Visual design rules you can safely follow every time
[Differentiate hues in a palette with unique brightness values.]
[Saturate your neutrals with warm or cool colours, but not both.]
[Spacing better separates contrasting elements than similar ones.]
The YouTube you see has the same colours and layout as the one I see, and yet we’re not present in each other’s space like two customers browsing through the same record collection at a music store. The Internet is seldom used to ‘connect us together’ any more. No, we’re each in a private bubble.
In a sense, the new digital interfaces are like a reflective store-front made of one-way glass. Whoever approaches will see an image of themselves, reflected in what products turn up, and what messages they receive. The corporate can see them, but the person is encouraged to imagine themselves as walking through an uninhabited room with shelves that belong to them: my shelf, my basket, my account, my list, my favourites, my Amazon, my Google etc. In the 1980s there was no ‘my Walmart’, but now your data is reflected back to you as your own store with that possessive pronoun. In doing that, they get to present themselves as you.
‘Erica’ is legally in the same category as the bank’s supply of staples or fleet of vehicles, but they don’t give human names to their water coolers or keyboards. They only grant that to assets that form part of the new outward-facing interface. They encourage us to get on first-name terms with this combination of code and hardware, and by now all of us have experienced the proliferation of these named interfaces like Alexa, Bard, Claude, or Jasper.
AI chatbots give the one-way mirror a human name that’s different to your own. “I’m having a conversation with Erica”, you think to yourself as you transmit information to the (largely male) engineers of Bank of America. “She knows me so well”.
Stop travelling when you feel good somewhere.
[LLM chatbot that runs offline entirely inside a browser with open models like Mistral and LLama 3. Needs WebGPU so you need to use Chrome or Edge.]
[Perhaps obsession with individualism shames us if we are 'less disciplined' when 'alone', while blinding us to how functional it is to live your best through other people.]
Write when hungry. Read when fed.
Programming require you to reify anything in order to act on it, whereas in the physical world you can directly engage with your environment.
It may be easier to change analog than digital.
I was wondering if it's possible to load a local JavaScript file via bookmarklet (to get around Firefox's character limit) but it seems file:// URLs will return an error. I can either load an https:// URL or embed my file inside an extension.
Social media keeps the locus of attention on small formats, which makes it easy to weaponize for misinformation.
"don't want to do tech but doing it anyway"
[Randomize your MAC address often.]
[Tor is for anonymity, not encryption: you need to configure it to avoid sending unencrypted data.]
[Most people buy transactionally to make money or get laid, and non-transactionally to support things they like. Framing yourself as a utility lands you in the first category. People want a parasocial relationship with creators, and will pay to feel excused from not trying the creative path themselves. Doing and publishing isn't enough to land you in the second category: documenting and explaining in an artful way can become as important as what you're making. Maintaining a community implies being more active on social media.]
[Try camming.]
