mortenjorck

There is another species of malaprop, one that has no name as far as I know, that I was made aware of by someone who was writing a character for a game who would use them copiously.

They are the intersection of an idiom or colloquialism and a mixed metaphor. Examples include “I'm running a little behind the eight ball” or “really went the extra mile in his shoes.”

The funny thing with the Chicago example is that Chicago actually does have a legacy system for addressing blocks! The examples from River North wouldn't be included (it dates from 1830 and only covers the original 58 blocks centered around the Y of the Chicago River), but you can see the historical map here: http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/11175.html

The only popular use of this system in living memory has been the long-in-development Block 37 project in the Loop that finally opened in 2016, about seven years after this post.

I actually had the same thought after I had installed it and noticed that the binary was over 600MB. Sure, it's probably just Electron, but still, it was just enough to get me to hold off on actually trying it for now.

I'm honestly surprised and disappointed that all they appear to have done is Sherlock Rectangle.

Stage Manager was the most interesting and useful thing to happen to window management in over a decade, and I was really hoping we'd see Apple do more with it. Its dynamic nature (windows don't always live in just a single context!) solved a lot of problems inherent in Spaces, and yet there's still plenty of room to build on its foundation.

I was hoping we'd at least see the window snapping behavior ported over from iPadOS. It's a really well-thought-out way to simplify window resizing and overlapping, and it would go a long way on MacOS (perhaps with a toggle in Control Center for those edge cases where you actually want pixel precision). Maybe in MacOS 16...

There’s actually a wonderful little mini-doc on YouTube that just came out the other day, produced by one of the people involved in the sleuthing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1EKIIM3ShI

Exactly; the article more or less obfuscates what the present proof of concept looks like. After opening with this dream of what sounds like an entirely passive system you could just select as a coating on your next Zenni Optical order, It makes no mention of current power requirements or how much space everything else takes up.

Would it fit in a Vision Pro? Is it currently 75 pounds of equipment spread over a test bench? The article is useless on these questions.

A lot of my prompts on Suno seem to inevitably gravitate toward a sort of contemporary pop style of production, but so far, it seems like Udio does better with older or more niche styles, such as 70s funk or show tunes. It also seems like a lot of of the trending examples I’m seeing on Udio use custom lyrics (which may or may not have started in an LLM, but appear to have human-generated phonetic spellings) as well.

This Dune Broadway Musical is a rather incredible example: https://www.udio.com/songs/eY7xtug1dV6hbfCDhyHJua

And this (nsfw and also quite funny) track feels like some unearthed 70s novelty record: https://www.udio.com/songs/oZ5EvJdtL152LUEhMB5YgJ

Less than three months after laughing in disbelief that it was now possible for an especially clever orchestration of AI models to instantly produce a pop song about my refrigerator, I’m almost nearly as amazed that there are now multiple entrants in this market. Feels singularity-ish.

Now this is a fun idea. If you think of embeddings as a sort of quantization of latent space, what would happen if you “turned off” that quantization? It would obviously make no sense to us, as we can only understand the output of vectors that map to tokens in languages we speak, but you could imagine a language model writing something in a sort of platonic, infinitely precise language that another model with the same latent space could then interpret.

Yes, yes, more explorations in this direction.

For a couple of years now, I've had this half-articulated sense that the uncanny ability of sufficiently-advanced language models to back into convincing simulations of conscious thought entirely via predicting language tokens means something profound about the nature of language itself.

I'm sure there are much smarter people than I thinking about this (and probably quite a bit of background reading that would help; Chomsky, perhaps McLuhan?) but it feels like, in parallel to everything going on in the development of LLMs, there's also something big about us waiting there under the surface.

Some good passes at UX copy in this thread, but for this application, I’d recommend against trying to explain the underlying technical mechanism at play and instead frame it in terms of outcomes.

“This message has been deleted, but you still have a temporary copy. If you need to save anything from it, you should do so before discarding the temporary copy.”

Early in my design career, I ran a user test of a lo-fi prototype with some members of a customer success team, the visual presentation intended to convey the mutability of what we were presenting. I got a comment that “the sketch look was really nice” and since then have never relied on that as a signifier of where a concept was in the design process.

I actually can’t use Touch ID, at least year-round.

I have naturally very dry skin, and no matter how much moisturizer I used in colder months, I had to constantly have it relearn my fingerprint, to the point where I would just give up and use a passcode instead.

Face ID, on the other hand, has been flawless since my first phone with it in 2018 (minus some mask-related challenges during the pandemic). It and ProMotion are basically the two reasons I bought an iPad Pro over an iPad Air.

Interesting model. As a designer currently exploring options outside of the increasingly competitive full-time market, I’d love to learn some more about how you’re making this work.

On the pricing front, I would suggest this: look at how your customer base breaks down between your two pricing tiers. If it’s weighted toward the higher tier, that may be a signal that you can push higher. Maybe experiment with raising that tier first?

This is one of those occasions where Apple is really on the hook to offer some sort of technical explanation of what’s going on here. It’s entered the realm of a trust issue.

This apparent etymology is fascinating, but the article left me disappointed in failing to actually connect the spatial dead-line to the chronological deadline.

There’s a hint that it started to become used metaphorically toward the end of the 19th century, but without any examples of early usage or even speculation as to how a spatial metaphor became a chronological metaphor, the origins of the modern usage remain a mystery.

I read your description and thought of a building in Chicago, but there must be a few like this. The one I was thinking of is in River North along the river.

It’s a beautiful building, with roomy communal spaces and vintage timber all over. I probably would have bought there if I weren’t too noise sensitive for timber floors.

I had always wondered why Figma supports this when there doesn’t appear to be any support for it in the wild (web or native). Nice to see the W3C draft is looking fairly mature at this point.

Now that would be capturing the full value chain.

I would sometimes play “co-op“ with my little brother, navigating with a flight stick and the number pad while he managed weapons and firing. It’s fun to see decades later that we weren’t the only ones to play Descent this way!

Perhaps we should be worried that such a clear (to me, at least) use of hyperbole can nonetheless be seen as potentially serious in this job market.

I’ve seen very impressive Gaussian splatting demos of more limited urban geographies (a few city blocks) running on consumer hardware, so the reason this requires research-tier Nvidia hardware right now is probably down to LOD streaming. More optimization on that front, and this could plausibly come to Google Earth on current devices.

“What a time to be alive” indeed!

You would never have known anything else. If you realized you were self-aware, say, sometime around reaching hydrostatic equilibrium, what would you even compare the experience to? Would the very concept of autonomy have any meaning to you? As a solipsistic consciousness, would you have an ontology into which to place such a concept?

(Apologies for the Socratic barrage, but this line of inquiry triggered my inner first-year philosophy student.)

This would be a great time for Canva to reassure customers that they don’t intend to change Affinity‘s business model. Not to say such assurances are even a reliable indicator of future plans, but it would at least be a nice gesture.

Is this the first YC company to offer a VST?

Congrats on the launch! Great to see a genAI product that generates ingredients for creative use rather than just a finished product.

Perhaps my perspective is skewed because I've only been on small design teams during the rise of Figma – but my view is that "multiplayer" was always a sell-to-managers feature, and at best an annoyance for designers.

Why Figma won is, at least in my own experience, due to two areas where they roundly beat Sketch: auto-layout and performance.

Auto-layout was one of those squandered first-mover advantage stories: Sketch had it first, but built it into the symbol/component system and never envisioned it as a global feature. Figma did, and it was a total game-changer. Overnight, everything else felt like using Photoshop in comparison.

Why couldn't Sketch just generalize its own auto-layout feature? They finally did (only about three months ago!) but I suspect it had to do with Sketch's architecture, which leads into the second Figma advantage: performance.

From the start, Figma turned the native-app-versus-web-app intuition on its head. Being browser-based, it should have been much slower than Sketch... but due both to Sketch's legacy as a general-purpose vector graphics app and Figma's stellar engineering org, Figma was leagues faster when it came to the kind of big, complex files design orgs deal with on a daily basis.

Between these two things, the writing was on the wall. I hope Sketch has a chance to come back, though – missteps like Dev Mode give them an opening now that they've had several years to catch up.

Yes. This is a legislative implementation of the Evil Bit.

I'm amazed to see multiple posters in this thread still getting Bono-rolled by Apple products a decade later. I moved it to my “hidden purchases“ almost as many years ago and it has never resurfaced; has Apple changed something since then?

That’s not really Apple’s style. More along the lines of “HomePod mini 2 features double the RAM, allowing for exciting new features like multiple kitchen timers. Pre-orders start Friday.”

Unfortunately, I think it's more zero-sum than that.

Imagine you're a product manager at McDonald's. For the point-of-sale kiosks, you can build the server component for deployment in the cloud, or you can build it for on-prem and add the overhead of physical deployments across tens of thousands of retail locations, plus maintaining them, plus dealing with franchisees.

You do a cost-benefit analysis of potential downtime from internet outages, and based on internet reliability numbers in the markets you serve (plus an uptime estimate from your devops org), you conclude the occasional outage is worth the trade-off.