mikelevins

20일 전discuss

Probably, if I could contact them. But all the links I turned up lead me back to the captcha black hole, and the only email address I've found elicits a reply telling me that nobody is reading it. Perhaps something is reachable through additional effort, but I'm not particularly motivated to keep searching further. Perhaps someone there reads HN and would like to know this happened to someone, in case they want to fix it (for someone else's benefit if not for mine).

mikelevins

20일 전discuss

I was interested in the Steam machine, but I might not get one because I cannot log in to my Steam account, for no reason that I know. Steam's web-based process for resetting my password always gets stuck after successful completion of the captcha, regardless of which device or OS I use to do it, the accessible-to-Google procedures for getting past that blockage have not worked, and the email address that one could once use in this situation now just sends an autoreply that says no one is monitoring it anymore.

So I have exhausted all of the obvious routes for logging into my Steam account. Perhaps there are additional routes to discover, but I'm not particularly motivated to look for them at this point. If just getting logged in is this painful, I'm not particularly optimistic about the experience of buying or owning the thing.

mikelevins

2개월 전discuss

In the early 1990s I worked on a couple of different projects at Apple that were done mainly in Common Lisp. When I was working on one of those, another of them hired a guy named Dave Vronay a young skater and assembly-language game-machine hacker to work on graphics and UI stuff. The Lisp we were using is the one that started as Coral Lisp, became Macintosh Allegro Common Lisp, then Macintosh Common Lisp, then OpenMCL, and more recently Clozure Common Lisp.

I remember stopping with a friend to chat with Dave one day not too long after he joined the team and he was over the moon about how the Lisp exposed not just an assembler, but an interactive assembler: he could write assembly routines, evaluate them, and see them run immediately, and also inspect the in-memory data that they operated on. He seemed so happy.

mikelevins

4개월 전discuss

It's going pretty well, though it took at least six months to get there. I'm helped by knowing the domain reasonably well, and working with a principal investigator who knows it well and who uses LLMs with caution. At this stage I use Claude for coding and research that does not involve sensitive matters, and local-only LLMs for coding and research that does. I've gradually developed some regular practices around careful specification, boundaries, testing, and review, and have definitely seen things go south a few times. Used cautiously, though, I can see it accelerating progress in carefully-chosen and -bounded work.

mikelevins

4개월 전discuss

Yes, I successfully fixed it. The fix was about ten years of regular practice of Chen style Taijiquan with good instruction. It’s not a quick, cheap, or easy fix, and it’s pretty hard to find good instruction, but it solved my problem.

It also seems to have solved RSI issues, but that’s impossible to prove.

mikelevins

5개월 전discuss

I'm finding that in several kinds of projects ranging from spare-time amusements to serious work, LLMs have become useful to me by (1) engaging me in a conversation that elicits thoughts and ideas from me more quickly than I come up with them without the conversation, and (2) pointing me at where I can get answers to technical questions so that I get the research part of my work done more quickly.

Talking with other knowledgeable humans works just as well for the first thing, but suitable other humans are not as readily available all the time as an LLM, and suitably-chosen LLMs do a pretty good job of engaging whatever part of my brain or personality it is that is stimulated through conversation to think inventively.

For the second thing, LLMs can just answer most of the questions I ask, but I don't trust their answers for reasons that we all know very well, so instead I ask them to point me at technical sources as well, and that often gets me information more quickly than I would have by just starting from a relatively uninformed google search (though Google is getting better at doing the same job, too).

mikelevins

5개월 전discuss

I've been experimenting with that from a slightly different angle: teaching Claude how to play and referee a pencil-and-paper RPG that I developed over about 20 years starting in the mid 1970s. Claude can't quite do it yet for reasons related to permanence and learning over time, but it can do surprisingly well up until it runs into those problems, and it's possible to help it past some obstacles.

The game is called "Explorers' Guild", or "xg" for short. It's easier for Claude to act as a player than a director (xg's version of a dungeon master or game master), again mainly because of permance and learning issues, but to the extent that I can help it past those issues it's also fairly good at acting as a director. It does require some pretty specific stuff in the system prompt to, for example, avoid confabulating stuff that doesn't fit the world or the scenario.

But to really build a version of xg on Claude it needs better ways to remember and improve what it has learned about playing the game, and what it has learned about a specific group of players in a specific scenario as it develops over time.

mikelevins

8개월 전discuss

Besides programming, my hobbies are writing stories, writing and recording songs, drawing, and painting. None of them needs to cost anywhere near $3000. Any of them can cost as much as you want.

Take the music hobby as an example. I have several expensive guitars now, but in the first 20 years of that hobby I probably spent under $1000 on guitars and related gear the entire time.

mikelevins

8개월 전discuss

I think the decline in UI quality is real, but I don't think the web takes all of the blame. The blame that it does take is due to a sort of mixed bag of advantages and disadvantages: web technologies make it quicker and easier to get something interactive on the screen, which is helpful in many ways. On the other hand, because it lowers the effort needed to build a UI, it encourages the building of low-effort UIs.

Other forces are to blame as well, though. In the 80s and 90s there were UI research labs in indistry that did structured testing of user interactions, measuring how well untutored users could accomplish assigned tasks with one UI design versus another, and there were UI-design teams that used the quantitative results of such tests to deign UIs that were demonstrably easier to learn and use.

I don't know whether anyone is doing this anymore, for reasons I'll metion below.

Designing for use is one thing. Designing for sales is another. For sales you want a UI to be visually appealing and approachable. You probably also want it to make the brand memorable.

For actual use you want to hit a different set of marks: you want it to be easy to learn. You want it to be easy to gradually discover and adopt more advanced features, and easy to adapt it to your preferred and developing workflow.

None of these qualities is something that you can notice in the first couple of minutes of interacting with a UI. They require extended use and familiarization before you even know whether they exist, much less how well designed they are.

I think that there has been a general movement away from design for use and toward a design for sales. I think that's perfectly understandable, but tragic. Understandable because if something doesn't sell then it doesn't matter what its features are. Tragic because optimizing for sales doesn't necessarily make a product better for use.

mikelevins

9개월 전discuss

It's called aging. Just wait until the first time you head back down the hall from the living room to the bedroom to get the thing you forgot to bring with you, get distracted for a moment by a pet or family member, and then can't remember if you were going down the hall to the bedroom or the living room.

mikelevins

작년discuss

I was [email protected] for about a decade. I never got misdirected mail, probably because there aren’t all that many people with the first name "Mikel." The only other one I personally know of is Mikel Bancroft, who works at Franz, inc.

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