We’re playing with embodied LLMs that can externalise thoughts in a virtual environment. The idea is to help facilitate knowledge work.
It’s not our main area of interest, but it’s been interesting to experiment with how human/machine and machine/machine interactions work in real-time when you limit how fast agents can move or write. It's much easier to engage in a dialogue with agents that can't create / move tens of sticky notes and graphics faster than you can create one.
I see the red rings in front. I tried adding some depth cues to see if I could see it both ways - https://i.imgur.com/LsPtsRr.png
It kind of works, but for me it feels more like the blue ring now has a variable depth, with parts below and parts above the red rings, kind of like a piece of fabric draped over a bar.
I wonder how it feels for people who see blue in front?
In 2015 the UN created 17 ‘Global Goals’ (https://www.globalgoals.org/) that are meant to be a "shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future":
Of the 10 most popular multiplayer games in 2023[0] seven of them owe their core mechanics to mods / flashes of brilliance from a handful of amateurs.
A more or less correct history of their origins:
- Four of the games on that list are battle royale games, which started life as a somewhat popular Minecraft mod and really took off with "Battle Royale" - a mod of "Dayz" which itself is a mod of "ARMA II". It's mods all the way down.
- Two are tactical FPS games, which owe a huge chunk of their mechanics to "Team Fortress" a Quake mod and "Counter Strike" a Half-Life mod.
- One is a MOBA, which started life as "DotA", a Warcraft III mod.
Of the other three, one is Minecraft. Created by a solo dev, and I expect its moddable nature has helped its multiplayer popularity significantly.
One is Roblox. Created by two devs, and is itself a game creation system.
The final one is Genshin Impact - something of a an outlier in terms of team size and genre origins.
Does anyone have examples of games with a client/server architecture, where new clients have been written, but that can still connect to an original server? I think there's a valuable learning exercise in the idea, but I can't find anything that actively courts multiple clients being developed.
The only UI/UX newsletter I subscribe to[0] also has a a similar problem, but the advice is usually solid. Maybe the first and/or last rule should be ‘seek feedback’.
I still think of early human progress as this slow march forward rather than what I expect it really was - thousands of years of rediscovery and reinvention by a few million people spread far and wide. Who knows how many groups of people, and their knowledge, were wiped out through bad luck, bad judgement, or worse.
Both metaphors seem apt. One is leaning towards how a product makes a person feel when using it, one is about what the product offers.
I hear arguments around what products can offer me all the time, they make sense, but I generally go with how a product makes me feel. Probably more than I even realise.
I don’t use Emacs, I do whisk eggs and fish doughnuts out of oil with chopsticks, I couldn’t fully say why for either.
I'm never going to stare at TV static and see deeper meaning in random noise, and while this is almost the opposite of that, I'm surprised by how I felt watching this.
Awe and mild discomfort aren't the usual feelings I get watching information being processed.
A couple of years ago I started to build https://www.temin.net/ for my own personal use. Describing its current feature set as "Miro/Mural in 3D" wouldn't be too far off. Really interested in helping teams with externalising thought/visibility/community/serendipitous collisions.
Give me a shout if you're interested in turning it into something - email is in my profile.
That makes sense. What the long-term effects of such 'performance enhancing' tools might mean for how its users think, or externalise those thoughts, is hard to call.
I also wonder what it means if everyone is farming out parts of their intellect to similar models, which might be limited pathologically, by training data or enforcement.
Some people are better at writing than editing, some people are better at editing than writing.
I find it necessary to heavily edit when writing - up to, and including, this comment. I don’t mind it, and I don’t mind doing it to other people’s writing either, so this new way of doing things appeals to me.
I’d be interested to hear what anyone who’s able one-shot their writing thinks of this. I feel like that type of person may have less of a desire for this kind of stuff?
What I'm waiting for is when these imagined conversations are generated for an audience of just me. When references I understand and abstractions I'm familiar with are tossed around with ease, but unfamiliar concepts are expanded on and picked apart, as you might with a good friend.
If the speakers are brilliant I often don't want to actively be part of a conversation, I just want a personal performance. Though I imagine in 10 years, with a tricorder on my face (brain sensor included), I'll probably always be part of the conversation/performance, however passive.
Successful people (judged by their own metrics of success) are generally willing to make short term sacrifices for long term gains.
My reluctance / fear / discomfort often isn’t even recognisable to myself for a while. If and when I do act on it, it quickly subsides and I can do stuff I that’s in some sense still uncomfortable, but that I seem to genuinely enjoy even in the moment - making things, experiencing novelty, being challenged etc. And yet my brain hasn’t put that together.
I sometimes set a repeating personal alarm* that just asks ‘are you doing what you’re meant to be doing?’. I’ll try framing some of how I answer that around discomfort / sacrifice from now on.
*I usually use it when talking with people who meander/derail conversations as much as I do, and we recognise it’s a problem.
I always framed this more as
‘the tools will not save me’. A better pen won’t make me a better illustrator, no system/framework/methodology will take in garbage and spit out gold. But, in retrospect, I think I should partly blame seeking a foolish level of preparedness. I’ll try to recognise/abstain from this ‘preparbation’ in the future.
A lot of videogames have their value tied up in 'forcing' players to spend a few minutes (or hours) on logistics that eventually give rise to ritual, rather than just giving them a teleport button.
We're building a metaverse for knowledge workers with a default approach of "use the physics engine, not magic" when moving around objects - be they virtual robots, sticky notes or walls. Simulating the seemingly annoying, tedious, mundane logistical act of moving through space seems to have genuine benefits in terms of how you think, what rituals you undertake (big and small/collectively or individually), and who you bump into.
Maybe it's not utterly ridiculous that in the future your first few minutes clocked into a virtual environment will just be getting to your workspace. Or I could just have overly fond memories of the Half Life opening sequence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nw63pZcBJH8
I was never a fan of this genre as a kid, but recently attended a launch event for a choose your own adventure book about change management, of all things - https://www.change-ninja.com/
Maybe part of the charm came from the novelty of the approach to the material, but I really got into it and 'cheating' felt more like learning. It got me wondering if the genre has legs outside of pure entertainment/fiction.
The article mentions different tools to think with (pen, paper, keyboards) and different methods of thinking (drawing/writing). Knowing when to pick what, or when to transition to using other tools/methods (usually CAD software or programming for me) often isn’t as obvious or as easy as I’d like.
It’s not our main area of interest, but it’s been interesting to experiment with how human/machine and machine/machine interactions work in real-time when you limit how fast agents can move or write. It's much easier to engage in a dialogue with agents that can't create / move tens of sticky notes and graphics faster than you can create one.
You can see a short, old video of the environment at https://www.temin.net