Data as an obstacle to legal AI is a human rights violation.
As citizens we are subject to federal, state, and local law. This consists of statutes, regulations, and common law. It is insane that the content of this law is locked away behind private paywalls.
How can one comply with laws when you aren't told what those laws are?
One of my favorite books but it wasn't until I came back to read it 15-20 years later that I realized the whole thing is a tragedy. As a younger man I was high on the futurism. As an older man it's evident that in Stross' telling much of the important parts of humanity are eventually washed away by keeping up with technological advances. It's beautiful but sad.
The inevitable outcome here is that designed materials become so generic and infinitely produceable that they become worthless background noise. We are well on the way to that path.
For almost all materials the only value of getting a seriously produced work of design (i.e., the "make me a magazine-style pitch deck for our seed round" this design engine mentions) is a signaling function that some combination of effort and capital went into its production. Yes, the 1 in a 10,000 work of design adds some actual value. But usually it's just a filtering mechanism. The purpose of making a powerpoint deck before a meeting is rarely the value of a deck. Rather it is signaling that someone spent some time actually organizing their thoughts instead of bloviating spontaneously.
All of this is lost with AI led design. Producing designed artifacts are free and instant. Yeah you will impress the old folks for a year or so who haven't caught onto the joke. Eventually this just becomes pointless table stakes. Just the same way desktop publishing was in the 90s. You impressed the old folks for a bit until it all became background noise table stakes.
I’m glad people will have to evaluate the substance of the deck rather than using a cheap heuristic like how visually appealing the presentation is.
I understand there tends to be a correlation between visual appeal and effort, and correlation between effort and merit, but correlation is notoriously flawed. Flawed models can be useful, but only if one qualifies their use sufficiently. I don’t think most people who used are using the aesthetics heuristic you mention to gauge merit are using it rigorously to sharpen their thinking, they’re using it as a shortcut to prevent themselves from needing to think.
An equally plausible scenario to that of which you mention is that technical people can make presentations that are similarly visually appealing as the non-technical people, and that their opinions will be valued more than before. Maybe this will happen, maybe this won’t happen, but I am certain that we do not know yet.
A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately.
Presentation will always be important as long as humans are involved because we're biologically wired to be attracted to good-looking things. Now I do think that what we associate with "good" will violently change, as it always does (look at fashion).
My guess is that verbosity will be an immediate turnoff, em dashes another immediate turnoff, and we'll value ooga booga conciseness over all other aesthetics. We've already unknowingly begun to move in that direction with the minimalism trend.
The apparent quality of our pull request messages and documentation is sky high (at least from a language and grammar perspective), but I do miss the days of hand crafted prose, it was easier to tell the low effort crap from the gold.
> The purpose of making a powerpoint deck before a meeting is rarely the value of a deck. Rather it is signaling that someone spent some time actually organizing their thoughts instead of bloviating spontaneously.
> All of this is lost with AI led design. Producing designed artifacts are free and instant. Yeah you will impress the old folks for a year or so who haven't caught onto the joke.
I was at an AI/LLM themed hackathon recently. At the end the winning teams presented what they’d done.
The slides were all AI generated, which was fair given the theme and the short time they had at the end to prepare to say something (~10 minutes given to prepare after winners were announced, and before that all teams were spending all the three or so hours we had fully focused on the tasks rather than wasting time making presentations about what had been done).
Still felt a bit weird to see someone speak with slides that were as surprising to themselves as it was to the audience. Like I said, no shade on them in this case given the theme of the hackathon. But it does make me wonder how the future will be at many jobs where “velocity”/“productivity” is so much in the focus that unreviewed LLM generated slides becomes the norm. Hopefully not.
Obviously if you make the slides yourself then you'd know the content well.
The way of using these tools is not to one-shot your slide deck (unless you have plenty time to learn the content) but give it a base product you've already worked on and ask it to make it pretty, interesting, etc. and perhaps make small changes to the content which you'd review and learn.
You can probably use a knife as a fork but it wouldn't be the best way of using the knife.
> The way of using these tools is not to one-shot your slide deck
This line of thinking IMO is hopelessly naive. Yes, the responsible way to use AI and perhaps the way _you_ use it is to do some formatting/cleaning up/enhancement of slides that you primarily authored yourself. The reality is that _most_ people are using and will use AI as a way to breeze through as much work as possible either out of laziness or pressure and their "reviews" will primarily consist of "LGTM." Which is going to lead to an explosion of "did you even read this?" or "did you even test this?"-style disasters.
It’s even worse when you cant push back with “did you even read this”, because the politics haven’t evolved to constrain the slop.
We are getting pre-solutioned massive epics, dozens of files, from senior leaders (non-ICs); when shit goes sideways, what do you do? Our jobs are already at risk just in general, and we have new KPIs around generative AI (as do those senior leaders). I’m not sticking my neck out get chopped off.
Just last week I had to make some shit up in my uplevel status report to shift blame away from an AVP. Technically it’s my fault, for not digging into the 30 files (and tanking my own metrics,m); I don’t even feel like it matters - the devs just hand that off to an LLM anyway to meet their KPIs. I’m just thankful it didn’t go to prod.
I beg people to send me their prompts rather than the stochastic text expanded drivel they send me as memos/plans/etc... Massive waste of my time responding to ghosts - actually taking 10 pages seriously that often the "author" has barely read. I'd much rather get some unstructured bullet points if those are actually a person's ideas.
I love AI. Used well it's a massive enhancer to make things. But yeah whats the value of a presentation that the presenter is also seeing for the first time. Not just zero. Since it wasted everyone's time and bandwidth the value is negative.
Almost 20 years ago, a professor I had in grad school agreed to let me submit my very detailed outline rather than filling in all the text to turn it into paragraphs. It's still the way I write presentations where I'll be speaking.
Maybe the "fill in the paragraphs" step was always unnecessary and we've finally stopped making people do it.
I think design as a "signaling function" for determining the quality of a thing was already broken. It was already possible to put up an impressive-looking site for anything; already possible to to dupe people with cheap product wrapped in fancy packaging.
Movies with insane budgets that spend forever in production are often still terrible. One of my favorite songs was written by the artist in a hotel room on a Sunday afternoon.
One thing to consider: if it's cheap and immediate to wrap any content in design, it can now also be cheap and immediate to customize the design of content. Maybe we can finally return to a user-focused internet like the one that was promised to us by browser custom style sheets.
Finally, I can see democratizing design in this way will make more content more pleasant to look a (which is a win). And we'll also make better decisions with design out of the decision matrixes it doesn't belong in (another win).
One use of design is signaling, but not all - successful design is that which fulfills its purpose.
Many designed things do not need to be differentiated and will benefit from a homogenous AI-powered design (internal documentation, local service business communications, etc) in the same way that desktop publishing replaced hand or type-written notes but did not replace professional designers (although it did require them to learn digital tooling).
For designs that do benefit from being differentiated it'll be interesting to see what happens. If anything, AI homogeneity provides more opportunity for talented human designers who can provide "design alpha" beyond whatever trends the LLMs sucked up in their last crawl.
>The modern world is design rich and art poor. That is to say that with the introduction of mass production it became possible to distribute everywhere items that in previous eras would have been seen as full of Mana, but now, not unique — they have none.
That was in reference to mass produced design, but it seems to apply 10X to AI produced Art.
> The inevitable outcome here is that designed materials become so generic and infinitely produceable that they become worthless background noise.
Hopefully. The process has taken way too long. Compare to something similar like PowerPoint animations. Fun the first time you see them, and then annoying after that.
The best possible side effect of the cost of producing content dropping to zero would be more effort spent honing a message into its most concentrated form.
This is why I beg people to send me their raw prompts rather than the output of running that prompt through a generic LLM. Same semantic content in a half page prompt as the 10 page stochastic text expansion LLM memo version but 1. takes me 1/10th the time to process and 2. I'm not forced to guess which ideas are real ideas I need to respond to and which are just text expansion ghosts.
That idea around LLMs reducing the signaling value of certain types of work is very interesting, and I hadn’t really thought about it.
I think about this effect with targeted advertising a lot, every since I read this article about why targeted advertising is so useless for both consumers and advertisers, even when it seems like on the surface it should be better for both: https://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/
Once it becomes very cheap to do something, it becomes completely useless as a way to differentiate quality from crap.
This is true if you that assume the only purpose of design is aesthetic differentiation. There actually is a lot of science in how you scan information in a design, how it's presented, the visual hierarchy, grouping and things that actually have utility in and off itself.
And the result will be people creating their own flawed but unique designs as a counter signal. Think of the early internet and the janky but wonderfully personal websites it spawned.
Can we add to the software failure list that Finder is an underpowered mess? Like the author said, fixing Finder won't have a correspondingly visible ROI. But haven't any of the Apple developers using these machines just said "ENOUGH" already. I used to like Pathfinder and was willing to just pay for that as an alternative but that software is just buggy enough that it's annoying to rely on for something as important as file management.
Cook was an able steward of Apple. Under his leadership the hardware side continued to iteratively improve nicely. Apple Silicon is good stuff. I am firmly embedded in the entire Apple ecosystem and have no reason to leave.
I do wish Apple used some of its massive cash hoard and market power to do better in software. The iPad remains my favorite form factor to use in lots of my day but Apple never invested in killer app software optimized for it. Same with VisionPro although maybe that story is just early. The VisionPro store demo was the closest I felt to tech magic since I was a kid in the 80s. The price was high but not prohibitively so. Rather, I could tell that there was just no reason to use it day to day because there wasn't enough software optimized for it.
I've lost track of the Apple Cash hoard which was insane some years ago but it would have been better for Apple to proactively invest in developing killer apps/uses for it's admirable hardware versus going into producing TV shows and movies because Hollywood people are fun to hang out with.
Cook did his job. Apple's supply chain didn't collapse and almost kill the company like in the 90s. But I hope we see some of the old innovative spirit come back. I want that "wow" moment again where I don't just get an iteratively improved version of what I already have but something new!
> The iPad remains my favorite form factor to use in lots of my day but Apple never invested in killer app software optimized for it.
Apple doesn't received much credit for making iPhoto for iPad back in 2012 (https://www.macrumors.com/2012/03/07/apple-launches-iphoto-f...), or more recently Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro. I think they really have invested in building pro software for iPads, probably on the order of millions of dollars, less for the vanishingly small segments of their user base but to make the case that the platform can be used for serious work.
The problem though is that the platform itself creates friction compared to macOS that, even at the best of times, makes the user at least slightly less productive. So I can't imagine myself picking up an iPad to do any actual creative work.
Not to mention the best-in-class keyboard cases, over-engineered stylus, mouse support, multitasking support, and on and on. It almost seems desperate that they keep trying to find "the thing" to crack this problem.
> versus going into producing TV shows and movies because Hollywood people are fun to hang out with
I disagree with this take quite a bit. Yes, software could be better, but Apple TV+ has given dozens of shows the budget and freedom to produce some truly generation-defining art. Ted Lasso, Severance, and For All Mankind are huge stand-outs in their scope, depth, and ambition. For instance, the latter is produced by Sony, yet you see nearly zero product placement, which has been a hallmark of the studio for over a decade now. Putting gobs of money into storytelling yields purer, and therefore more compelling, narratives that will hold up well over time and represent the best of what we are capable of. At the same time, Apple TV+ as a subscription service is also a very convenient way for Apple to weather any ups and downs in the physical product categories.
> Rather, I could tell that there was just no reason to use it day to day because there wasn't enough software optimized for it.
I think you can get rid of the "because there wasn't enough software optimized for it" part.
It's simply a product without a defining use case, and most people do not want to live life literally behind a screen with giant goggles strapped to their face. I think VR/AR goggles may certainly have a place in some time-limited uses like gaming, but this idea that it would be "the next big computing platform" is just bunk. Even if it had a limitless supply of the best software ever made, I challenge anyone to say why people would actually want to use it for extended periods.
Yes, just like spreadsheets and email have been the ultimate killers of many startups run by smart people; the modern smartphone, laptop, and to a lesser extent tablet, have been the killer of many cool hardware ideas.
After a ~decade of very serious investment from multiple huge corporations, there's still not a compelling use case for VR goggles that's not achievable for the vast majority of people with either a laptop or their iphone.
Look around on any public transit ride anywhere in the world, we already live in the metaverse. It's just small glass rectangles + headphones instead of headsets because that's a better form factor for most people.
The TV shows and stuff were never in competition for their money, they spent over $700 billion on stock buybacks in the last decade that's where it went, and they certainly could have spent a miniscule portion of that to ignite the iPad and AVP software scene. It will be interesting to see if they change approach with the folding iPhone, the rumour mill says it won't support iPad apps so it is primed for the same problem.
I know they spent time catering to companies to build iPad apps. I worked on some stuff where Apple had reached out to build our existing desktop apps to be optimized for iPad's specific use cases. To be honest, I don't think our team did a very good job of focusing on iPad's unique features and the contexts in which it was/could be used, but I was also fairly confident that iPad was very limited for work (especially then).
Some of the user research was around the mental models behind switching to do deep work on a desktop/laptop—though they're still blurry with younger phone-first (or phone-only) users. It's not unlike why the UI for work software should be different than consumer stuff. If you're there everyday, you don't need stuff hidden and progressively disclosed. You'll learn it, adding extra clicks is worse. The cockpit is better this way. It's not clutter. Obviously, with a laptop you get a full keyboard too whereas the iPad's addition is the touch screen, which has it's merits, but is a much blunter fat-fingery input. And people would talk about how you can add a keyboard, but you know, if the user is doing that, should they not just bring their laptop?
I remember at the time trying to pitch a mindset that a laptop is a portable device. Sure it doesn't fit in a pocket, but neither does an iPad. So even the use cases you'd have away from your desk aren't exactly carve outs for an iPad experience.
You can't throw money at software and get better software on the other side, see Meta(verse). Better software requires focus, which may mean spending less money instead of more.
iPad is the best consumption device in existence. Reading, video, casual games, it handles all without breaking a sweat. And as speech recognition and translation into intent using LLMs and other tools continues to improve, the keyboard will become less critical and so will be the shortage of screen real estate.
I'm excited about the future of the tablet form factors.
If you enjoyed coding for the sake of coding it hasn't gone anywhere. People still knit for themselves when they can go buy clothes off the rack. People still enjoy chess and Go even though none of them can beat a machine.
If you enjoyed that you could do something the rest of the world can't - well yeah some of that is somewhat gone. The "real programmers" who could time the execution of assembly instructions to the rotation speed of an early hard drive prob felt the same when compilers came around.
It has rekindled my joy however. Agentic development is so powerful but also so painful and it's the painful parts I love. The painful parts mean there is still so much to create and make better. We get to live in a world now where all of this power is on our home computers, where we can draw on all the world's resources to build in realtime, and where if we make anything cool it can propagate virally and instantly, and where there are blank spaces in every direction for individuals to innovate. Pretty cool in my view.
A problem with mythologizing past defeat is it can lead to sacrificing the present and future. Some people have the need to live in a grand mythic narrative. Others just want decent lives for themselves and their children with security and a future.
To quote the article: «The defeated of the world theorize what they endure. In truth, the only critical thinking possible today is thinking from the standpoint of the defeated. This standpoint is not one of passivity, nor of victimhood. On the contrary, it asks: How can one think from within brokenness, from within the ruins, and still produce meaning, and even possibility?»
And further: “I do not want to exalt the past at the expense of my present and of my future.”
As citizens we are subject to federal, state, and local law. This consists of statutes, regulations, and common law. It is insane that the content of this law is locked away behind private paywalls.
How can one comply with laws when you aren't told what those laws are?
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