When I discuss interfaces on this blog, I’m most often referring to software interfaces: intermediating mechanisms from our human intentions to computers and the knowledge within them. But the concept of a human interface extends far before it and beyond it. I’ve been trying to build myself a coherent mental framework for how to think about human interfaces to knowledge and tools in general, even beyond computers.| thesephist.com
This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter.| thesephist.com
For most of the history of music, humans produced sounds out of natural materials — rubbing together strings, hitting things, blowing air through tubes of various lengths. Until two things happened.| thesephist.com
There’s a lot of great research on foundation models these days that are yielding deeper understanding of their mechanics (how they work) and phenomenology (how they behave in different scenarios). But despite a growing body of research literature, in my work at Notion and conversations with founders, I’ve noticed a big gap between what we currently know about foundation models and what we still need to build valuable tools out of them. This post is a non-exhaustive list of applied resear...| thesephist.com
Cross-posted from my Notion.| 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
A core research interest of mine is imagining new kinds of interfaces to text documents that are made possible by modern AI and software. I think an interesting place to look for such ideas may be interface designs for reading and writing legal documents.| thesephist.com
When I get stuck on a really hard problem, whether it’s some impossible bug in my code or my sofa not fitting through my front door on moving day, I close my eyes and … think really hard. Somewhere behind my shut eyelids and confused eyeballs, things are happening. Electricity is flowing through the vat of brain-stuff and spindly wires that somehow make up my thought process, and for a few seconds, they just kind of do their thing. Until, if I’m lucky, an answer pops into my head a few ...| 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