AkelaA

It’s interesting that the theory of Quantum Mechanics emerged just after this point and threw a wrench in the idea that the universe could be neatly explained through a universal single theory, suddenly there were more questions than answers. And Einstein famously hated quantum physics.

There’s something to be said about the cultural impact of quantum mechanics and how it shifted people’s perceptions from a universe that could eventually be explained by a set of fairly simple, understandable laws of physics to one that is much more complex, mysterious and contradictory. Suddenly the laws of the universe were defined by randomness and uncertainty, rather than determinism and easily understood logic.

AI art as a whole has just become the new clipart. The fact that it’s effortless to produce just means that it has no real artistic value, and by using it all you’re signifying to people is that you’re too cheap to pay someone to create real art.

It’s quickly become the modern day equivalent of Comic Sans, WordArt, and the default clipart illustrations included in Word ‘98.

It also - as seen in that screenshot, had large, always visible scrollbars where it was easy to see how far down you were in a folder or document, and could easily click and drag to scroll to where you needed. Now in the service of minimalism we have scrollbars that consist of a thin, semi-transparent line that fades out after half a second and is nearly impossible to click and drag due to how small it is.

Most regular people use AI to get restaurant recommendations or cheat on homework. I think you massively overestimate just how many people actually care about the more advanced features of AI services.

Your average PC buyer doesn’t know what an LLM is, let alone why they should run one locally.

They just want a good PC that runs Word and Excel and likely find the fact that Copilot keeps popping up in Word every time they open a new document to be annoying rather than helpful.

Which is probably why the CEO felt okay to make these comments. I would be very surprised to hear this from someone like Satya Nadella.

How many people do you think need to die before we have adequate AI safety laws?

Well, LLMs aren't human so that's not relevant.

I think it's funny that at no point in the article do they mention the idea of simply making LLMs more efficient. I guess that's not important when all you care about is winning the AI "race" rather then selling a long term sustainable product.

We need food and housing. We don't need AI.

It does feel like there would be a lot more skepticism about the technology if it had appeared a decade or two ago.

In my experience it’s usually the engineers that aren’t worried about AI, because they see the limitations clearly every time they use it. It’s pretty obvious that whole thing is severely overhyped and unreliable.

Your boss (or more likely, your bosses’ bosses’s boss) is the one deeply worried about it. Though mostly worried about being left behind by their competitors and how their company’s use of AI (or lack thereof) looks to shareholders.

EPSXE also defaults to an emulated bios nowadays as well, which seams to work pretty well.

Also on the more VFX side, Houdini is super powerful in the way it puts it's visual scripting system/node graph front and center - while also making it really easy to embed "actual" code in the form of VEX (or Python) directly into the node graph.

If contrast is used to make some comments harder to read as a way to de-emphasise them from the discussion, then end result is that the visibility of the comment is determined by your level of eyesight (or the quality of your monitor), rather then any conscious decision by the reader.

A visibility toggle would serve the same purpose and make the experience of reading discussion threads the same regardless of personal ability or the screen you're using.

That was more then 18 years ago though, back when Microsoft was very new to the console game. They've had a lot of successes and failures since then. A more recent example would be Mojang which has gone extremely well for them - Minecraft is now the best selling game of all time with 147m copies by 2019 compared to around 14m back in 2014 when the company was acquired - largely down to their successful pivot to mobile and console.

It's rare to see something as mass market and expensive as a modern AAA open world game making a "statement" that isn't extremely watered down and tepid - there's just too much at stake. And a piece of media that's fully embedded in multinational corporate culture is unlikely to seriously challenge that culture either. You'll have to look to the indie space for that.

Blade Runner was provocative, but it was also a box office bomb. Both times. The aesthetics of cyberpunk have broad mass market appeal - that much is certain. Yet the more philosophical, political and artistic questions and themes that define the genre, maybe not so much.

I can't help but notice that many of the "non ideal" examples are pretty much identical to the colors used by companies like Google: https://blog.datawrapper.de/img/full-200805_goodcolors28.png. Apple is another company that's not afraid to use extremely bold, saturated colors in their UI designs: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline... - in fact the colors chosen in that UI goes against a large amount of the advice found on this article, that green to lime gradient is pretty much 100% saturated for example, with a background that is absolute #000000 black.

The main theme of this article is to try to use complementary colors that aren't overly saturated or "pure", which is decent enough advice most of the time, but I feel that in an attempt to find color schemes that are more "professional looking", the author has used colors that come across as overly staid for most applications - navy blues and olive greens that are more associated with serious banking institutions then anything else. Which I guess is fine for infographics that need to display a level of trust and seriousness, but maybe not so much for a mobile app or social network that wishes to put on a more playful, friendlier face.

The original Blade Runner is a great example of a film that depicts the changing architecture of a city - while we see sweeping shots of mile high sky scrapers throughout the film, on the ground we still see the remains of historic architecture, repurposed and built over - the police station was built within Los Angeles's 1939 Union Station, Frank Lloyd Wright's 1924 Ennis House makes an appearance as Deckard's apartment, and of course the famous Bradbury Building was used as the set for the film's finale. The end result is a city that still feels like it has a history not too dissimilar then the Los Angeles of the real world, extrapolated out to 2019 based on 1980's fears of overpopulation and such.

Something it's sequel wasn't really successful with, where instead the city looks unrecognisable, with architecture that looks alien rather then anything actually realistically plausible. If it wasn't for the frequent Coca Cola and Sony product placement you could be convinced the city was Coruscant from Star Wars or something.

Not to mention it's a false statement. They do fund exclusives through their publishing arm, and are currently in the process of funding the next games by Remedy (creators of Control), Playdead (Limbo, Inside), and Gen Design (ex Team Ico team, responsible for The Last Guardian and such): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_m4LxDG1D4

And according to Skybound Games CEO, Epic was also involved in helping to establish the team that completed development of The Walking Dead's final season after Telltale collapsed, so it wasn't just a case of Epic simply buying exclusivity after the fact:

"We’re excited to work together on their latest transformative event with the launch of the Epic Games Store. Epic stepped up to the plate immediately to work with us in order to bring the original team back together and ensure fans will receive the completed season of ‘Telltale’s The Walking Dead: The Final Season.'”"

https://variety.com/2018/gaming/news/telltales-the-walking-d...

And really, the same can be said for other exclusive games that are still in development, since money given to the devs is money that inevitably goes into the production of the game. By virtue meaning that they're helping to fund the game, at least in part.

Plus Ebay incentives sellers to upload their own photos and written descriptions of the product they're selling, rather then having generic product pages for multiple listings.

If I'm buying a second hand item like an old video game or something I always use Ebay since I can see what the product actually looks like and can make my own judgement on condition based on the photos. Something you can't really do on Amazon.

In a way this is the equivalent of an old-school carriage dispute but for apps. I wouldn't be surprised if we see more of this in the future.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carriage_dispute

Many statistics have shown that younger generations are less likely to drink: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-45807152 (among many other things: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/44880278) so it seams like staying sober is becoming more normalised. The recent growth of non-alcoholic drinks and bars certainly suggests that.

I imagine that since drinking is a social activity, without the social pressure to drink many are simply forgoing it entirely - which itself acts as a feedback loop that further reduces the social pressure to drink. I think a lot of people are discovering that you really don't need alcohol as a kind of "social lubricator" to have a great time out.

Or, perhaps, maybe you're just not the target audience and those animations are designed as visual indicators for less experienced users?

Those animations are absolutely a product of well researched UX design, it's just design that's intended to make the UI more accessible by showing users the flow of information and how the structure of the interface changes in a visual manner, rather then design intended to address the needs of power users. The animations used in the Spaces feature on MacOS is a good example of that, where apps and desktops slide and zoom around to make it absolutely obvious that the apps you have open haven't just disappeared. That's quite important for a fairly advanced desktop manipulation feature like that.

Modern operating systems are designed for broad audiences, and that includes people who aren't as savvy with technology as we are. That means accepting some level of tradeoffs between the speed that pro users want, and UI accessibility that necessitates slowing things down somewhat. In the case of desktop OS's there's still usually ways for power users to disable that stuff and of course Terminal for those who don't really need a UI at all. And then there's a lot of different flavors of Linux that make no attempt at appealing to a less technical audience.

But just because you're not the target audience doesn't mean the UX team are "idiots" or that the companies are "stupid". The amount of novice or casual users is orders of magnitude higher then power users who care only about efficiency, and for better or worse those users always come first.

If all those things are just commodities, then surely the OS, CPU, and really every single low level aspect of a computer could be considered a commodity as well? Nobody's buying a PS4 because it runs a FreeBSD derived OS, nor are people buying the Nintendo Switch because of it's ARM architecture or that it has a Tegra X1 from Nvidia inside.

Components like the CPU and OS might be designed in America, but it's the higher level software development and hardware design that takes these largely off the shelf parts and assembles them into an actual product, and in the case of Nintendo that happens in Kyoto, not Silicon Valley. Is that really any different from say, assembling a piece of furniture out of materials and components sourced from around the world? Without the product design and assembly all you'll have is a collection of wood and nails lying about.

Same with the N64 - it might have been an SGI designed system at it's core, but through the guidance of Nintendo which developed the higher level industrial design of the console, the controller, the concept of using carts over discs, some of the more lower level OS functions, and of course the user facing software like Mario 64, etc. All the things that actually make the N64 the N64. SGI didn't decide to make a games console all on their own.

You might be interested in https://www.earthcam.com/ - they host a large selection of live webcams from different locations around the world, many at a pretty decent HD resolution and frame rate.

Here's a live view of Midtown Manhattan for example: https://www.earthcam.com/usa/newyork/midtown/skyline/?cam=mi...

Or the Seattle Space Needle: https://www.earthcam.com/usa/washington/seattle/?cam=seattle...