belugacat

Most non technical people in my circles lose their messages every few years, when they change phones.

A lot of open source projects suffer from “pet project” syndrome. Some maintainers have very strong opinions about how/what things should be done regardless of actual user demand or feedback, and there’s no one with the power to rebuff them because the product owners deciding what to implement and the engineers doing implementation work are one and same. Commit right makes might.

In a (healthy) company, you have PMs and executives who will tell the overly opinionated engineers to STFU and actually implement things that move the needle and solve problems users are facing.

This is also why most open source projects have terrible UI/UX and any designer who attempts to help and improve things finds themselves ignored, with no means to actually carry out any decision, and walk away soon after.

Honestly, the real mystery is why so many people are confused about “why, despite universe seeming so vast, there are no signs of other alien civilizations” in 2023.

We have all the elements for answers if we focus on what we know, and forget the hand wavy sci-fi speculation.

1) Complex life is rare.

2) Reaching a space faring stage is even rarer. (we’re the most minimal definition of “space faring” you could come up with, and even then we got really lucky with so many things)

3) The universe is huge. It’s like, the hugest thing there is, man. And except for some little bits of interesting dust here and there, it’s mostly empty. As empty as it is huge.

So, does life - in any form - exist elsewhere in the universe? Almost certainly.

Are/were there life forms elsewhere in the universe that escaped their home planet gravity to go explore their moon or other planets in their solar system? Seems quite probable.

Is there any shot we are sufficiently close in space/time to encounter such another advanced life form? Almost certainly not.

Exactly this. Even to this day, Nintendo is very smart about almost never discounting their flagship games - and when they do, it’s by a small percent, sometimes with strings attached, not the crazy “90% off” tactics many other developers/publishers follow.

commercial design needs to hit a set of 2 contradictory goals:

1) be as boring as possible so people can make sense of it quickly and efficiently in a world where there are countless other things competing for your time and attention

2) standout as much as possible to gain your attention in the aforementioned busy world

IME this explains a lot the nature of trends that design experiences.

It might well be intentional. Scientists like those weird double entendre titles; it's especially noticeable in paper titles in academia, which often follows the format ("project name: punny phrase vaguely explaining the project").

It's frustrating because as a grad student I was explicitly taught to avoid using local slang, informal sayings and expressions, humor, etc. in my academic writing to make it as understandable and unambiguous as possible.

> I think a simple piece of advice (stolen from Tuft) is to not use colors unless you really need to.

Funny, read your comment as my copy of Tufte's VDoQI is open to page 154:

"Color often generates graphical puzzles. Despite our experiences with the spectrum in science textbooks and rainbows, the mind's eye doe not readily give a visual ordering to colors, except possibly for red to reflect higher levels than other levels [...] Attempts to give colors an order result in those verbal decoders and the mumbling of little mental phrases [...] Because they do have a natural visual hierarchy, varying shades of gray show varying quantities better than color."

The classical optical camera does not capture anything. It is a light sealed box, with a pinhole for a lens. As an optical system, it interacts with electromagnetic waves that go through it, that's the only 'reality' you can really care about.

What captures an image is an imaging surface; traditionally a chemical emulsion on a piece of film, now a complex array of digital sensors.

This imaging surface is of human design, it therefore images what its designers designed it to image. But don't forget that it is a sampling of reality; by definition always partial, and biased (biased to the 400~700 nm range, for starters).

“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us”

I'm a photographer, and for years I've been pixel peeping at photos taken on phones with "portrait mode"; many years after the first introduction of the feature, regardless of the implementation, results still look crummy to my eye.

Looking at fine elements like hairs (nevermind curly hair) is a disaster, especially when you're used to fine classic german/japanese optics that accurately reproduce every subtle detail of a subject while having extremely aesthetically pleasing sharpness falloff/bokeh.

I've had to swallow the pill though: No one (end users; pros are another story) cares about those details. People just want something that vaguely looks good in the immediate moment, and then it's on to the next thing.

I suspect it'll remain the same for AI generated visuals; a sharp eye will always be able to tell, but it won't really matter for consumption by the masses (where the money is).

I do visual work (graphic/UI design, photography, video editing) along with programming and there is no display with the resolution and color fidelity of the XDR at its price point. I got one shortly after release, and if it stopped working today I'd buy another one in the amount of time it takes me to click "Submit" on the Apple Store. It's just that good.

When I look at a high resolution scan of a large format negative on it, it feels like looking at it directly on a light table. It's insane. My only complaint is the local dimming, which shows its limit when you're doing fine white on black linework in a dark room. Hopefully we'll get a pro OLED display of that quality in the next decade which will solve that one issue.

The only other piece of hardware I've spent money on that comes close of giving me the same satisfaction is my Happy Hacking Keyboard, which I've used for over a decade now and I hope I will keep using until I cannot use computers altogether anymore (I have a few spares just in case).

This is why the reductionist argument of "your brain is reducible to a computer with inputs/outputs like any other, all we have to do is reimplement it" of AGI proponents always fell flat to me.

It's now becoming clear that we can't just take the brain in isolation, treating the spinal nerve like a PCI-E lane - the gut has to come with it. And if the gut comes with it, all the other organs (skin top of the list) probably do as well.

Now to model a human brain, you need to model an entire human, along with all the complexity of the microbiota, interactions of the organs with the environment... it all just falls apart.