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
As I’m thinking about defining more narrow focuses for my independent work next year, one area has stood out consistently as both personally exciting and more widely important: imagining and building better ways computers can help people do their best creative, thoughtful work, and in the process rethinking the relationship creative people have with the computer as a part of their work.| 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
Humans are bad at coming up with search queries. Humans are good at incrementally narrowing down options with a series of filters, and pointing where they want to go next. This seems obvious, but we keep building interfaces for finding information that look more like Google Search and less like a map.| thesephist.com