Case

This seems like a livejournal for sure.

I was trying to find out just how much information the mind gathers before it focuses attention, and I wanted more and more gradations of information on that. And it led me to this!

Interested in Calm Tech? Come to a special edition @metagov.bsky.social seminar on the Neuroscience of Calm on 11 Feb! Free and open. Just sign up below:

Tl;dr Preattentive Processing is amazing!

To test the generality of our results, we varied two important display parameters—display duration and feature difference—and found boundary conditions for each. Implications of our results for application to real-world data and tasks are discussed.

Furthermore, random variation in one of these features resulted in no interference when subjects estimated the percentage of the other.

Our experiments tested displays that were designed to visualize data from salmon migration simulations. The results showed that rapid and accurate estimation was indeed possible using either hue or orientation.

In our present study, we investigated two known preattentive features (hue and orientation) in the context of a new task (numerical estimation) in order to see whether preattentive estimation was possible.

We beleive that studies from preattentive vision should be used to assist in the design of visualization tools, especially those for which high-speed target detection, boundary identification, and region detection are important.

Preattentive processing refers to an initial organization of the visual field based on cognitive operations believed to be rapid, automatic, and spatially parallel. Examples of visual features that can be detected in this way include hue, intensity, orientation, size, and motion.

High-speed visual estimation using preattentive processing | ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction A new method is presented for performing rapid and accurate numerical estimation. The method is derived from an area of human cognitive psychology called preattentive processing. Preattentive processi...

dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

A new method is presented for performing rapid and accurate numerical estimation.

It's not what the future *looks* like, but what the future *feels* like.

One of my favorite little domains is expiring. Rural.io. There's nothing on it now, but for many years I had fun using it as a private blog. If someone wants to buy it off of me, send me a message. .io domains renewals are a little pricier than others and I've been using pikapods now.

Dear Google Hangouts: Please Fix How Notetaker Bots Join Our Calls! Have you ever been on a work call which looks like this? You’re there to see one individual, but multiple chatbot notetakers have also…

By simply taking up large amounts of space, bots de-emphasize human contributors. When there are many bots in a meeting, they can easily take up more space than actual people.

There are other ways to display notetaking bots!

Read more at: caseorganic.medium.com/dearb-google...

Dear Google Hangouts: Please Fix How Notetaker Bots Join Our Calls!

Have you ever been on a work call which looks like this? You’re there to see one individual, but multiple chatbot notetakers have also joined! When a notetaker bot is joined to the Meeting, it’s the same size as a whole person!

Non-place - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-place One of my very favorite concepts and books.

Dead Internet theory is what we could call the non-places of supermodernity in the digital realm. Places where people are on pause -- "places" where people are without identity, relation or history.

Buildings isolate people more efficiently than villains.
Digital buildings follow suit.

Image: NCR Corporation model of self-service checkouts and fast-lane at a Sainsbury's store by SchuminWeb. CC BY 2.0.

Our hands don't have the memory of the fast-clicking PLU codes for bananas, potatoes and radishes.

Only shift workers at the store do: seniority affects how fast those fingers fly.

So we plod through flat touchscreens that don't allow for muscle memory, but at least we've avoided conversation.

At first, the design feels clean and effortless. But the simplicity is doing more work than it lets on: much of the thinking has quietly been handed to the "user".

There's no such thing as automation in a store. When we use self-checkout, we're performing that labor. And poorly, too.

These two spring from the same source
but diverge in their naming.

Together we call them: the modern way.

The modern way leads to the modern suffering -
things that work but are never done,
tools that serve but can never be owned.

In the beginning was the CD:
material, bounded, complete.

From completeness came ownership.
From ownership came care.

Now we have removed the boundary.
The infinite patch, and the endless service.

We measure commits, not completions. We measure features shipped, not problems solved. We measure lines of code, not value delivered.

And so we get programmers who are very good at *writing code* but very *bad* at finishing software.

But our industry doesn't value this skill. We value the opposite: the ability to keep going, to keep building, to keep iterating. We've gamified productivity in a way that rewards activity over accomplishment.

You cannot learn this from a textbook. You cannot learn it from a tutorial. You can only learn it by doing it, over and over, until the muscle memory of *completion* overrides the *seduction* of endless improvement.

Because finishing is not a technical skill. It's a form of discipline. It's the ability to say "this is good enough for its purpose' and then actually stop. It's the willingness to ship something imperfect because shipping is the point.

The people who complete this challenge usually end up transformed in a way.

Of course their quality of code improves, and their little library of tools and tricks. But the real transformation lies in their ability to finish.

The Thirty-Day Baptism

Every so often you see it: this practice of "thirty days of code", or "30 days of design", in which a single person determines to build something - anything really - every day for 30 days.

In programming, we have no equivalent.

We ship the rough-cut wood and call it furniture.

In woodworking, there is a separate skill called finishing. Sanding, staining, sealing. Multiple coats.

Waiting for each to cure. Buffing. These are techniques you must learn and practice. The finishing reveals flaws in the underlying work.

You cannot hide poor joinery under polyurethane.