gyomu

https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/114160190826192080

"Coding is like taking a lump of clay and slowly working it into the thing you want it to become. It is this process, and your intimacy with the medium and the materials you’re shaping, that teaches you about what you’re making – its qualities, tolerances, and limits – even as you make it. You know the least about what you’re making the moment before you actually start making it. That’s when you think you know what you want to make. The process, which is an iterative one, is what leads you towards understanding what you actually want to make, whether you were aware of it or not at the beginning. Design is not merely about solving problems; it’s about discovering what the right problem to solve is and then solving it. Too often we fail not because we didn’t solve a problem well but because we solved the wrong problem.

When you skip the process of creation you trade the thing you could have learned to make for the simulacrum of the thing you thought you wanted to make. Being handed a baked and glazed artefact that approximates what you thought you wanted to make removes the very human element of discovery and learning that’s at the heart of any authentic practice of creation. Where you know everything about the thing you shaped into being from when it was just a lump of clay, you know nothing about the image of the thing you received for your penny from the vending machine."

Buying digital drawing tools before you have the fundamentals nailed is a bad idea.

For anyone reading this who wants to learn how to draw: look up dynamic sketching, it’s a method that was developed by Norm Schureman at Art Center in LA in the 90s, targeted to getting product design students quickly up to speed. It’s very analytical and works well with engineer-brained people in my experience.

It’s mostly carried by Peter Han, a former student of his, these days, you can easily find resources online.

I think 1) holds (as my experience matches your cynicism :), but I have a feeling that data minded people tend to overestimate the importance of 2)...

You can get that with a headset; there's emulators for the Quest, or you can use Citra in SBS mode with a headset like the Vision Pro or Xreal glasses. But yeah it's more finnicky for sure.

They do not have evolution ability, as their architecture is fixed and they are incapable of changing it over time.

“Skills” are a clever way to mitigate a limitation of the LLM/transformer architecture; but they work on top of that fundamental architecture.

This is a mix of the “in the future, everyone will have a 3D printer at home and just 3D print random parts they need” and “anyone can trivially build Dropbox with rsync themselves” arguments.

Tech savvy users who know how to use LLMs aren’t how vendors of small utilities stay in business.

They stay in business because they sell things to users who are truly clueless with tech (99% of the population, which can’t even figure out the settings app on their phone), and solid distribution/marketing is how you reach those users and can’t really be trivially hacked because everyone is trying to hack it.

Or they stay in business because they offer some sort of guarantee (whether legal, technical, or other) that the users don’t want to burden themselves with because they have other, more important stuff to worry about.

For Aperture specifically:

- it doesn’t run on newer machines. Sure there are workarounds (run it in a VM, use a dedicated old computer, …) but those are clunky and people want things to run smoothly within their current setups.

- it doesn’t support newer file formats (the insistence of many manufacturers to use proprietary RAW formats when there truly is no need to is its own rant-worthy rabbit hole…)

- even if people praise the UI and remember it fondly, there are a number of modern tools and conveniences one expects in photography software in 2025 that 2010 Aperture doesn’t have. Eg people care about things like AI denoising/upscaling now, support for HDR color profiles, etc.

> it seems like using and taking care of legacy tools is the best we're got

I’d vote for supporting independent developers and open source software.

Your visual system looks for detail, it's consistent with your world model but empty of meaning, it doesn't trigger your attention network, you can ignore it and keep going.

AI images do suffer from detail collapse - the longer you look at them, the less sense it makes. Look at the image in the linked post - the sculpture makes no sense, the code inscribed on it looks like real code - oh wait no it's not, the characters quickly blur into garbled scratches, and oh ? there's a smaller block of even more "meaningless" code nested into the first?

Your visual system looks for detail, it's inconsistent with your world model, so it triggers your attention network in search of the meaning behind it (things that are not consistent with our internal world model are of utmost importance to our attention), but there's none to be found. You've just wasted mental cycles on slop, whether you consciously realize it or not.

In either case shitty MSPaint drawings would be much better as they would express personality, and there'd only be the level of detail that their author judges useful, but that would require actual effort.

French culture is a rare culture where shop owners won't be afraid to tell off/talk back at customers that don't show a basic level of politeness. You, as a customer, are in the shopkeeper's "home", so to speak, and you should behave accordingly. Someone who doesn't use the customary "bonjour/merci/au revoir" is likely to be met with some response like "tout d'abord, bonjour" ("first of all, hello"), or "et la politesse, alors?" ("what about politeness?").

(of course, people from older generations would be likely to say that these things are going away)

I'm French/American, raised across both countries, and even as a kid it shocked me that a customer in the US could get away with "I'll have a coke" as their only utterance to a waiter - no hello, please, thank you.

I suspect this is why the French have a reputation for rudeness. It's easy to understand why tourists from cultures where "the customer is king" would be shocked when they get told off for being loud/rude/inconsiderate.

(I've lived in Japan for a few years now, and ironically enough, I find Japanese customer service culture to be closer to that of the US than France - the customer is king, and while thankfully not too common, some Japanese customers will definitely abuse that dynamic. There's been a growing awareness and pushback on カスハラ, but it's a real thing, and is very cringe to witness)

"I find that most of the insights I achieve when high are into social issues, an area of creative scholarship very different from the one I am generally known for. I can remember one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while high, in which I had an idea on the origins and invalidities of racism in terms of gaussian distribution curves. It was a point obvious in a way, but rarely talked about. I drew the curves in soap on the shower wall, and went to write the idea down. One idea led to another, and at the end of about an hour of extremely hard work I found I had written eleven short essays on a wide range of social, political, philosophical, and human biological topics. Because of problems of space, I can’t go into the details of these essays, but from all external signs, such as public reactions and expert commentary, they seem to contain valid insights. I have used them in university commencement addresses, public lectures, and in my books."

https://www.organism.earth/library/document/mr-x

It’s for sure one of the biggest blind spots of this community, which should come as no surprise but is still a shame as it would be nice to have the high level of discourse we can expect from other topics applied to this period that could easily be, for many of us, the most significant geopolitical event of our lifetimes.

I’m curious if that’s a topic the mods have any thoughts on.

This is a strawman and absolutely not backed by historical evidence.

Look into the lives of Caravaggio, Milton, Voltaire, Wilde, Verlaine, Goya, Balzac, Courbet, Rimbaud, Schubert, Manet, Wagner, Dickens, Zola, Tolstoy... and see how their personal lives and/or political views/positions negatively affected their standing despite the huge recognition their creative work had.

Congrats on your continued success!

OTOH the OLED panels on Apple's iPad Pro series are outstanding, and I'm excited for them to come to MacBooks. Yet another example of Apple's hardware team taking its time to do things right.

> iNaturalist the product is fundamentally complicated, and I have watched many, many people bounce off that wall of complexity over the years, even as I’ve seen so many people enrich their lives after they climb over it.

Oof, as someone working on consumer facing creative software, I feel that.

There is some sort of higher calling to making tools that truly teach things to people, augments their mental models and knowledge of the world, taps into their curiosity and creativity - but demands some sort of effort in return.

All those aspirations are kind of "dirty words", as they go against the currently accepted playbook of software that's as "frictionless" and "intuitive" as possible - the goal being a viral product with the potential to gather 10 million users overnight, which requires superficial, immediate results, and not really asking anything from your users unless it fits in a single screen/single tap flow.

Especially relevant in the current context of generative AI, where I've heard some argue that actually expecting people to build skill or knowledge is akin to discrimination, and anyone should be able to generate a novel without knowing how to write, a song without knowing how to compose, a painting without knowing how to draw.

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

https://explorabl.es/

"gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha"

https://www.rrauction.com/auctions/lot-detail/35081740734601...

The author loves vibe coding because... it lets them vibe code even more:

"One of my early intense projects was VibeTunnel. A terminal-multiplexer so you can code on-the-go. I poured pretty much all my time into this earlier this year, and after 2 months it was so good that I caught myself coding from my phone while out with friends… and decided that this is something I should stop, more for mental health than anything."

It's unclear whether the "all my time" here is "all my waking hours" or "all my time outside of my job, family duties, and other hobbies", but it's still a bit puzzling.

And so anyway, what is it that they want to code on the go so much?

"an AI assistant that has full access to everything on all my computers, messages, emails, home automation, cameras, lights, music, heck it can even control the temperature of my bed."

I guess everyone's free to get their kicks however they feel like, but - paying thousands of dollars in API fees to control your music and the temperature of your bed? Why is that so exciting?

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...

Yes, but you have to put a bit of effort to make it so. For example, if you write your software as a ROM for an early game console (SNES/GBA/etc.), you can probably expect it to run for a very long time, as there will likely be people who want to play Final Fantasy 6 and Pokémon Silver for as long as computers are around.

That's one extreme, but you don't have to go that far. I have some HTML/CSS/JS projects (meant to run locally) from the 2000s that still work totally fine today. Same for Python code from 2010, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if those still worked just fine 50 years from now.

All I do is write code that is meant to run locally first, with very minimal dependencies, only choosing to use conservative/proven technologies.

Based on the measurement of these outcomes you can absolutely say whether an interface is better or worse than another.

Anyone in software design in the 90s/early 00s was quite familiar with this subfield of human factors. Very few people making software today are. As vibe coded UIs become more and more widespread, it's only going to get worse.

Things like “human interface guidelines” get written by nerds who dive deep into user studies to make graphs about how target size correlates to error rate when clicking an item on screen.

Things like Liquid Glass get designed by people who salivate over a button rendering a shader backed gradient while muttering to themselves “did I cook bro???”

They’re just two very orthogonal cultures. The latter is what passes for interface design in software these days.

All of them immediately hate that it’s bulky, it’s heavy, it messes with your hair, messes with your makeup, doesn’t play well with your glasses, it feels hot and sweaty. Everyone wants to take it off after 5-10 minutes at most, and never asks to try it again (even tho the more impressive 3D content does get a “that’s kinda cool” acknowledgment).

The headset form factor is just a complete dud, and it’s 100% clear that Apple knew that but pushed it anyway to show that they were doing “something”.

Except where enshrined by law, eg in the EU

This would be true if programming were a static field, but given that new programming languages/frameworks/technologies/techniques/etc. are constantly coming out and evolving, that argument doesn't make sense.

You don't, Apple does :)

Agreed, the only reason we don’t have a streamlined version of Little Snitch (very flexible network monitor) built in to the OS is that it’d destroy billions of revenue for the advertising industry.