gyomu

That quote stood out to me as well, but mostly because the 3 images shown by the author have nothing to do with product/interface/communications design.

I guess they’re vaguely cool looking images? If the author had used them to talk about how “concept art” in games/movies was going to get upended by AI there would be a point there, but as it stands I find it very puzzling that someone who claims to teach design would use them as key examples of why design - a human process of coming up with specific solutions to fuzzy problems with arbitrary constraints - was headed in any particularly direction.

> I barely understand what I just said, and I’m sure it would have taken me a whole day to track this down myself.

This is what the future of IT work looks like

> Trinary is philosophically appealing because its ground-floor vocabulary isn’t “yes” and “no”, but rather: “yes”, “no”, and “maybe”. It’s probably a bit much to imagine that this architectural difference could cascade up through the layers of abstraction and tend to produce software with subtler, richer values … yet I do imagine it.

You can just have a struct { case yes; case no; case maybe; } data structure and pepper it throughout your code wherever you think it’d lead to subtler, richer software… sure, it’s not “at the hardware level” (whatever that means given today’s hardware abstractions) but that should let you demonstrate whatever proof of utility you want to demonstrate.

As always, Apple didn't wholesale invent a product category, but they made the first product that synthesized all the right tradeoffs in a sufficiently compelling package that enabled them to sell tens/hundreds of millions of units fairly quickly[0].

- hardware quality wise, already the 1st gen Apple Pencil had the specs of the higher end tablets (12-bit pressure sensitivity, orientation, azimuth, all in a sleek package)

- you can use your iPad for a bunch of other stuff too, and it's super portable - whereas for the high end tethered drawing tablets, they're pretty single purpose, and they take up a bunch of space on your desk. This all matters to broke artists living in dorm rooms/tiny apartments.

- the Procreate team designed a tool that was really focused on the digital drawing experience and managed to make a high quality, affordable product out of it. The standard for digital drawing on those tethered tablets is mostly Photoshop, which a) is meant for tons of stuff beyond drawing, making it quite complex and b) has 4 decades of interface cruft piled up at this point.

Honestly yeah, there truly are pre/post iPad+Pencil eras in consumer tech for anyone doing work that involves hand illustration/sketching.

[0] whereas their competitors struggle to sell low numbers of units at terrible margins

People on here love to dump on the iPad for being a “consumption device”, and to hate on the Apple Pencil by misquoting/misunderstanding Steve Jobs[0]…

…but if you spend any time around artists it’s evident that the iPad/Pencil/Procreate trio is one of the most significant leaps in consumer tech for visual artists of the last decade.

[0] he never said that any and all styluses are bad - he said that 1) cell phones that 2) you can only interact with by using a stylus (not an uncommon paradigm back in 2007) were bad

As a photographer, the OLED screen is truly gorgeous and it is kind of ironic that it is the best display available on any Apple device (the blooming on miniLED is pretty horrendous, and it’s beyond me how anyone deemed it a viable technology to ship in products aimed at professional visual artists/designers).

> the reality is quality of life at 90+ is a lot worse than in your 20s or 30s.

All my grandparents lived well into their 90s (mediterranean lifestyle + modern medicine), and all of them would’ve chosen euthanasia had it been an option (they phrased that in various ways - essentially something along the lines of “if God could bring me home now it’d be good”).

It’s been a sobering thing to experience and it leaves me hoping that if I’m ever in their position, that option will be available to me somehow.

My guy, such a bad faith argument to say “books and toys wear out too” to justify an API locked toy that costs $100 for one hour.

There are books, lego bricks, and other toys in my family that have now gone through three generations of kids and are ready for a fourth.

I understand you’re fighting hard to defend the thing you built, but come on.

And yeah, if you’re comparing this to TikTok brainrot, sure, I guess it’s one step above.

> How is roleplay with this object different than other toys?

Traditional role play is driven by the child and their imagination, and is essentially free of constraints. This is driven by the technology, follows a narrow script, and only allows for a single mode of engagement. Not saying that makes it good or bad, but they're clearly 2 different modes of play.

> If you get lost in a D&D game is that bad because the world isn't real

D&D is fundamentally a social activity (by definition, you can't play D&D alone)...

> Getting lost in Myst

...enjoying a piece of art built by a creative team with an artistic vision...

> making Doom WADs

... an open ended, constructive activity that exercises various skills and that gives you something to share/show for it.

Do you really not see how all of the above are fundamentally different from interacting with this black box that pretends to be something it's not (a human voice), is fundamentally extractive because of the technology it runs on (pay more for more time with it), not to get into the fact that a) the data gets siphoned off to a corporation with its own profit motives and b) there is absolutely 0 guarantee that the simulation can't go off rails?

> These 'LLM Role play' toys have hit a real fun spot with my kids.

Coca-Cola and McDonald's hit a real fun spot with kids as well. This on its own is a weak argument of value.

Clearly playing with this for a bit isn't going to be catastrophic for the child (although $99 for 60 minutes of play, with pay-for-more beyond that point, is a pretty darn steep asking price, if you ask me - and if the child enjoys it, it means they will be begging their parent to cough up more money for more time - a pretty poor success case for a toy. Normally once a toy is bought, infinite time can be spent with it with no further financial transaction).

Is it desirable to build a world where kids spend more time with this category of toy over others (in effect priming them for being an AI girlfriend/boyfriend app subscriber a few years down the line)?

This is why everyone not in technology hates us.

I'm a technologist. I get it, on some level it's kinda cool that we have the technology to bring this thing into the world, and so of course one wants to build it and make it real.

Breadboarding it as a fun weekend project is one thing. But making it exist as a product sold on Walmart.com is another.

What is the point, exactly? I mean this as a serious question to think about, not as a blanket dismissal. Any object, by the mere fact that it exists, demands something from the people it is put in contact with. What behaviors does it encourage, what beliefs does it promote, what skills does it exercise?

If I spend 60 minutes with my kids writing a physical letter to Santa, then going out and putting it in a mailbox, I have a fair sense of the answers to the questions above, and whether those answers are things I want to encourage or not.

If they spend 60 minutes interacting with this object, I'm not so sure I feel so confident about the answers.

> the repo is too far off the data distribution

ah, this explains why these models have been useless to me this whole time. everything i do is just too far off the data distribution!

For anyone curious, the competition rules are here:

https://www.birdpoty.com/rules

"With the exception of HDR, stitched panoramas, focus stacking, and in-camera multiple exposures, composited images or AI-generated images are not permitted in any category. Sky swapping or removal of objects through cloning, for example, is not permitted."

There are two main threads I keep going back to when thinking about long term AI and why so many investors/statespeople are all in:

1) the labor angle: it’s been stated plainly by many execs that the goal is to replace double percent digits of their workforce with AI of some sort. Human wages being what they are, the savings there are meaningful and seemingly worth the gamble.

2) the military angle: the future of warfare seems to be autonomous weapons/vehicles of all sorts. Given the winner takes all nature of warfare, any edge you can get there is worth it. If not investing enough in AI means the US gets steamrolled by China in the Pacific (and other countries getting steamrolled by whomever China wants to sell/lend its tech to), then it seems to justify most any investment, no matter how ridiculous the current returns seem.

It is pretty simple to bootstrap an engine. What isn’t simple is supporting asset production pipelines on which dozen/hundreds of people can work on simultaneously, and on which new hires/contractors can start contributing right away, which is what modern game businesses require and what unity/unreal provide.

Cartoony isn’t the uncanny valley. Uncanny valley is attempted photorealism that misses the mark.

Rich foreigners will send their kids to big name schools, and WKU will adapt their pricing to get the kids of middle class foreigners.

People love Sora in no small part because it lets them make videos with their favorite public figure/fictional character in them.

OpenAI knew that, played fast and loose with IP laws because… they wanted that bit of popularity to impress investors or something… then the lawyers got nervous and now they’re dialing it back down.

It’s a trick they can pull once but that’s it.

I suspect the more limited it inevitably becomes due to lawyers being lawyers, the more its popularity will wane.

Ironically enough, that’s why I think open-source models will still come out ahead in the long term. People really want to make videos with Pikachu in them.

Didn't a lot of other great apes evolve intelligence similar to ours, but we more or less drove them all to extinction?

> That's a fairly new term that implies being engineers which we are not. We haven't studied to be engineers, nor have real engineering degrees. We've called ourselves that because we were doing much more than the original job of programmer and felt like we deserved a raise.

Uh, speak for yourself. There are countries where being a software engineer does indeed imply that you studied engineering and hold a "real" engineering degree.

Also, Hillel Wayne's "Are We Really Engineers" is worth reading:

https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/

No X. No Y. No Z. Just W.

While the world was doing Y, I was doing Z.

Everyone’s doing X. I’m quietly [ChatGPT loves that word] doing Y.

People don’t X. They Y. It’s not about Z. It’s about W, and it taught me everything/means everything to me/utterly transformed me/etc.

Do X. Do Y. Even if it’s just Z.

Cheers for answering, was genuinely curious whether it was AI-written, you were doing it tongue in cheek, or that’s just how writing the post came naturally to you.

Did you purposefully write every paragraph of your intro post as an AI writing trope?

> organisms with ADHD have not failed to reproduce in the past

Yes, that's the real insight. You can be terribly unsuccessful by society's standards and yet immensely successful by evolutionary standards.

If you're broke/in prison/homeless/addicted/(whatever else you want to include) with 6 kids, you're evolutionary more successful than someone who has it all put together with 0 kids.

> It is important that the US have strong auto companies. Same is true for Germany, France, Japan, S. Korea, etc.

It is. But the reality is that those companies are complacent fossils who have lost all their vigor, and only threat of extinction would force them to innovate. Which they’re not under because legislators agree with you (in no small part thanks to their lobbyists).

Like many things, we’ll realize the extent of how badly we messed up when it’s way too late.

Yes, that makes sense.

Also adding to that tendency, I suspect as the tech matures more and more consumer space models will just run on device (sure, the cutting edge will still run in server farms but most consumer use will not require cutting edge).

Young users without payment methods do not sideload binaries on a Nintendo DS.

If you’re hacking with a Nintendo DS in 2025 you were most likely a teenager in the 2000s/early 2010s, and you most certainly have a payment method.

Agree that OP is underselling their work at $5 - the next big psychological barrier after $0.99 is at $9.99, might as well go there

Would you rather be a 22 year old starting in life in 2025 or 1995? Unless you pick one of the few countries that underwent a drastic change of regime in that time, the answer’s pretty clear to me.

I don't know man. It's easy to wax poetic about simplicity behind a keyboard, but again - they're maintaining an operating system that has to work for blind users, for people using their AirPods as hearing aids, for people who want to make the font XXXL, for people who read in (one of dozens of languages, all with their own quirks as to how they should be displayed), people who want to interact with their phone by talking to it, people who want to plug in their phone to their car, people who use their phone as a transit pass/credit card/digital ID in (one of the dozens of countries supported, each with its own regulatory quirks), people who mostly care about using their phone as a camera, people who are using their phone for work purposes with arcane legacy requirements...

Etc etc etc. With all that in mind, a few dozen/hundred features a year (depending on what you count as a feature) sounds quite tame to me. If you look at each individual app, they honestly get way less churn and change for the sake of change than most products on the market do. For example my usage of Notes.app has remained more or less unchanged over the last 15 years, while in a fraction of that time apps like Notion will shift stuff around and force workflows on me a half dozen times. I don't even remember Apple killing a core app that people relied on? That can't be said for most any competitor.

The hate towards the new design system that feels rushed and is riddled with inconsistencies and legibility problems is justified. Comparing macOS to Windows - an operating system that has been literally shoving ads in our faces, or saying "well they should just take inspiration from Linux and just not ship new features" feels... as weak of an argument as it gets.

Would love to read your manifesto of what "doing it right" entails.

Is there an example of a platform that serves almost 2 billion users, across 40+ languages and many more geographic locales, countless possible hardware configurations etc., introducing dozens/hundreds of new features a year, without falling into all those traps?

Of course I wholeheartedly agree with your critiques. But the original iPhone - or even macOS circa 2005 - were very different products, much more limited in scope and capability.

It's already hard enough to make a product a paragon of simplicity when the number of things it needs to do are so limited (as evidenced by all the products out there that are even more confusing than Apple products, doing even less), but I'm not sure it's even possible to do it when you reach such planetary scale.

Seems to me that the only way to have a product that's a paragon of simplicity is to have a product that does much, much less. But you don't become a trillion dollar company with 2 billion active users by doing less.