It’s nearly 2024.| thesephist.com
Direct manipulation interfaces let us interact with software materials using our spatial and physical intuitions. Manipulation by programming or configuration, what I’ll call programmatic interfaces, trades off that interaction freedom for more power and precision — programs, like scripts or structured queries, can manipulate abstract concepts like repetition or parameters of some software behavior that we can’t or don’t represent directly. It makes sense to directly manipulate lines...| thesephist.com
I spent the last month wondering and investigating how we might design better workflows for creative work that meld the best of human intuition and machine intelligence. I think a promising path is in the design of notation. More explicitly, I believe inventing better notations can contribute far more than automated tools to our effective intelligence in understanding ourselves, the world, and our place in it.| thesephist.com
Suppose you’re a product engineer working on an app that needs to understand natural language. Maybe you’re trying to understand human-language questions and provide answers, or maybe you want to understand what humans are talking about on social media, to group and categorize them for easier browsing. Today, there is no shortage of tools you may reach for to solve this problem. But if you have a lot of money, a lot of compute hardware, and you’re feeling a little adventurous, you may f...| thesephist.com