shriracha

Thank you!

This has been on my list forever, finally added it today: https://perthirtysix.com/rss.xml

hah good morning to you too HN (it's my piece and I'm not AI)

My personal satisfaction and sense of craftsmanship is definitely lower now, even if my net output is higher. I think there is a world where I am only using AI to do the menial and repetitive stuff and leaving the more interesting cognitive work for myself, but in reality the lines are all blurred.

I sure hope not.

I appreciate the nuanced take here. LLMs have definitely made certain tasks easier, and therefor let me build ou features I wouldn't have had time to before (i.e. the theme picker example from the blog post)... but I am increasingly finding myself susceptible to the "tumbleweed effect" you describe, where an LLM can start to feel like more of a crutch than a tool.

Great read. Raymond Chen's blog is absolutely legendary.

https://drawbeats.com

This is one of my long-standing passion projects, a simple web-based music sequencer built to have a very low barrier to entry.

Great great project, as usual by the pudding

Great read. The part about art needing to be created by a human particularly resonated.

There is a fundamental difference between creativity and novelty. Novelty is empirically measurable and is something an AI can do. Creativity is an expression of the human experience. It can't be outsourced.

If you really don't see any difference between "evoking emotion" and "emotional manipulation" then nobody will change your mind on this.

And like I wrote about, you can have very precise charts that can be extraordinarily manipulative.

The whole "charts should be about hard data" thing always sounds nice, until you realize that every visualization is an abstraction and brings in some human bias. You are always picking the scales, whether or not to use color, how to aggregate the data, etc. There is no such thing as a neutral chart.

Also... there are data visualizations outside of science. Of course science should be more precise than something like data art.

No reason those need to be mutually exclusive. Posted this in another thread, but I don't see a good argument against this project (https://www.dear-data.com) being both data visualization and being an act of personal expression.

Hah, so I actually went back and forth on that. The original studies around visual inference also included axis labels on the bar chart. The fact that you CAN label the axis on a bar chart that way is actually an argument people make not to use pie charts.

Author of the article here. Great points, thanks for reading and commenting.

I think that data journalism is a great example of that "put it in someone's brain" idea.

I also think there are all kinds of places we're seeing more novel approaches in too: data art, physical data viz (e.g. museum exhibits), visualizing huge datasets, etc. The Climate Stripes project, maybe the most famous data viz of the last couple decades, was made by a climate scientist.

But I definitely agree that this "more experimental than rigid" side of data viz doesn't capture the majority of the field, nor should it!

All visualizations abstract and obscure data. There is no such thing as a fully neutral graph. Should everything just be a raw table?

A few thoughts there:

1. I generally agree with you on that goal, but there are a TON of ways to convey information in a digestible way without being misleading. Even if you follow good practices.

2. "Convey" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. What are you conveying? One number? Many numbers? A specific story? As much data as possible to let the viewer find a trend themselves? Are the numbers important or the general direction of the data? Picking an answer and making the visual serve that goal is an art IMO.

You think the Climate Stripes are an example of "lying"?

Congratulations on the book drop!

So I'm not sure if you read my piece or just wanted to drop a promotion, but I think you're misrepresenting my view here. I'm not advocating for "art for the sake of art" and I certainly don't think you should not know your audience.

My main point is that I don't think all of data viz is as simple as you're implying here, i.e. that a pretty chart probably won't "resonate" or that a chart from the Tufte school of thought automatically will.

I don't see art and design as mutually exclusive. I also don't think that data viz is exclusively about functionality.

Take a project like this: https://www.dear-data.com/theproject... this is clearly data visualization and, to me, quite evocative. These visualizations aren't designed for clarity and they don't need to be, that wasn't the goal.

Thank you! Yeah, I hear you on the framing. I don't have a formal education on data viz myself (I guess not many people do?), but I've gotten into the world over the last few years. A lot of the literature I've seen has come across as dogmatic to me, which is what sparked this article. That's great to hear that your experience is more aligned with this way of thinking.

And thanks for the nice words about the animations! Glad to hear that work doesn't go unappreciated haha

Author of the article here! Yes you're completely right. I think they also have other underrated properties, like they fit neatly in a square which can be helpful for laying out a dashboard. And for some reason, in my experience, people just like them.

But when done poorly, they can be a mess. Like any other chart.

Weirdly poignant and beautiful, but also feels a bit wrong to watch.

Glad to see this regulated. This is a pretty cool study on dark patterns that make unsubscribing hard today: https://pudding.cool/2023/05/dark-patterns/

Hi! I made this tool. I saw it had way more traffic than usual and then realized it was from HN, very cool!

Would love to hear any feedback. I've been super interested in how well-designed web apps and visualizations can communicate things like probability, which I think is very hard to intuit for many of us.

The most surprising thing I learned from the tool was just how bad your payouts usually were even if you cut the pool of numbers to pick from in half (by using the "Custom" option).

When I was a kid, I remember reading that the Earth's smoothness is comparable to a billiards ball. This was always hard for me to intuit, so I built out some visualizations to try to understand this better!

Built using Three.js and Vue, using data from the Copernicus Digital Elevation Model

I built a grid-based music sequencer for the web a while ago that lets people see projects other people made in a side panel.

I very quickly realized I needed some manual content moderation because some people immediately started sharing patterns that looked like dicks and swastikas lol

Hi, creator of DrawBeats here! I noticed a bit of extra traffic coming from HN today :)

Thanks for sharing this! I'd love to hear any feedback or ideas on how to improve DrawBeats from the community.

Thank you! My friend and I started this project pretty early on during COVID. FiveThirtyEight was definitely a design influence, along with pudding.cool, some NYT pieces, and others. There are some things on the data side that FiveThirtyEight does sports which I'm not a fan of, like their emphasis on "all in one" metrics to measure performance, but overall they definitely do a great job with their presentation.

Author here! This is great feedback that I just implemented. Thanks.

Maker of the visualization here! Curious how you would use a plaintext list of 2309 words to get at some of the questions I mentioned on the tool, like "how many words use Y as the only vowel?".

Maker of the visualization here! Super cool to see all of the great feedback here. Thanks for checking it out.