fsloth

Browser developers implemented the dev console there. You are not reaching it ”just because you have kb/m”. You can reach dev tools as easily via touch on a pc with touch support.

Touch is really nice UX modality.

But it sucks to use application designed for mouse with touch.

So it's not that "touch is bad UX modality" it's "applications should be designed for touch as first class citizen" and by design I mean _proper_ design as in from the ground up not just prettier colors and slihgtly tweaked layout.

" you have less control."

Keyboard and mouse don't give you any more autonomy over the application developers state machine.

I'm not sure I understand the claim of "being in control". The UX is different, sure, often. But that's not "control" over the design of the application.

Yes. Design sells.

"Why would anyone get Eames Lounge Chair? I can buy similar enough kit for a 20th of the price".

Since many of us are sort of keen on products this would be really, really good to remember :)

We may be at some sort of communications gap.

To be clear my intent is not to misrepresent your statement, just to explain how I hear it.

"I am talking about fairness of application of law"

But there is no fairness in application of law?

The law is the law. Just like 1 + 1 is 2, the role of the legal process is to compute this. And it should apply to same to any party that is active in a legal process.

The fact they are rules mean they are expected to be respected and enforced.

You are here repeating the same argument that goes "it's only a crime if you get caught".

This is a specific philosophy of law.

Now while rule of law has different meanings depending on the country where you live, in a nordic democracy like Finland legislation exists for the benefit of public good, and acting by these laws is one of the foundational expectations in the society.

The fact they are recognized to serve the public good, means everyone is expected to follow them, and not following them is not only a process error, but in fact, deeply immoral.

I do realize different countries operate differently and somewhere else laws are not necessarily about trying to achieve philosophical good outcomes for the population.

But in Finland "well it's the law but who follows those things" argument is not common sense rule of thumb but considered wanton disregard of public good - which everyone considers to be a shared responsibility to maintain.

No, those are not art in themselves if they are based on dumb prompting.

They are random noise pastiches.

Art requires authorship.

I mean that's my definition :)

The author needs to have sufficient level of artistic skill and talent to be able to produce pieces with artistic merit. Even if they just prompt it - which they likely wont because prompt based outputs alone generally suck.

My definition for sufficient level of skill where AI tools become useful as a form of expression with true artistic merit, would be that you must be able to generate the same image with traditional media without AI:s help

If it turns out there was deep authorship in these works on some level (other than just running through random prompts) then the situation becomes more nuanced.

You should be able to tweak each individual detail with exact authorship. And _understand_ what you are doing.

So if an established painter, photographer or cinematographer uses prompt based tools, there the tools become part of expressive workflow that likely has higher artistic standard.

You can't really develop this sensitivity with prompting alone (generally).

_General_ artistic value is a DIFFERENT thing from doing something a person personally enjoys, though!

It's totally fine to enjoy prompting images.

People enjoy doing puzzles, building legos, practicing piano, playing computer games etc.

Ie engaged in activites which they enjoyu without external valuation mechanism involved.

These things are called _hobbies_. And it's awesome to have hobbies whatever they are.

That was because they were training for the "manual labour" part. Which is what most people enjoy and cherish, I think (including myself).

But that's not really how art market values the merchandise.

Conceptualization suffices for the market after sufficient prestige and brand value exists. I guess the Damien Hirsch reference was not that obvious for this venue so -

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-damien-hirst-is-controve...

Note: I'm not saying you should measure the value of art with money. I'm saying those people _who measure the value of art in monetary terms_ may value branding and conceptualization more than manual skill.

You can use AI to transfer content between mediums and manufacture designs.

Succesfull artists don’t necessarily develop the pieces beyond conceptualization and editorial control.

See for instance Damien Hirsch. Or the academic painters with their own workshops.

AI can handle large amounts of routine tasks. Like converting an image to a 3D mesh. I don’t frankly see the difference between that and Damien Hirsch giving his craftsmen a task to deliver a piece.

If you talk to modern art critica you will end up with argumentation where the concept of the piece is what matters not the execution or it’s quality.

If original concept is all that matters very hard to see how AI generated steps could not be part of that pipeline.

Nobody is claiming getting random stuff from generic non-specific prompting counts as art.

But what if you do an original painting or drawing; then have AI convert it to 3D mesh and print it - and pass it off as art? That is a non-obvious situation.

Not really sure why removing the AI component would make anything better. They are a new modality for art and expression.

To give you an idea how the situation really is like, for example Finland has municipal compost inspectors that track individual property composting.

While things can fall through cracks your disregard for regulation does not really apply as a fair example to the milieu.

I think this is missing a nice hack.

Learn to draw.

Then ask the model to restyle the image.

You can get wonderful photographs with the exact composition and scene you want for all sorts of use cases.

Second hack.

Model the scene you want from low resolution geometry (boxes, spheres etc) for the composition. Then use that to ground the generated image (ie give it as reference) and ask the model to re-imagine it in the style you want.

"jump through pointless bureaucratic hoops?"

This here is the exact sentiment which is making the entire country quite angry.

These are not pointless bureaucratic hoops.

The entire voting population is quite worried of large multinational companies starting extractive projects that damage the environment, like mines.

These are the same processes that are put into place to stop say mining companies wantonly ravaging the landscape.

It's a canary of a large company attempting to avoid the process, which was put in place to protect the environment.

So everyone is now quite concerned that are the environmental protections really functional or not.

Basically everyone considers nature to be a public good in Finland. There is "every mans right" which allows you to camp and collect berries almost everywhere, for instance. Majority of the population has vacation homes in the forests next to lakes. A large mine that ignores environmental effects can thus damage both the public goods and the value of private properties quite a lot. I mean - that is the feeling the people have.

So it's not about "company doing something in their own property, big deal". It's about respecting safety mechanism to protect public goods.

And, that the government should keep everyone equal under the law.

No one is thinking only about few trees. Everyone is quite angry that a company could not follow due process without any backlash and worried what happens with, say the next large mine if the systems intended to protect the nature are not really working.

The main issue is that can a large company avoid process in a way that would land an individual in trouble.

It's not about trees.

It's about fairness.

It's also about the fact these processes are in place to stop large companies causing environmental damage.

It can be argued "a few trees isn't much" but it's about the entire protective mechanism to stop, say mining companies, to wantonly ravage the landscape.

If one company can do it, it means the system isn't implementing the protection the voters would like to have for nature.

Hence it's a quite political hot potato.

"Because of the news articles."

Yes, generally that's how you make public aware of illegal activity.

Not having news about companies braking laws mean generally that the country is likely quite corrupt.

So I don't know where you are from but in Finland anyone breaking a law is expected to be treated equally.

If an individual had ignored the process to this extent they would be in quite hot water.

A large multinational company avoiding the official process feels unjust and is exactly the thing public has been extremely worried of happening regarding the environmental impact.

So it's not because news inflamed something.

It's because something like this is exactly what the public has been alarmed about for a long time.

No, you found the Finn who wants everyone to respect law and order.

Including large multinational companies.

I do realize different countries have different names for various political alignments but I've never heard respecting law and order to be particular to liberals.

Having the companies building the data centers respect laws is more important.

This isn’t about trees. This is about not following the environmental regulation.

To put in contrast this is something for which a private citizen could get into a lot of hot water.

So it’s about can a large corporation act as they like or do they need to follow the laws just like everyone else.

If they had followed the law, the trees would not be an issue.

No.

It was about making an environmental assesment before starting on the clearing.

Which is mandated by law.

Now the environmental impact cannot be assessed.

This is making the entire country quite angry.

Thanks, appreciate the market research insights and thoughtfull feedback!

The UX tips are really helpfull.

The market research is really interesting. It’s really fun to see how market preferences are so against the grain of my personal aesthetics :)

” 1. Teach is amazing”

Thank you so much! Maybe I managed to innovate something in this quite well trodden genre :)

Thanks!

I would appreciate if you could try again.

I added a WebGL2 rendering backend.

Thanks for your feedback!

Can you please test again?

I added WebGL2 backend as separate binary selected during page loading if browser does not support WebGPU.

I left out WebGL rendering backend to shave off few megabytes but might have jumped the gun on WebGPU support.

The better choice clearly was offering both :)

Would you mind sharing which browser you use?

(WebGPU is getting really nice support finally - https://caniuse.com/webgpu - not _full_ coverage yet but getting quite prominent)

“WebGPU … isn’t needed”

Yes! That’s why the headline says “overdesigned”:)

It’s designed as a universal native app. So browser here really is just a platform for deployment.

The design is for a an application that is a single download and few megabytes in size that runs the same on desktops natively (after compilation) and in the browser. Rust ecosystem is getting _really_ nice for that.

So it’s Egui with WebGPU backend.

So if the requirement is ”an universal app” it’s nicer alternative than using Electron but Tauri might have been a more reasonable choice if I didn’t want to leave the door open more for more options on rendering backend on desktop.

Sort of same lineage in thinking as Flash, Java apps (circa 2000 :) ) etc. Or something like Ghostty.

The downside is that it does not use native GUI for much which means it’s closer to a game than ”professional” desktop app.

”If WebGPU works …”

It’s ”almost” fully supported: https://caniuse.com/webgpu

Edit: There is now also WebGL2 backend

Sure - when discussing C of all languages this expression felt shallower than usual though.

If you are really enthusiastic you can write _obsfuscated_ C. And people can kind of agree what that is when they see it.

But _idiomatic_ ? Good luck defining what that is.

The term has sort of stuck in Python and there it's purpose is a bit more clear. There is this _object_ way of doing things, there is this _expression_ way of doing things etc and the interaction patterns work really nicely.

But you can't really use that expression in other languages which lack the same level of institutional design without sounding very much out of touch.

”This can result in several different implementations of a function that differ only by type — often, the more idiomatic C approach would be to use macros or void * arguments.”

”Idiomatic” - is a ridiculous tautology I wish people discussing languages would stop using.

The only non-idiomatic code written seriosly is that which the compiler/interpreter does not understand.

Claiming universal superiority of style is shallow and thoughtless.

Intentional obfuscation is a different thing.

Getting a dubious stream is far less risky than running a dubious binary. But maybe people would not care supporting bot networks and other maladies.

This is false analogue. Comparing SWE to pianist and using desktop as the similar element is false. Desktop to SWE is like … how the concert pianist arrives at the concert venue. You want the pianist to arrive on time but you really don’t care about their mode of transportation.

Besides it’s good to take things slow when face to face with people.

Yes! Best book ever on how a high technology startup operates. If you are wondering how to create an "internal startup" - that's your guide. It's a people system - so you need to find the people!

"that work does not exist unless an engineer invents it."

This is so strange. To my mind the only purpose companies hire engineers is to support business. The staff engineer should not need a project manager to tell what is interesting for business aspects - even though the goals are likely mostly technical.

I do realize this does not hold up always. But to me if you can't provide some reasoning for your work in business metrics you are participating in an academic exercise.

Well, US did not really have that to start with (Kaiser &co learned fast). So it’s not about having something and losing it as much as bootstrapping and discarding.

For processes that are scalable, well known and industrial, profit motive actually does provide results.

The question is more of are there bottlenecks of skill and maybe secret sauce (eg something like ASML).

” that’s too mathy” I’m not really sure there is any remedy to the fact computer graphics is based on math.

I suck at math myself so can relate. But actually the math you need to learn to be effective at graphics is mostly about understanding _a very small subset_ of a bunch of concepts (such as how 2x2, 3x3 and 4x4 matrices work) and one is set for life,

so I think it’s good to give the formal mathemathical explanation and then Gilbert Strang what it all means.