197 karma · joined September 27, 2011
Your comment made me wonder if there are any halfway-acceptable model benchmarks for law tasks? Specifically I’d love to know how the frontier models’ abilities compare between common law vs. civil law systems. My guess would be that an AI in a common law context should have a clearer idea of how a specific case is interpreted/accepted by (common law) practitioners, whereas trying to rely on AI in a civil law context, like Germany, can be daunting. In a few Germany-specific recent examples, the models feel like they present only (maybe too stubbornly?) the “civil law”-based laws. All while negating much of AI’s research benefits because civil statutes are portrayed as being absolutely accurate, binding, and their enforcement (and thereby the legal reality) being uniformly applied. Am I making this interpretation up? If so, how can I prove myself wrong?
I’ve been trying to limit the days on which I eat unhealthy foods to Fridays and Saturdays (yay, it’s Friday!). I’m good at sticking to plans like that without help from an app, but when I gave “Habits” a quick spin, I admired its mission to provide a playful, game-like alternative in the sea of habit tracking apps.
Once a day (except Fri & Sat) it sends me a notification. Tapping it launches the app straight to that “checkbox”. While the description in the post may make it seem like this is too long of an interaction, I promise you that it really isn’t, and that the haptics and animation are indeed a satisfying experience. So satisfying in fact that I stuck with the app even though I’m certain I’d follow through on my challenge without it.
(That certainty, btw, comes from how I personally have set up habits like this for over a decade, with help from a mental trick somewhat adjacent to a mind palace/loci[1] to track and reward follow-through. I bring this up because I have often thought that it might be possible to bring the power of these rewarding mental models to a broader audience via an app. And to some extent that’s what Habit accomplishes via its unique approach. The haptics and emotional resonance of the “checkbox” are a little Pavlovian mental & sensory reward for completing one’s goal. And they lead the user to a playful/gamified representation of their progress through their habit, in the form of a small, abstract 3D scene that gradually builds as you continue sticking to your goal. If I’m in a rush, I ignore that scene. But I always enjoy tapping the notification and checking off the day’s accomplishment.)
As a designer, I could maybe quibble over details of the interaction or visual style (which is customizable btw via a season of themes — another unique component) but as a a user I’m simply excited to have this app as part of my routine, thankful that someone is daring a different approach to app design, and curious to see if there will be more apps that might introduce a wider audience to the mental hacks I’ve found useful for a long time.
If you’ve read this far, I’d encourage you to check out some of the other posts on Andy.works, incl. a great retrospective on Paper’s creation[2], as well as background on the developer’s philosophy behind the “Not Boring” suite of apps[3]. Lastly, here’s the App Store link if you want to give the interaction a try (I promise I have no affiliation): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/not-boring-habits/id1593891243
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci [2] https://www.andy.works/words/paper-at-10 [3] https://www.andy.works/words/here-we-go
Impulse, by the way, is covered by the press release [1] and, I agree, would need to be a priority no matter which FTL drive is used to get the satellites to their final destination.
[1] > The Starlink team commanded the satellites into a safe-mode where they would fly edge-on (like a sheet of paper) to minimize drag—to effectively “take cover from the storm”
I was perplexed by the wording as well. Apparently software updates can be labeled recalls now? Did someone inform Microsoft, maybe this would help Windows 11 adoption.
In the the 8 years that Adobe employed a similar style, starting in the mid 90s, it clearly managed to do so without even an inkling of diversity: http://splashscreens.sourceforge.net/acrobat.php Depending on the year you look at, the 90s version is less abstract than the current examples we're discussing here, but some years are actually more abstract. The lack of diversity is fairly clear to me regardless of that variation.
Of course, whenever we analyze abstract visuals, biases come into play. So maybe this read above is rooted in my own bias (either in favor of being able to make a point here, or in regards to how I believe a 90s corporation would portray "the business user"), but I think that's a stretch in most of these examples.
I had viscerally negative reactions to those as a child. Nothing ever foreshadowed "this is not going to be fun" quite like those shirts & ties. Nor was it clear why one would need to juggle the world to open a text document. (Maybe it was all just a premonition about the malware that is CC.)
But then your nephew throws it in the regular trash eventually.
You’ve broken your promise to me. If you’re also the world’s most valuable public company you’ve made that promise to your shareholders and used it to increase your brand perception. It seems reasonable that you’d like to make sure you keep it, no?
Anyways, thank you for writing the article, it’s really an enjoyable read after a day of wrestling a closed source framework and wishing I could understand how that particular architecture was reasoned about.
I did feel that the yellow warning sign was a bit much. There was also a line about it not being for designers. As somebody with both design and engineering backgrounds, I felt less enthusiastic right away — mostly because I dislike buckets being enforced. It encourages people to put themselves into one over the long run, which in turn has a tendency to stunt their progress. It’s also odd when any educational resource (higher ed in the US being a great example) introduces itself by trying to be inaccessible. It feels counter to the professed goal of the institution / article.
Anyways, I guess I felt the comment above is a valid thing to discuss if it could improve other people’s efforts to write similar pieces.
As an aside: ironically, the article is fascinating from a design perspective. Just not the particular bucket of design the author was thinking of when he wrote that line.
These two are kind of fun to play with: https://github.com/andreipitis/FluidDynamicsMetal https://github.com/hagmas/MobileFluidSimulation
Both based on this approach, detailed here by Nvidia: http://developer.download.nvidia.com/books/HTML/gpugems/gpug...
The technique this is based on doesn't create those satisfying tension effects but is more similar to paint flowing on a surface of water, so from a tangibility perspective I'd still love to find something closer to this post's work that runs natively.
Having read this thread, I really hope that this kind of (comparatively shallow) architectural problem is something AI can help with sooner rather than later. Or at least the onboarding process to a new codebase could be tackled by some smarter tools / better IDEs. Seems like there’d be some real value in that.