Midjourney launched a new “personalization” feature this week, and I think it presents an interesting and valuable contrast to the kind of direct manipulation interfaces for interacting with AI systems that I’ve been advocating for. I also think this implementation of personalization reveals an unconventional way of thinking about style in creative tools, not by concrete stylistic traits but by a style’s relationship to a universe of other tastes or style preferences.| thesephist.com
Foundation models gesture at a way of interacting with information that’s at once more natural and powerful than “classic” knowledge tools. But to build the kind of rich, directly interactive information interfaces I imagine, current foundation models and embeddings are far too opaque to humans. Models and their raw outputs resist understanding. Even when we go to great lengths to try to surface what the model is “thinking” through black-box methods like prompting or dimensionality ...| thesephist.com
Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning… Was the Command Line is one of the most profound pieces of writing about technology I’ve read. I found myself underscoring and highlighting numerous passages in this essay that reads equally as much like political propaganda, memoir, novella, and journalistic reporting all at once. If you have a couple of hours to spare, I’d recommend this essay only behind Greg Egan’s Diaspora, my favorite piece of science fiction, as a must-read.| 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