The5thElephant

Figma on desktop is an Electron app I believe. Figma chose to build a custom webGL rendering engine for their design canvas, so the core issue is that technical decision early on (probably allowed for some better performance and multiplayer back then). Figma is stuck with wanting to control their rendering and allow for non-product stuff like Figjam or the new Draw tools, but it will inherently hold them back from providing a really good design/dev handoff and always will hold designers back because it doesn't use CSS web rendering.

Exactly this. Thank you.

We need a Blender-like design tool specifically for product design. Using HTML/CSS for rendering so it covers most web needs and that usually more than encompasses native app-layout emulation. Open source, technical, and not expected to be picked up in a day or fully understood top-to-bottom by everyone.

The reason Figma is putting us into a design box is because it doesn't have all the CSS features that actually let you create incredible experiences.

Because I can do way more meaningful design exploration and iteration if I am not constantly running into a tool's limitations. I work at a fast paced startup where my prototyping rapidly iterates into production and the vast majority of developers I have ever worked with don't really know CSS. If I want to implement something actually complex in layout it would be SO MUCH FASTER if I could show the devs how to do it in CSS correctly in the design tool. AND it would let me better test and explore how the complex layout interacts with real data and real users. Figma prototypes are terrible.

Figma is a great tool for 90% of basic and boring design. A lot of product design is not just basic and boring, and a lot of stuff I need simply cannot be reproduced in Figma. So yes I do just write the code directly, but that doesn't let me explore those complicated layouts and iterate on them visually the same way I could if it was HTML/CSS in a Figma-like design canvas.

Sketch has the same issue with handoff. Sketch does not use CSS for rendering either.

What about variables that don't use pixel units? Often values appear as hardcoded in dev-mode when they are actually meant to be a % unit or something else Figma doesn't support because Figma doesn't actually use CSS for rendering.

When my devs just copy whats in Figma dev-mode they get so much stuff wrong.

I actually have the opposite problem with Figma. It is way too basic and simple, targeting every kind of design and the average designer skill level.

I work in complex SAAS product design. Basic things I can do in CSS I can't do in Figma. Things like a table? Yeah it is entirely faked and awful in Figma. Don't even get me started on anything more complicated than flex rows and columns.

Half the debate over designer/dev handoff in the industry right now is simply because of Figma's limitations and the refusal of designers and front-end devs alike to learn HTML and CSS.

We need a Blender-like tool for web and app product design. Highly capable and advanced, you aren't expected to know all of it, and it can do anything you want it to.

I need a tool that is more than just a fancy rectangle drawer.

PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) would not have been possible without a completely unrelated discovery of a heat-resistant bacteria by a federally funded scientist years earlier. Is it possible that eventually a privately funded effort may have figured out that some bacteria can survive in temperatures beyond what was generally considered possible and connected that to replicating DNA? Yeah maybe, but it seems extremely less likely.

Your black and white way of looking at this is naive at face value. We need both federal and private funded research. Is there fraud in science? Yes. So your answer is throw it all out instead of rooting out the fraud? Somehow expect fraud not to exist in privately funded research? Your comments here are so myopically driven by a bias against something rather than what is the best outcome for scientific research.

Peter Watts is fantastic. Very different tone from a lot of other scifi, with some very clever and dark ideas.

Not doing basic research, and your research is entirely driven by short-term profit motives rather than long term benefit of humanity.

Funny enough I also got diagnosed with gout once in my 20s. I have always had somewhat bad toes/bunions (probably partially genetic, and partially wearing only tight soccer shoes as a kid) and I went to a wedding wearing some new leather shoes that I hadn't broken in yet. The next day I woke up with a fever and horrific pain in the sides of my toes. Went to doctor and they did some tests and were also seemingly surprised at the results indicating gout. They asked me to come back in a week to double check, and by then my symptoms were gone and the tests no longer indicated gout.

Our bodies are such strange mechanisms.

Why have I heard so many stories of doctors not wanting to diagnose something as Lyme disease?

Honestly main reason is the UI and speed.

Cursor has consistently felt faster and easier to use with better inline auto-complete and faster large edits in chat than VSCode ever did. The way suggestions and chat is shown is just a bit easier to read and more elegantly presented.

These things make a big difference.

Looking at the performance it's quite clearly much faster than equivalent effects done in traditional web browser rendering or in design tools.

It's not so simple. Background panning on modern TVs can look very juttery/flickery with motion-smoothing completely off. OLEDs can turn on and off very quickly, and 24 frames a second really isn't that many, so you end up seeing each frame rather distinctly instead of the more smoothed out and less instant frame updates you got on older TVs.

I've found the lowest motion-smoothing setting makes watching stuff like this far more enjoyable while avoiding the awful soap-opera effect you get from higher settings.

It felt awful to admit to myself since I hated on motion-smoothing for so long, but I simply cannot not see the 24 frames in pretty much all scenes where the camera is panning and background has to move a lot.

He is a serial liar, but we can also actually see the engineering progress which is remarkable regardless of his overinflated timelines.

His lying doesn't change the incredible work by those engineers and other employees of SpaceX.

I'm guessing it will get nowhere close to as well considered, written, and structured as what Bartosz makes himself.

I don't know how people don't see how poor quality so much AI writing is, even when referencing good quality work.

Also making effective visualizations that do a good job of illustrating a concept is not just a matter of being able to write the code.

Isn't that what they are claiming is true now? That the errors do decrease exponentially with each qubit added?

Or maybe you just have some aphantasia?

My visual imagination absolutely can have a time dimension just like my audio imagination. I can remember sequences of film from movies I have seen many times with high level of detail, and then if I so choose change what happens in that sequence to whatever I want.

I think it's more that as humans our audio fidelity in general is less detailed than our visual fidelity so it is easier for us to notice limitations in our ability to imagine visuals than in our ability to imagine audio.

This is where the confusion stems from.

I can have very vivid mental imagery, I can imagine all sorts of fantastical things in detail in my mind on command. But that doesn't mean I don't see black when I close my eyes. It doesn't mean the mental imagery blocks what I can see normally with my eyes open. It is in your "mind's eye", so it is still triggering the vision parts of the brain, but almost like its on a different screen.

Similarly with imagining sound or music. I can almost perfectly recall some of my favorite music, I can compose a new piece (poorly) in my head based on music and sounds I have heard, but none of it will drown out an actual sound I hear around me.

That being said, if I am very mentally focused on some mental imagery it can still distract me from my real vision and or even sort of "replace it" without my closing my eyes. Sort of like the feeling you get when driving and zoning out thinking about something (but you are still safely driving).

The nuclear explosion analogy is a bit off since for anything living in the simulation the nuclear explosion would be quite real. The explosion isn't real for us in the physical world because it cannot interact with us, but a simulated mind can interact with us in the real world.

> Only a small subset of what our brains do is actually conscious. What makes some information processing more special than others that some of it is conscious and the rest is not?

This is an excellent way of approaching the question, but I just as easily can say isn't it more likely that the difference is the pattern of the information and not the strict physical structure that makes it? Look at how many different physical structures and mechanisms we have for seeing, hearing, breathing, touching, etc across nature. Many of them are fundamentally different from each other, but end up in the same result of a sense.

Isn't it more likely that conscious thinking is like other senses in that it's a kind of information processing, rather than a specific mechanism of processing?

This also make it more likely to answer your question of why are some mental processes conscious and the majority are not, it would seem far more likely that the brain's neuronal structures (most of which are the same basic cell throughout the brain, just in different types of structures) discover different patterns rather than fundamentally different physical processes.

> It's an idea that comes out of sci-fi. It's been used as a plot device in some episodes of Star Trek. But it's just that, science fiction.

I'm not talking about hand-wavy sci-fi or spiritual "the universe is a sentient being" stuff. I'm talking about one of the few solutions to what the nature of qualia is and why we aren't philosophical zombies. Why would the universe have some mechanism of consciousness available to it prior to those structures even existing? What is more convincing about a physical process being the literal mechanism for consciousness and not an informational process that has an abstracted physical basis? Could the literal mechanism not just be the information system considering you can create the same behaviors in a simulation as in reality?

Consciousness being some thing that just appears in the universe all of a sudden because evolution happened on this "neat trick" in physics seems more "magical" than it being an emergent property of increasing more complex systems, but a property that has always been there. We see the same emergent behavior appear in all sorts of systems built using different parts and/or simulated as long as they are in the same context of rules. Why wouldn't that also hold true for the emergent behavior of consciousness?

The argument for it being this unique thing that only can happen via a strict physical process strikes me as dualist. Why is it a unique thing?

I'm struggling to understand this argument. Our brain is just hardware. Even if there is a quantum effect we haven't discovered that is necessary for it, that effect is still running on regular old atoms and molecules. There is no inherent reason we couldn't just add that effect to our metal and silicon computers.

Those atoms and molecules may just be bits of information themselves in some higher order computer. But there is nothing inherently "magical" about consciousness other than its uniqueness.

Heck there are fairly convincing arguments for pan-consciousness where it is a fundamental part of any set of information and is simply as complex as that information system. If you have a highly complex, self referential information system like our brains, then the complexity of consciousness is equivalent to our experience. The chinese box would have its LLM-like consciousness, which we would not recognize as our own, but could still a qualitative experience born from objective information states.

Think more about your last paragraph, it undermines your argument from the previous two. If everything is the result of a physical process, then how is that an argument for consciousness being somehow fundamentally different or exceptional in our ability to recreate or simulate it?

Scratch them with your liver.

What is it with Google Maps refusing to show me the street name I'm zooming in on? It feels like they make it especially sparse on streets your route line uses!

All of what I am saying is anecdotal observation of trends and behaviors, nothing objective or measurable, just like what you have been saying. I also have been in the industry since the era of table layouts and slices.

I bundle UI/UX together because that's what most design teams end up doing, both. In my experience only very large companies commit the resources to having dedicated UX research. It's only telling of the practical reality, not of my knowledge of UI or UX.

My point is that there is no universal "purpose" to design. Design is a practice that can be applied to a wide range of purposes, some more aesthetic, some more functional, and in all cases are struggled to be measured by subjective or objective means.

The popular designers I refer to are not from advertising backgrounds. They are all "design engineers" who make things that stand out from the rest because they can actually produce their work and thus are capable of way more than the crazy limitations Figma or other design tools put on us. The trend amongst tech startups has been landing pages that follow the aesthetics of companies like Linear and Stripe. Whether or not they are functional, they stand out because they are flashy.

So many comments here are just anecdotal experiences pretending to be absolute statements.

Web design used to be filled with ridiculously detailed and "over" designed websites that rarely were hyper-focused on clarity or efficiency of communication. It's only recent years where that has become such singular focus, and in turn has created a sentiment that UI and web/app experiences have lost their charm.

Many of the currently popular marketing site designers in the design community do come from UI/UX and web-design backgrounds, and they are popular because they design over-the-top big-text animation-filled websites that catch your eye.

The core of UI design is not "clarity". That is one adjective you can aim for, and you will find a wide range of opinions on what it means and how to measure whether you were successful or not. But "user interface/experience" does not imply it HAS to be an efficient one. Some UI/UX is designed for delight and delight alone.

The person you are replying to got into the industry with the same attitude most UI/UX designers I know had starting out. The people who approach it with your attitude have mostly been engineers. In the end most meet somewhere in a happy middle.

Punishing major corporations at scale might help prevent the next multi-generational fuckup, and help pay for the energy and changes moving forward.

I'm not really sure what it is you are trying to defend here? I understand arguing that you can't guarantee a different approach would have led to better results, but in this situation it seems fairly clear that corporations being open and honest would be superior.

How do you think you come around to having cost-effective alternatives? You need people actively working on them, and for that you need an incentive.

I'm sorry but this is just not a reasonable thing to be worried about. Drones are going to be more prevalent across numerous industries and professions, planes and helicopters fly over your head all the time already, and most people are not listening for tire or engine sounds to prepare them to dodge an out of control car.

I am in WAY more danger from a police car currently than from a drone mitigating the need for the police to send a car in the first place.

> Another way of saying this is that unacceptable tyranny will roll in on a tread of acceptable compromises.

That's a very black and white way of looking at things. We have vastly more surveillance today by businesses, governments, AND private individuals on each other. There have been abuses that have been exposed and fought against, there have been exposes due to this surveillance of powerful people who otherwise would not have been discovered in their corruptions or misdeeds. Surveillance is a tool, not just something used by the powerful against the weak. It can and will be used for good and bad.

I am familiar with the arguments made against policing, and agree it needs significant reforms, but don't agree with the approach the defund the police, abolish prisons, and ACAB groups take even if I understand where they are coming from. They are very effective however at making the average person dismiss progressive thinking instead of actually consider their otherwise valid points.

> You seem to be under the misapprehension that only surveillance can reduce violence.

It's not just about violence, and surveillance is only one of many tools a society uses to regulate itself. Can you suggest to me what tool, process, or policy would be able to track down a kidnapper faster than having a few more available cameras would? Nothing after the fact is going to be more effective than knowing where the person was when it happened and where they went.

We can discuss and likely agree on all sorts of policies that can help mitigate violence and social problems BEFORE they happen, but that won't make you feel better when your kid is gone already. What if drones ARE the safe way to improve policing? You get eyes on the scene without a fallible and scared human trained to shoot before thinking.