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drewbeck

779 karma · joined June 2, 2014

UX designer by trade. I also throw dance parties in New York City.
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drewbeck··on Juan Atkins, pioneer of Detroit techno sound, dies aged 64
One of the true originals.

Cevin Fisher just passed, too. House royalty.

Time is coming for dance music’s pioneers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cevin_Fisher

drewbeck··on Police chief unplugs Flock cameras after company ignores contract cancellation
There is no single point, instead there’s a build up of actions just like you see in this case. I’m curious what else you’re waiting on. What evidence will be sufficient for you that, yes, citizens are engaged in civics?
drewbeck··on Show HN: Spotify FOSS Alternative with Google Drive, S3, Soulseek
The soulseek integration is perfect for folks who think the problem with Spotify is that they pay too much to artists.

ETA ah I see from your post that this is indeed you. You want all music for free yes? And for musicians to be poor?

drewbeck··on Building an AI-native engineering org
whoa like an ai calvinball. Or, you compete to get the right to one prompt that changes the rules/physics/map etc. Whoever gets to the genie's lamp first …
drewbeck··on Genie 4
If they don’t get ahead of this our robots are going to be sitting ducks against knights riding wyverns smh
drewbeck··on Why is AI generated language so hard to understand?
This is one of the biggest issues with it – appropriate variation in information density and tone are an important part of good communication and the bots fail at both.
drewbeck··on A farewell to Arc browser
Oh man I’m going to miss peek :(((
drewbeck··on A farewell to Arc browser
Note that Arc had no or minimal AI when it launched; its appeal for so many of us was its refreshing opinionated stance on the browser UX. The AI hype train hit them hard and they tried to pivot to Dia, which leaned fully into AI but did none of the fancy UX things that Arc did. From what I could see online most of the fans they attracted with Arc were turned off by the pivot. It was peak early AI hype, which didn’t help: so much more smoke and so much less fire than there is now.

Dia now does appear now to have many of the Arc UX features. Plus AI.

drewbeck··on A farewell to Arc browser
Damn. I’ve been riding hard for Arc since I installed it years ago. Dia looks like it has a lot of the same UI sugar thankfully, tho I’m sure there are things I’ll hate.

I’m still pulling for Atlassian to do Interesting Things with the app. AI can be part of it but I think there’s a ton of opportunity for a browser for the enterprise / organizations and atlassian is well positioned to do that, AI or no. Things like: - shared company file Management accessible directly in app - cross saas–app workflows enabled at the browser level, managed centrally by the org — slack, zoom, screen sharing/recording and other collab tools natively baked into the app

So many people spend all their work day flipping between different apps and docs in the browser and there’s sooo much more we (as humanity) could do to improve that experience. The browser is a natural site for it and I hope someone gives it a shot.

drewbeck··on No more icons in every menu by default
IMO icons here would be a crutch to half-fix the problem. That list is a scattered buffet of operations and it needs structure way more than it needs icons.
drewbeck··on Using thousands of AI agents to uncover new leads in biological data
Hype and functionality are only loosely correlated.
drewbeck··on How the Claude Code team does code review
Yep. It’s the consistent emphasis in every statement that is so draining to me. A human might use a similar tone once or twice in a piece to drive home a particularly important point, but Claude does it with every point. It’s exhausting.
drewbeck··on Apple HomeView
One, this isn't an accessory like a keyboard or a watch strap. Two, the cheapest iPhone on apple.com right now is $799. This device sells for $299.
drewbeck··on In the wake of Tippett Studios’ closure, a digital archive appears online
Tippett Studios or Phil’s name should probably be in the title here to give this the audience it deserves. He’s a legend and many many nerds will know his name.
drewbeck··on Revealing the details of how OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face
Protection racket maybe? Yous better sign up for our AI security, hate to have some rogue AI come bust the place up you know.
drewbeck··on CSS-Tricks in Limbo
> Someone will dig through some old forums/news group/twitter posts that someone made and use that as a stick to beat them with.

This is not about digging up some old careless post. It’s about his current views which he posts proudly online.

I’ll note your post pulls a classic trick:

- these views are not that important to who he is

- anyway even if he did hold those views it’s not that big of a deal

- but also I agree with those views (even tho I am but a humble, reasonable centrist)

drewbeck··on iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27
Yes! The way it tries to be smart about what you actually wanted to press but has certain areas that are exceptions to that rule — like space bar — drives me crazy.
drewbeck··on iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27
Typing “sound” and end up with some obscure sound setting as top option and the general “sound” control panel nowhere to be found. Every time.
drewbeck··on XCancel service is suspended until further notice
No. “Malice” isn’t the only possible descriptor with moral weight. There’s many more ways this decision could be immoral without malice.
drewbeck··on The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead
This is a great thought experiment bc it raises the question of WHY humans wouldn’t behave this way. IMO the answer is a lot of socially enforced incentives that are dynamic and would be tough to fully articulate in a prompt.

The white hat has their own liability to consider, and the liability of their employer. Reputation and relationships are a big factor. All these tie into fundamental human incentives: survival, community acceptance, safety and freedom (prison not preferred!).

It’s a good sketch of why alignment is difficult, at least when it’s conceived of as an attempt to match human behavior.

drewbeck··on We finally learned to center a div, then browsers added sidebars
You’ve effectively created a slide over sidebar. It’s an interesting hack to get there but IMO “should” properly be the domain of the browser.
drewbeck··on Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
I think it holds true throughout if you scope it to knowledge about your reports’ domain. If you’re managing managers you should have a good handle on what a manager does and different ways to do it.
drewbeck··on Help I accidentally a wigglegram
That frog with a joint is a turtle with a joint FYI.
drewbeck··on The California state assembly has passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'
It seems like one reasonable response from game companies is to include a service agreement with all games that explicitly limits the guaranteed server uptime. Ie “buying this game only guarantees operation until Dec 31 2028”

No clue if the market will go for that but it would meet the issue head on. “Companies will provide server binaries” on the other hand feels like pure fantasy.

Overall I’m glad folks are trying to do something about this.

drewbeck··on The mechanical latching memory of an adhesive tape
This is so cool. The discussion section [0] does a good job of explaining where this fits in, scientifically, but all I can think of is spies sending messages encoded in a piece of scotch tape.

[0] - https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/ae4acc#...

drewbeck··on Meetings are forcing functions
In my experience a good async culture is sustained by regular, high-quality check-in meetings. They serve as connecting moments that support team cohesion and camaraderie.
drewbeck··on Issue links now open in a popup
If there's two things HN hates it's UX designers, PMs and off-by-one errors. As a UX designer I have to laugh: one of the most important parts of building good UX is humility and a willingness to be wrong. The confidence with with many on HN assert that they know what the right UX is for any app is exactly the same error that bad UX designers make.

As always in product the user's frustration is real and important but their ideas for a fix are almost never the best choice for the product, the company, or most users.

drewbeck··on GitHub unwanted UX change: issue links now open in a popup
> It’s like these products that are in a way some of the most valuable products in the planet, are given a junior web dev and a “UX designer” who really doesn’t know anything about UX.

What you pay attention to grows. And company's pay attention to those things that move the needle on revenue. For many successful platforms UX doesn't move the needle much anymore (if it ever did). LinkedIn has effectively won their space and a clunky UI isn't going to show up in the numbers.

LinkedIn might have amazing designers on staff, but if leadership isn't prioritizing updates and fixes it won't happen. And leadership won't prioritize it until the problem shows up in the numbers.

drewbeck··on Forcing an inversion of control on the SaaS stack
My take in this (ironic) comment was just "no feature is free", which I don't think should be odd coming from a UX designer!

> the idea is perhaps that users vibe-code their own distinct UX with everything valuable to them

I do find this interesting. I work on a complex business operations and reporting platform and every facility has their own lil quirks. More control in their hands would let them smooth out their workflows while still relying on the foundational work our platform does.

drewbeck··on Forcing an inversion of control on the SaaS stack
> The real moat they have is SaaS vendors have everyone believe that trivial feature requests take time to implement.

So true. People are going to be sooo mad when they find out we all have these Build Features For Free buttons and just don't press them.

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