Dan Hiester

I love the Arthur C. Clarke quote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

But this public dialog we’re having about em-dashes? It makes it painfully clear to me that *basic punctuation* is a sufficiently advanced technology. 😱🤯💥

That’s right. I generated a LinkedIn comment with ChatGPT and added an em-dash to it.

And as I reflect on what so many people have been saying about ChatGPT and em-dashes over the past few months, it really dawns on me how uneducated we are about writing.

So, funny story. I used ChatGPT to help me hastily paraphrase the “there is no spoon” quote from The Matrix for a LinkedIn comment yesterday. And as a former student journalist / “kinda trained” writer, its punctuation bugged me.

It overused ellipses. I replaced one ellipsis with an em-dash.

Prediction: The push for everyone to become a manager for agentic AI teams will fall apart when companies realize that the cost of LLM tokens makes team meetings cost exponentially more than meetings with humans.

That’s just math. 😜

Oh hey! We *should* connect! There are some things about your story that really resonate with me. As a UX Engineer, I also have a complicated relationship with code. But I’m always happy to talk shop with designers who have been down that rabbit hole!

What if there are *reasons* for the friction we fantasize about eliminating?

If we’re going to pretend we can sweep them under the rug, where are the grown-ups?

Does AI sign our contracts for us? Or by using AI to book things are we just opting in to contracts without ever seeing them?

Have we taken a time out to tell AI whether we prefer a window seat or an aisle seat? Or does it interrupt what we’re doing to ask us? Does it narrate every individual available seat while we’re trying to focus on something else?

When I see a demo or advert that shows someone using AI to book a flight, book a hotel, etc., I stop and ask: “How many details are being skipped here?”

Are we booking just any old room? Any old flight?

A text message that says, I bet your mailman still knows you by name.

This is my favorite random spam test since “Have you disappeared into the darkness?”

Like, she never really says what she’s going to do when she finds her baby, but I think she’s maybe going to kill him. Like a Kill Bill type situation.

This song’s vibe is like, “Nancy Sinatra’s sad because her baby shot her down? Don’t get sad, get even.”

I Took A Ride Zeds Dead · I Took A Ride · Song · 2022

Randomly stumbled over this song, and I love how this chord progression is so dreamy but dreary.

It adds some real tension. There are some emotional *layers* I pick up here.

open.spotify.com/track/4iX3NZ...

What do I have wrong here?

Call me crazy if I’m wrong but I think that:

1. LLMs qualify as generative AI but not analytical AI.
2. Whoever has spread the idea that they do qualify for this to the point that massive data centers are being built to satisfy the demand of this boondoggle should face serious civil penalties.

Running Through Colors Phantogram · Memory Of A Day · Song · 2024

I think this is the first newish song I’ve heard that feels like summer to me.

Except it’s not the happy chill summer vibes kind of song.

It’s too cool for school. It’s burying trauma under thick skinned jaded disdain.

“Hot girl midlife isolation summer.”

open.spotify.com/track/7EdZIL...

Not to be all AI pilled, but when I see people talk about how LLMs aren’t reasoning, they’re mostly doing pattern recognition, I get what they’re saying, BUT… Do any of these people understand the psychology of mammals?

Adults don’t respond well to new input. We pattern recognize too!

As I experiment with using AI to generate prompts to generate prototypes, one thing that I notice quickly is: It’s a *little* interesting that it’s generated *so much* stuff, it puts me in a position where I have more to *cut* than to *add*.

And cutting is faster than adding.

That’s neat… I think!

I feel like it’s worth sharing that I’ve literally had a bad dream where my phone’s screen cracked, and I tried to just keep looking at messages like it wasn’t the end of the world, but the cracked screen cut my finger and it started bleeding all over my screen.

Go touch glass, indeed!

I’m starting to think it’s an enlightening exercise, when talking about professional skills, to mentally substitute the word “superpower” with “trauma response,” and see how often it makes you see someone in a more meaningful way.

If you told me a month ago that within 30 days I would:

1. Have a job working with Microsoft
2. Have one of my LinkedIn posts get reposted by Jesse James Garrett

I would have told you that you have no idea what you’re talking about.

And yet…

…both of those things happened! 🤩

A user review of the Ubuntu distribution for Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Review title: “My dogs name is Ubuntu”. Review text: “LAY DOWN UBUNTU”

What if I told you that user generated content is the problem, not the solution? 🙃

I found myself explaining Geocities in a chat with some younger designers, and I think I stumbled over a newfound respect for Comic Sans. 🙃

I’m just amused at the one screen that has a label saying NO_COUNTRY. What’s that about?

However, this feels like it’s trying to optimize for fewer clicks in a way that adds a pause while users wait for the long press.

The actions in this dropdown are both available within one tap once the app loads.

So. I’m curious about whether they’re looking at metrics on this getting used.

This is a good example of why, when I’m designing for mobile experiences, I consider the full user journey, before the user even opens the app.

Often times it makes sense to design for the user responding to a notification, for example.

If you want to see which AI platforms are most desperate to win for winning’s sake, long-press their app icon on iOS and see if they have a shortcut for starting a new chat.

I don’t know how many people notice these things, but *I* noticed the Google Gemini iOS app icon has been updated so that:

(A) It has colors that align with the Google brand

(B) Doesn’t look confusingly almost identical to the icon for Luma 😂

As someone who loves music, though, I really love both their work. They’ve both done some great work on their own, but they’ve done great work together, as well.

I feel like there’s *something* here that I want more UX people to think about, on the topic of specialists vs generalists.

Cortini has a lot less range than Reznor. But the texture of his synth work is so much more layered than… well… seemingly anyone else I’ve ever heard. The baseline for Sonoio’s “Enough” makes the baseline from “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails sound flat.

Trent is solid at a lot of different things. He was an auteur as a solo artist early in the Nine Inch Nails story. Bowie praised the way he ignores synthesizer instruction manuals and just tinkers until he finds things he likes. He’s made beloved musical soundscapes.