Dave
@davekim
Dave
The Dandy’s aesthetic ruses reveal the performativity of identity itself, the fiction of race, gender and all other categories. For their final trick, the Black Dandy makes themselves visible but not fully legible. The trickster is unknowable because he is always in disguise.
I, Dandy
“visible, but not fully legible”
Research shows that the practice of looping - of teachers staying with a class of students fore more than one year - has a positive impact on student performance. This pattern exists in sports and music - it should feature more prominently in education more broadly. Finland and Estonia use this practice in their school systems.
Matt Webb describes four areas of AI user experiences.
Looking at this landscape, I’m able to see different UX challenges:
With generative tools, it’s about reliability and connecting to existing workflows. Live tools are about having the right high-level “brushes,”” being able to explore latent space, and finding the balance between steering and helpful hallucination.
With copilots, it’s about integrating the AI into apps that already work, acknowledging the different phases of work. Also helping the user make use of all the functionality… which might mean clear names for things in menus, or it might mean ways for the AI to be proactive.
Agents are about interacting with long-running processes: directing them, having visibility over them, correcting them, and trusting them.
Chat has an affordances problem. As Simon Willison says, tools like ChatGPT reward power users.
The affordances problem is more general, of course. I liked Willison’s analogy here:
It’s like Excel: getting started with it is easy enough, but truly understanding it’s strengths and weaknesses and how to most effectively apply it takes years of accumulated experience.
It’s like Excel: getting started with it is easy enough, but truly understanding it’s strengths and weaknesses and how to most effectively apply it takes years of accumulated experience.
Which is not necessarily the worst thing in the world! But just as there are startups which are essentially an Excel sheet with a good UI and a bunch of integration and workflow, and that’s how value is unlocked, because of the Excel affordances problem, we may see a proliferation of AI products that perform very similar functions only in different contexts.
AI Horseless Carriages | koomen.dev
koomen.dev
"So—there are alternatives everywhere, it seems. The feed may not be inevitable, though it's certainly a convenient linear mode for consumption. The question I'll still be thinking about for some time to come: What's a way to make some of our digital interactions feel less like a river (a list) and more like an inlet or bay? Something bounded and contoured in a spatial way?"
Which does make me wonder: in the face of narrative abundance, what is the appeal of media? Like, it will still be appealing, I know that, but I’d like to understand how precisely.
Interconnected, a blog by Matt Webb
Here are topics we should be talking about:
- What’s the right balance of generalizable knowledge vs specific, contextual knowledge, how does that vary by type of problem, and who holds generalizable knowledge?
- What elements of systems change are achievable at what levels — local, national, regional, global — and how can the right people get a seat at