Steve Farrugia

Dispatch #31: Anti-Design Design to compensate for a lack of design Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3eL... Audio: pnc.st/s/faster-and... 1/x

For my reporting I'm interested in talking to people who know about old telecom wiring still hanging between wooden utility poles, sometimes unused, and how it's being stolen for scrap. Infrastructure enthusiasts, linemen, rural cops, telecoms scholars: my email is jsilverman@icij.org.

https://www.404media.co/proton-to-re-interview-staff-about-ai-to-see-who-gets-to-keep-their-job/ did you listen when I told you proton is a bunch of dickheads?

Roose does a very nice job signaling in the second paragraph what sort of book this will be. He decided to write it the night after partying with ketamine-snorting effective accelerationists. He isn’t e/acc himself, but he hangs with that crowd and accepts their premises as newsworthy,

Once more unto the breach

I guess the answer is either "our boss wants results faster" or "I've never enjoyed development, I just want to skip to the end"

you can't automate prototyping because you can't automate design because you can't automate invention

Something I try to illustrate with these annoying threads is that design is not business, but business is a constraint on design. The responses "it can be an advantage to be faster" are not unexpected. It's the implication that they are *part of* design that is incorrect.

also why would you automate one of the most fun and invigorating phases of development?

This lives in my memes & reactions folder for a reason

The purpose of prototyping is *learning*, not the production of a prototype

I was asked to comment on a student project, essentially a recommendation engine. I asked how it determined the recommendation based on user answers. He said the app did it. I asked what logic it used. He was baffled by the question, and the follow-up of how he knew the recommendation was any good.

like having had to do a fair bit of both engineering *and* design (and a nonzero amount of philosophy i suppose), • engineering is about going from zero solutions to one solution • design is about going from ~infinite solutions to one solution

at the time of writing this the unlisted (why?) video has 783 views after 3 days someone put mozilla out of its misery blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/c...

Folding screen technology is so undercooked that it has Gordon Ramsay seething, and the user experience of these phones is dogshit, but Apple has gone ahead anyway because investors demand "innovation" But the innovation is just copying Samsung

Good ol' Apple strategy of refusing to copy their competitors' cutting edge features until they've worked out a good implementation has paid off again *finger to earpiece* Sorry, reports are coming in that the opposite has happened

The elite hate us being educated, us educating you, you educating each other, and you having time to do this. Stop granting that it's the university that is elitist inherently: it's been made that way for a reason. Some more points below also on the marriages between patriarchy, AI, capitalism...

I recommend reading this book! See this extract where she says that we cannot avoid our duty by claiming excuses like that we do not "deserve" the duty. I also recommend it to everybody in this thread.

instead of hearing about ai more can you just punch me in the head until I pass out

don't waste my time with a conflictless meeting

twitch is on its shit again https://twitch.uservoice.com/forums/923383-creators-and-stream-features/suggestions/51844737-cancel-the-openai-x-twitch-twitchcon-hackathon-eve

> What I mourn is the loss of trust, the alienation of people with institutional knowledge and the chaotic disruption of real communities by strangers walking in like a toddler with a Glock. aftermath.site/ai-slop-hobb...

Guillermo Del Toro dropping another one liner that’s exactly how I feel about AI slop, the “punishment” is built in

AI is an inherently corrosive additive to any existing pre-AI product because it's either forever a broken slot-machine or on a trajectory that makes any task-specific UI skin completely unnecessary.

AI is a product that depends on it staying broken enough to require task-specific UI products while simultaneously requiring the belief that it is constantly improving and infinitely capable.

when you comic sans-ify AI et al tech product sites it all becomes clearer