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It would be easy to think of the character of AI models as a product feature, deliberately aimed at providing a more interesting user experience, rath

The freedom of information the internet brings helps us expose idiot intellectuals quickly and more accurately than ever before. But the internet also

“As a medium, the internet is defined by a built-in performance incentive. In real life, you can walk around living life and be visible to other peopl

I am tired of seeing speed as a selling point. I’ve wanted to talk about this for a long time. I think one of the main reasons many of us feel anxio

From Lily Chambers: I genuinely do not care if AI tools make me more productive. I am tired of seeing, "increased productivity" as a selling point. I

Technologists are obsessed with reaching god (lower case g) AS technologyInstead reaching God (upper case G) THROUGH technology

The problem with AI tools today is that they don’t take your judgment into account

pre-training data should be augmented with explicit moral values metadata

But the bigger loss of human agency comes from the billions of people that use these apps. These deep learning AIs are designed to maximize the time w

I’m equally responsible to the people who pay me to design and the people who have to live with my designs

My Techno-Optimism

We should be skeptical of both utopian and dystopian technology predictions. New tools will amplify both our virtues and our vices, just like every pr

“Where there is selection there is art.” —BH Liddell Hart.

The man we call an adventurer...is one who remains indifferent to the content, that is, to the human meaning of his action, who thinks he can assert h

www.simonstalenhag.se

The text actually moves back and forth between all of these. Few novels pay less attention to the rules of fiction than Zen and the Art of Motorcycle

surprise may be a better proxy for creativity than quality. A polished output is not necessarily creative, but a surprising one might be. Yet even sur

So much value and love for the process of writing and what it does for the coherence between heart, brain, imagination, lived reality, unseen, and see

You can’t write a viral essay that says “it’s complicated and I’m not sure.” But this is the only path to truly novel insight.

Writing is a task that takes both objective and subjective intelligence. LLMs ace the objective parts the same way they ace every test; you can’t faul

From My Data to Our Data: A Proposal to Equitably Distribute Wealth in a Digital Economy

We live in a world where movies aren’t considered art, but intellectual property. They’re “content,” little chunks of stuff that can be licensed, exte

Governments sporadically got things spectacularly wrong. In 1865, the rail and horse-drawn carriage lobbies in the U.K. drummed up enough outrage to p

This is why successful companies still pursuing breakthroughs are always led by live players, often the founders. Only Mark Zuckerberg could have cha

summarize the last 50 user interviews and cluster the main pain points by frequency and intensity. suggest 3 product bets with highest signal-to-noise

generate 3 alternative mobile UI flows for our onboarding experience, optimized for clarity and low cognitive load.” “simulate how a distracted user

"You are an extremely skilled lacanian analyst with decades of clinical experience and training in coherence therapy. You use a transference-focused p

my current ChatGPT custom prompt -- curious what others are using/doing? Have been slowly iterating over time... -- At the start of a response, creat

A Design Reset

dreamers addicted to reality instead of realists addicted to dreams. -Neri Oxman on what she looks for when hiring

Language models need auteurs and creative directors, not “thumbs up if you liked this personality”

Poetry is the art of proving that a few words are worth more than a thousand pictures.

This is pretty good, and strangely consistent with my own idea of good taste Tasteful people pursue stuff with purpose, have an appreciation and curi

On paper, taste = discernment. In practice, taste = your sense of self, made visible.

For Kant, judgment is the mental faculty that connects particulars to universals—the capacity to say “this thing is an instance of that category.” But

A system optimized for noise elimination is hostile to the genuinely new. It converges on what works, on what has worked. That convergence might produ

Bret Victor, beast of burden

The existence of AI models means that openness is a bigger liability for user-generated content companies. The existence of a successful company in so

The natural end state of marketplaces and social media is the eventual shift from user generated supply to professionalized supply/content. They can f

The usual cycle with social media sites is that they start out being very flexible and open, and are happy to have users even if those users are shari

Similarly, I wonder whether the creator economy, as it matures, will resemble less of its original promise (a way for people to do the things they lov

Be Good-Argument-Driven, Not Data-Driven