gyomu

- designers who come from an advertising/visual design/motion design/packaging/print (although those are a dying breed)/etc background.

Those people care more about how things look in a video commercial or on a giant billboard, and they care about visual aesthetics and making something that catches your eye because it looks really good.

- designers who come from an interaction/HCI/usability/accessibility/etc background

Those people care about things more from a systems point of view, how features will behave across a variety of contexts/modalities, how users come to understand them over time, etc. They had more of a voice in the 80s/90s (Don Norman, Bruce Tognazzini, etc are in that category) but have been increasingly in the minority ever since.

(Designers who come from an industrial design background are a bit of a wildcard - some will put superficial fit & finish above all else, while others really get how good ergonomics, tactility, etc can translate to software).

Honestly, there's value in both. Users will judge a book by its cover, and you want interfaces to look attractive and be compelling - designers from the latter group will be content with designing interfaces that just look like black and white wireframes.

But at the same time, you don't want pure aesthetics to run completely orthogonal to core usability. So it's a balance, and software interfaces are usually worse off when that balance is out of whack.

Anyways, I'll let you guess what category of designers are overrepresented in Apple's ranks. Hint: their current head of interface design comes from a magazine design background.

It's for autonomous drone warfare.

Invading a neighboring nation doesn't seem too appealing if it means sending tens/hundreds of thousands of your young people (a resource that's getting scarcer and scarcer most everywhere in the world) to the meat grinder. Millions of drones though...

After all, the game does not introduce any significant new mechanics beyond the first couple areas - any human player who has the reading/reasoning ability to make it to Mt Moon/Lt Surge would be able to complete the rest of the game.

So why are these models getting stuck at arbitrary points in the game?

As someone technical who works in creative circles, I hear this kind of reasoning all the time and it drives me nuts. The “it’s just art bro, don’t take it so seriously” excuse is so tired, but like the best fake excuses there’s no way to counter it.

Great read, it made me realize how far we've come. Video games as an art are really in an interesting spot right now - big budget projects all end up being bland, buggy, cookie cutter rehashes of the same couple templates.

Companies that once represented the pinnacle of creativity and what could be achieved with high budgets - Blizzard, Bethesda, Ubisoft, etc - are now the laughing stock of gamers. Not that it matters when the bulk of gamers are still putting dozens of hours and plenty of microtransaction dollars into decade old games like Fortnite/Minecraft/GTA every week.

What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression? What's the next big budget release that will actually move the needle of the medium meaningfully?

Thankfully, there are a bunch of indie developers that still release fresh experiences - but they too kind of end up falling into the same tropes (if you like 2D roguelike/platformer/puzzler there's plenty of choice, otherwise...).

Not too unlike the state of the film industry. It's hard to imagine what a solid shakeup of these behemoth, mature industries could look like.

As an owner of a playdate, it’s kind of the wrong platform for… everything. So in that sense it’s right at home.

You have to respect the vision, execution, and the commitment to the product - the hardware looks great and feels great.

The games are all kinda gimmicky and obviously limited by the platform though. Falls squarely into the “I want to love this thing so bad, but I just can’t” camp.

It's probably still a while away, but I for one am very excited for Apple to ship a regular size iPhone that folds down to a small square (people with small pockets know the pain), and an iPad Pro that folds down to the size of an iPad mini and can fit in my daily sling.

And as the tech keeps maturing and gets cheaper, we'll probably see interesting offerings from smaller players like Nothing. Nintendo making a foldable Switch 3 could also be super cool.

As someone who works in the hardware space, I'm excited :)

It truly felt like the future in a way very few pieces of tech have managed to pull off since. One of Sony’s peak accomplishments.

Imagine being a young ambitious student not getting placed into a PhD program because some old dude doing it for the benefits and the lolz took the spot.

The costs are minimal (they all run on a shared $4/mo instance + $10/yr domain per project) and I get to control where the data lives, the features I want to have, etc.

No need to worry about getting the rug pulled on me because the company got acquired or needs to raise revenue or anything like that. No frustration because a redesign made the UI worse or removed features I cared about.

It obviously takes a bit of time upfront, but I see it as a long term investment in my productivity. I use boring, basic, stable technologies so once something is deployed it keeps on humming with extremely minimal involvement on my behalf.

I’m basically slowly working on replacing pretty much every 3rd party app I use with something I wrote myself (it’s going to take a while but that’s okay). My grandpa was a carpenter and pretty much every piece of furniture in the house was something he or his friends had made. As software craftspeople, we should strive to do the same with our digital houses.

Kudos to the author and anyone else who does this. You don’t hear about these things in the mainstream because there’s no reason for people doing this to shout it from the rooftops, but this is software at its best.

Main tells:

- validates the prompter (“the gameplay is indeed…”, “you’re right that…”)

- restates clauses from the prompt (“fluid, biological-themed game”)

- likes to say things authoritatively (“fits the description perfectly”)

- states things that superficially match the prompt but don’t really make sense if you actually know the topic (“there’s a deeper layer to the game, such as the shift in environments, as well as challenges and threats as you progress” - the environments do change in color and the enemies get stronger as you play flow, but no one who’s played it would call that a “deeper layer to the game”)

My interpretation is that it's because they make the art for them, not for the audience. In a sense they got lucky that one piece of their work found itself at the right confluence of factors to blow up like it did, because that's not something you can really control or guarantee, unless you play it extremely safe (which is why all the big game/movie studios produce sequel after sequel, or old rockstars will just keep performing their classics).

There's an interview with Jon Blow I heard recently that stuck with me, where he says that he could probably have made lots of money making Braid 2 or The Witness 2, but that it just wasn't interesting to him.

Willingly leaving money on the table, now that's the mark of an artist.

When you start becoming a big tech company whose products have the power to bend entire societies though, that's when people typically start calling for more accountability in hiring practices.

That implies they felt like they wouldn't have been able to do the work nearly as well within the confines of the digital bug tracking system.

There is such power to spatial visualization and tangible interaction that we lose out on in digital interfaces.

This makes me think about the Dynamicland vision again...

“Good design is as little design as possible” ok cool but I have 30 different feature requests coming in every week from actual users, that doesn’t really help me make concrete design decisions

“Good design is aesthetic” whose aesthetic? Aesthetic is extremely cultural and arbitrary, my designers are fighting over whether a photorealistic leather texture is more aesthetic than a gradient texture background, how does that help?

“Good design makes a product useful” uh yeah okay I’ve never had a design problem that was solved by someone saying “you know what, we should just make this product useful” “oooh right how did we not think of that”.

I mean these principles all sound good and high falutin’ as abstract statements, but I’ve never found them useful or actionable in my 15+ years working as a designer.

The goal of an interface is clear: it is how a human interacts with a machine. Buttons, dials, latches, sliders - those are interfaces. We can reason about them, make taxonomies, determine what operations they are appropriate for (or not), and so on.

“User experience” tries to capture everything into a nebulous haze that exists not to serve a human with a task to accomplish that a tool will assist with - but a business and how it will capture “users” and guide them on the “journey” it deems most appropriate to reach its sales goals.

Design students won’t be able to formulate a cogent thought on what the properties of appropriate interface feedback are, but they’ll be great at cranking out “personas” and sleek landing pages that enumerate marketing points. Something’s rotten.

The startup never became profitable and ran out of investor money 18 months later.

There were many things wrong with the company but this was one of the things that made me most feel like I was in Office Space.

Even what is considered “full frame” today is ridiculously small from a historical point of view, when 8x10 plates were common (that’s 60x the surface area!) and not even the largest format in use.

Cell phone photography has made us used to imaging surface areas that are not even a centimeter on each side - it’s a miracle of engineering we can get decent pictures out of those constraints, but image quality is as low as it gets, even though the marketing tells us those are the most advanced cameras ever.

That’s pottery, not sculpture. Traditionally in sculpture you start from a block of marble or wood, but you can also make sculptures of cast bronze or welded steel (or clay, but you don’t use a spinning plate).

The answer is in the comment you just wrote.

If those tiny startups are successful, they will become the next bloated large companies where things take forever because of "intra team conflicts, legal hurdles and processes", which are categories of things LLMs will never solve because LLMs can't solve problems of human consensus.

If those startups aren't successful, they will run out of money and die.

Big companies take forever to do things because they have lots of paying customers to keep happy, a bunch of people who are ready to sue them at the slightest misstep, thousands of employees with families who want job stability and therefore don't want to be betting the farm every 6 months, etc.

Tiny companies can iterate really fast because they have none of this.

LLMs don't change anything about this fundamental reality.

Just because a program with an internal codename gets terminated doesn't mean there aren't a bunch of other initiatives in related spaces going on.

And the work on the core technologies certainly doesn't end.

There's no product until there are boxes piling up in warehouses, getting ready to be shipped.

If only we could stop giving attention to these "news", which are really just propped up narratives for investors to nudge the market in their favor, and for Mark Gurman to get a paycheck.

There’s so much we don’t know about the solar system, little bacteria crawling around deep under the crust of a moon or swirling about in a gassy giant doesn’t seem too far fetched.

Wormy fishy creatures (or even more complex than that) under the ice of Europa is a bit more of a stretch, but even then I don’t think we’re aware of anything that would outright refute that possibility as of now.

For every tech/finance worker who made hundreds of thousands a year and could afford to casually drop $5k a month on “collectibles”, there was easily 10 people who clearly were not making that much money but compulsively spending it for short lived dopamine hits.

It was kind of sad.

The one that really stuck with me was a social worker who worked with sick children making minimum wage, and spent all her spare cash on our product.