Windows is rotten to the core.

The scariest part is just how many people stick with the default settings, and get this stuff pumped into their brains 24/7.

I hope some day we’ll take this as seriously as environmental protection. Which granted isn’t perfect either, but a lot more than we do about all the mental toxicity being spewed at scale by large tech firms.

A document like this isn't going to magically "solve" the use of AI in higher education. The purpose is to define a shared understanding of the situation across a large, complex organization, and set an initial direction and general shape for actions to take.

It contains clear, specific observations of how AI is organically changing the reality of education. And, in my opinion, fairly clear high-level guidance on what MIT as an entity wants to do about AI, and what individual departments and faculty should decide on their own.

A document like this doesn't need to be revolutionary, it may feel like fluff because no specific item in it is particularly surprising or groundbreaking, but the value is in having the entire document as a whole. And it is a lot more comprehensive and well thought out than what most companies can put out.

It’s managed to do what years of self-imposed content blockers etc. on my own side have failed to do - finally broke my Reddit addiction!

It took a bit of digging, but it looks like around 80% of the plastic the Ocean Cleanup has captured comes from rivers - while the article focuses mostly on criticizing the open ocean catch. It would be interesting to see what is the budget split between the two methods, but I couldn't easily find it.

It makes sense to me that removal requiring infrastructure will be more costly than unpaid volunteers on land. It is NOT clear to me if that means the infrastructure solution is not worth pursuing in parallel. It does seem the open ocean catch is ineffective compared to the river capture, and I can understand that argument. Not so clear to me if / why river capture should be scrapped in favor of the volunteer beach cleanup, as the article seems to imply. Intuitively, pursuing both would makes more sense. Again, this would be a very interesting analysis to see.

> Unfortunately, it also shows how some people can take certain ideas too closely to heart — and take it personally when those ideas are criticized. When experts started speaking out about the Ocean Cleanup several years ago, I witnessed several of them endure online harassment from supporters of the organization, often phrased as “At least they’re trying to do something to help, all you do is complain.”

To be honest, yes, this article seems to be getting the same response. Doesn't mean the criticism is invalid, but public communication is a skill in itself, separate from depth of expertise in a subject.

Briefly considered adding “Verbing weirds the English language - stop it!!!” to its instructions.

But to me, both the process and the pitfalls are going to be heavily specific to the individual or team, and to the work they are doing... It's something that evolves over time as you bump into repeated rough edges.

Taking someone else's skills and blindly applying them to my situation feels odd. I don't know what rough edges those skills were made to address, so I have no reason to believe they would fit my specific needs, initially, any better than the baseline LLM.

The first two years were shared with Electrical Engineering. The second two years started to specialize towards Computer Engineering topics.

* Physics and chemistry.

* Circuits.

* Transistors.

* Logic gates.

* FPGAs.

* Assembly.

* Compilers.

* CPU and hardware design.

* Operating systems.

* Networking layers.

* Programming languages.

* Computer graphics.

Did I master all of the above - absolutely not. I loved some of them, struggled with others. Generally the cut-off for how my brain works is logic gates, I was never strong at the levels below that.

But we did cover them, and I could honestly say I had at least a rough understanding and mental map of everything that happens inside a computer from the point where it's plugged into an outlet, to the point where pixels show up on the screen.

They cannot possibly be putting up with Windows 11 as experienced by regular people.

In every project I've touched, business requirements are always the bottleneck - so I've never been able to wrap my head around what kind of requirements can be fed into a setup like this at high enough volume to justify it.

It's more nuanced than that, and "in Dark Souls, every monster is inherently hostile toward you" is not true.

Most games have a clear division between hostile mobs you kill for XP and loot, and story NPCs which you cannot / are not supposed to attack.

That line doesn't really exist in Dark Souls. Most (all?) story NPCs can be killed, which has specific consequences if the player chooses to do so. And there are monsters throughout the game world that are functionally identical to hostile monsters - they look the same, drop the same resources if you attack and kill them - but are simply not hostile to you and are just minding their own business.

It IS more subtle than in other games, and might not even be obvious to the player at first. This gradual realization was actually one of my favorite parts of playing Dark Souls.

But there are definitely intentional gameplay elements that support this, it is not strictly text lore.

This is almost 1:1 with a project we worked on several years ago. Unfortunately it never launched - founder ran out of money. It was one of my favourite projects we’ve done and I genuinely believed in the concept, so I was sad we couldn’t see it come to fruition. But glad someone else is giving it another go!

Without giving away anything confidential, I can say your cold start plan is very similar. Can’t say it’s a good or bad plan because we never saw it executed in practice… but it’s not unreasonable!

I think distribution and stickiness will be a challenge. Even if you get enough content that users will have a great first experience, most people don’t travel that often, so getting them to come back regularly won’t be easy.

Best of luck - would love to see this succeed!

It's instructive to look at how a company presents itself to the public, so I went looking at what Adobe says about itself, and what is the first instance I can find of a principle or value that this bad UX violates.

Google result:

> Adobe: Creative, marketing and document management solutions > Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. We help our customers create, deliver and optimize content and applications.

About page:

>Changing the world through personalized digital experiences. >Adobe empowers everyone, everywhere to imagine, create, and bring any digital experience to life. From creators and students to small businesses, global enterprises, and nonprofit organizations — customers choose Adobe products to ideate, collaborate, be more productive, drive business growth, and build remarkable experiences.

>Creative Cloud >Industry-leading photography, design, illustration, and video apps that professionals rely on to do their best work.

Company values: https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2023/03/07/evolving-adobes...

>Creativity is not only what we enable for the world but it’s also core to the fabric of the company. It has driven our curiosity to look around the corner to transform the industry and ourselves. Over 40 years, we launched the desktop publishing revolution with PostScript, innovated and led every category that we are in — creativity, documents, customer experience management — to serve a wider customer universe. Create the future is all about being the customer and being relentless across all the elements that make up customer centricity to delight them, deliver unparalleled value and innovate to address unmet (and possibly unknown) needs.

>Raise the bar is about continuous evolution and never being satisfied with the status quo. It’s about never settling for good enough and always striving to be first, only and best. It’s about being intellectually honest and direct in talking about the things that aren’t going well and always looking to do better. At the end of the day, our ultimate measure of success is the customer and today more than ever, we need to surprise and delight them at every turn.

So really, the closest I could find to guiding principles being broken are tangential concepts like "remarkable experiences", "customer centricity", and "surprise and delight". Good goals for any company, but not especially design focused in my opinion.

Paraphrasing, Adobe as a company thinks of itself as a provider of technology to fuel content, marketing, and advertising money-making machines. Design at this point is incidental to who their customer happens to be.

I am sure individual employees might feel different, but as a company, we have no more reason to expect excellent UX from Adobe than, for example, Oracle or Salesforce.

Add enshittification, products randomly getting acquired and shut down, etc, and $50/month quickly stops looking like $50/month.

Not saying the math works out for the “build your own” version… But it’s not that clean for the subscription option either.

On a separate note, there is the concept of “ideal customer profile”. If the people you’re speaking with feel they can solve this problem on their own, then they are not it!

>There is nothing else to it – you must eat a few hundred bowls of phở and find out. If this requires moving to Hanoi, so be it.

Not the worst life plan, to be honest!

A little bit sad that my own "death bed pho" - chicken pho from that one stall near the market in old quarter - gets just a passing mention as the only acceptable variation to traditional beef pho.

This also brings back memories of our "mystery pho man" - who had three tiny stools and one large pot outside his house every morning, looked like a character straight out of an 80's movie, and was usually sold out by 8am.

Vietnamese food has got significantly better in Toronto in the past 5-10 years - but still haven't found anything that comes even close to Hanoi chicken pho.

https://blog.kevinzwu.com/symbolhead-syndrome/

The much more useful posts are “my team and I are doing X with AI”. Of course, the challenge there is that the ones who are truly getting a competitive edge through AI are usually going to be too busy building to blog about it.