In a (healthy) company, you have PMs and executives who will tell the overly opinionated engineers to STFU and actually implement things that move the needle and solve problems users are facing.

This is also why most open source projects have terrible UI/UX and any designer who attempts to help and improve things finds themselves ignored, with no means to actually carry out any decision, and walk away soon after.

We have all the elements for answers if we focus on what we know, and forget the hand wavy sci-fi speculation.

1) Complex life is rare.

2) Reaching a space faring stage is even rarer. (we’re the most minimal definition of “space faring” you could come up with, and even then we got really lucky with so many things)

3) The universe is huge. It’s like, the hugest thing there is, man. And except for some little bits of interesting dust here and there, it’s mostly empty. As empty as it is huge.

So, does life - in any form - exist elsewhere in the universe? Almost certainly.

Are/were there life forms elsewhere in the universe that escaped their home planet gravity to go explore their moon or other planets in their solar system? Seems quite probable.

Is there any shot we are sufficiently close in space/time to encounter such another advanced life form? Almost certainly not.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38544296

Points: 2

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1) be as boring as possible so people can make sense of it quickly and efficiently in a world where there are countless other things competing for your time and attention

2) standout as much as possible to gain your attention in the aforementioned busy world

IME this explains a lot the nature of trends that design experiences.

It's frustrating because as a grad student I was explicitly taught to avoid using local slang, informal sayings and expressions, humor, etc. in my academic writing to make it as understandable and unambiguous as possible.

Funny, read your comment as my copy of Tufte's VDoQI is open to page 154:

"Color often generates graphical puzzles. Despite our experiences with the spectrum in science textbooks and rainbows, the mind's eye doe not readily give a visual ordering to colors, except possibly for red to reflect higher levels than other levels [...] Attempts to give colors an order result in those verbal decoders and the mumbling of little mental phrases [...] Because they do have a natural visual hierarchy, varying shades of gray show varying quantities better than color."

What captures an image is an imaging surface; traditionally a chemical emulsion on a piece of film, now a complex array of digital sensors.

This imaging surface is of human design, it therefore images what its designers designed it to image. But don't forget that it is a sampling of reality; by definition always partial, and biased (biased to the 400~700 nm range, for starters).

Looking at fine elements like hairs (nevermind curly hair) is a disaster, especially when you're used to fine classic german/japanese optics that accurately reproduce every subtle detail of a subject while having extremely aesthetically pleasing sharpness falloff/bokeh.

I've had to swallow the pill though: No one (end users; pros are another story) cares about those details. People just want something that vaguely looks good in the immediate moment, and then it's on to the next thing.

I suspect it'll remain the same for AI generated visuals; a sharp eye will always be able to tell, but it won't really matter for consumption by the masses (where the money is).

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38471538

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

As a film photographer, if I ever find myself in possession of a time machine, the first thing I'll do is go back to ancient Minoa/Rome/Egypt/China/Tikal and show people how to make silver based emulsions to use with pinhole cameras.

In a similar vein, this article "Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?" is a nice read.

https://rootsofprogress.org/why-did-we-wait-so-long-for-the-...

When I look at a high resolution scan of a large format negative on it, it feels like looking at it directly on a light table. It's insane. My only complaint is the local dimming, which shows its limit when you're doing fine white on black linework in a dark room. Hopefully we'll get a pro OLED display of that quality in the next decade which will solve that one issue.

The only other piece of hardware I've spent money on that comes close of giving me the same satisfaction is my Happy Hacking Keyboard, which I've used for over a decade now and I hope I will keep using until I cannot use computers altogether anymore (I have a few spares just in case).

It's now becoming clear that we can't just take the brain in isolation, treating the spinal nerve like a PCI-E lane - the gut has to come with it. And if the gut comes with it, all the other organs (skin top of the list) probably do as well.

Now to model a human brain, you need to model an entire human, along with all the complexity of the microbiota, interactions of the organs with the environment... it all just falls apart.

… I guess that makes me a product person?

https://www.noemamag.com/ai-and-the-limits-of-language/

The moment these models can run locally on the kind of cheap hardware that phone scam operations have will be the real Pandora’s box moment. (I give it 3-5 years or so)