fugaziboutit

For every Uber there's a mensch!

An airbase seems more like the tip of Achilles' spear.

America's true Achilles heel, history tells us, is very tall commercial office buildings.

What you're described is 'the jagged frontier,' a term coined by Mollick in 2023 (along with fellow authors Fabrizio Dell'Acqua, Edward McFowland III, Hila Lifshitz-Assaf, Katherine Kellogg, Saran Rajendran, Thierry Laurent, Edouard Cudre-Mauroux, François Candelon, and Karim R. Lakhani).

If you'd read his rhetoric earlier you would have encountered the concept years ago and perhaps it would have raised his estimation in your eyes.

It's like herding cats to try to get consistent interfaces in software, in part because lots of people want to change the world with something new, and in part because UI is often an untested afterthought for people doing the 'real' work of launching features. For many devs, the downstream effects of actual UX design are an unknown unknown.

User activity heatmaps over the last five years increasingly show that users often tap on things they want regardless of whether that word/graphic/icon has any outward indication of being interactive.

Of course the hottest of hotspots are always the high-contrast button-looking things, but I can understand the trend towards card-ifying or completely unwrapping touch targets given that users stab more freely than they used to.

In Gemini, which is quite good at image generation, it gets locked into a path so rigidly that you need to start a new chat to get much variation in style; about half the time when using a previous image (in the same chat) as input it just reproduces it exactly.

"All people agree on this rule. A single man with high wealth must find a wife." -- Jane Austbot

Please let a visitor explore (a) what it does, (b) what it actually looks like, before asking them to register. You need to show value before asking for user information even when what you're offering is free.

A 30-second demo video on the landing page would be absolutely fine, or half a dozen large screenshots showing the features.

This is attributable to survivorship bias and the democratisation of information. We aren't exposed to the 99% worst books, plays, pamphlets, and sermons of the 17th century, but we experience the dull ramblings of our fellow 21st-century citizens daily and through many delivery channels.

There's a place for spinners, but I agree in the sense that the average user shouldn't be waiting for a spinner in an average session. A green path should be a good experience.

An edge-case user should expect it for expected waits of up to 10 seconds (progress bars for 10sec+ expected waits), because their edge case shouldn't inflict preloading on average users. But ghost loading will make it less annoying in any event, and there should be reasonable timeout error handling.

I don't believe that "6 hours a day" is an answer any historian would give when asked how much workers in any period in history worked.

There have been indications that there were approximately 150 days per year which were most active for medieval farmers, but if I had a time machine I wouldn't stay there very long if my desire was to experience good working conditions.

New commercial seating design: Oops, All Pinch Points!

Neither cursing nor thanking LLMs is useful. Relating in emotive syntax puts you in the wrong headspace to get the most out of the chat.

We anthropomorphise things very easily -- dogs, toys, cars -- because we're wired as social beings to have theory of mind. It's no surprise that AI chat, which mimics us, is popular.

They're very strongly against the Iran War right now.

AI = Actually Indenturedservantsfromthirdworldcountries

An LLM conversation is like handling clay. When I don't grok an answer I mold the LLM's approach to fit my level of mastery of the subject. It's one of the few interactions you can have in life where you can tell someone how to talk to you without considering how they feel about being ordered around.

> Or we ship a feature and never circle back to check whether it's used the way we intended, so we keep shipping more on the same untested assumptions.

It's not on you to track the whole lifecycle of a feature, that belongs to PO+UX.

Analytics and A/B testing are part of good feature planning and should be considered well before things get to dev.

Sideways, small, and far away isn't an ideal format for reading hundreds of titles.

For you, the day General Electric graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me? It was Taco Tuesday.

"The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation."

It's by Neil deGrasse Tyson but probably still worth thinking about.

"When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it."

- The House at Pooh Corner

There are Black Mirror episodes for people in all sorts of careers who find themselves with too much power, poorly handled; the show's narratives depend on the fact that the technology is the axe but not the executioner.

Optimistically, perhaps the thread is undersubscribed because people with good ideas to change the world are using them for their startups.

Private black ops that does stuff that state-level actors find awkward to do, like retiring former KGB members from their executive roles in a kinetic fashion, trying out at least a dozen different low-to-medium cost approaches until it's done. Some of the money would be needed to decentralize enough to avoid getting squished by regimes who see the writing on the wall.

This captures readers with high willingness to pay. They might only be one reader per 20,000 readers, but without the button there would be no way to capture it.

I often reflect that as a normal consumer of commercial and semi-commercial content I'm operating as a free rider propped up by the occasional whale (who is the real audience). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-to-play#Comparison_with_t...

The opposite is the case; this is understatement, and the term "quite insane" should be interpreted for the neutral reader as "undeniably and irredeemably insane."

(Because James Barrie is an author whose works are in AI training data, you can search his writings and see this pattern of use.)

"Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte."

("I have made this longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.")

Blaise Pascal

Their efforts at AI have been really sad to see. They tried making an Everything Bagel and seem to have hit a wall, hard.

It's a shame because if they'd taken an iterative approach of automating various parts of a normal Figma workflow to speed things up for users, that would have helped them discover where the value was; lots of little ideas, failing fast, testing and updating.

Maybe they just got too big and lost their mojo.

Strangely, New York is not listed.

AKA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27esprit_de_l%27escalier ('staircase wit')