I hear you, but I didn’t say flat ui is due to processing power. My line of thought is that a sudden bump in available processing power might prompt designers to feel that elaborate uis are fine now because despite flat ui not being an efficiency thing, it is definitely perceived as one by the average designer who doesn’t know how much of the css used to render it is generated client-side via js

yeah but I didn’t say that flat ui was created for efficiency. Any efficiency of a flat ui is cancelled out by the excesses of client-side JS. I know it is fashion, I was there. But I also know that there is a sense that it is efficient by the designers that design with it.

that;s exactly the catch I was hoping wouldn’t be the case. When the AI shit is abandoned, is the hardware useful for regular stuff…

So, from what you’re saying: Generative AI is fucking up in the past, present, and future

is this a possible thing: all the AI assistant stuff being forced onto us in the next gen hardware is gonna need significant computing power bumps to support it, is this creating a potential surplus of computing power in all devices that could time very well with an excessive skeuomorphic UI design response to the decade of bland flatness we’ve endured that’s gonna cook the cpus on the devices of everyone else?

sorry, can’t let this post go without calling out the greenwashing ecosia that has a chatgpt integration while they only report their own energy stats with a limp “it’s too early to tell uwu” when it comes to openai as a provider

Afterwards I was thinking it could also pass as an emo album name. I wonder if there is a good guessing game in “metal album title or emo album title?”

The earth is our coffin and hope is a mistake.

such a metal album name

like adding bacteria to a petri dish

I call this the law of conservation of complexity

sorry if my reply sounded rude. I didn’t mean it to be. I just saw it again and it sounds dismissive.

It’s definitely the prudent option but I’m over mental capacity and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t sharing this just for the upvotes. I couldn’t see any mentions of the sponsor in the comments, so I guess the audience, at least, were duped. I already have a string of unanswered questions on ecosia’s greenwashing social posts, though

Yeah, I get what you’re saying but I’d really have to stretch my benefit-of-the-doubt muscles to consider someone who makes such well-researched videos wouldn’t go to the website before he reads the url out on his video and see that on the homepage, above the fold, in big letters, it says “Powered by AI”

Ok, but are you suggesting he was duped?

NASB, I had a jarring experience this morning watching Patrick Boyle’s latest video “Big Tech is Going Nuclear!” (not gonna link it) where 5 mins in he introduces the sponsor and it’s an AI presentation slide generator, which he said he used for the images in his video. This after he mentioned the data on generating one image using the same amount of energy as charging a smartphone. The thing is he seems careful to not mention that it is a gen ai product–he never says AI–rather a piece of software that helps making presentations.

It kinda made me panic stop the video, like an instant “well, done with you” - not sure if he continued to make a joke of it or anything. I mean, I’m sure (I hope) he was given a lot of money for the spot, but damn! Just when I thought I had a foundational understanding of people

beat me by seconds.

She’s incredible

I just want to share this video because I think it is a work of art

“I’m gonna replace AI” by Olivia Squizzle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbh_J7VI94g

sorry for yt link, invidious didn’t like it

out of curiosity once I tried to ask it to make a colouring picture from a photo of a toy for my kids and it just ran what seemed like imagemagick filters over the photo to convert to black and white and pump up contrast to only show the hard lines - just like all the free convert to outline web tools that have existed forever. I asked it to try again but without the filters, instead to identify the object, and to draw it in a colouring book outline style, and it spat out some shitty stylised mishmash derived from all the illustration IP it stole and ingested. I still feel guilty for trying even that

I’m pretty confident they’ll continue to roll out new stuff that, like the 4o release, are mild (if, at all) technical improvements made to seem massive by UI stuff that has almost nothing to do with AI. SJ’s voice talking to you, bouncy animations, showing “reasoning” aka loading progress.

It’s weird that none of the responses in here popped up a notification on my little bell icon

Hey, thanks!

It’s interesting that you bring up the indie game developers because games—as software products—are such an interesting exception in my mind because they are games they have a concrete, and immovable, purpose built into them. Even though the game industry is by no means not-getting-shittier, it still depends on that core purpose being satisfied somewhat. I.e. being enjoyable to play. Also, games can’t benefit from the abstraction from the end-user by being B2B corporate subscription models. They are always(?) paid for by the person who is using them.

This is another part of the larger post the above text is a sample of, that most of this purposeless software is optimised to be sold to people who will then impose it on their subordinates.

You are right about the question “right, what can I do about it?” for sure! Pretty much all of my previous blog posts have had comments exactly like that. And…to be honest it’s a tough one for me. I feel like identifying reasons for the situation is exhausting for me, which I guess I resolve to it being hard work and then I wonder, is identifying problems the hard part or is solving problems the hard part, but then I always settle with the belief that they are two separate hard parts.

I can honestly say I don’t know what can be done about these things because I’ve invested so little energy into thinking about that. That’s actually what I’ve been trying so hard to define design as being. The process that does that - as I am always careful to say, design isn’t “problem solving” but rather “purpose satisfying” because these things are addressed in a fluid nature.

Am I making excuses for doing half the job of a critic? Perhaps… But I feel like I need to keep understanding the situation before I would feel comfortable throwing out ideas to address it, at least ideas that I would be confident enough in to put my name behind them.