Haein Jung

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on the atlas — 22

highlights — 44

prefer interfaces that let the user incrementally move towards the right answer over direct search. Humans are much better at choosing between a few options than conjuring an answer from scratch. We’re also much better at incrementally approaching the right answer by pointing towards the right direction than nailing the right search term from the beginning. When it’s possible to take a “type in a query” kind of interface and make it more incrementally explorable, I think it’s almost always going to produce a more intuitive and powerful interface.
Navigate, don't search | thesephist.com
incremental progress, unexpected benefits, minor redirections, small refusals
Frank Chimero · Beyond the Machine
No Face does not understand that what he’s really seeking—genuine connection—can’t be bought or consumed. He mistakes his spiritual hunger for a physical one, trying to feed an emptiness that food can’t fulfill.
Frank Chimero · Beyond the Machine
As punishment, they are turned into pigs. The parallel to AI is hard to miss: eating without consent, where uncontrolled appetite destroys any awareness of the intangible dimensions of what’s being consumed, etc. etc. etc.
Frank Chimero · Beyond the Machine
The internet challenged copyright by creating infinite distribution of perfect copies. With AI, what happens when infinite distribution is hooked up to infinite imitation?
Frank Chimero · Beyond the Machine
sampling to spawning
Frank Chimero · Beyond the Machine
They say that all media is training data, so their work wrestles with the implications of what media generation at scale means for artists. The AI model and the economic model don’t need to come packaged together. Both can be areas for innovation, and severing the implied connection may be a requirement for ethical AI.
Frank Chimero · Beyond the Machine
treating the model as material
Frank Chimero · Beyond the Machine
we have to resist its pull towards average by working beside it, shaping what it gives, and listening for what’s missing. Sometimes what’s needed is a good, old-fashioned mistake or two.
Frank Chimero · Beyond the Machine
becoming mind numbingly mediocre
Frank Chimero · Beyond the Machine
In other words, every new technology promises better clarity, yet its essence is determined by the noise it produces. The friction of limits is what gives a technology its character, so when a system becomes too smooth, too all-encompassing, or too accommodating, it stops having a signature at all.
Frank Chimero · Beyond the Machine
They can also behave like a horoscope or a fortune.
Frank Chimero · Beyond the Machine
treaming services flattened art into algorithmic averages and background noise, newsfeeds rewired attention toward outrage because engagement meant growth. Each time, the machine attracted us with individual customization while quietly taking control of the terms. The same will happen with AI if used for passive consumption, even if that consumption is dressed up as execution.
Frank Chimero · Beyond the Machine
Lately, I’ve been thinking about my use of AI as a kind of spatial relationship. Where do I stand in relation to the machine—above it, beside it, under it? Each position carries a different kind of power dynamic. To be above is to steer, beside is to collaborate, below is to serve.
Frank Chimero · Beyond the Machine
UX problem known as discoverability, where messing around led to finding out.
An AI OS from a design perspective - by David Galbraith
Even when there isn’t an explicit construction of space in the interface, there is often a hidden metaphor gesturing at one. When we open a folder in a file browser, for example, we imagine hierarchies of folders above and below to which we can navigate. In a web browser, we imagine pages of history coming before and after the current page. When editing a document, the undo/redo “stack” gestures at a hidden chronological list of edits. Sometimes, these hidden metaphors are worth reifying into concrete visuals, like a list of changes in a file history view or a file tree in the sidebar of a cod…
What makes a good human interface? | thesephist.com
A good engaged interface makes visible what is latent. In that way, they are like great maps. Good interfaces and maps enable us to more effectively explore some domain of information by visualizing and letting us see the right slices of a more complex, underlying reality.
What makes a good human interface? | thesephist.com
You are effectively analyzing a system where the equation rewrites itself every hour.
Jaya Gupta on X: "Who will set price / intelligence?" / X
For most people, their important information lives across so many different pieces of software across a range of companies and technologies that building a personal Memex would seem impossible
Building Monocle, a universal personal search engine for life | thesephist.com
Monocle isn’t a standalone project by itself, but a cross-cutting infrastructural project that integrates with a wide range of other projects in my portfolio to provide some shared functionality: search.
Building Monocle, a universal personal search engine for life | thesephist.com
The more I use it, the more I want it to become even more powerful and even more present in my life.
Building Monocle, a universal personal search engine for life | thesephist.com
reader-generated essays.
Reader-generated Essays — LessWrong
parating idea generation from writing
Reader-generated Essays — LessWrong
So clearly, there’s some directed-ness to the way our minds are navigating our internal webs of ideas – good thinking is effective navigation through the idea maze.
A GPS for the mind | thesephist.com
good thinking happens with a goal
A GPS for the mind | thesephist.com
The human mind […] operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.
A GPS for the mind | thesephist.com
mental model for what thinking is, so that we can design human + tool systems that better accomplish whatever it is
A GPS for the mind | thesephist.com
In a similar way, there’s an inherent inadequacy in writing about tools for thought.
How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
Speaking loosely, the range of expressive thoughts possible in such a medium is an emergent property of the elementary objects and actions in that medium
How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
Our results show the potential of always-on wearable systems with LLM-driven user models to support new forms of cognitively scaffolding, context-aware human-AI interactions.
Mind Mapper: Modeling and Predicting Behavioral Patterns from Everyday Conversations with Wearable AI Systems and LLMs — MIT Media Lab
Communications is rife with shallow metrics, from impressions to reach to page views and downloads and eyeball time. It’s no good to swim in data that isn’t useful.
There is No General Public: Starting with Audience for Stronger Science Communication Plans | by Aaron Huertas | Science Communication Media | Medium
speak different languages and have different concerns
There is No General Public: Starting with Audience for Stronger Science Communication Plans | by Aaron Huertas | Science Communication Media | Medium
What do they already know about what you work on? Explicitly stating the assumptions — or lack of assumptions — an audience may have about a scientific topic can be an enlightening exercise. Apartment dwellers whose water bills are baked into their rent may have barely thought about water use in their home before. People who garden and maintain their lawns may feel like they already know a lot about how much water they use and will filter information about a new water-use study through that lens.
There is No General Public: Starting with Audience for Stronger Science Communication Plans | by Aaron Huertas | Science Communication Media | Medium
But going overboard and trying to reach too many audiences at once can dilute the effectiveness of a plan
There is No General Public: Starting with Audience for Stronger Science Communication Plans | by Aaron Huertas | Science Communication Media | Medium
What will the audience know or do?
There is No General Public: Starting with Audience for Stronger Science Communication Plans | by Aaron Huertas | Science Communication Media | Medium
But that shared reality has been fracturing, meaning we have many overlapping specific publics and no real general public anymore.
There is No General Public: Starting with Audience for Stronger Science Communication Plans | by Aaron Huertas | Science Communication Media | Medium
There is no general public, or at least they’re harder to reach nowadays
There is No General Public: Starting with Audience for Stronger Science Communication Plans | by Aaron Huertas | Science Communication Media | Medium
A new history of the word For most of the history of writing, humans produced words out of natural thought — taking in some ideas, mixing it with our memories and intuitions and logic, and vocalizing what came to us in our minds. Until two things happened. We understood the physics of ideas. An idea is composed of concepts in a vector space of features, and a vector space is a kind of marvelous mathematical object that we can write theorems and prove things about and deeply and fundamentally understand. We learned to relate our mathematical models of writing to ideas in the real world. We buil…
Synthesizer for thought | thesephist.com
Embeddings are numerical representations of concepts converted to number sequences, which make it easy for computers to understand the relationships between those concepts. Our embeddings outperform top models in 3 standard benchmarks, including a 20% relative improvement in code search.
Introducing text and code embeddings | OpenAI
So far, the way we label our work (“tools for thought”, “knowledge graph”) and the way the world perceives this field have been defined mostly by the loudest and biggest companies to fill the room. This kind of ad-hoc identity is enough to bring people together, but these words we use today are laden with overloaded meanings and associations to existing products and ideas.
Towards a research community for better thinking tools | thesephist.com
Detailed decomposition of concepts and styles in language
Synthesizer for thought | thesephist.com
with breakthroughs in mathematical understanding of a medium, come new tools that exploit that mathematical understanding to enable new creative forms and human interfaces.
Synthesizer for thought | thesephist.com
dramatically expands the design space of how humans can interact with music.
Synthesizer for thought | thesephist.com
Starting [at a young age] he’s read everything that he could find about business. The subject that interests him, he’s read newspapers, biographies, trade press. He went over to his grandfather who was a grocer and he read the progressive grocer magazine, and he read art
Curius / Onboarding