he could have just admitted he couldn’t get the ai to draw a dick. Instead, a future without dicks is his idea of a surprising future

this project intrigues me because we’re able to see the brainstorm doc that he believes is shareworthy, combined with a reasonably slick website and a careers page.

There is no open position for a “product designer” or any kind of role that would be interested in concretely working on addressing the clear problem statement in the brainstorm doc. I have to assume there isn’t anyone in the group doing that already because they would not let a brainstorm doc be published like that, as if it has any value.

This is what bothers me so much about iterative design culture and the “doing something is better than nothing” mantra. It makes out that identifying the problem/purpose is the assignment, and undermines the REAL design work of coming up with a good response to that purpose.

If this project gets off the ground, they’ll start building and they’ll hire UX designers and they’ll just make something that resembles an online school and focus on making sure it has blockchains and nfts and all that shit, and the whole concept of “design” will be relegated to user acceptance and finding frictions to remove.

At no point will anyone sit down and say “how can we effectively address illiteracy in developing countries” and find out why, what, how, and all the barriers, all the realities, the complexities, the options for means to achieve certain things, all the DESIGN.

Its no different for everything else in tech, they all start from this point where nothing was initially designed beyond throwing together an idea and iterating it into a behemoth that needs an army of staff to groom its hair and clip its toenails. The people given design titles (ux designers, product designers) are not answering to an overarching design or any principled basis for design.

it should also be said that the giggle academy is probably a publicity thing for CZ’s character

CZ created the Giggle Academy (from prison?) which seems to be an NFT fuelled education thing that wants everything to be automated with as little effort as possible.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240320105524/https://www.giggleacademy.com/

the website links to a “concept paper” which is nothing but a brainstorm doc which has a clear problem statement followed by a list of mushy, kinda, sorta, items that don’t add up to much at all

https://web.archive.org/web/20240320105858/https://www.giggleacademy.com/Giggle Academy v0.4 20240221.pdf

such as these under “gamification”;

Badges (NFTs), points, scores, rankings, etc.

Early education (elementary school levels) are easier to gamify. High school subjects become more difficult as the subject becomes more complex. Hopefully by then, the kids have developed enough learning habits to sustain their on-going learning.

or under “completely online”

There are some drawbacks to the online approach, such as lack of peer support, group learning, etc. We won’t be able to solve all problems. We will try to address some of these issues in later iterations.

Use AI & automation

Scalable

The page has a careers page, looking for gamification people and content creators, so there’s at least some money there (?)

anyway, dodgy af

My point was more about how you decide that the heat is the undesirable outcome compared to whatever the fuck the thing is meant to be doing. Brakes have a very clear purpose at the expense of the heat. GPUs being used as graphics processing units when you’re playing crysis have a very clear purpose to heat output ratio. Ya see wot I mean?

instead of citizens using a wasteful private electric stove?

I’m 99% sure this person eats only gig-work delivered food

at what point is “large amounts of heat” output considered the part that’s the waste?

Do they know that brake discs get hot because they’re stopping a car from colliding with a wall?

I’ve been going through the issues and I’ve found so far that Tom’s works are the standouts

I found this article last week about AI bullshit written in 1985 by Tom Athanasiou and published in the, also new to me, Processed World zine.

The world of artificial intelligence can be divided up a lot of different ways, but the most obvious split is between researchers interested in being god and researchers interested in being rich. The members of the first group, the AI "scientists,‘’ lend the discipline its special charm. They want to study intelligence, both human and "pure’’ by simulating it on machines. But it’s the ethos of the second group, the "engineers,‘’ that dominates today’s AI establishment. It’s their accomplishments that have allowed AI to shed its reputation as a "scientific con game’’ (Business Week) and to become as it was recently described in Fortune magazine, the "biggest technology craze since genetic engineering.‘’

The engineers like to bask in the reflected glory of the AI scientists, but they tend to be practical men, well-schooled in the priorities of economic society. They too worship at the church of machine intelligence, but only on Sundays. During the week, they work the rich lodes of "expert systems’’ technology, building systems without claims to consciousness, but able to simulate human skills in economically significant, knowledge-based occupations (The AI market is now expected to reach $2.8 billion by 1990. AI stocks are growing at an annual rate of 30@5).

https://processedworld.com/Issues/issue13/i13mindgames.htm

All Processed World issues on archive.org https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A"Processed+World+Collective"&and[]=mediatype%3A"texts"

and the official Processed World site with html archive https://processedworld.com

I’ve never actually had the patience to watch his whole speech before! This gave me that patience and I winced so fucking hard when he talked about his wife calling it a scam

because it’s funny

from https://web.archive.org/web/20240210054003/https://www.uxtigers.com/about/people his cv presented in an image without alt text

credit to Matt May for spotting this one https://mstdn.social/@mattmay/112037962750954987

p.s. read his great response to the last shitty Nielsen newsletter about AI generated accessibility: https://buttondown.email/practicaltips/archive/we-need-to-talk-about-jakob/

Good response https://axbom.com/nielsen-generative-ui-failure/

Still very much in the UXniverse but nice to see pushback

that’s the fun part. He’s been on “samattical” since beginning of Feb. Plenty of time for twitter harassment but this one will have to wait

https://web.archive.org/web/20240229125209/https://ma.tt/2024/02/samattical/

This week AI will make software accessible for everyone because “traditional methods” failed but let’s not spend 5 minutes thinking about why that is.

“When I’m back in May”

https://mastodon.social/@photomatt/112010162224861540

When Nielsen says:

Authorship will be unleashed by eliminating the need to master individual media crafts

If you eliminate the need to master the crafts, it’s still authorship, but what’s the point of authorship when it’s not fit for consumption?

I’m meeeltiinnnggg

haha, when did [Internet Explorer] get so mean?

I look forward to the fruits of this thread and I am already sure that every single song deserves recognition for having more effort put into it than typing a prompt into a shitty generative ai text field

You know you’ve done bad when you create the conditions for “got to give him credit for putting the work in” to this guy https://youtu.be/JZYZoQQ6LJQ

that certainly fits his pinned tweet