gyomu

Eg at 00:30, for a few seconds there's a marked difference in how the speech sounds - like the filter is turned off or something.

I think the video also mixes things up a bit. For example it compares the skeuomorphism of "Find my Friends" with that of a car maintenance training program - but the latter isn't an example of a skeuomorph ("a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues (attributes) from structures that were necessary in the original"), it merely adopts a realistic graphic design style to mirror the operation it's depicting.

Features paramount in a document viewer (broadly, "respect the user's local document viewing preferences") aren't desirable in a general purpose application platform.

A large number of companies/web developers don't think of themselves as offering the user a document to view on their own terms, but rather an "experience" that they want full control over (which means, most of the time: show ads and record user behavior).

If you're offering me a game, fair enough. But if you're showing me my hotel reservation or electric bill, I want a document, not an ""experience"".

It’s funny how anytime an article gets called out for being AI slop on HN, the author’s reaction is something like that: “oh yeah sorry I used AI but just for proofreading I swear, I should’ve done just a tiny bit less”.

No one seems to get the message that relying on AI at all is what makes writing shit. Good writers have confidence in what they produce. The fact that you’re willing to incorporate any AI suggestion at all means you’ve already lost the battle.

99% of everything is crap, but if you want to find that 1% that makes you so happy you found it, you have to deal with trudging through that 99%.

Also it helps to try and socialize with people who have similar values and notions of fun as you so they can point you to the things they find fun. You won’t agree a lot of the time, but it’s still interesting directions to have on your radar.

Steve had great taste and keen insights as a PM, but what pushed him to GOAT status was his intuition for people and his capacity to rally them to his cause. Whether pre-Apple, at early Apple, NeXT, Pixar, or modern Apple, he was consistently able to identify world tier performers and get them to join the vision and do great stuff.

Witness that some of those people are still making Apple what it is 15 years after his death. That’s an insane skill that you very rarely see, whereas as a designer I see people with great taste not that infrequently.

These sort of things are exactly what hand-rolled setups à la OpenClaude are great for- the potential for insane privacy disaster is still there, but in that case you have no one to blame but yourself.

Large tech companies aren’t going to take that heat for features that aren’t really monetizable.

Americans like to clown on the EU, but consumer protections and privacy laws don’t magically pop up on their own, and businesses don’t all magically act in the consumers’ best interests unless they are legally made to.

I knew that they were plenty of careless people with no taste for truth or quality in the world, but I didn’t realize there were so many of them.

Especially so amongst my friends and family members and coworkers. Here’s someone who’s now sending AI generated messages for daily communication. Here’s someone who’s now using AI generated slop art to promote their work. Here’s someone who turns to ChatGPT for any random question they have. No regard for beauty or truth or personal expression or the quality of expert work, only hooked to the “get this done” machine.

As far as I know this is the first time anyone has publicly claimed to know, quoting insider sources, what YC's actual stake in OpenAI is.

What do you think people did with their lives before retirement became a thing? My great grandparents worked the fields and took care of the animals till they dropped. I did have one great grandma who spent the last few years of her life vegetating in a chair because she literally couldn’t do anything else, otherwise she’d have been working the fields and taking care of the animals.

They weren’t “economic entities” in the sense that they got a paycheck from an employer, but they were “economic entities” in that if they weren’t putting daily labor into the farm, they’d eventually freeze and starve.

Of course the music matters, but the persona of who creates the music and their lore matters just as much. There’s a reason why live events are the moneymakers, people care about physicality.

No one gives a shit about AI music designed to make money, there’s no story to follow or be inspired by there.

All this was already tried with “digital idols” etc in the 2000s, the only one that had any lasting success was Hatsune Miku by virtue of being “first”.

Spending long chunks of time with no adults, in a large mixed-age group, is a less and less common experience.

I spent some time in a remote fishing village in Madagascar and that was one of the things that surprised me the most - kids would spend all day together in an unsupervised mob roaming around the village, from the youngest ones who were just old enough to walk independently to age 8-10 or so (older than that and you had things to do).

I also enjoyed this essay on the topic: https://unpublishablepapers.substack.com/p/where-do-the-chil...

https://boardgametextbook.com/EBGRIA.pdf

Overview here: https://boardgamegeek.com/blog/13453/blogpost/164134/every-b...

There's the kind that, when given a problem, will jump in, learn what they need to learn to solve the parts they don't fully understand yet, deliver meaningful iterative results, talk to people as needed, keep you posted on their progress, loop in other team members and offer/request help to/from them, take initiative on the obvious missing parts that would benefit the project as a whole, etc.

And then there's the rest.

Within the first few years of someone's career, you can quickly tell which kind they are. It's almost impossible to turn someone from the latter group into the former.

Yes, everything else is a façade. You can be a "senior" developer with 30 years of experience and still be in the latter group. And you can be fresh out of college and be in the former.

Now some people are extremely good at other skills (politics, interpersonal communication, bullshit, whatever you want to call it) and will be able to seem to be in the first group to the people who matter (managers, execs, etc) while actually being in the second group. But then we're not talking about actual software-making skills anymore.

You can also totally be in the first group and be underpaid, never promoted, etc. There's little correlation with actually career success.

It is cursive script, and only specialized academics/people with extensive training in calligraphy/etc. would know how to read it.

Interestingly enough this is an area where machine learning has been extremely effective:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.09433

Food appears somewhat cheaper, housing much cheaper; but clothing and tools/appliances were much more expensive. Things like student debt and healthcare costs are also interesting to compare and wildly differ over time & place.

Also common for the average middle class person to spend a sizable percentage of their income on travel/vacation today; as I understand it that was quite uncommon before the mid 20th century.

The author wants using the iPad to “feel like a finger ballet, your hands swooping and swiping”, but also the author seems to care a lot about emails and Claude Code and writing. Those are fundamentally at odds, and it makes complete sense that they’re very happy with a MacBook Neo instead (but they could have just been using a MacBook Air the whole time).

The iPad is fantastic for, as the author points out, “reading the news and watching YouTube and playing games”, and it’s an amazing tool for digital artists and anyone who does lots of hand annotation work. So really overall a product that’s found its niche, and when I see grandpas and grandmas and students at my local cafe using their iPad their hands are effectively swooping and swiping in a finger ballet.

I think there’s just a kind of techie who desperately wishes they could do everything on an iPad, but really the machine meant for them is a lightweight MacBook (Neo or Air), and for some reason that induces some sort of frustration in them and they feel like things somehow shouldn’t be that way. I guess I get it, the iPad hardware is pretty slick. But yeah, your work makes you a MacBook person, not an iPad person, that’s just how it is. (Apple should make an 11” MacBook again though).

> iPad apps should be weird as hell, unlike anything you find on a desktop operating system […] The iPad should be a highly-focused touch playground. Weird as hell, one-of-a-kind apps

I don’t know what this obsession with “weird apps” is, but 99.9% of people don’t care about “weird apps” and so that’s not enough to justify a whole device category (and you can find weird apps on all platforms anyways).

This is built from the collective works of all humans throughout history who have strived to make infographics, illustrations, and communicate knowledge - with 0 actual credit or reference to them (or financial compensation, if they’re still alive).

Instead, who is making money from this? Google, as providers of the model - and maybe the founders of this product, if they ever choose to monetize it somehow.

I’m not even going to get into how the results it produces have just enough “insight” to appear valid but the moment you inspect it up close, it’s completely wrong in most details, and replete with ornamentation that doesn’t actually add to meaning - a Potemkin village of knowledge - because the common answer to this criticism around here is “just wait 6 months bro the models will definitely solve all those problems”.

(some of the things I’ve tried for reference)

https://flipbook.page/n/56fed5ac8e164467b1d6151a6d5068ae

https://flipbook.page/n/deeb4d846d1a44738aa70d8973fc5765

https://flipbook.page/n/335fb5d4c4d8428d82e8a43fc4f7a4e8

We are not better off investing billions of dollars in computers doing this over paying humans to write and illustrate and make cultural artefacts. We are not better off putting this in the hands of kids rather than meaningfully designed resources & curriculum designed by humans.

What are we even doing.

That’s the biggest problem with the current wave of AI tooling - it’s so easy to make a cool demo all while completely missing the point of what actually is good for human flourishing.

There’s rumors that upcoming iPad models are water resistant, I suspect that’s the motivation for it.

Amano made his money through professional cycling - but he funneled the profits towards another passion of his, aquariums. He loved aquatic life but found the state of aquariums in the 70s quite tacky; so he set out to design aquariums full of plant life, wood, and rocks that would mimic natural habitats as much possible, offering a peaceful, inspiring viewing experience - rather than tacky multicolored gravel and bubbling treasure chests.

His company designs and sells tools to support that vision. For instance, they manufacture gorgeous aquariums with no visible joints or support, glass inlets/outlets for pumps that are completely invisible when submerged, etc. To use a cliché, they're the Apple of aquariums.

They also organize the yearly International Aquatic Plants Layout Contest, which always features gorgeous designs. [4]

If you've heard of "aquascaping" (it's been growing in popularity the last few years), it's all thanks to this guy. Super inspiring.

[1] Their YouTube channel details the design process of the Sumida aquariums, here's the last episode of the series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP0Qk4DnLis

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takashi_Amano

[3] https://www.adana.co.jp/en/

[4] https://iaplc.com/gallery/en/

I remember an educator ranting to me a long time ago that the only data-proven ways to meaningfully improve educational outcomes was to reduce classroom size and make sure kids got enough sleep + fed well enough, everything else was just a waste of time.

It's very common for art museums in Japan to have a room dedicated to paintings from local residents. As one would expect, the quality ranges from "why would you show this to anyone" to "can't believe how amazing this is". I always enjoy going through them.

> That is why weird shaped windows are easy to prototype and expensive to polish.

> But there is an issue with Win32 API programming. And the truth is that custom windows mean doing everything yourself, controlling every Windows message, and that is fragile

Software used to be made by small teams (often of 1). Once released it could be expected to be stable for years.

The priorities have shifted to software that can be built and iterated on quickly, by large teams with high turnover. It’s not uncommon for popular software to get updated weekly, daily.

I suspect this is also why skeuomorphic design lost the evolutionary race - everything needs to be tweaked and aligned and optimized ad hoc. If you want to reorganize the interface, it means potentially recreating a lot of assets. Flat design is interchangeable and modular.

These trends will only get stronger with agentic software engineering - the incentives reward scale and speed.

This is also why we don’t really see large ornate hand carved wooden funiture anymore, it’s all flatpack particleboard now.