Notices by Pavel A. Samsonov (pavelasamsonov@mastodon.social)

@mhoye you can also use the subway stations on the midtown portion of the 6 line in Manhattan to roughly convert from Fahrenheit to Celsius

@foone JAVASCRIPT should be all caps but not an acronym

A fable about #GenAI

The Emir wanted to teach his donkey to talk. No one was willing to take the job so he raised the salary. Finally, Hodja Nasreddin accepted the job on the condition that he could have 10 years to do it.

His friends were shocked. "No one can teach a donkey to talk. You will be executed."

"Perhaps," Hodja answered. "But the money is good, the job is easy, and in 10 years a lot might happen. I might die, or the Emir might die, or sure enough even this old donkey might die."

This is your brain on #ai: "Subject to the terms of this Agreement, You hereby grant to HP a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free right to use, copy, store, transmit, modify, create derivative works of and display Your non-personal data for its business purposes."

Someone out there wrote "as a user I want my printer to steal my documents to train LLMs" without hesitation.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/hp-wants-you-to-pay-up-to-36-month-to-rent-a-printer-that-it-monitors/

I use a great prompt-driven interface for generating images. It's much faster than Midjourney (produces millions of results in a fraction of a second).

It's called web search, and it rules.

Real user story seen in the wild: as a system I want to connect to the database to get the data

#Agile

AI has already been used to run scams, rip off artists, destroy search engines, and drown publishers under an avalanche of shit.

Now AI boosters found a new thing to enshittify: #UserResearch .

"AI research is better than nothing" is the latest in a long series of "bad research is better than nothing" arguments that miss the point of research in the first place.

#UXDesign #softwaredevelopment #ProductManagement

https://spavel.medium.com/no-ai-user-research-is-not-better-than-nothing-its-much-worse-5add678ab9e7

The 2 #AI use cases are both actually just search:

Commercial - all my data is in unindexed PDFs, I will ask AI to read through it & find the answer for me

Consumer - I will ask AI to draw big booby because I don't know how to find the big booby pictures that already exist on the internet

the video conferencing software is getting existential

@superball @futurebird Weirdly, this has lineage from the Sumerian dog joke:

A dog walks into a tavern. "It's too dark to see anything," he says. "I think I'll open my eyes."

@thomasfuchs Yes but think of the people who write that for a living

LLMs are just the new VUI. A technology that makes *some* things easier, in *some* cases, but is being sprayed on everything because it's the Hot New Thing, and rushing out features is easier than doing real user research and modeling use cases from observed needs.

3/

Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Samsung assured us they were building the future.

Nobody wanted the future they built. After a couple of years, Bixby, Cortana, and Assistant are gone from the spotlight. But not to worry - Microsoft has a new thing it wants to stick into your face! This time it's a physical keyboard button!

2/

Microsoft's Copilot button is a shining example of the form factor trap.

Who remembers when Siri came out and voice assistants were the future of computing? Samsung built a physical Bixby key into their phones (and went through massive pains to prevent users from disabling it). Microsoft had a dedicated Cortana button ship pinned to Windows 8's dock. Google Assistant was a default Android homescreen.

1/

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/4/24023809/microsoft-copilot-key-keyboard-windows-laptops-pcs

#uxDesign #ProductManagement

Today is tabs jubilee. We are forgiven all our debts and obligations to the open tabs we promised to read and haven't. Close them now and go in peace.

happy stylish but illegal ikea monkey day to those who celebrate

The medium is the message

The C in CSS stands for ChatGPT

"Don't make me think" is only half of the story.

It's a #UX sin to assume that your app is the most important thing in your user's world, and add to their cognitive load unnecessarily. But sometimes the user *is* focused on your product. They don't want a low-touch, automagic experience. They want to be in control. Let them.

Don't *make* me think - but *let* me think.

This is part of why "reduce friction" is misleading. Friction is texture. Without it, there's nothing to grab on to

#UXDesign

#ProductManagement #Scrum #Agile