Duanemclemore

Anecdotally, when I use simple command idioms like ctl-tab to change tabs, alt-tab to change applications, or press alt in an application to bring up the single letter shortcuts for navigating menus my students are blown away.

I have to actively teach them how to use and navigate file folders, how to make an appointment in Outlook, and other fundamental user operations. I don't blame them, I blame the developers primarily of browser based cloud apps and OS's.

Edited to add: this includes using ctl and arrows to move by whole words, etc. fundamental stuff in the apps they would have been using since a young age. Not to mention how to use the fn key to access the other functions of Function keys, and fn-esc to switch the behavior globally on their laptops.

Whatever direction this line of inquiry goes, the compositor / window manager split that Isaac Freund and company built into River [0] is the future and would be the perfect platform on which people could build the environments that explore it. Freund's blog post "Separating the Wayland Compositor and Window Manager" [1] and the talk of the same name (linked in the post) are awesome. The list of compatible WM's [2] grows by the day. [3]

[0] https://codeberg.org/river/river

[1] https://isaacfreund.com/blog/river-window-management/

[2] https://codeberg.org/river/wiki/src/branch/main/pages/wm-lis...

[3] I even had Claude vibe-code one for me based on a Dfns / tacit-where-possible style of APL, heavily commented so I could learn some new stuff about APL. I haven't shared it publicly since River has a no-LLM policy and I want to respect that.

I'm a licensed architect. Welcome to our hell of the last 40 years.

When I was seven I wrote my first program. It was in Terrapin Logo and evenly tiled the monitor of my elementary school's Apple IIe with hexagons.

It's been all downhill since.

Nope, he fled the draft there from South Carolina*. He has been there since '67 though.

He appears in an old CBC documentary about the Yorkville neighborhood and the hippies there from then.

https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/1.3202122

*ETA: Whoops I just realized he was born in SC, but he grew up in Virginia. So THAT'S where he fled to Toronto from.

As a university professor, back in the early days of this when students were just copy / pasting output directly I was really hoping the model builders would implement steganographic fuzzy hashes.

Not that it's the ideal solution. But it would be really neat.

Buildings are a fantastically complicated and interesting complex problem space. I found my architecture studio students using it to ask technical and code questions about the buildings they were tasked with designing. I observed that the inaccurate information it was returning was compounding...

To be clear, I say "inaccurate" rather than "wrong" in this case because even if the information it returns is factually correct to the question being asked, students don't have an understanding of the complexity of the interdependent tectonic, regulatory, and spatial / experiential factors of a building sophisticated enough to ask their questions of the specificity and nuance necessary to get a good output that addresses the entire problem.

Anyway - with the students still learning to ask questions the right way, and the conditionally-incorrect facts making their learning more complicated rather than less, I hit on a strategy for them to use LLM's that seemed to help much better.

I suggested that instead of ask the LLM for the factual answer, or even better for the facts and an explanation, that they ask it to direct them to the proper place in the source material to find the answer themselves. Then, to treat it like a lab partner. IE:

Hey Claude I'm looking for "x."

Claude: "look at foo, bar."

Thank you - chapter (foo) part (bar) table (goo) says "car." However I notice that footnote (hoo) says there's an exception if "dar." Which is what I have. Walk me through this exception...

It seemed to have good results as a guide to understanding the disparate bodies of knowledge that they will eventually have to keep together in their heads and work synthetically and non-linearly through, rather than just as an external source of blindly trusted authority.

NIST Cigarettes are a mere $204 per carton.

Depending on what state you live in, that's not bad these days.

https://shop.nist.gov/ccrz__ProductDetails?sku=1196a&cclcl=e...

In line with the recent threads here on Appropriate Technology, etc. Brought back to my attention by the Advent of Computing podcast.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/21nolZRWrV8M2W28NxCMVa?si=f...

Victor Papanek's Design for the Real World [0] is a foundational text in the area of Appropriate Technology (cited here by others).

Essential reading alongside the Illich (also linked by others), Pye's Nature and Art of Workmanship [1], and Winner's "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" [2] for those interested in.... Let's call it an ecology OF technology?

And also the Papanek was probably the book that felt most like a forbidden text in undergraduate architecture school...

[0] https://archive.org/details/designforrealwor0000papa/page/n6...

[1] https://archive.org/details/natureartofwor00pyed

[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/20024652

Absolutely, if they're not asking for your information, as they were when I visited the site. The Wayback Machine snapshot here [0] shows a site identical to the one I visited.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20260622140511/https://nevergive...

When I visited the page there was a field to enter your email to "sign" a pledge of refusal.

The state I saw appears to be preserved in the first Wayback Machine snapshot:

https://web.archive.org/web/20260622140511/https://nevergive...

Who runs this site? There doesn't appear to be any information on this. A whois search returns nothing illuminating.

So... is it part of the parable they're trying to tell that they're seeing who will go against the exact sort of advice they're giving? Or does this -just happen to be- the kind of shady data gathering that they're warning against?

to quote the site itself, "We spent a generation teaching people the first rule of the internet: never give out your real identity to strangers."

I distinctly remember seeing an exhibition of this work in Los Angeles in the early aughts. For the life of me I can't remember where. The photos were shot with a macro lens and blown up so that each specimen was ... 12" square? maybe bigger?

Even then there were dozens upon dozens of them on display. It was mind bending.

Very cool!

If you're just learning about the Wallpaper Groups from this and feel like you've seen them before, it is probably from the work of MC Escher [0].

If you want a great recent survey, an episode of (the inimitable and now restarted) In Our Time from last month goes into the friendship / mutual influence of Escher and Coxeter. [1]

[0] https://eschermath.org/wiki/Regular_Division_of_the_Plane_Dr...

[1] https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/m002v19c

Zometool rules!

I run workshops about the use of modular systems in facilitating non-expert participation in architecture. One I did (at the CAAD Futures Conference in 2023) was with Zometool. It was a blast and really successful.

In preparation I also got to interview the late great Steve Baer, inventor of the Zome (among many other things - seriously look him up, he's one of the most brilliant people of the past 100 years imo). It was a huge honor.

The book chapter the organizers were supposed to do about the conference workshops never materialized (hrmph), but I've done other little collaborative build projects since, so one day I'll document them all together.

Thanks for the link!

I have come to modal editors after decades of modeless, I enjoy them - but respect, understand, and appreciate Tesler's efforts, and I always enjoy reading about them.

Our use case for After Effects was video stabilization. We have had good luck with Blender for this. I've also noticed that the old simple motion graphics I used to do - title overlays, etc - Blender can do easily. As for more intensive motion graphics, I can't speak too much to that.

As for any After Effects-style NLE capabilities - DaVinci Resolve knocks those out of the park. You'll also probably hear a lot of people singing the praises of Natron for NLE and Motion Graphics, and from our experience with that it seemed like the learning curve was non-trivial, but anything AE (and some aspects of Premiere Pro) could do, it could match... Good luck!

Unfortunately it looks like BricsCAD has gone the SaaS way, but they are an extremely mature alternative to classic AutoCAD 2d and 3d [0]

Additionally, Rhino has always been a good drafting tool [1] but my understanding in the current WIP (which if I'm guessing will probably be released as 9.0, within the next 6-12 months) is making a huge push to include better drafting tools. McNeel, the developer, has no plans to go to a subscription model.

[0] https://www.bricsys.com/

[1] https://www.rhino3d.com/

See my comment below, or here [0] and the same on github here [1].

[0] https://x.com/XdanielArt/status/1799474607055102257/photo/1

[1] https://github.com/KenneyNL/Adobe-Alternatives

It's absolutely very important for students to understand what standard they'll be held to in industry. But few architects need an intricate understanding of the real publication-facing aspects of the programs. In our case, using these tools is pretty much always in support of getting the output of 3d modeling / BIM tools / photography of physical models into presentable shape. Going away from Adobe might be unwise were I teaching graphic design students, but for these students, those more sophisticated, domain-specific expertises are a lot less essential.

No, the concepts are the same. The button you push is incidental.

For example, the GNU Image Manipulation Program now has non-destructive workflows and adjustment layers - and can easily easily be configured with photoshop-like keybinds anyway.

That's not to mention free-to-use tools like Affinity.

The things an architecture student needs it for are:

Photo adjustment:

Lightroom -> Darktable

Photo retouching:

Photoshop -> Affinity Pixel or Gnu Image Manipulation Program

Vector drawing (which for us is mostly processing from 3d modeling programs):

Illustrator -> Affinity Vector or Inkscape

Board and Book Layout

InDesign -> Affinity Layout or Scribus or VivaDesigner

Plus, for motion graphics and video processing, my partner and I have had great luck replacing AfterEffects and Premiere with Blender and DaVinci Resolve, respectively.

And ... believe it or not, I've had excellent luck with LibreOffice Draw as a PDF editor, so anything they would have needed Acrobat Pro for is covered by that (and / or PDF SAM).

The real "sticky wicket" is Revit. Autodesk has been a FAR more abusive company for FAR longer, but it's what we're stuck with - although the emergence of the BIM Workbench (Building Information Modeling) with the release of FreeCAD 1.0 [0] and the continued development of BlenderBIM (oh, now called BonsaiBIM) [1] at least gives some hope.

Anyway, for the Adobe replacements, here's more [2] based on [3]

[0] https://wiki.freecad.org/BIM_Workbench

[1] https://bonsaibim.org/

[2] https://github.com/KenneyNL/Adobe-Alternatives?tab=readme-ov...

[3] https://x.com/XdanielArt/status/1799474607055102257/photo/1

I have been an Adobe user since 1996. Starting with Photoshop 3. Then, using the rest of their programs since 1999.

Between this and the fact that they've just 1. Changed all the old accounts to "Adobe Creative Cloud Pro" 2. DOUBLED the monthly fee, now charging you for the AI features whether you want them or not, and 3. Removed any tiers that have full program access but no AI, I am walking away forever when my current month expires.

Not to mention, students now only get the old $19.99 membership for the first year.

I teach visualization and representation tools to architecture students. I had always taught them Adobe products before. Now I can't in good faith sign them up to have their expertise tied to using this program stack forever. So tomorrow I am giving them a lecture on free to use and FOSS versions of the same tools. And I'm going to teach the class from them in perpetuity. Congratulations, Adobe that's 50+ students a year who won't be using your products when they graduate.

Great article. Where my mind goes as a counterpoint that proves the point is the famous Bill Atkinson lore about -2000 lines of code[0].

As a practicing architect (of buildings) I had a special fondness of working on minimalist projects. Buildings are a complex problem space. You typically can't design out unnecessary complexity entirely. So you have to work backward from goals (the finished condition) to infrastructure (the building structure) to figure out how to make the end product look like almost nothing (Mies's "beinahe nichts").

That's all to say that "complexity impresses" as the article says, but the discerning understand that simplicity can be even more impressive.

It also puts me in the frame of mind of another famous one - Fred Brooks's "No Silver Bullet" [1] and the idea of essential vs. accidental complexity. Or as I like to think of it in a slightly more nuanced way - not necessarily "accidental" but at least "incidental."

[0] https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

[1] https://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks_1986_-_No_Silver_Bullet.p...

Yeah, in retrospect that was always a little on the nose, wasn't it? A real 'my t-shirt is raising questions that I thought were answered by the shirt' kind of deal.

Bookmarked for constant reference. As a designer, Japanese printmaking is a constant source of inspiration, and the effort that went into putting this together is pretty astounding. Thank you to the author for the hard work, and to the OP for surfacing it!

RIP Sheldon Brown. His enthusiasm for and ability with bicycles - and his clear and engaging way to communicate both to you - were a large part of getting me back into cycling as an adult.

Legends Never Die.