gyomu

I’m a photographer, and am on a bunch of beginner photography groups.

These groups used to be a mix of people being confused at how their camera worked and wanting help, people wanting tips on how to take better pictures, and sometimes there was requests for editing pictures on their behalf (eg “I found this old black and white faded picture of my great grandparents, can anyone help restore it?”)

These days, 99.9% of the posts are requests that involve synthesizing an entirely new picture out of one or more other pictures. Examples: “can someone bring in my grandpa from this picture into this other family picture?”. Or “I love this photo of me with my kids, but I hate how I look. Can someone take the me from this other picture and put it in there? Also please remove the cups from our hands and the trees in the background, and this is my daughter’s ex boyfriend please also remove him”.

What’s even crazier is that the replies of those threads are filled with dozens of people who evidently just copy pasted the prompt + picture into ChatGPT. The results look terrible… but the OP is always pleased as punch!

People don’t care about “reality”. Pictures have lost their status of “visual record of a past event”* and become “visual interpretation of whatever this person happens to want”.

There’s no putting back the genie in the bottle.

*: yes, you can argue they were never 100% that, but still, that’s effectively what they were.

In the countryside where I am there are 2 buses a day (only during the school year, for students, although they let non students ride it) and the nearest train station is 30 minutes away.

The real concern here is people driving when they shouldn't (drunk, tired, etc.) because they have no other option, putting lives at risk, so to the degree that self-driving cars will curb that I am wholly for the technology.

Self-driving is one of the most interesting technologies of our times, from a legislative/social standpoint.

Will every large city in the globe be filled with self driving cars in 2035, or will the situation be roughly identical to 2025?

Honestly it feels like it could go either way - the last ten years have been such "one step forward, two steps sideways, one half step backwards" on every front - what the technology seems able to deliver on, what companies claim they can/will do, what regulators and the common people make of them, freak accidents that inevitably sway the popular opinion, etc.

Personally I hope the technology matures and becomes ubiquitous in my lifetime (the sooner the better), because I hate driving (a few acquaintances have been in grisly accidents due to drunk drivers coming the other way) and I just want to get in a car at 10p with my backpack in tow, lie down, and wake up at 7a 600 miles away.

Funny, it’s actually after I come back from a week of backpacking that my “internet quality time” is highest - there’s a bunch of new, meaningful content for me to go through.

After a few hours of catching up tho, that’s when my internet usage devolves to reading pointless faff and refreshing my timelines in a loop.

Signatures seem to be completely useless. Like you, my signature has devolved into a squiggle that is never the same, and it has never mattered.

I remember experimenting as a bored young adult with my first credit card, before tap to pay, when you often had to sign with a stylus on a terminal (in the US) - I would sign something different every time, sometimes nonsense, sometimes a little drawing, sometimes writing “Obama” or “Einstein” to see if I’d get a call from my bank or something - never did.

Maybe there was an era when actual matching signatures mattered, but it seems long gone.

I guess if you’re a celebrity signing autographs then it matters.

This would actually be a cool use case for AR glasses- digitize everything as you write it, tie it to the physical notebook it’s in, so that you can later search it, or have the system tell you things like “you wrote your thoughts on your summer 2032 London trip in pages 34-39 of the red muji notebook that should currently be in your desk’s bottom drawer”.

> my maps app wouldn’t connect to my phone’s music player any more

Sorry a bit of a detail but I don’t understand this. What does it means for a maps app to connect to a phone’s music player?

Are we talking about 2 apps on the same phone? 2 apps on 2 phones? I use map apps on my phone all the time, while listening to music, but I’ve never “connected” the two.

> if you don’t have anything to translate it won’t output anything good.

One of the greatest quotes in the history of computer science:

“On two occasions I have been asked, – "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question"

> "a software engineer pedal."

hah, in the world of photography, we talk about "cameras for dentists" (they often have a little red dot on them)

Yeah, the AI angle doesn't really bring any new element to this conversation that free software advocates have been having for almost half a century now.

Well, I guess AI-as-my-romantic-partner people don't care so much about freedom to inspect the code or freedom to modify, in this instance - just the freedom to execute.

If you made a "Replika in a box" product which, for $3k, gave you unlimited Replika forever - guaranteed to never be discontinued by its creators — I think a not so tiny amount of people would purchase without thinking.

Given how obsessive these users seem to be about the product, $3k is far from a crazy amount of money.

Yes, that's also what caught my attention. I landed on this article by way of reading about barnacles, and that the Barnacle Goose is named as such because it was thought it was born from barnacles.

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

Maybe it's hard for us to realize how filled with superstition the world used to be; and how so little was understood and in such minuscule proportions compared to today, such that most anything could appear plausible under the right circumstances.

> you are just writing your own history to suit your narrative

Classic LLM behavior

The OP1 is a genius piece of design tbh. It is very flexible and powerful for its small size, and devices in its category were very rare when it first came out (it helped define the modern incarnation of that category).

It was pricy but still under the $1k mark - pretty standard for a piece of consumer creative gear.

The design made it extremely approachable, which means a ton of techie people who wouldn't be into music gear otherwise still wanted to grab one just to try it and who knows, maybe it'd turn them into musicians.

So yeah, fantastically designed piece of kit. Lots of respect to TE for having brought that into the world.

I think a lot of the frustration directed at TE more recently is due to the fact that that base equation around price/features/quality of the product, which was very good for the OP1, has only gotten worse for later products.

And the OP1 itself, despite being an almost 15 year old product, has gone up in price A LOT (and the 1f upgrades don't justify the bump).

When I reached upper level Japanese classes (N2/N1), my native Japanese teachers would regularly (maybe once a week or so) have to look up a character they were writing on the board during class.

It definitely made me feel better.

In Japan, paper

The world of music hardware is an interesting one.

You'll meet some amazing musicians who have been touring for decades and are still playing on the same guitar they got for $800 15 years ago.

And you'll meet people who drop 5 figures on synth gear every year and have never put together a single track.

If you're running a business selling electronic music gear, who would you rather target?

There's plenty of options, take your pick. The latest one that I've been hearing about is https://retro.app, there are others.

The issue of course is that your friends won't be on it, most of them won't sign up even if you beg them, and most likely none of you will be using the service anymore 6 months from now.

> Strip the platforms of any and all initiative. Make them dumb pipes. Stop pretending that people want to use social media for entertainment and news and celebrities. Stop trying to turn it into interactive TV. Stop forcing content from outside of my network upon me. Make the chronological feed the only option.

Congrats, you now have platforms no one will care about, as attention span gets sniped by competitors who want to maximize engagement and don't care about your arbitrary rules (ie, literally what happened 15 years ago).

I think our brains as kids are very different than as adults, and like it’s a fairly unexplored area because studying kids is much, much harder than 20 somethings or older.

I have a number of such weird things, the most dramatic being probably that I remember experiencing vivid synesthesia until age 4/5 or so, which kind of faded away has never happened since.

> the S.K.I. model — Storage Kills Investment

What is this? Google doesn't return anything for me...

> Seeing Devine at StrangeLoop last year […] took a lot of mental energy!

Why?

> I’ve never really understood the need to build a full fidelity reproduction of the layout systems a design is targeting.

Well, you wrote why right before:

> As a dev that does a lot of his own design

You understand the whole, so you don't need lossy abstractions to connect the ends. When roles are specialized and people only understand part of the context in which they're working, they need ways to communicate about the whole thing.

Tools like Figma fill those sort of gaps, that tend to occur in organizations with dozens/hundreds of employees, with the need to quickly onboard frequent new hires, etc.

That’s why we love Easter eggs, they’re a sign that the software is built by a small enough team that those cover-your-ass processes haven’t been put in place.

As an indie dev, if users trust my taste enough to use my software, then I can follow my taste as well when it comes to Easter eggs.

And it’s why most attempts to do cutesy Easter egg style things by bigger companies tend to just sound lame and fall flat.

> Apple has begun to transition this way too. There aren’t any designers working there

This is a dumb “no true Scotsman” argument, there are undoubtedly designers working there by any stretch of the imagination.

The more interesting discussion to have is why the field of software design has come to the point it’s at today, and why many designers think that work like the kind Apple is doing is good design.

> I built something in less than 24h that I'm sure would have taken us MONTHS to just get off the ground, let alone to the polished version it's at right now

Would love to see it!

> I’ve shipped non trivial greenfield products

Links please

Broadly agreed with all the points outlined in there.

But for me the biggest issue with all this — that I don't see covered in here, or maybe just a little bit in passing — is what all of this is doing to beginners, and the learning pipeline.

> There are people I once respected who, apparently, don’t actually enjoy doing the thing. They would like to describe what they want and receive Whatever — some beige sludge that vaguely resembles it. That isn’t programming, though.

> I glimpsed someone on Twitter a few days ago, also scoffing at the idea that anyone would decide not to use the Whatever machine. I can’t remember exactly what they said, but it was something like: “I created a whole album, complete with album art, in 3.5 hours. Why wouldn’t I use the make it easier machine?”

When you're a beginner, it's totally normal to not really want to put in the hard work. You try drawing a picture, and it sucks. You try playing the guitar, and you can't even get simple notes right. Of course a machine where you can just say "a picture in the style of Pokémon, but of my cat" and get a perfect result out is much more tempting to a 12 year old kid than the prospect of having to grind for 5 years before being kind of good.

But up until now, you had no choice and to keep making crappy pictures and playing crappy songs until you actually start to develop a taste for the effort, and a few years later you find yourself actually pretty darn competent at the thing. That's a pretty virtuous cycle.

I shudder to think where we'll be if the corporate-media machine keeps hammering the message "you don't have to bother learning how to draw, drawing is hard, just get ChatGPT to draw pictures for you" to young people for years to come.

> However, I wouldn't be surprised if he tried to hire other devs to outsource some of his workload while he remained the interaction point with the company.

What a silly waste of his time and reputation (in addition to other people's).

If he's that competent, he could hire/mentor juniors and just use his skills to run a contracting business and keep making big bucks while not having to lie all the time?

> There are a bunch of fundamental computer science problems that stand in the way, which I was schooled on in 2006 from the brightest minds in the field. For example, how do you represent arbitrary spatial relationships on computers in a general and scalable way? There are no solutions in the public data structures and algorithms literature. We know that universal solutions can’t exist and that all practical solutions require exotic high-dimensionality computational constructs that human brains will struggle to reason about. This has been the status quo since the 1980s. This particular set of problems is hard for a reason.

Where can I read more about this space? (particularly on the "we know that universal solutions can't exist" front)