pondered the same question and wrote a few research papers.

Like the author, my inspiration for doing this work had come from a vintage watch I received from my dad!

Turns out, there’s a rich literature in design and psychology research on the heirloom status of objects. And more generally, on why and how people imbue things with value.

Here’s a link to the page from my academic projects archive, with citations: https://www.baytas.net/work/computational-heirlooms

We even went as far as to apply for (and receive) a grant for UX design research, exploring how to create for heirloom value in the digital world. I’ve moved on from academia since then, but AFAIK our PhD is working on it at KTH in Stockholm: https://www.baytas.net/work/digital-preciousness

“In the exercise, someone picks a number of adjectives from a list, choosing ones they feel describe their own personality. The subject's peers then get the same list, and each picks an equal number of adjectives that describe the subject. These adjectives are then inserted into a two-by-two grid of four cells.”

“Room one is the part of ourselves that we and others see. Room two contains aspects that others see but we are unaware of. Room three is the private space we know but hide from others. Room four is the unconscious part of us that neither ourselves nor others see.”

I wonder how the fourth room, which neither the subject or their peers see, is populated…

Sheet brilliance.

The landing page is indeed very good design.

As an experienced web designer I can tell you the design and implementation are straightforward, but very competently done. There are many things like the typography and UX writing that suggest this is the work of a fellow experienced designer. There’s much more here than what can be captured in a “guide” - it’s just an overall high level of design competence.

I re-drew the artwork based on the originals from the publications, it’s not copy-paste images.

This, plus the fact that the original source is cited, makes it work.

A while back I made a small NFT collection with my favorite CS illustrations:

https://instagram.com/citationsnft

It was an experiment that didn’t do much commercially, but we learned a lot from it.

I have a theory that when the C-suite decides to slay an entire division they assign an incompetent boss. Give them a few months to mess it up. Then go for the kill. The incompetent new boss magically absorbs all the blame.

Copywriter.

Branding.

Member of elite institution (MIT) - check. Expert in hot field (AI) - check. Famous guests - check.

Anyone who checks these boxes can attract a large following for a podcast, youtube, etc.

MIT is perhaps the magic ingredient with the most brand power, through which he was able to attract initial famous guests. From there, snowball.

This is not to say that Lex is not hardworking, intelligent, consistent, etc. But being a MIT AI researcher is a vastly leveraged starting point.

“Ph.D.s are looking at the labor market, seeing opportunities out there, and taking them,” she says. “Those skills that we teach our Ph.D. students are in demand.”

LoL.

Among all the stereotypes in academia perhaps the truest one is profs taking credit for what their students achieve.

Not even bothering to hide it anymore.

There is a branch of computer science, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), where exactly the ideas in this article have been playing out for a few decades already.

Earlier this year I wrote about HCI as the intersection of technical craft and social sciences: https://www.designdisciplin.com/hci-profession/

Interestingly the responses I got from people in the HCI field was the inverse of the sentiment in this article. Here it seems that the author is arguing to increase social sciences in CS, and getting pushback. One of my arguments was to increase tech/eng competences in HCI, and I got pushback on that too.

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newsnationnow.com%...

One thing that strikes me from this article is a vast bureaucracy, regulation, credentialing structures, accounting, etc. that the story revolves around.

In Sweden, where I live, there are plenty of educational opportunities available to people completely free of charge. Entirely subsidized by the government. Instead of assembling elaborate bureaucratic structures, the state spends its money paying school admin and teachers.

While these are not universities per se, the opportunities they open up to students are top notch. You don't need an entire college education to "set graduates on a path towards breaking the cycle of poverty", which according to the article is what work colleges aspire to achieve.

This vocational education is also much more economically efficient than universities in the same country, mainly due to losing the weight of bureaucracy and credentialing structures. Teachers are well-paid, ops run smoothly with few personnel, and students get access to many new job opportunities completely free of charge.

Feynman most probably would be a youtuber if he were alive.

Even posthumously he’s been one of the most popular educators on youtube.

Today: crypto is a much superior way of sending money across international borders – cheaper, faster, more “user-friendly” (not for everyone, but definitely for my user persona).

More generally, crypto can do most things that a bank can do. It’s not the best at many of those things yet. But it’s evolving much faster than banks do.

Here’s Yanis Varoufakis on disintermediation from banks:

“ Today, you use digital money (phone apps or plastic cards) to buy a cup of coffee at your local Starbucks. But, to do so, you first need an account with a commercial bank. In other words, to grant you access to digital fiat money, the state forces you to fall into the embrace of the commercial banks.

So, today, the state guarantees a monopoly over payments to commercial banks. And that is only one gift to the oligarchy. A second, even greater gift, is that only commercial banks are allowed to have an account with the central bank.” [https://the-crypto-syllabus.com/yanis-varoufakis-on-techno-f...]

(He’s very critical of crypto in the rest of the interview - great read.)

Even more generally, with smart contracts, the blockchain becomes a platform not only for finance and trade, but also law. Every country has laws written in their own language. Smart contracts are our laws, written in code. So, anything done by authorities which involves record-keeping is a candidate for disruption by the blockchain.

The trouble is that many of the best use cases for crypto (land deeds, electric car charging, scientific publishing and citations) are public goods – beneficial for the society as a whole, but not profitable for any individual to build. Once we get over baseball cards and apes, it will be exciting to see public goods flourish on the blockchain.

Virgil was not only a creative genius and maestro of culture, but a true philosopher of design.

I was never into his whole aesthetic, and never owned any of his pieces, yet he was one of my favorite designers in the world. One of the most sophisticated and savvy designers to walk the earth.

I’d 100% recommend going through the lectures and interviews he has given, for all kinds of creatives. He gives a masterclass on how to cut through the superficial with creative and intellectual integrity.

I have very extensive experience on this topic and I’m happy to talk to you about it – you can find me on Twitter as doctorBaytas.

Background: I started my graduate studies in human-computer interaction design on the inaugural research team of a brand new lab, which turned into a research center that employed 4 faculty and their research groups. When this happened I became the coordinator (the only administrative employee) of the center, and effectively took care of all of the founding documentation, moving into a new space, hiring technical staff, communications, etc. I did this job officially for 2 years (unofficially for 3, since I started before the institution existed).

Ghost.

Author here.

I actually agree that a lot of academic scholarship (including Stolterman's and my own) is "inside baseball." This has many reasons, for example, it's easy to publish things that provide value to scholars, even if they aren't relevant to practical or commercial work.

This is actually why I started the Design Disciplin project, which this post is part of. It's meant to be design scholarship outside the establishment, hopefully improving the signal/noise ratio.

It doesn't happen in one day, and it's not for everyone. I keep iterating on the scope, topics, format, etc. Happy to hear any suggestions from the HN community as we move forward.

Well "clickbait" is hardly a property of the headline – it's a condition of the content failing to deliver on the headline's promises and implications.

Been looking for this for a while. Thank you.

Scott Klemmer’s HCI- and design-related courses: https://www.coursera.org/instructor/~1250

I really wish someone would explain how and why has 300+ stars and 30+ forks and 5 contributors.

From the article:

"We are short shares of Eastman Kodak Company (“Kodak”, NYSE: KODK), a 138-year old commercial printing and imaging company whose stock has more than doubled since announcing a blockchain and cryptocurrency licensing partnership."

"Every groundbreaking innovation that captures market fascination has talented developers who apply the technology in a thoughtful manner. It also has imposters, looking to trade on the promise of the technology without any legitimate chance of delivering. Kodak has licensed its brand to the latter. [...] Eventually, possibly as soon as the next time Kodak reports earnings, a share price levitating on the hopes of blockchain technology will give way to the gravity of dying, old-world fundamentals."

"Peace is a dangerous cause to fight for in Turkey right now. In the latest blow to academics, 11 members of the Turkish Medical Association, including its president, Raşit Tükel, were arrested in early-morning raids last week. Their crime? Using the slogan that war is a matter of public health, the association had called for a halt to the Turkish army’s cross-border assault on military units of Syrian Kurds, launched on 20 January to international consternation. (...) The raids follow the arrest of more than a thousand academics who signed a petition in January 2016 calling for peace in the country’s southeast, where government forces were fighting Kurdish separatists. Many face criminal charges, and hundreds lost their jobs."

"As one part of the government oversees mass arrests and orchestrates war, other parts are quietly but determinedly working to fix some of the entrenched problems in the research system. Thousands of new PhD places have been created in recent years, along with some brand-new research institutes, and universities have been energized into competing with each other by offering financial rewards for strong performers. It is a start, and has been enough to persuade at least some young scientists doing postdocs abroad to return home to establish independent research labs."

The essay puts the similarities between cognition and cooking well, in an entertaining and convincing way: "Although there was a great deal of repetition in the daily menus within each household, she told her colleagues, the variety from house to house was dizzying."

However, knowing a few cognitive scientists, I believe they are much better aware of the limitations of their discipline than credited by the author.