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spythonon Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

a place for unfinished thoughts and experiments in art, UX design and AI.

spythonon Companies must stop using Google Analytics

"Any reason why my Xiaomi Robot Vacuum uploads 11.5GB of data per month to the internet?" https://www.reddit.com/r/Xiaomi/comments/9tgyrg/any_reason_w...

spythonon Seam Carving

I've been playing with seam carving as an artistic tool: I used it to compress maps: https://rybakov.com/blog/cartographic_spasms/

Since, you know, why would all the empty space on a map be important?

spythonon Ask HN: What other news feeds do you read besides Hacker News?

I've been reading https://www.metafilter.com/ for more cultural things, though the site changed quite a bit over the twenty years of its existence.

spythonon AI camera with no lens

In 2013 a friend and I made a similar photo app (called parallelogram.me) but based on visual similarity instead of GPS coordinates: https://rybakov.com/parallelogram/

spythonon Anxiety can be created by the body, mouse heart study suggests

There are actually exercises where you imagine a dial, like a volume knob, and imagine dialing the emotion that you want to regulate down a bit. The astonishing thing is, it works quite well!

spythonon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2023)

  Location: Berlin/Karlsruhe, Germany
  Remote: yes
  Willing to relocate: yes
  Technologies: UX design, UX concepts, Python, Flask, HTML + CSS, Hugo SSG, MPEG DASH Video, etc.
  Résumé/CV: https://rybakov.com/
  Email: michail@rybakov.com

Not looking for a technical position, instead interested in developing sensible UX design paradigms for early stage products. Lately worked on researching UX approaches for 'tools for thoughts' browsers Beam https://beamapp.co/ and Synth https://synth.app/

spythonon I almost bought a scanner

Thank you for the thorough explanation! The low bit depth and the inconsistent color reproduction do sound like a deal breaker.

spythonon I almost bought a scanner

That sounds very interesting, but where would you get the right software and drivers for the scanner?

spythonon Ask HN: Please share tips and strategies for dealing with eye strain

I feel like one cause of eye strain might be psychological: I find my eyes mostly strained when I'm overly fixating on something, when the project 'must' be completed, when the bug 'must' be found. My eyes in those moments feel like the fingers of an overly anxious climber who uses way too much power in his grip, and as a consequence tires way too fast.

As the strain comes from tension, the way out of the strain is to let go of the tension, and try not to grip with the eyes but to observe calmly, just as you would calmly observe the water flowing in a river.

Observe how tense the muscles around your eyes, around your forehead are. Observe whether your jaw is tense. See if you can allow your facial muscles to relax while working, and if you can allow your gaze to remain soft. Make pauses to relax the grip (the metaphorical grip on the situation you are in, as well as the actual muscle tension) every time you catch yourself tensing up.

spythonon Ask HN: Has anyone fully attempted Bret Victor's vision?

To me, the the most interesting part of Bret Victors ideas lie in the re-embodiment of disembodied interactions. The computers choreograph us anyhow, but often in a very poor and limited way – only our fingertips and our eyes move a bit. Why not make the choreography of interaction richer? Why not create a computer-aided full-body choreography of interaction?

In a way, the interactions can be broken up in subject, verb and object. I edit text. I crop a photograph. The subject is the user, and all the representations that extend the user. The mouse pointer in that sense is part of the user. The verb is the action. To select text on screen, I put pressure on a touchpad, move my fingers and release. This is a learned interaction, there are no inherent affordances to a medium (only, at best, inherent affordances to a tool that extends you). The object is a representation. With computer interfaces, you hardly ever interact with something in an immediate way. I want a comment to appear on this site but instead I am writing this text in a white box and not where the comment would appear. All the computer interactions are mediated by these in-between steps. (An example for unmediated interaction would be cooking. What you chop is what you get.)

To get a rich feedback loop in such a mediated environment you need to try and make it as unmediated as possible. To make the subject less mediated, the whole body of the user, the quality of the movements could be integrated into integrations. Here I have hopes for AI supported movement recognition. In addition, the representations of the user (e.g. the mouse pointer in existing systems) could become less binary in their state (I don't have a good example for it, but a hammer can be used with a whole range of intensity while a mouse pointer either performs a click or not).

To make the object less mediated, its representation should ideally be as transparent as possible. AR in this regard is much more promising than VR, since in VR the representation takes place within another representation.

To make the action less mediated, the action should be able to be embodied by the (technologically extended) user, as well as being inherent to the medium which represents the subject. Here we are building a bridge between the human body and a way to represent things that physically do not exist. It's never going to be ideal, but it could be better than what we have now.

So for such a task you'd need to be a UX person, a choreographer, a programmer, a AR/AI person, and ideally have some insights into media theory. It's just not an easy task.

spythonon Smartphones wiped out 97% of the compact camera market

Sigma DP2M. As slow as a film camera. Bad screen. Battery lasts for just 100 photographs. Limited dynamic range. But a great combination of a sharp and tiny lens and unique Foveon sensor. If you get it right, it produces film-like images with amazing colors.

spythonon KDE beats macOS

I use forklift as my main file manager, it has a lot of power user features, and a button to open terminal in the current folder is one of them – https://binarynights.com/

spythonon Each visit to the page deteriorates the main image

I used a similar concept to repeatedly upscale and zoom in on an image with different AI-based super resolution algorithms. At some point only the idiosyncrasies of the algorithm remain: https://rybakov.com/project/im_sitting_in_ai/

spythonon Ask HN: Why is coil whine in electronics so prevalent?

Here's an example for a controller going up to 16 kHZ. http://www.iskydance.com/index.php?c=product_show&a=index&id... (no affiliation). Would need a DMX fader to control it though.

spythonon Ask HN: Why is coil whine in electronics so prevalent?

You can buy good LED drivers with up to around 20kHZ PWM, but even 800 hz is enough to not see the flicker anymore, though it will show up on a video camera as stripes. It's the cheap 250 hz drivers that are painful to the eyes.

spythonon Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (November 2022)

SEEKING WORK

In Germany or remote.

I'm an artistic researcher interested in developing new UX paradigms with non-traditional approaches. Lately worked on researching UX approaches for 'tools for thoughts' browsers Beam https://beamapp.co/ and Synth https://synth.app/

Résumé/CV: https://rybakov.com/

Write me: michail@rybakov.com

spythonon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (November 2022)

  Location: Berlin/Karlsruhe, Germany
  Remote: yes
  Willing to relocate: yes
  Technologies: UX design, UX concepts, Python, Flask, HTML + CSS, Hugo SSG, MPEG DASH Video, etc.
  Résumé/CV: https://rybakov.com/
  Email: michail@rybakov.com

spythonon On Bruno Latour (1947–2022): The world was his laboratory

I worked closely with him for two years, researching for the Critical Zones exhibition at ZKM Karlsruhe in 2018-2020, and he has been my mentor for my own artistic research on spaces and movement during this time.

I remember him as an incredibly kind and patient person, he took time to listen and speak with all the participants, and would try and help everyone grow. Sure, he was a great thinker, but it was his near-childlike openness and excitement that influenced me most.

Once, when I was presenting my research during our regular group meeting, he fell asleep, tired from the long journey the day before. He woke up incredibly sorry but also very happy, explaining that an idea came to him in the dream of of how to talk about point of view vs. point of life (i.e. taking a usual top-down perspective of a map vs. speaking about what each being relies upon, in order to be alive). Later, in a cafe, he took the menu and drew rough sketches on the backside of it, like some genius from a movie, explaining the idea to us.

I'll miss you, Bruno.

spythonon Bruno Latour Has Died

I worked closely with him for two years, researching for the Critical Zones exhibition 2020 at the ZKM. He was also my mentor for my postgraduate artistic research project. I remember him as an incredibly kind and patient person, he took time to listen and speak with all the participants, and would try and help everyone grow. Sure, he was a great thinker, but it was his near-childlike openness and excitement that influenced me most.

We agreed to meet again at his estate in France, for a photo session of him at a place where he goes to think and be alone with himself. Due to the pandemic, that never happened. I'll miss you, Bruno.

spythonon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (October 2022)

  Location: Berlin/Karlsruhe, Germany
  Remote: yes
  Willing to relocate: no
  Technologies: UX design, UX concepts, Python, Flask, HTML + CSS, Hugo SSG, MPEG DASH Video, etc.
  Résumé/CV: https://rybakov.com/
  Email: michail@rybakov.com

spythonon Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

One product in that space that I particularly like is https://mmm.page/ It's just so much fun and adds all the tools to have fun when building a website. I wish that aspect of old internet would be more present in website builders and by extension in personal websites.

spythonon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (September 2022)

  Location: Berlin/Karlsruhe, Germany
  Remote: yes
  Willing to relocate: no
  Technologies: UX design, UX concepts, Python, Flask, HTML + CSS, Hugo SSG, MPEG DASH Video, etc.
  Résumé/CV: https://rybakov.com/
  Email: michail@rybakov.com

Not looking for a technical position, instead interested in developing sensible UX design paradigms for early stage products.

spythonon I have 218 browser tabs open

Great to see that. Kind of disappointed not seeing it developed first in Firefox.

spythonon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 2022)

  Location: Berlin/Karlsruhe, Germany
  Remote: yes
  Willing to relocate: no
  Technologies: UX design, UX concepts, Python, Flask, HTML + CSS, Hugo SSG, MPEG DASH Video, etc.
  Résumé/CV: https://rybakov.com/
  Email: michail@rybakov.com

Not looking for a technical position, instead interested in developing sensible UX design paradigms for early stage products.

spythonon I have 218 browser tabs open

In 2018 I wrote a blog post called Open tabs are cognitive spaces [0] – about that exact problem. It got a bit popular on HN, and since then quite a few alternative browsers tried to solve the problem, I even consulted a few of them, such as Beam[1] and Synth[2].

The hard part of the problem is that by creating 'spaces' full of tabs to make our lives easier we create yet another categorization, another taxonomy, and with it all the timeless problems that taxonomies have: Should the current page belong to category A or a similar category B? Or to both? How can I merge two spaces into one in a good way? Can I do it automatically or do I have to, yet again, select, curate, categorize? How can browsing and researching be a living process and at the same time be neatly sorted for later recall?

One thing that I kind of still miss after watching the field develop for four years, is the simple idea of making groups of tabs easily shareable. Just let me share a tab group with another person! Better yet let us work on the same tab group together, treating it like a living document, a living research space.

I guess this can't be solved by an alternative browser, but instead by an open standard that could be implemented in all browsers.

[0] https://rybakov.com/blog/open_tabs_are_cognitive_spaces/

[1] https://beamapp.co/

[2] https://synth.app/

spythonon Volkswagen bringing back Scout brand truck as electric vehicle made in America

Incredibly disappointed with how designed the front on this one. The original T1 had round 'eyes' and a friendly look; the headlights on the new one give it a mean squinting look.

spythonon The Curse of the Hasselblad XPan

Mamiya 7 is great but got really expensive in the last years, not much cheaper than XPan.

spythonon The Curse of the Hasselblad XPan

I find the camera to be perfect for environmental portraits. Not just because of the image quality or even the unique framing, but also because the camera itself looks so basic in comparison to over-designed professional-looking DSLRs. It feels much less threatening to your surroundings. Had a lot of fun with it as a travel camera: https://rybakov.com/blog/guinea_babka/

P.S. I own two XPans and would be willing to sell one. Hit me up if you are in Germany/EU and are interested.

spythonon Pepsi: Breathtaking Design Strategy (2008) [pdf]

I see it is a feature – the mobile web experience is just bad enough to not get sucked in too much.