Link tags: sight

Frank Chimero · Redesign: On This Design

Most experienced designers want concision—clear, robust, consistent, elegant systems that avoid redundancy. Concise designs are smoother to implement, faster to render, quicker to understand, and easier to hand-off and maintain. Achieving a simplicity with clarity means that you’re engaging with the fundamentals of the problem (and of your craft) at the correct fidelity. You’ve cut through complexity with insight, understanding, and committed decision-making. That third one is critical. A lot of complexity comes from an unwillingness to commit to the things that insight and understanding surface.

Bulb Design System

I really like the way that this pattern library includes research insights to provide justification for design decisions.

Acephalic Agile—worse than Waterfall? - Oliver Wyman Labs: Technical

Agile itself provides us with the ability and opportunity to correct course, it allows us to steer, but it does nothing as such to help us steer correctly.

This observation about (some) agile projects is worryingly familiar:

I was suddenly seized by a horrible thought: what if this new-found agility was used, not teleologically to approach the right outcome over the course of a project, but simply to enshrine the right of middle management to change their minds, to provide a methodological license for arbitrary management? At least under a Waterfall regime they had to apologise when they departed from the plan. With Agile they are allowed, in principle, to make as many changes of direction as they like. But what if Agile was used merely as a license to justify keeping the team in the office night after night in a never-ending saga of rapidly accumulating requirements and dizzying changes of direction? And what if the talk of developer ‘agility’ was just a way of softening up developers for a life of methodologically sanctioned pliability? In short, what if Agile turned out to be worse than Waterfall?

An Apology for the Internet — From the People Who Built It

A hand-wringing, finger-pointing litany of hindsight, published with 11 tracking scripts attached.

1. Start With Hippie Good Intentions …
2. … Then mix in capitalism on steroids.
3. The arrival of Wall Streeters didn’t help …
4. … And we paid a high price for keeping it free.
5. Everything was designed to be really, really addictive.
6. At first, it worked — almost too well.
7. No one from Silicon Valley was held accountable …
8. … Even as social networks became dangerous and toxic.
9. … And even as they invaded our privacy.
10. Then came 2016.
11. Employees are starting to revolt.
12. To fix it, we’ll need a new business model …
13. … And some tough regulation.
14. Maybe nothing will change.
15. … Unless, at the very least, some new people are in charge.

The Real Danger To Civilization Isn’t AI. It’s Runaway Capitalism.

Spot-on take by Ted Chiang:

I used to find it odd that these hypothetical AIs were supposed to be smart enough to solve problems that no human could, yet they were incapable of doing something most every adult has done: taking a step back and asking whether their current course of action is really a good idea. Then I realized that we are already surrounded by machines that demonstrate a complete lack of insight, we just call them corporations.

Related: if you want to see the paperclip maximiser in action, just look at the humans destroying the planet by mining bitcoin.

Sight on Vimeo

A well-executed sci-fi short film on augmented reality and gamification.

Nanotechnology - Foresight Institute

There’s still plenty of room at the bottom.

Foresight Institute’s mission is to ensure the beneficial implementation of nanotechnology.

A space elevator, for example.

Huckleberry

A clever little periscope-like device that allows you to use your Macbook's iSight facing outwards.