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The ability of generative AI tools to analyse huge datasets can also be used to help spark creative inspiration. This can help us if we’re struggling for time or battling writer’s block. For example, if a social media manager is looking for ideas on how to engage alumni on Instagram, they could ask ChatGPT for suggestions based on recent popular content. They could then pick the best ideas from ChatGPT’s response and adapt them. We may use these tools in a similar way to how we ask a colleague for an idea on how to approach a creative task.

We may use these tools in a similar way to how we use search engines for researching topics and will always carefully fact-check before publication.

we will not publish any press releases, articles, social media posts, blog posts, internal emails or other written content that is 100% produced by generative AI. We will always apply brand guidelines, fact-check responses, and re-write in our own words.

We may use these tools to make minor changes to a photo to make it more usable without changing the subject matter or original essence. For example, if a website manager needs a photo in a landscape ratio but only has one in a portrait ratio, they could use Photoshop’s inbuilt AI tools to extend the background of the photo to create an image with the correct dimensions for the website.

You want to order from a local restaurant, but you need to download a third-party delivery app, even though you plan to pick it up yourself. The prices and menu on the app are different to what you saw in the window. When you download a second app the prices are different again. You ring the restaurant directly and it says the number is no longer in service. You go to the restaurant and order in person. You mention that their website has the wrong number and the woman behind the counter says they have to contact the company who designed the site for changes, which will cost them, but most people just order through an app anyway.

You want to watch the trailer for an upcoming movie on YouTube but you first have to sit through an ad. Then you sit through a preview for the trailer itself. Then you watch the trailer, which is literally another ad. When it ends, it cues up a new trailer, with a new ad at the start of it.

The first page of Google results are links to pages that have scraped other pages for information from other pages that have been scraped for information. All the sources seem to link back to one another. There is no origin. The photos on the page look weird. The hands are disfigured. There is no image credit.

You can’t read the recipe on your phone because it prioritises the ads on the page. You bring your laptop into the kitchen and whenever you scroll down, you have to close a pop-up. You turn AdBlock on and the page no longer loads, then AdBlock sends you an ad asking for money.

You buy a microwave and receive ads for microwaves. You buy a mattress and receive ads for mattresses.

What we have now is a profusion of well-cast, sleekly produced competence. We have tasteful remakes of familiar titles. We have the evidence of healthy budgets spent on impressive locations. We have good-enough new shows that resemble great old ones.

Put these two forces together — a rising level of talent and production competence on the one hand, the pressure to deliver versions of something viewers already like on the other hand — and what do you get? You get a whole lot of Mid.

MID IS NOT the mediocre TV of the past. It’s more upscale. It is the aesthetic equivalent of an Airbnb “modern farmhouse” renovation, or the identical hipster cafe found in medium-sized cities all over the planet. It’s nice! The furniture is tasteful, they’re playing Khruangbin on the speakers, the shade-grown coffee is an improvement on the steaming mug of motor oil you’d have settled for a few decades ago.

Mid is fine, though. It’s good enough.

Mid TV, on the other hand, almost can’t be bad for some of the same reasons that keep it from being great. It’s often an echo of the last generation of breakthrough TV (so the highs and lows of “Game of Thrones” are succeeded by the faithful adequacy of “House of the Dragon”).

As more people drop cable TV for streaming, their incentives change. With cable you bought a package of channels, many of which you would never watch, but any of which you might.

So where HBO used to boast that it was “not TV,” modern streamers send the message, “We’ll give you a whole lot of TV.” It can seem like their chief goal is less to produce standout shows than to produce a lot of good-looking thumbnails.

Cities are commonly mapped and surveilled like the internet, said to be made up of “networks” and clusters of “users.”

A City Is Not a Tree can provide us with some answers. As Alexander argued almost 60 years ago, our minds are inclined to categorize the world as a tree, but an organic society and city actually resembles a semilattice. And just like with a city, organizing the internet like a tree stifles it completely.

The internet hasn’t become a tree, but there are certainly those who would like it to resemble one. Both leading tech platforms and governments believe themselves to be capable of containing information and separating its parts. The process started in earnest after the Arab Spring (2010-2012), when it became clear that online activity could produce shocks with real-world consequences. A growing pessimism about technology in the hands of the public developed at the top, as the interests of both “public safety” and profit converged to more deliberately plan the internet and mediate its branches. Simply put, complex systems are easier to surveil when information is neatly siloed into branches. It also simplifies data collection for advertisers.

Overlap on the internet is made possible through search and indexing which has, in almost all cases, badly declined.28 Google, as the leading indexer, has been the prime target of enshittification despite its market dominance increasing.29 Additionally, most platforms are walled gardens that are not easily searchable, their content only being found because it was reposted in another walled garden. Platforms have an interest in making sure users stay in their domain as much as possible. This makes overlap especially difficult by design, and so much of the internet now exists as islands on the periphery as a result. Effectively, that which would make a semilattice of the internet dynamic and alive is being dismantled.

Like a city, the internet is a receptacle for life, and how it organizes itself has consequences for the psychological well-being of its users.

If you pledge to “vote blue no matter who,” promising Democrats your vote no matter who they nominate, what leverage will you ever have over the party? Once you give away your vote for nothing, how do you get any of what you want?

If the number of people who feel the same way as you grows large enough, eventually it becomes very politically expensive to ignore you. Your individual vote is worth very little. But if enough of you feel the same way - well, you can do things like vote en masse for George W. Bush despite your Democratic registration and hand him the presidency. Or you might eventually get the Democrats to implement a policy agenda that broadens their coalition and enables a 50-state strategy instead of piecing together coalitions of disparate groups that you hope turn out in sufficient numbers.

So here’s the question: once you’ve pledged your vote to a party in perpetuity without any qualifications and with zero expectation of getting anything in return… how do you make that party do what you want? You’ve already promised to give them the only thing they care about. Your vote’s already committed, so why on earth should they move in the direction of your values the slightest bit?

People love to say that there’s no other choice than a worse choice. But what if the Democrats and Republicans just keep getting worse in tandem? What if the Democrats remain one inch better than the Republicans, forever? How does actual progress happen? How do you get an actually-good option, instead of just “better than the Republicans,” which is the lowest of low bars? I have no idea. I don’t think the people who insist on “vote blue no matter who” have any idea, either.

I’m prepared for these questions to have answers that I don’t like. They do however strike me as very sensible questions, and yet Democrats often react to them with anger. And if we’re going to be in the business of condescending to each other, allow me to point out that for all of the post-2016 election recriminations the Democratic party has still not done essential work in figuring out what went wrong, which of its fundamental assumptions about politics had led it astray, and whether it really benefits them to treat left-wing voters with such unbridled aggression.

Hillary Clinton was a uniquely bad candidate who earned the nomination thanks to a massive amount of insider advantage, which she received because it was “her turn.”

If leftists voting third party amounts to support for Trump on consequentialist grounds, doesn’t voting and advocating for Hillary Clinton also amount to support for Trump on the exact same grounds?

Haptic sensations feel rewarding, so users feel compelled to repeat these actions.What's the optimal length for vibrations? Try 400ms

But what if you sell products on desktop?Instead of using vibrations, try animating products upon selection. Move items into the basketShake from side to sideGrow and shrink

In an online grocery store, customers bought more items when they felt vibrations while adding items to their cart (Hampton & Hildebrand, 2021).

Classical Conditioning. Vibrations often co-occur with social messages. Therefore, vibrations feel good because these sensations have been frequently paired with hits of dopamine (Hampton & Hildebrand, 2021).Perceived Ownership. Vibrations mimic touch, as if you are physically touching an item on your device. And touch is key to ownership (Li, Cowan, Yazdanparast, & Ansell, 2024; Peck, Barger, & Webb, 2013).

People are taking issue with the claim that media apparatuses are controlled by Capital, but its literally true. The profit motive requires any media source to optimize based on what is profitable while also handing over editorial control to the owners of these media companies.If the main sponsor of a small town paper does something egregious, is it in the paper's interest to report on that if it means losing their funding? Of course not. That is the mechanism for control of media. Like social media censorship for ad placement, any media falls victim to the preferences of their patrons.

The language issues are indicative of the bigger problem facing the AI Pin, ChatGPT, and frankly, every other AI product out there: you can’t see how it works, so it’s impossible to figure out how to use it. AI boosters say that’s the point, that the tech just works and you shouldn’t have to know how to use it, but oh boy, is that not the world we live in. Meanwhile, our phones are constant feedback machines — colored buttons telling us what to tap, instant activity every time we touch or pinch or scroll. You can see your options and what happens when you pick one. With AI, you don’t get any of that. Using the AI Pin feels like wishing on a star: you just close your eyes and hope for the best. Most of the time, nothing happens.

I think the newest comfort is not exactly a relationship with Jesus Christ as Lord but the desire for routine, structure, rules, and the quiet, wholesome aesthetic of being church goers.

I really appreciate your input; there's a difference between Christianity and Churchianity. Hard to articulate, but can be felt quite obviously once you're in the faith

Design Engineers tend to work on products and systems that involve adapting and using complex scientific and mathematical techniques. In essence, they work on high technical challenges that requires strong design consideration

tech has a tendency to consolidate roles. Interaction Designers, UX Designers, UI Designers, and Visual Designers became Product Designers. Graphic Designers, Illustrators, Communications Designers, and Marketing Designers became Brand Designers.

Design Engineers have deep knowledge in technological systems while scaling interface quality. They naturally fit in design crit or reviewing code with engineering.

three core areas Design Engineering is the top candidate for leading: product architecture, design infrastructure, and 0-1 R&D.

Design Engineers have the right skills to explore aspects such as information architecture of a product and also understand the technical logic of how such things function.

contributing to component libraries, building internal tools to increase efficiency, or prototyping new patterns and interactions to inform the future of their software.

When you’re dealing with an interaction with a Language Server Protocol (LSP) or layout engine for a site builder, you have to build the prototype in code.

Exploring new product directions can be a need for an early stage company needing to pivot in direction or an established company looking for new growth opportunities.

It’s uncertain if every company needs a Design Engineer. However, I am confident authoring environments or work with complex interactions/ data need Design Engineers. Snap, Retool, Replit, Uber, Square, Open AI, and The Browser Company are a few examples of companies that have Design Engineers on their software teams.

The New Yorker contains empty frames that can be filled by whatever a series of unknown adtech companies decide is the best fit for me based on the slice of my browsing history they collect, like little spies with snippets of information. If it were a direct partnership to share advertising slots, at least we could imply that a reader of both may see them as similarly trustworthy organizations, given that they read both. But this is not a decision between the New Yorker and the Times. There may be a dozen other companies involved in selecting the ad, most of which a typical user has never heard of. How much do you, reader, trust Adara, Dataxu, GumGum, MadHive, Operative, SRAX, Strossle, TelMar, or Vertoz?

As important as it is for users to confirm who is collecting their data and for what purpose, it is more important that there are limits on the use and distribution of collected information. This sea of data is simply too much to keep track of.

Bloomberg reporters are evaluated and receive bonuses tied to reporting market-moving news. They’re incentivized financially to make mountains out of molehills, and craters out of divots, to maximize the immediate effect of their reporting on stock prices. And Bloomberg appends these stock price movements right there in their reports, to drive home the notion that Bloomberg publishes market-moving news, so maybe you too should spend over $2,000 per month on a Bloomberg Terminal so that you can receive news reports from Bloomberg minutes before the general public, and buy, sell, and short stocks based on that news

kjellsbells 33 minutes ago | next [–] I've often wondered if the traditions around warfare that we read about in ancient classics like the Iliad were intended to reduce PTSD. For example, after every military action, there are always games and feasts, with a lot of communal time with fellow survivors and some "play re-enactment" like boxing matches or running races. The soldiers never, ever just demobilize and go home to their homesteads. Mental phenomena like disturbing dreams are taken seriously (albeit through the lens of the religious practice of the time) and openly discussed.

when they aren’t hallucinating, what they’re capable of is still impressive, though it’s a bit like watching a dog walk around on two legs — fun, but not exactly an efficient way to get around.

It was my brother, the lawyer, who pointed out that what I had experienced sounded a lot like a coerced confession. “I read enough transcripts of bad interrogations in law school to understand that anyone can be convinced that they have a very narrow set of terrible options,” he said. When I posed this theory to Saul Kassin, a psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who studies coerced confessions, he agreed.

“If someone is trying to get you to be compliant, they do it incrementally, in a series of small steps that take you farther and farther from what you know to be true,” he said. “It’s not about breaking the will. They were altering the sense of reality.” And when you haven’t done anything wrong, the risk of cooperating feels minimal, he added. An innocent person thinks everything will get sorted out. It also mattered that I was kept on the phone for so long. People start to break down cognitively after a few hours of interrogation. “At that point, they’re not thinking straight. They feel the need to put an end to the situation at all costs,” Kassin said.

Imagine being able to see through walls, or to understand the strength of radio waves emanating from you Wi-Fi router. You'll be able to see which piece of furniture or wall is blocking the signal from getting a reliable connection to that one device in your home constantly getting disconnected.

Imagine never losing your keys or wallet ever again. Like a hint in a video game, the headset will simply highlight its exact location in the house for you through the walls.

Not many people realize Vision Pro’s visual augmentation in passthrough mode is actually a step backward from human vision in many respects. Perhaps that’s part of the reason so many people greet this technology as dystopian? After all, who wants to volunteer to have degraded eyes on the real world? Even for floating windows or the promise of cool virtual worlds to visit, that’s a tall order

Android phones still don’t have this effect. It’s not because they don’t have high-enough frame rates or low-enough latency for touch input. It’s just that the math is off for putting everything together to create the illusion of direct manipulation. The physics aren’t quite right. It’s no longer about hardware specs (although that was a factor working against Android in the early years). It’s about craftsmanship

There are a lot of ideas in the Vision Pro, and they’re all executed with the kind of thoughtful intention that few other companies can ever deliver at all, let alone on the first iteration. But the shocking thing is that Apple may have inadvertently revealed that some of these core ideas are actually dead ends — that they can’t ever be executed well enough to become mainstream. This is the best video passthrough headset ever made, and that might mean camera-based mixed reality passthrough could just be a road to nowhere. This is the best hand- and eye-tracking ever, and it feels like the mouse, keyboard, and touchscreen are going to remain undefeated for years to come. There is so much technology in this thing that feels like magic when it works and frustrates you completely when it doesn’t.

seriously, some of the best cinema is in pornography. If you ignore the money shots, like Bijou by Wakefield Poole, it’s psychedelic gay porn, and it’s just remarkable. It’s interesting because, starting off with the ’90s, there was a pantheon, and there still is a pantheon, so Bergman and Fassbinder, they were at the top of the National Film Theater, as it was called back then, which showed Italian horror, it was on the trash heap. And now, of course, it’s high up because of Mr Luca and his film. So I’m waiting for pornography to get to that, maybe he’ll do a remake of Bijou, I don’t know. I always enjoyed films which were seen as disreputable. There was always okay, this is interesting, let’s look for the trash. I think part of the filmmaker’s job is to be a bit like a vulture, a scavenger, to find things that people would turn their noses up at. So I think you can find great filmmaking anywhere.

Yes, it's something you'll need to cure, but while they're occurring, it's much like being sick with a cold. You don't get mad at yourself for sneezing, so you shouldn't try to fight your thoughts or see them as a bad part of your personality while you're still dealing with your disorder.

Acceptance is crucial. These thoughts are not in your control, and not something you should expect to control. Learn to accept that they're a natural part of the disorder and that when you treat your disorder you'll have fewer of these thoughts.