this is cool. Considering their first album was all songs about accepting death I assume they're not fans of anything tescreal adjacent
I love that album, and i'll never forget when I was dating someone who was a classical pianist, the type that closes their eyes and sways their head when listening to classical, and when I put that album on it was a few notes into the first song and she made this tortured face and said "no, no, no! those chord progressions are so depressing!" It was so strange to me to hear that, but you know how you just know when someone knows what they are talking about and she was sure it had hit some kind of melancholy brown note.
Still... that era of interpol and white lies was great. That shit made me happy
I hear you, but I didn't say flat ui is due to processing power. My line of thought is that a sudden bump in available processing power might prompt designers to feel that elaborate uis are fine now because despite flat ui not being an efficiency thing, it is definitely perceived as one by the average designer who doesn't know how much of the css used to render it is generated client-side via js
yeah but I didn't say that flat ui was created for efficiency. Any efficiency of a flat ui is cancelled out by the excesses of client-side JS. I know it is fashion, I was there. But I also know that there is a sense that it is efficient by the designers that design with it.
that;s exactly the catch I was hoping wouldn't be the case. When the AI shit is abandoned, is the hardware useful for regular stuff...
So, from what you're saying: Generative AI is fucking up in the past, present, and future
is this a possible thing: all the AI assistant stuff being forced onto us in the next gen hardware is gonna need significant computing power bumps to support it, is this creating a potential surplus of computing power in all devices that could time very well with an excessive skeuomorphic UI design response to the decade of bland flatness we've endured that's gonna cook the cpus on the devices of everyone else?
sorry, can't let this post go without calling out the greenwashing ecosia that has a chatgpt integration while they only report their own energy stats with a limp "it's too early to tell uwu" when it comes to openai as a provider
Afterwards I was thinking it could also pass as an emo album name. I wonder if there is a good guessing game in "metal album title or emo album title?"
The earth is our coffin and hope is a mistake.
such a metal album name
I call this the law of conservation of complexity
sorry if my reply sounded rude. I didn't mean it to be. I just saw it again and it sounds dismissive.
It's definitely the prudent option but I'm over mental capacity and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't sharing this just for the upvotes. I couldn't see any mentions of the sponsor in the comments, so I guess the audience, at least, were duped. I already have a string of unanswered questions on ecosia's greenwashing social posts, though
Yeah, I get what you're saying but I'd really have to stretch my benefit-of-the-doubt muscles to consider someone who makes such well-researched videos wouldn't go to the website before he reads the url out on his video and see that on the homepage, above the fold, in big letters, it says "Powered by AI"
Ok, but are you suggesting he was duped?
NASB, I had a jarring experience this morning watching Patrick Boyle's latest video "Big Tech is Going Nuclear!" (not gonna link it) where 5 mins in he introduces the sponsor and it's an AI presentation slide generator, which he said he used for the images in his video. This after he mentioned the data on generating one image using the same amount of energy as charging a smartphone. The thing is he seems careful to not mention that it is a gen ai product–he never says AI–rather a piece of software that helps making presentations.
It kinda made me panic stop the video, like an instant "well, done with you" - not sure if he continued to make a joke of it or anything. I mean, I'm sure (I hope) he was given a lot of money for the spot, but damn! Just when I thought I had a foundational understanding of people
beat me by seconds.
She's incredible
I just want to share this video because I think it is a work of art
"I'm gonna replace AI" by Olivia Squizzle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbh_J7VI94g
sorry for yt link, invidious didn't like it
out of curiosity once I tried to ask it to make a colouring picture from a photo of a toy for my kids and it just ran what seemed like imagemagick filters over the photo to convert to black and white and pump up contrast to only show the hard lines - just like all the free convert to outline web tools that have existed forever. I asked it to try again but without the filters, instead to identify the object, and to draw it in a colouring book outline style, and it spat out some shitty stylised mishmash derived from all the illustration IP it stole and ingested. I still feel guilty for trying even that
I'm pretty confident they'll continue to roll out new stuff that, like the 4o release, are mild (if, at all) technical improvements made to seem massive by UI stuff that has almost nothing to do with AI. SJ's voice talking to you, bouncy animations, showing "reasoning" aka loading progress.
Fields API lead stepping down
https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/10/13/fields-api-team-seeking-new-leadership/
Authors claim they have not been told about the AI deal, were not given the opportunity to opt out and are receiving no extra payment.
> Authors have expressed their shock after the news that academic publisher Taylor & Francis, which owns Routledge, had sold access to its authors’ research as part of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) partnership with Microsoft—a deal worth almost £8m ($10m) in its first year.
On top of it all, that is such a low-ball number from Microsoft
> The agreement with Microsoft was included in a trading update by the publisher’s parent company in May this year. However, academics published by the group claim they have not been told about the AI deal, were not given the opportunity to opt out and are receiving no extra payment for the use of their research by the tech company.
I am a front-end developer who is FED up about front-end development. If you write front-end, this isn't about you personally. It's about how your choices make me angry. Also this is about how my choices have made me angry. Also this is mostly just about choices, the technologies are incidental. Not...
A masterful rant about the shit state of the web from a front-end dev perspective
> There’s a disconcerting number of front-end developers out there who act like it wasn’t possible to generate HTML on a server prior to 2010. They talk about SSR only in the context of Node.js and seem to have no clue that people started working on this problem when season 5 of Seinfeld was on air2. > >Server-side rendering was not invented with Node. What Node brought to the table was the convenience of writing your shitty div soup in the very same language that was invented in 10 days for the sole purpose of pissing off Java devs everywhere. > >Server-side rendering means it’s rendered on the fucking server. You can do that with PHP, ASP, JSP, Ruby, Python, Perl, CGI, and hell, R. You can server-side render a page in Lua if you want.
Here's Jared Spool talking about knowing who/what you are designing for as if it's a novel idea. This UX influencer opinion that being able to recognise that you're making something for people is some kind of UX skill superpower. Yet they never acknowledge the critical distinction between designing for-profit vs their usual non-commercial case study examples, like this one of a European government ministry.
Commercial design has always been somewhat dumb in how egotistical it is, but we're in a golden age of believing ones own bullshit where people think that UX is a force for good separate from whatever the UXer is being paid to do. In an ad agency, that kind of ignorance was usually isolated to the sales suits who snorted copious amounts of coke to cope with the internal anguish, while everyone else was comfortable with being paid a lot of money to make ads.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230804073453/https://articles.centercentre.com/how-ux-outcomes-make-a-teams-daily-work-truly-human-centered/
A couple artefacts from my personal pocket of dislike for the company:
Google dot com used table layout components till feb 2022 - something that has been semantically incorrect since forever.
Google's Web.dev, a stealth advertising project disguised as a developer community, has poor accessibility test results—on AXE and it's own Lighthouse test—where developer.mozilla.org scores 100% on Lighthouse and passes with minor issues in AXE tests.
I talk a lot about how "empathy" in commercial UX is mostly a posture because in reality capitalism doesn't care, but it's important to consider the additional problem of people in charge who are too shallow to be capable of understanding "why" some people prefer, or need, to do things differently than they do.
This one time I was telling the ceo/founder of a startup I worked for that our react app was making my new macbook pro crawl and we need to fix that because it was a b2b product that would be used by people in finance offices decked out with dell opticrap machines. He responded with surprise "wow, steve. you really care about people don't you?"
I was kinda floored. Anyway, here we are...
https://web.archive.org/web/20230727121010/https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1684491212219359232
Here's Brian Chesky at the Config 2023 conference for Figma, the current designated software for drawing pictures, talking about design at his "design-led company" airbnb.
Brian Chesky went to design school, studied industrial design, and worked as an industrial designer before founding airbnb. They talk to him here as some kind of hero as the only designer ceo in the fortune 500. It's truly sad that this guy is held up as a model for "design" when airbnb does all the things it does.
This cult is based on a reductionist view of design being form alone. Relegating function to being a business and engineering concern.
A room full of UX designers should be grilling the shit out of brian.
From my blog:
> In November 2022, Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb, began a tweet thread with “I’ve heard you loud and clear” in response to a customer backlash over the way they hid additional costs till the checkout page. “You feel like prices aren’t transparent…starting next month, you’ll be able to see the total price you’re paying up front” he said about a change that could be made urgently in a day, or carefully over a few.
> When he said I’ve heard you loud and clear he was also telling his User Experience (UX) researchers and designers they were ignored, if they were heard at all. The dark pattern was no mistake. Intentionally designed to deceive and benefit from excited holiday planners and their potential to give in to the sunk cost fallacy. Instead of addressing the ridiculous additional fees the company chose to trick customers into paying them. That’s not empathy, at best it’s apathy, at worst it’s hate. The decision to fix it only came after the balance of business value and public relations started to tip the wrong way. Chesky presented himself as a model CEO doing right by his customers as if he wasn’t responsible for wronging them in the first place. People bought it too. He demonstrated how bright a performative aura of care can shine to hide questions about the business activity or even questions about the business’s legitimacy to exist.
consider this 👆 at the 12:20 mark when the audience applauds him for talking about how design helped them recover from a break-even to a 4bill free cash flow last year - saying they did it by designing the company with "fewer parts, fewer projects" - which probably refers to the ~1900 people they laid off mid-pandemic?
I used to enjoy Ariely's books and others like him before I started reading better stuff. All that behavioural economics genre seems to be a good example of content that holds up as long as you don't read any more on the subject.
Thought it worth sharing among so much very, very questionable material I've found in reading through the reference material of this book, I came across ths Blake Masters + Peter Thiel connection.
It's my obsession sneer because of how celebrated this god damn book is among the fight for the user UX community.
I’ve mostly been reading the material but need to back up and do an author background check for each one.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200101054932/https://blakemasters.com/post/20582845717/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-2-notes-essay
Steve @awful.systems I write things on my blog sometimes https://fasterandworse.com/