Tag: AI

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Thoughts on How to Speak Machine

How to Speak MachinePicked up John Maeda’s How to Speak Machine: Computational Thinking for the Rest of Us and read through it pretty quickly, but I’m not sure it was a worthwhile read for me and I don’t think I’d recommend it for anyone already familiar with modern software design.

Maeda spends the majority of the book’s 200 pages explaining the basics and extolling the value of UX research, product design, agile delivery, and iterative development and comparatively little on the actual premise of the book.

Both Amazon and Maeda frame the book as a way for designers to understand “the complex world of AI and machine learning”, but while it hints at AI’s transformative potential these mentions are more speculative than practical. There really isn’t any actionable insights or detailed explorations of how AI can concretely impact design work today.

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Use AI to highlight and summarize podcasts with Snipd

Been enjoying using Snipd lately for capturing podcast notes/highlights.

Anytime there’s something I want to capture I mark it and their AI generates transcripts & highlights. Those highlights are then automatically exported to my PKM (Obsidian) making it easy find later for future reference. Worth checking out if you listen to a lot of podcasts and especially if you’re already using some sort of system to save the highlights to.

Check out this example of a snippet from a recent episode of Cal Newport’s podcast:

I still use Overcast for all my tech/sports/entertainment podcast listening, but having a separate app for my business/design/productivity shows that helps me remember what I learn has been really useful.

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Humane reveals the AI Pin

Humane’s AI Pin tech looks kinda interesting, but mostly pointless. And even worse, in their prerecorded demo they featured multiple factual AI errors. The fact that they didn’t fact check the AI responses and then released their big reveal video with errors in it, seems like a worse sign for the company than making the errors in the first place.

It just seems like all of this will be part of your smartphone well before the mass market is interested in a device like this.

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Video: An introduction to Photoshop’s Generative Fill

Adobe’s five minute demo of their new AI-based Generative Fill feature in Photoshop is absolutely incredible. Check it out:

I think using AI for iterative creation like this could be the more interesting new capability AI gives us, at least for for a little while. Fabricating new images from thin air still has so many obvious flaws (ethically, technically, and artistically) so this type of use seems like it could be both more successful while also less ethically murky.

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ChatGPT does NOT recommend using Mac IE 5.5

My mind was completely blanking on the methods/terms we used “back in the day” to target Mac IE 5.5 with CSS overrides and I even struck out on DuckDuckGo so I asked ChatGPT 4. In addition to giving me the answer I was looking for and code examples, it also first spent several paragraphs first telling me how ancient that browser and what a terrible idea it was to even try to support it.

And then closing with reiterating AGAIN how “strongly it recommended not targeting such an old browser” and told me to convince users to upgrade to Chrome, Safari, or Firefox. ?