fasterandworse

Authors have expressed their shock after the news that academic publisher Taylor & Francis, which owns Routledge, had sold access to its authors’ research as part of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) partnership with Microsoft—a deal worth almost £8m ($10m) in its first year.

On top of it all, that is such a low-ball number from Microsoft

The agreement with Microsoft was included in a trading update by the publisher’s parent company in May this year. However, academics published by the group claim they have not been told about the AI deal, were not given the opportunity to opt out and are receiving no extra payment for the use of their research by the tech company.

A masterful rant about the shit state of the web from a front-end dev perspective

There’s a disconcerting number of front-end developers out there who act like it wasn’t possible to generate HTML on a server prior to 2010. They talk about SSR only in the context of Node.js and seem to have no clue that people started working on this problem when season 5 of Seinfeld was on air2.

Server-side rendering was not invented with Node. What Node brought to the table was the convenience of writing your shitty div soup in the very same language that was invented in 10 days for the sole purpose of pissing off Java devs everywhere.

Server-side rendering means it’s rendered on the fucking server. You can do that with PHP, ASP, JSP, Ruby, Python, Perl, CGI, and hell, R. You can server-side render a page in Lua if you want.

This is not so much about a particular post but rather to document Jakob Nielsen's relentless generative AI boosting.

His weekly updates are so saturated with AI subject matter and every image is AI generated they are unreadable and I can only assume the text is AI generated as well. It really doesn't matter if it isn't, in fact, because he's demonstrating in real-time how damaging the AI aesthetic is to a brand.

He also seems to be mentioning his 40 years of expertise a lot more, which might be a reaction to some negative feedback. I want to dig deeper, but I don't like the feeling that I'll have to read generated stuff carefully.

His latest newsletter triggered this post because he links to a terrible AI generated song he made (with the line "Jakob Nielsen with UX fame, forty-one years, still in the game") and spends most of the newsletter talking about the process.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYt12jr5yUY

replaced with essay of lament by creator.

My only hot take: a thing being x amount of good for y amount of people is not justification enough for it to exist despite it being z amount of bad for var amount of people.

I don’t really have much to say… it kind of speaks for itself. I do appreciate the table of contents so you don’t get lost in the short paragraphs though

I think I giggled all the way through this one.

Pebble, a Twitter-style service formerly known as T2, today launched a new approach: Users can skip past its “What’s happening?” nudge and click on a tab labeled Ideas with a lightbulb icon, to view a list of AI-generated posts or replies inspired by their past activity. Publishing one of those suggestions after reviewing it takes a single click.

Gabor Cselle, Pebble’s CEO, says this and generative AI features to come will enable a kinder, safer, and more fun experience. “We want to make sure that you see great content, that you're posting great content, and that you're interacting with the community,” he says.

How is it "kinder, safer, and more fun"?

Cselle says he recognizes the perils of offering AI-generated text to users, and that users are free to edit or ignore the suggestions. “We don’t want a situation where bots masquerade as humans and the entire platform is just them talking to each other,” he says.

To protect the integrity of the community as it throws open the door to over 300 million people, Pebble will also be using generative AI to vet new signups. The system will use OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 model to compare the X bio and recent posts of people against Pebble’s community guidelines, which in contrast to Musk’s service ban all nudity and violent content.

Pebble CTO Mike Greer says the aim is to determine “whether someone is fundamentally toxic and treats other people poorly.” Those who are or do will be blocked and and manually reviewed. Pebble intends to vet would-be users against “other sources of truth” online once it opens signups further, he says, to include people without an X account.

There are too many quotable passages, so I'll stop there.

My favourite thing about these products is how they want to take on giants with these differentiating features that would be trivial plug-ins for the giants if they were to pose any threat. It's common in the enterprise blockchain world as well. It'll take SAP much less time to figure out blockchain than it will for your shitty blockchain startup to work out whatever SAP is.

The decentralised finance club needs to make their core values poster bigger and easier to understand

We’re here in 2023 and they still forget that the core value of “not your keys not your wallet” is the equivalent of putting your cash under your mattress instead of using a bank and the complexity that comes with that is unavoidable.

You can get more people to use a mediocre product/technology by making it easy to use

People will use complex products/technologies if they are useful enough.

But these people can’t make it useful so they keep banging their head against the wall trying to make it more simple.

It is inevitable that they will try the even lazier route of deceiving people into thinking it is simple.

Nitter: https://nitter.net/evanvar/status/1699032296870015232

edit: changed title to reduce keyword matches in lemmy fediverse searches

I always knew they had it in them, I just thought they'd ease into it a little

https://nitter.net/gitcoin/status/1691092823872073728

Here's Jared Spool talking about knowing who/what you are designing for as if it's a novel idea. This UX influencer opinion that being able to recognise that you're making something for people is some kind of UX skill superpower. Yet they never acknowledge the critical distinction between designing for-profit vs their usual non-commercial case study examples, like this one of a European government ministry.

Commercial design has always been somewhat dumb in how egotistical it is, but we're in a golden age of believing ones own bullshit where people think that UX is a force for good separate from whatever the UXer is being paid to do. In an ad agency, that kind of ignorance was usually isolated to the sales suits who snorted copious amounts of coke to cope with the internal anguish, while everyone else was comfortable with being paid a lot of money to make ads.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230804073453/https://articles.centercentre.com/how-ux-outcomes-make-a-teams-daily-work-truly-human-centered/

A couple artefacts from my personal pocket of dislike for the company:

Google dot com used table layout components till feb 2022 - something that has been semantically incorrect since forever.

Google's Web.dev, a stealth advertising project disguised as a developer community, has poor accessibility test results—on AXE and it's own Lighthouse test—where developer.mozilla.org scores 100% on Lighthouse and passes with minor issues in AXE tests.

I talk a lot about how "empathy" in commercial UX is mostly a posture because in reality capitalism doesn't care, but it's important to consider the additional problem of people in charge who are too shallow to be capable of understanding "why" some people prefer, or need, to do things differently than they do.

This one time I was telling the ceo/founder of a startup I worked for that our react app was making my new macbook pro crawl and we need to fix that because it was a b2b product that would be used by people in finance offices decked out with dell opticrap machines. He responded with surprise "wow, steve. you really care about people don't you?"

I was kinda floored. Anyway, here we are...

https://web.archive.org/web/20230727121010/https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1684491212219359232

Here's Brian Chesky at the Config 2023 conference for Figma, the current designated software for drawing pictures, talking about design at his "design-led company" airbnb.

Brian Chesky went to design school, studied industrial design, and worked as an industrial designer before founding airbnb. They talk to him here as some kind of hero as the only designer ceo in the fortune 500. It's truly sad that this guy is held up as a model for "design" when airbnb does all the things it does.

This cult is based on a reductionist view of design being form alone. Relegating function to being a business and engineering concern.

A room full of UX designers should be grilling the shit out of brian.

From my blog:

In November 2022, Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb, began a tweet thread with “I’ve heard you loud and clear” in response to a customer backlash over the way they hid additional costs till the checkout page. “You feel like prices aren’t transparent…starting next month, you’ll be able to see the total price you’re paying up front” he said about a change that could be made urgently in a day, or carefully over a few.

When he said I’ve heard you loud and clear he was also telling his User Experience (UX) researchers and designers they were ignored, if they were heard at all. The dark pattern was no mistake. Intentionally designed to deceive and benefit from excited holiday planners and their potential to give in to the sunk cost fallacy. Instead of addressing the ridiculous additional fees the company chose to trick customers into paying them. That’s not empathy, at best it’s apathy, at worst it’s hate. The decision to fix it only came after the balance of business value and public relations started to tip the wrong way. Chesky presented himself as a model CEO doing right by his customers as if he wasn’t responsible for wronging them in the first place. People bought it too. He demonstrated how bright a performative aura of care can shine to hide questions about the business activity or even questions about the business’s legitimacy to exist.

consider this 👆 at the 12:20 mark when the audience applauds him for talking about how design helped them recover from a break-even to a 4bill free cash flow last year - saying they did it by designing the company with "fewer parts, fewer projects" - which probably refers to the ~1900 people they laid off mid-pandemic?