flâneur

jacq g

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on the atlas — 45

highlights — 192

  • And there's a world where that's actually kind of bad for designers, because products don't need to differentiate on design anymore when they're all so different anyway. I don't really know what the way out of that is.
    AI Design Field Guide
  • COMPUTER USE Giving an AI model the tools to interact with a computer the way a human would — clicking buttons, typing in text boxes, scrolling, navigating between apps. Instead of working through APIs or code, the model sees the screen and operates it directly.
    AI Design Field Guide
  • This is the art of AI Design – deciding when to let the model cook.
    AI Design Field Guide
  • And yeah, you kind of have to go on faith that it will be useful to people. And you have to go, as a designer, find the intersection: what's useful and what people need.
    AI Design Field Guide
  • I think a lot of the AI stuff starts from a technical thing and a solution, much less so than starts from a user problem.
    AI Design Field Guide
  • We don't choose to value human product designers in the same way.
    AI Design Field Guide
  • But people don't really think about software that way as much. Nobody goes, "I want to use this interface because I know it was made by a human being." So it will be interesting to see if that changes, which it totally could.
    AI Design Field Guide
  • The point is human beings doing human things, as part of a human tradition of coming together.
    AI Design Field Guide
  • Radical transparency at Palantir wasn't just a practice—it was foundational for building alignment across the company. Every email, decision, and retrospective analysis was available to all in the company, breaking down silos and creating a hive mind that thrived on collective learning
    Palantir: The Founder Foundry - by Apoorv Agrawal
  • Every team, including those not focused on government work, managed to define their own shared enemy.
    Palantir: The Founder Foundry - by Apoorv Agrawal
  • The challenges weren’t always strictly software.
    Palantir: The Founder Foundry - by Apoorv Agrawal
  • A core principle at Palantir—especially among FDEs—was the relentless pursuit of solving real user pain points, not just shiny problems. This often required 'tasting the soup' by spending time with users in their environment—whether that was down the street or on the other side of the globe.
    Palantir: The Founder Foundry - by Apoorv Agrawal
  • The focus is on results, not just technology.
    Palantir: The Founder Foundry - by Apoorv Agrawal
  • Setting the mission to be larger than one’s own identity is a winning formula.
    Palantir: The Founder Foundry - by Apoorv Agrawal
  • The mission was everything—it became a personal, deeply ingrained commitment to achieve a shared goal that was larger than each of our individual existence.
    Palantir: The Founder Foundry - by Apoorv Agrawal
  • Here are the key elements that create the magic of Palantir’s culture: Uncompromising Talent Bar Mission Orientation Forward Deployed Engineering: Deliver Outcomes, Not Software Seek Truth: Solve Real Problems, Not Shiny Ones Define a Shared Enemy: United The Team Flat Structure: Direct Access To Leadership Radical Transparency: Learn From Everything
    Palantir: The Founder Foundry - by Apoorv Agrawal
  • Good founders have an instinct for reading rooms, group dynamics, and power. This isn’t usually talked about, but it’s critical: founding a successful company is about taking part in negotiation after negotiation after negotiation, and winning (on net).
    reflections on palantir - Nabeel S. Qureshi
  • This made the software hard to describe concisely - it wasn’t just a database or a spreadsheet, it was an end-to-end solution to that specific problem, and to hell with generalizability. Your job was to solve the problem, and not worry about overfitting; PD’s job was to take whatever you’d built and generalize it, with the goal of selling it elsewhere.
    reflections on palantir - Nabeel S. Qureshi
  • “getting out of the building” – means you capture the tacit knowledge of how they work, not just the flattened ‘list of requirements’ model that enterprise software typically relies on.
    reflections on palantir - Nabeel S. Qureshi
  • but few have the intellectual atmosphere, the sense of being involved in a rich set of ideas. This is hard to LARP - your founders and early employees have to be genuinely interesting intellectual thinkers
    reflections on palantir - Nabeel S. Qureshi
  • just think about all the wasted time we have collectively spent engineering the same feature again and again for every new App, when we could have been crafting unique commands that users can choose to obtain a la carte.
    The desktop metaphor must die. Why I set out to re-imagine the… | by Jason Yuan | UX Collective
  • Mercury is designed, first and foremost, to be an experience inclusive of people with limited executive function and cognitive load. People living with ASD, ADHD, and other neurological differences who are frequently overwhelmed by the flood of sensory information we have all come to expect in conventional operating systems.
    Introducing Mercury OS - A speculative vision of the OS
  • Still, the personalities are pretty thin. Emily is Away Too is told through instant messages, so there isn’t a lot of room to write fully fleshed-out exchanges, but you don’t quite get to learn much about Emily or Evelyn throughout the five chapters.
    Review: Emily is Away Too – Destructoid
  • The original trafficked on ideas of the woman as a prize to be won, but ultimately frustrated those expectations. This one fully embraces the trope.
    Emily is Away Too review
  • relationships as affinity (get the girl if you have the same ideas and tastes), and relationships as transaction (get the girl by being nice to her or helping her). Neither is very good; both, to be completely fair, crop up very often in other games.
    Emily is Away Too review
  • And dating sims as a genre can become uncomfortable when the mechanics of how you get the girl are too simplistic, which I do think they are, here.
    Emily is Away Too review
  • And it is hard not to endorse a game that leaves such a strong impression.
    Emily is Away Too review | Eurogamer.net
  • It hurt, something I wasn't expecting. I'd played the game in chunks, breezing through the conversations with the girls, only half-heartedly invested in chatter about music and other people's boyfriends.
    Emily is Away Too review | Eurogamer.net
  • It's not perfect. Occasionally, the writing falters. Exposition sometimes takes precedence over character building, and the dialogue rings a little false. Similarly, the girls sometimes feel predictable, more archetypes than individuals. Evelyn is very much the punk with hidden depths, Emily the gamer girl with a vision that'd take her far away from this little town that you share.
    Emily is Away Too review | Eurogamer.net
  • The first time I saw a familiar name and a familiar icon in the game's buddy list, I jumped. I hadn't expected Emily is Away Too to pull from my Steam rolodex of friends but it did, and you know what? All these details do add up.
    Emily is Away Too review | Eurogamer.net
  • I played through to every “ending” and tried to see every line of dialogue in the first, but in the sequel I found that I got the perfect ending and I don’t need or want to see any alternatives.
    Emily is Away Too Review | GameGrin
  • heavily based on what the internet looked like in 2006. They will also send you files, from chat logs to art projects and poetry that will “download” to your desktop.
    Emily is Away Too Review | GameGrin
  • In the first game - and this is a pretty heavy spoiler for a free game you should definitely already have played - you lose all freedom of choice and no matter what you choose, you’ll type some of it out, then delete it and write the same answer. In the sequel, one of the two girls will pick you up on that in a lovely throwback to what was legitimately one of the most heartbreaking scenes I’ve played.
    Emily is Away Too Review | GameGrin
  • This condensed story works a lot better, since I always found it a little strange that the two characters from the previous game only seemed to talk once a year despite being best friends.
    Emily is Away Too Review | GameGrin
  • When I was working on my personal website, the hardest struggle wasn't figuring out how to build it, it was coming to terms with the fact that this website will never capture the entirety of my being.
    ways of seeing - by steve nguyen - steve’s synapses
  • This is to make the point — I don’t think we tell our loved ones enough, what it’s truly like to see them through our eyes.
    ways of seeing - by steve nguyen - steve’s synapses
  • What I was told after writing that post is that railway station operators in the UK have been saving money by laying off the people who used to be paid to keep the stations clean, and replacing these waged humans by putting down “self-cleaning” paving slabs. And, it turns out, “self-cleaning” paving slabs are unbelievably slippery when they get wet. Like, way more than normal paving slabs, unexpectedly so. And now they’re in the exact locations where people will be rushing so they don’t miss their train! So the operators have saved money for themselves by pushing the cost onto the public in th…
    Interconnected, a blog by Matt Webb
  • When there was only one agent managing tools, the chance of error increased – so the Replit team limited their agents to each perform the smallest possible task. They assigned roles to their different agents
    Replit
  • The team hardcoded restrictions to prevent the agent from interacting with tricky pages – including those containing complex workflows like large canvas interfaces or tables with numerous elements.
    Ramp
  • “The most effective way to improve an agent’s accuracy is by constraining the decision space. LLMs still struggle to pick the best option among many similar ones.”
    Ramp
  • One of the Ramp engineering team’s unique insights was that every user interaction with the Ramp web app could be categorized into a scrolling-, clicking-button-, or text-fill step. So, to automate a task for the user, the Tour Guide agent would need to generate these interaction steps in the right sequence.
    Ramp
  • users don't need to manually activate the Tour Guide’s capabilities - instead, the Ramp team developed a classifier that intelligently identifies relevant queries and automatically routes them to the Tour Guide feature when appropriate
    Ramp
  • What’s unique about the Tour Guide agent is its strong emphasis on human-agent collaboration. Users can see all the agent actions and interrupt or take control of the agent at any point, rather than just running it in the background.
    Ramp
  • Just as I don’t think I believe in the concept of a soulmate, I don’t think there’s that ultimate problem out there for me — instead, you’ve got to allow yourself to “commit to the bit” and work on the thing you think you like.
    i can do more more more - by Claire Wang - cold brew blog
  • While the weight of these decisions varies - choosing a font color definitely matters less than choosing a career path - collectively, they form the backbone of our identity. You can have the consistency to make these choices and create patterns that others see as “you,” while having the courage to make new choices to allow for growth and evolution.
    are these my people? - by steve nguyen - steve’s synapses
  • These choices weren't just about web design - they were about embracing discomfort. Each decision meant closing doors to alternative presentations of self, but through the string of decisions, I came to the conclusion — identity isn't about finding some pre-existing "true self." Instead, it emerges from this web of choices, where each decision adds another thread to the pattern of who we are.
    are these my people? - by steve nguyen - steve’s synapses
  • Good openings propose problems, pose questions, drop you into an unfinished story, or point at fundamental tensions within a topic. Ideally within the first paragraph or two.
    On Openings Essays, Conferences Talks, and Jam Jars
  • Devon Zuegal is another notable gardener who has epistemic status and epistemic effort on their posts, indicating both their certainty level about the material, and how much effort went into making it. They also make a strong case for lazy epistemic statuses as a feature, not a bug.
    A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
  • “The [World Health Organization] now calls it the loneliness epidemic. And if they say that it’s an epidemic, it’s because it’s actually infectious. In other words, if you’re isolated, your loved ones are too because you’re unreachable. So during the two hours you’re on TikTok, they have no one to talk to,” Martin told me.
    With Amo, the founder of Zenly wants to make social apps social again | TechCrunch
  • “We’re prioritizing scale because my goal is to create an indestructible company. And it’s Zenly’s founder who is saying that! I used to think that 18 million [daily active users] would be enough to make a company indestructible. But I was wrong. I think you need 100 million [daily active users],” Martin told me.
    With Amo, the founder of Zenly wants to make social apps social again | TechCrunch