One person’s helpful metadata is another person’s noise. It’s much better for a door to visually indicate that it should be pushed open than to put up a sign there.
However, doing the former requires a level of empathy with humans that LLMs rarely have.
Human brains have caloric demands. It is possible for humans to process enormous amounts of unrelated facts to make a decision, but it’s tiring. It’s much better to not do that, especially just to get some basic information.
To anthropomorphize a bit, an LLM might find it charming and interesting to read someone’s life story as a preamble before their taco recipe. Humans by and large find that annoying, not because we can’t understand the biography but because processing that information is not free.
So it’s probably possible to design using an LLM. You would probably have to be intentional about it.
Much has been discussed about AI coding but there's been a lack of discussion on the design/UX side as that's also a step being rushed by via prompting + "looks pretty enough".
We're entering an era of hyper dense UIs with plenty of excess and quick workarounds.
If you don't have any kind of agent instructions saying "don't copy code into prose", you'll inevitably get text that reflects some previous state of the system instead of its current state.
It's fine in isolation to have help text for complex interfaces needing explanation. Better yet contextual hints.
But there's about 10 other examples explaining intention of the coding rather than immediately useful information to the user, it's all over this one site in small grey text. And I guarantee you nobody is reading them carefully. Just like how nobody likes reading a 15 line LLM code comment over a simple function.
Most of it could be better solved with more thoughtful design or deleted. The link explanation is particularly egregious.
I'm sure AI can figure this out better than a human can. Obvious and empirical, we certainly haven't figured it out or optimized it, with all the engineers that CalTrans has. How often have we been in a four-way controlled intersection and the green is on for the empty side. There's no way that's impedance matching, it's more like Good to go boss, call it a day.
There's no incentive to modernize traffic light control because it's public works and there's no capital profit motive for it in the same extent as private. I would not advocate privatizing it either because that will bring different consequences. The hero will be that new young Caltrans engineer who's grown up in the AI generation and will probably be fed up with the legacy technology.
> How often have we been in a four-way controlled intersection and the green is on for the empty side. There's no way that's impedance matching
Who claimed it was tho? We were talking about throughput. If all your intersection knows is time, it can't decide based on traffic. Which is why inductive loops, camera based systems and so on exist, but (1) they are not deployed everywhere and (2) if they are deployed there may still be a time based limit for the case of defective sensors.
Our traffic systems are already pretty well optimized where we are willing to spend money on them. Note however that if you 100% optimize any system for perfect throughput, it has zero slack to deal with unexpected fluctuations in traffic patterns. That is as true for traffic as it is for networks. Throughput is important, but so is comfort, resilience, predictability and cost. All different metrics you have to keep in mind¹ and all of them can suffer when you over-optimize for one.
The view from inside the traffic that we are part of may make that seem inefficient, but seen system wide the main problems usually are not traffic lights, but harder to change structural issues.
¹: or rather you don't have to keep them in mind, since there are people who specialize on just that and are pretty good at it
Speak to a carpenter or construction worker from any country with the metric system. Measure anything by simple powers of ten and simple decimal shifts makes life so much easier. Quick, what is half of a yard-length beam less 12 1/16"?
But realistically - most things are standardized. Nominal sizes. 2x4's, a sheet of plywood or drywall is 4x8 feet, etc.
(In fact, the metric equivalents of construction units are all based on feet/inches converted to a round mm because construction sizes are much older than metric)
So yes maybe you're messing with lengths, etc. 100% true. But unless you're doing fine carpentry, it doesn't matter.
The other thing is that it's a system that divides by 2 multiple times - it's not totally random. But metric only divides by 10 and 5 cleanly. You can't do a "quarter" of anything. Which is fine... but I'm saying that both systems have their advantages and disadvantages.
Assuming you mean (3 ft / 2) - 12 1/16 inches, it's about 6 inches, which is probably the accuracy you need. But it's exactly 5 15/16 inches, which is also easy to do in your head. Carpenters do it all the time, and even a doctor can.
My head did 36" divided by 2, so 18", minus 12 1/16", so 5 and 15/16". That is harder than working with quarters or fifths of meters, but easier than thirds or sixths of meters.
I don't know which is better. Considering how nothing stops you from doing decimal inches or fractional meters, but people rarely do that, both ways seem fine.
33.3 cm is easy to measure out, and 99.9 cm is exactly 1 mm short of 1 meter, well within tolerances for carpentry. Narrower than the mark left by your pencil.
I want to thank the author for this. The difference is night and day. It's not just for adhd, it's just a really practical output in general.
To get it to fully work though, it has to be asserted at every turn in the session. That reminder in the skill is negligible in tokens but uses extra nonetheless. I hope the scientists at Anthropic can figure this out, it's not simply an output style flag.
A clean place to live with minimal clutter opens room for time to enjoy other things. Labor Day and Memorial day are milestones for assessing your hoarding. Or you could just rely on the season change as a reminder.
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