Comment by d-lisp
19 hours ago
You can only be blind for things you cannot notice.
What you cannot notice is what shapes your "noticement" ability.
The best design is the shape of your perception.
The best design is already implemented in your reception of reality.
The quest for "good design" is a game.
On the other hand, your aesthetical culture and the shape of your perception create a system in which elements are more or less "understandable", "readable", "accessible".
The game of design does not have stable rules and is inconsistent among world populations.
"No design" is impossible, the nature of reality is such that entities are embodied. To be embodied is to be rendered in the game of design.
Ideas are not embodied OR their apparent embodiment in the game of design (electrical information ?) does not contain their content for the observer.
"No design" is perceptually inintelligible.
Sure, the medium is the message. But if the medium distracts from the message it means they are not aligned well
(side note I put your comment into LLM to make sense of what it meant re my comment without mentioning HN, it said "this is a classic Hacker News–style metaphysical sidestep: You made a practical design aphorism, He responded with ontology and epistemology. That usually signals polite disagreement or intellectual one‑upmanship" LOL)
> (side note I put your comment into LLM to make sense of what it meant re my comment without mentioning HN, it said "this is a classic Hacker News–style metaphysical sidestep: You made a practical design aphorism, He responded with ontology and epistemology. That usually signals polite disagreement or intellectual one‑upmanship" LOL)
Woah homie, watch out for the model which is trained on reddit comments dataset to talk about intellectual one-upmanship xD
Also another thing but holy shit, LLM's are sycophantic man, it tries uses big words itself to show how the person has intellectual one-upmanship while cozying you up by saying practical design aphorism.
Like I agree with both of you guys and there's nuance but I am pretty sure that nobody's tryna sound intellectual hopefully.
Sorry for turning this into a rant about LLM's being sycophantic but man I tried today watching big bang and asked it if sheldon and raj were better duo in more common about physics (theorist and astrophysicist) since I was watching a episode where they both have dark matter in common and chatgpt agreed
Then I just felt the sycophancy in my heart so I opened up a new thread and I think I used the same prompt and changed it to sheldon and leonard and it ended up saying yes again.
The problem felt so annoying to me that I ended up looking at a sycophancy index being frustrated of sorts and wrote a lengthy ddg prompt lol to find this https://www.glazebench.com/
We really don't need more yes man's in our lives and honestly I will take up a less intelligent model than a sycophantic one. So I am curious what your guys opinion are on it too as sometimes I use LLM's as a search engines to familiarize myself with things I don't know and I am lately feeling it will just say yes to anything even silly ideas so I would never know what's the truth matter of the reality ykwim?
LLMs say yes to a lot. I often find myself priming it first with "absolute mode" type prompts before dealing with it. And also keeping my own opinions close to my chest
2 replies →
Pragmatically, you can design things to be highly readable for yourself and people that are "like you".
Alignment between the shape and the content is done in a circular fashion : what you see educates you to fabulate about design, once you fabulated enough you begin to say things are bad or well designed.
I often express myself online by writing a bit what goes through my mind, in a joyful and not very attentive manner, and I find it amusing to be barely understandable sometimes (I like the fact you had to use an LLM, lol) because, well, I feel it may bring a certain color to the otherwise often too uniform and immediate/instantaneous world of internet -- So, what I said previously is also mostly what occurs when you let your mind wander;
now, if I rejoin my own person and body, I can agree with you that my culture of good design is about the testimony of the removal of intention, in such a way that I feel content is highly readable, (fictionnaly) devoid of style, and somewhat raw or pure.
But again, at the "philosophical stage" all of this is pure fiction, and with a certain mindset, I am pretty sure I could shift my habits to adapt to what I feel as weird design, ugly, barely readable etc... It would be totally useless and absurd, but I could (given I have no specific perception-related medical conditions) !
We saw the web become a repetition of the same design, and while it IS good design in our "minimalism" addicted brains, I am pretty sure stumbling upon weiiiiird websites makes us great good sometimes, so much that maybe we also start to think about the absurdity of our standards : we arrived to the point in the "lie" where we identify this specific style as "the shape" of our perception, and yes : it become invisible to us, and is good design, but also it is a bit depressing.
My window manager and my emacs/vim/terminal configuration aren't what I call good design. They are highly readable but stratosphere-reaching levels of kitsch (yes ! I WANT to cosplay and feel as if I was writing code for aliens or to fight the matrix at work, and yes that's a bit cringe but at least I am honest with myself).
I don't wish the world and internet to be "more like that" and am ok with the actual state of design. Nevertheless I find that's a bit arbitrary and somewhat boring.