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Even if chatbots were to fix their accuracy issues, Google would still have a business model problem to contend with. The company makes money when people click ads next to search results, and it’s awkward to fit ads into conversational replies. Imagine receiving a response and then immediately getting pitched to go somewhere else — it feels slimy, and unhelpful. Google thus has little incentive to move us beyond traditional search, at least not in a paradigm-shifting way, until it figures out how to make the money aspect work. In the meantime, it’ll stick with the less impressive Google Assistant.

“Google doesn’t inherently want you, at an inherent level, to just get the answer to every problem. Because that might reduce the need to go click around the web, which would then reduce the need for us to go to Google.”

Web3 has largely been technology looking for problems to solve while generative AI has been about almost too many solutions created by technology which is evolving on a seemingly daily basis. As a result, web3 has thus far been evangelists trying to convince us to re-solve old problems with their new technology

n order for designers to do high-quality design work, they need to work at companies that truly understand design. Here’s the catch though, there’s a tiny amount of such companies out there.

They treat it as something that makes things look pretty, so they hire UI designers to do UX design for them.

ChatGPT feels like the current aim assist debates in a lot of FPSses to me. It'll make you better at the shooting part of the game, perfect even. But, won't necessarily make you that much of a better player, because aiming is only one aspect of what makes someone good at FPSes. However, if someone is generally good enough or very good at the "not aiming" portion of the games, then having aim assist would drastically increase their overall skill.

Autism has been gentrified. This is a dynamic I now cannot stop seeing: once a human attribute like autism or mental illness becomes seen as an identity marker that is useful for social positioning among the chattering class, the conversation about that attribute inevitably becomes fixated on those among that chattering class. It becomes impossible to escape their immense social gravity. The culture of that attribute becomes distorted and bent towards the interests and biases of those who enjoy the privilege of holding society’s microphone.

Today we have the usual demand to have it both ways, to be seen as one’s disorder when convenient for differentiating ourselves from the pack and then setting aside that definition when uncomfortable. Again, the truly disabled can’t do this. They do not deftly craft facades from their disorders, lacking the self-control and capacity for social scheming required to do so. They aren’t afforded the possibility of ignoring their condition when convenient. Yet the voice of the ambitious and shameless patient seeking validation and coin for being sick is becoming the voice of mental illness, those unprincipled enough to treat it all as marketing. Mental illness should not be fodder for building your personal brand.

there is something disordered, and untoward, about a society in which legions of successful people have suddenly discovered their diagnoses and, despite those conditions never having impeded their relentless marches up the ladder of American meritocracy, making the mental illness conversation all about them.

how do you proceed with your quest to turn mental illness into a positive thing, an honored thing, a “valid” thing, without inevitably privileging the narratives and interests of those whose mental illness is least malign? How do you tell generations of young strivers that having a mental illness is cool and unique, without alienating those who feel neither cool nor unique, but only afflicted?

How do you keep the schizophrenic and the schizoaffective and the bipolar and the borderline and the violent and the self-harming and the catatonic and the permanently deluded at the forefront of the culture? Because the way things are going, contemporary mental illness discourse threatens to do to the truly incapacitated the very thing it claims to oppose - leaving them voiceless, ignored, unheard, alone.

Look a week ahead: Towards the end of a week, I’ll start to take a look at what meetings I have the following week. For any that I’m responsible for, I’ll start pulling together some information for attendees. Sometimes this means updating the calendar invite with an agenda; other times this means starting a Google Doc for what we need to run through during the meeting, and I share it with edit rights for all attendees. Use meeting goals: If the meeting has a bunch of people in it (like, more than two), especially if those people typically have full schedules, then I’ll write down goals for the meeting. Often, I’ll put those goals in the calendar item, and I’ll mention them at the beginning of the meeting. That means that if we get off-track during our time together, I can hit pause and recenter on the goals, asking folks to continue that other conversation afterward. Find a plant: Once in awhile, it’s helpful to “seed” the meeting somehow. For example, in one meeting where there’s an “open questions” time and I want people to ask anything, I’ve asked a buddy to think up a super weird one to demonstrate to others that it’s a safe space. Don’t surprise people in the meeting: Additionally, I do a lot of prep to make sure there’s no surprises in my meetings, at least none coming from me. This usually means that I let a handful of people know about a big announcement ahead of time (or had a tough conversation), usually one-on-one, so they wouldn’t be surprised in front of a lot of other people. Gain consensus 1:1 beforehand, if possible: My goal with any decision-making meeting is to already have a sense, going in, of what issues people have, what their opinion is, and what they might need to come to agreement. I do as much legwork in advance as possible, so that the whole group is ready to make that decision more quickly in the room.

Few things bog down meetings more than an unclear process, or a lack of clarity about how people in attendance are supposed to participate. By sharing the goals of the meeting and a high-level overview of what we’re going to do there, I hope to make it clear what’s expected of folks in the room.

Setting up a form for people to add their questions to - including people in the shared physical space - so that the facilitator can run through them rather than prioritize the voices in the room

I cancel meetings if they’re unwarranted. I check-in every few months to see if a meeting’s goal still makes sense; I ask attendees how they’re feeling about the length of the meeting, how often it happens, and what we do during it. I iterate on meetings to make sure they’re still effective, or even necessary.

Swelling trade tensions and the rise of “direct-to-consumer” platforms were bound to heighten the scrutiny on the import of mass media cultural products. But it’s also notable that the Marvel movies that did gain admittance in China were led by six heroes (The Avengers), five of whom were employed by the American military (with the sole outlier being an extraterrestrial) and all of whom were white. The current, rejected leads are more diverse in vocation, American allegiance, and ethnicity (among other attributes).

In 2017, Disney began a marketing integration with aerospace and defense giant Northrop Grumman encouraging those who use Google to research American defense contractor Stark Industries to join something like the real thing.

Avatar’s unprecedented achievements require us to examine not just its technological innovations, but also its narrative. The film’s “protagonist humans” are classic Western archetypes such as the taciturn soldier and the driven scientist. The villains are archetypes as well, but they are also particularly close to foreign caricatures of evil Americans: the tough-as-nails, violence-prone colonel and pillage-the-earth corporate executive. Furthermore, Avatar’s overarching message is one of collectivism, spiritualism, and alignment with nature. At the end of the movie, each of the Western heroes literally shed their individual identities (and white bodies) to become part of the cooperative aboriginal mind and save the day.

Not all design work is done in code, prototyping tools, or sketches. Likewise, not all engineering work is done in code or technical diagrams. Natural language, text, and conversations should be some of your primary mediums for creative work.

one of the most important sub-skills for writing and conversation as a design medium is learning how to create great analogies. Douglas Hofstadter thinks that analogies are actually the core of cognition, which I buy.

the web has some amazing advantages for launching new projects, which include (but aren’t limited to): Super fast distribution and updates Cross platform Huge tooling ecosystems Enormous, worldwide community If you’re into games, awesome! If you’re into mobile or native development, that’s cool too. There are lots of platform-specific toolkits and environments to make those. There’s also a lot of effort in creating cross platform tools and community-driven projects for both domains (like Unity and Flutter). They all have their advantages, but to me, nothing beats the portability and speed of launching new websites and using web tech to get ideas out the door.

using web tech for 80-90% of my projects has a lot of skill transfer effects. Since I’m using similar tools for lots of different projects, I can still refine my core skillset no matter what I’m making. If I’m making a drawing tool concept, a game, or a text editor— I’ll can still probably build all three with React. Of course there are specific libraries or APIs I might need to learn to make each kind of project, but there’s enough in common between all the projects that I can focus on the new content instead of yakshaving and deliberating over unnecessary details.

There are also market pressures that imply focusing on web will have long term payoff, like the rise of wasm, new browsers, and collaborative apps becoming the norm.

Something with no visual interface sounds amazing until you realize it is impossible to know its boundaries. You can ask for a translation to one language and it will work perfectly, but a different language is not translatable. A command that activates some smart home gadget may not work the same way for a different device.

By creating a character who can’t be written off as another predictably problematic man, “Tár” draws our attention to how Lydia learned to become one. And, by following Lydia closely, the film relieves the audience of a neurotic cultural obsession with the artistic legacies of real-life powerful figures, focussing instead on their tools. In lieu of asking “Can you separate the art from the artist?” or “But what will happen to these poor, bad men?,” “Tár” asks, “What does power look like, feel like, not only within an institution but within an individual psyche?”

At nineteen, I wrote in a private journal that “the knowledge that anything I feel has already been expressed in a work of art” was my version of feeling watched over by a higher power.

I do not mean to suggest that art works can be divorced from social context, only that our reactions to them are not, in themselves, public statements, acts of harm, or good deeds.

the desire to ship quickly was counterbalanced by a demanding, comprehensive perfectionism. Most commercial projects are driven by commercial values, where the goal is to maximize profits by outperforming your competition. In contrast, the Macintosh was driven more by artistic values, oblivious to competition, where the goal was to be transcendently brilliant and insanely great.

Unlike other parts of Apple, which were becoming more conservative and bureaucratic as the company grew, the early Mac team was organized more like a start-up company. We eschewed formal structure and hierarchy, in favor of a flat meritocracy with minimal managerial oversight, like the band of revolutionaries we aspired to be.

You need to make your case for what the problem or opportunity is—most often validated with at least directional data and/or research insights—and why your specific solution could work. You need to ensure it weaves into broader company initiatives as well as goals for your team and org. And you need a plan to get your product out there in a timely manner along with ways you'll further learn and validate your approach. An executive team won't be thrilled to hear you want to spend a year building something based solely on a hunch.

People hire services not just based on what they can do but how it makes them feel. Quality has a direct relationship to that. Quality products can take your users from "I'm merely using this thing to accomplish a task" to "this is something I love using and I'm telling everyone I know about it."

To maintain a shared, company-wide understanding of the company's specific stance is on quality, how does quality get rewarded, celebrated and prioritized? Is there a process in place for delaying a release and having a retro when the quality bar slips? Who decides when quality has slipped? Who's accountable for addressing it?

What does quality mean to them? How does it tie into the career ladder, promotions and prioritization frameworks? Do they focus more on execution speed over quality?

Is quality baked into the normal product development process, or is it often relegated to low priority "polish" tickets that pile up.

Do different roles (like engineering, product, design) have different motivations for getting their work done? This, again, ladders up to what the org thinks about quality.

Liberal use of "MVP" or "it's just an experiment". Does the team use those terms to skirt around typical quality standards and ship something subpar? Does everything worked on, even experiments, demand the same care as a more mainstream release that goes out to all users? That's a slippery slope because it's all too easy to simply ramp up that experiment to 100% of your users if it performs well, without addressing quality issues that were neglected prior to shipping to that initial set of users. No one wants a slice of cake that is just a piece of the bottom layer. You need to have a taste of each layer with each bite, including the icing. So even if it’s not your entire vision, it has all the right pieces involved. Ditch the term MVP and use SLC (Simple, Lovable, Complete).

I’m not saying designers, PMs and engineers should be holding up their projects for months to “get it right”. I'm saying that teams should be working in a way where everything is considered and there's a framework for identifying, discussing and prioritizing quality-related issues so that quality is a bit less of a sisyphian task.

Does your team have the skills and incentives to identify and adequately fix those issues? Does the organization continually reinforce and celebrate work that ladders up to quality, craft and great design?

Bikeshed refers to topics which have never recieved concensus and are likely to generate side-discussions and flames unless all participants are well-read on all the past history. It stems from the idea that big changes (like the building of a power plant) go through quickly, since everyone assumes that someone else has checked it out, while simple changes (like building a bikeshed) often get mired in bureaucracy, since everyone has an opinion on it.