HN user
Philipp Flenker www.philippflenker.com
That’s not it in this case, because the book is mostly a recounting of what happened. I narrowed it down to two things: One is that every aspect of the story is treated equally - unimportant facets get an equally profound sounding prose like the really important bits.
And the other one is the repetition of phrases. Everything is worth slowing down on.everything is load bearing. That’s so annoying.
It’s great to have the entire topic brought together into a cohesive book - but wow, I find it very annoying to read.
I find it very hard to find books worth reading. It’s so difficult to separate Signal from noise - there are just too many books and too few reliable curators. Amazon ratings, goodreads, some book awards, best seller lists - they all are sometimes hit, mostly miss for me.
Reminds me of m favorite late 90s messenger, Odigo[0]. It had some sort of radar which showed you people who were visiting the same site. It sure had this town hall feel, but admittedly most sites were simply empty.
This doesn't work for everyone, for example, if I get motion sick, closing my eyes makes it far worse, almost immediately.
Yeah me too. It felt like it was designed exclusively for me, it ticks all the boxes in what a dumb phone should and shouldn't have in terms of functionality.
If it had an option to install a messenger of choice (Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp etc)
It has that capability. From TFA: > A flip phone with the apps you need: WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram. Music, podcasts, maps, rideshare, a great camera for the moments worth keeping.
As a parent, what I find effective are content rating systems, be it for movies, games or apps, along with the ability to control and fine-tune them.
For example, with Apple's parental controls, I can blanket-decline access to Social Media apps, or to apps recommended for a specific age or older, and I can also allow exceptions as I see it fit (for example, my kids have no access to WhatsApp but they are allowed to use Signal, both have the same age recommendations)
This moves the responsibility for age verification to me, the parent, and provides me with suitable tools to monitor this. With this, there is no need for my kid or me to upload sensitive data or go through some bad age verification implementation.
Websites are more difficult to control, but not impossible.
Long story short - improve tooling for parents that allow more centralized control instead of mandating social media to do the age verification on their end.
You confuse ease of using a tool with quality of output. A skilled carpenter can work both with high and with medium quality tools and prefer one over the other with no difference visible in the craft they produce.
One skill that I still possess and that LLMs haven't been able to replace (yet) is to ask good questions, for example:
- Rephrasing the original question to validate my understanding - Asking "why" a sufficient amount of times until I understand where the other party is coming from - Asking open questions aimed at generating insights
et cetera.
Instead, LLMs (often badly) guess what the background of the question may be, answer with that in mind and find it very difficult to let go of what they have made up.
Pratchett introduced the concept of active laziness to me. One of his characters is so lazy that he’s working out frequently because he is too lazy carrying around excess weight all the time.
That has stuck with me, and a lot of things I do both in my professional and personal life can be attributed to this: I, too, am very actively lazy.
The part where data providers lose traffic because their own data is displayed directly on the google premises is what repeats.
A couple of years back I worked with a company which maintained specific data which was the main traffic driver on that page. Google approached them and wanted to pay for the rights to get the data and display it on top of the search results, a feature which was fairly new back then.
This was an interesting dilemma because it was very clear that the money was way less than the loss in ad revenue due to traffic drop, but it was also clear that if we wouldn’t take the deal, a more desperate competitor would, which would result in the same traffic loss but without the extra google money. So the company took the deal.
History repeats itself here, with the difference that instead of paying for the data, the ai crawlers simply take it for free.
I had a similar realization today. I work as an EM, and one important aspect of my work is becoming worthless: experience.
Having been an IC for a long time usually enables me to support my team, or identify risks, lead projects and so on. However, since I never was an IC in the day and age of AI, I find that this experience is less and less applicable.
A significant part of what helps me increase impact of others is that I’ve „been there, done that“ and that’s going away right now.
I don’t mind - it’s exciting! But if I was an IC right now I would not switch tracks under any circumstances. There is so much more to learn directly in the trenches.
For me, this misses the point of bookmarks - it’s not about remembering where I have been but getting there extremely fast.
For a game like anchorhead, which is famous in its niche, shouldn’t Claude already know it sufficiently to just solve it right away? I would expect that its data source contained multiple discussions and walkthroughs of the game.
I was close to finishing school when Wikipedia came up. A lot of complaints and concerns about LLMs today echo remarks about Wikipedia back then. Kids won’t learn anything, they will just copy and paste! The information is unreliable, our kids will stop thinking critically or learning how to research!
While I don’t mean to equate both, I find the resemblance in this case striking.
A teacher of mine used to say:
Lottery is a tax for people who don’t understand statistics.
When was that? DB has gotten much worse in the past ~5 years
All this costs money for little return of invest. As long as the collateral damage is below a threshold that causes reputational damage, there is no business incentive to solve this.
I don’t mean to defend this, but I know from experience that gift cards are frequently used for money laundring. The laws against that are very strict, incentivizing companies to overshoot and block false positives.
At the same time, AML solutions tend to be a closely guarded black box which simply tells you to block a customer, finding out why is pretty difficult.
To add more to the problem, some anti money Landry solutions are … AI powered.
Gift cards are huge in the B2B business as they are used a lot as gifts from companies to employees.
It’s a well done homage - but no one should believe for one second the actual average page back then looked _that good_!
Easy. You have data available which tells you about the most likely travel dates, and you set this as the default. Many booking platforms pick a weekend in 2 weeks or something like that. This predefined field changes the task from entering a date to correcting a date, where the prefilled date is likely close to the desired date and thus requires less input/changes than starting from scratch.
Since then, it’s been incredible to see how much people love it. AI Overviews now have 2 billion users every month.
Come on, you can’t be serious.
The best date picker is the one which doesn’t require picking a date. If done correctly, the browser can auto-fill your birthday, for example. In many other cases it’s possible and makes sense to guess a date and prefill the date field. Phones attempt the same with being biased towards entering the current date or datetime.
Tangentially related, the AI integrated in Google Chat is hilariously bad. Find a thread which starts with „Bug: (…)“ that has 90+ answers. Hey, an AI could be useful here! Click summarize. Wait. Without fail the result will be along the lines of „X, Y and Z discuss a bug.“
They should be. Articles have been gotten longer and longer over time, getting an AI summary instead is the logical consequence.
MAD magazine once printed a listing with some non obvious errors in it, introducing my 10 year old self to the concept of a bug.
Maybe now I will have the chance to see a self-made Alfred E. Neuman!
I don’t see how your argument applies to Apple‘s transition to Liquid Glass. Apple only did incremental design changes for years, IIRC this is only the third major UI/UX iteration since the early 00s.
UX is not timeless, features emerge or go out of fashion, user behavior and expectations change, the hardware on which the UI/UX is operated changes. You only can incrementally evolve your ui/UX so far, as you can’t know what the future will look like.