Arvind (has towel, not panicking)

It only took us four decades to get Apple to do design via A/B testing, but we finally managed it!

Uh huh.

“Theory” is great but the thing it refers to, while it can be powerful, also happens under very specific conditions which are rarely recognised as influencing and limiting the output.

There is theory that cannot be developed outside of applied work!

Thanks for sharing the doc!

This is actually really similar to how we run meetings for a conference volunteer group!

One thing we’ve found to be useful is to let people talk about accommodations without needing to categorize them - letting them talk about adjustments they need b/ of their circumstances/loads at the moment.

The classist basis of academia shows itself clearly in these moments:

Academia is a special and elevated place; the behaviours and vocabulary there are reflective of the content of the work; anyone who strays from that performance is not one of us.

Actually here’s another question: if you don’t cook/don’t cook much for reasons relating to your own knowledge/skill/confidence, what would help? What kinds of things would you like to learn? Reposts very welcome on this!

Hyperscalars not considered harmful

bsky.app/profile/lizt...

Today is when Amazon brain drain finally caught up with AWS column: When your best engineers log off for good, don’t be surprised when the cloud forgets how DNS works

Yes and this is also an example of trying to solve a social problem (layoff-based culture management) using decentralisation

www.theregister.com/2025/10/20/a...

Tagging @albanvillamil.bsky.social who has probably done this already

It would also kick out the manufactured intimacy coming from the design of the interface

A kingdom for the basic recognition of everything we have known for a generation about the information architecture of knowledge work interfaces.

Write code to make being human easier. Rip code out if it makes being human harder. Write code to make caring for each other easier. Rip it out if it makes caring for each other harder.

Empathy driven development has literally never failed me. It’s done me better than everything else combined

You guys, this is not funny, an internet only does this is when it is in distress.

SNAP benefits are going to be paused on November 1. If you are able, now is a good time to give to food banks, food pantries, or local mutual aid groups.

Sweet, I’ll DM you, I need to gather a few reference pics of me first.

You probably missed it because I only changed it from a real photo sometime earlier this year, not when I started following you?

Ooh thanks for reminding me I had one made using Notion's avatar generator.

Unfortunately yes, I am wiping my photo exposure on the open internet.

I need to find an artist to make me an avatar but I keep forgetting.

Design Research Society?

Well you see, he had the original idea of talking about it and deserves credit, which you didn’t give.

You are just trying to steal from his rightful place as the content creator who is the mostest in talking about things.

(/s in case it’s unclear)

Ooooh is your internet broken. Did someone's immaterial web of financial speculation and surveillance turn out to have a failure point in material infrastructure

My guess is that we will see some lay users really get into this and start getting thoroughly confused or misled in the same ways they are likely to when using chat interfaces.

Yeah, I can imagine it being useful to say things to your computer like “uninstall and remove traces of <app>” but it doesn’t seem likely that LLM IxD is mature enough to turn bouba commands into kiki workflows, and that is especially dangerous for laypeople.

It is, notably, extremely hard to do deixis purely in speech!

Using synthetic feedback data on the people who give you money is like running around with a blindfold on wondering why you keep bumping into things and getting tripped up, or walking around with a VR headset wondering why the forest you’re seeing smells like a sewer.

I’ll going to start calling any AI-enabled user / design research “vibe insights” unless an inductive analysis process can be demonstrated.

(Narrator: this could not, in fact, be demonstrated.)

Yesssss!!! Our lab has a new paper out, and it comes with an awesome story:

Even in stuff like AR/VR, I was seeing much more interesting software, interaction, and hardware design going on in Shenzhen than in Menlo Park or Redmond.

I used to visiting China for design research projects from 2009-19, and in fairly confident that the flip occurred around 2015-17, where I started consistently seeing local products surpass American imports.

You just couldn’t buy any of those here, because of Amazon’s incentives.

Them: need help doing things?

Me: yes

Them: we have a doing things medication

Me: ooh

Them: hahahahaha guess what you have to do to get it?

Me: oh no

Them: things.