90–90 Rule: The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time. … The Dunning-Kruger Effect: If you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent. The skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is. … Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law. … Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. … Wheaton’s Law: Don’t be a dick.
Tag: design
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No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation – One Useful Thing
Yet it is clear that what has happened to text will happen to images, and eventually video and 3D environments. These multimodal systems are reshaping the landscape of visual creation, offering powerful new capabilities while raising legitimate questions about creative ownership and authenticity. The line between human and AI creation will continue to blur, pushing us to reconsider what constitutes originality in a world where anyone can generate sophisticated visuals with a few prompts. Some creative professions will adapt; others may be unchanged, and still others may transform entirely. As with any significant technological shift, we’ll need well-considered frameworks to navigate the complex terrain ahead. The question isn’t whether these tools will change visual media, but whether we’ll be thoughtful enough to shape that change intentionally.
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The hardest working font in Manhattan – Marcin Wichary
But then, I started seeing Gorton in other places. Hours of looking at close-ups of keys made me sensitive to the peculiar shapes of some of its letters. No other font had a Q, a 9, or a C that looked like this. One day, I saw what felt like Gorton on a ferry traversing the waters Bay Area. A few weeks later, I spotted it on a sign in a national park. Then on an intercom. On a street lighting access cover. In an elevator. At my dentist’s office. In an alley.
These had one thing in common. All of the letters were carved into the respective base material – metal, plastic, wood. The removed shapes were often filled in with a different color, but sometimes left alone. At one point someone explained to me Gorton must have been a routing font, meant to be carved out by a milling machine rather than painted on top or impressed with an inked press. Some searches quickly led me to George Gorton Machine Co., a Wisconsin-based company which produced various engraving machines.
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In the vastness of empty space surrounding Earth, the Moon is our closest celestial neighbor. Its face, periodically filled with light and devoured by darkness, has an ever-changing, but dependable presence in our skies. In this article, we’ll learn about the Moon and its path around our planet, but to experience that journey first-hand, we have to enter the cosmos itself.
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Asleep at the wheel in the headlight brightness wars – The Ringer
Gatto is the founder of the subreddit r/FuckYourHeadlights, the internet’s central hub for those at their wits’ end with the current state of headlights. The posts consist of a mishmash of venting, meme-ing, and community organizing. A common entry is a photo taken from inside the car of someone being blasted with headlights as bright as an atomic bomb, and a caption along the lines of “How is this fucking legal?!” Or users will joke about going back in time and Skynet-style killing the Audi lighting engineer who first rolled out LED headlights. Or they’ll discuss ways to write to their congresspeople, like Mike Thompson, House Democrat of California, who recently expressed support for the cause.
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Make a bold statement with custom CasiOak watches, each piece a canvas of striking hues and robust features for dynamic lifestyles and discerning tastes.
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Face painter: Meet Chris Alexander, The Dial Artist – About Time: Esquire
Chris Alexander, who goes by the name The Dial Artist … has elevated watch dial customisation to a fine art. The former senior lecturer in design at Dundee College divides his time between personal commissions of one-of-a-kind hand-painted watch dials, and official projects in collaboration with brands including Spinnaker, L’Epée and Perrelet. … With the customisation market only heading one way, business for The Dial Artist is in rude health. His Instagram offers regular updates of one-off designs for individual clients – A Santos de Cartier adorned with a Roman gladiator, a Tissot PRX with a Tetris game pattern – while on March 8th he’ll be appearing at British Watchmakers’ Day in London, where he’ll be painting live at the event.
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Why in the world does this creepy fork exist? – Food & Wine
I should have remembered that the internet exists and it is full of horrors. One of those horrors is the Man Fork. At first glance it looks like an ordinary fork — stainless steel, about seven inches long. You know, a fork. But when you look closer, you will notice that it is a fork with six tines, which is an unholy number. It is caught in the uncanny valley between fork and comb. […]
reaction I have gotten when I brandish the Man Fork in person is like those viral videos where an owner shows a cat a cucumber and the cat jumps three feet directly into the air. It looks unsettling, as if an AI illustration has come to life and landed next to your plate of macaroni and cheese. The most common reaction is “No.” followed closely by “Why?”
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Museums and galleries have a fresh opportunity to work with a new type of digital art venue that is spreading around the world, with the power to tell interactive stories of cultural heritage to multiple users using free-roam VR headsets
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Apple discontinuing this 18-year-old iPhone feature – MacRumors
Apple reportedly plans to announce a new iPhone SE as soon as next week, and the device is expected to feature a full-screen design with Face ID, instead of a Touch ID home button. That means Apple will no longer sell any new iPhone models with a home button, for the first time since the original iPhone launched.
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CD-ROMS in 1994: Bowie, Prince, Gabriel, and Cybermania ’94 – Cybercultural
“Brian and I are developing something from which the user will genuinely feel he has had a full participation creatively,” Bowie said in an online chat on 1st July 1994, when asked about his multimedia plans. Clearly he and Eno had been discussing how music would evolve in the digital technology era; in addition to their March recording sessions, the pair swapped creative ideas over email regularly. Bowie was convinced “interactive multimedia” was the key, going forward. “Everything seems to have crossed through the mediums a lot more,” he told the New York Times later in July, “and I’m not quite sure what it is we’re doing, but it’s not just making records anymore. It’s got a lot further than that, and we keep translating everything to be interactive. The medium that we are working in is not actually CD-ROM. The medium is interactive multimedia, and I think that the CD-ROM is only the best delivery system currently available.” […]
Overall, Gabriel’s CD-ROM has a much better logic than Bowie’s Jump (there are no random barking dogs, for a start) and it’s less confusing to navigate than Prince’s Interactive. From the vantage point of thirty years later, it must be said that XPLORA1 looks dated — with its tiny video screens and boxy graphics. But at the time, it got relatively positive reviews and no doubt deserved the three awards it got at Cybermania ’94.
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OpenAI has undergone its first ever rebrand, giving fresh life to ChatGPT interactions – Wallpaper
I have to ask – was ChatGPT’s generative powers used at all in the processes? According to Moeller, the software was helpful when making calculations for different type weights, but other than that the process was entirely traditional. Later, the designers elucidate on this often-fraught relationship. ‘We collaborate with leading experts in photography, typography, motion, and spatial design while integrating AI tools like DALL·E, ChatGPT, and Sora as thought partners,’ they add in an email, ‘This dual approach – where human intuition meets AI’s generative potential – allows us to craft a brand that is not just innovative, but profoundly human.’
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“Meaning,” as put its it, “zero download, zero login, zero crashing, zero UI… a way to greatly amplify the number of people that are desirous of using Second Life already and basically can’t.”
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The Pudding Cup: The best visual and data-driven stories of 2024 – The Pudding
Battle of the Chocolate Bars: You may have heard that food is better in Europe, compared to the US. This is especially the case for chocolate. We really liked how this project broke down the differences between European and American chocolate standards, annotating ingredient lists and incorporating chocolate imagery into all of the charts. Moreover, readability wasn’t lost when chocolate was used in the graphics, which often happens when deviating from typical chart shapes.
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The LED Scroller is a web tool that displays scrolling text, emojis, or messages. You can change the text color, speed, style, and even add a blinking effect. It simulates an LED sign, which makes it useful for announcements, events, or just for fun.
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The peppermills of Jens Quistgaard
Taking the dispersal of salt and pepper as the jumping off point, JHQ’s designs are a meditation on the possibilities of shape for a common household object. Intriguing and fantastical, the variety of forms expands the vocabulary of functional design, calling on an array of familiar references: chess pieces, tools, clocks, toys, as well as natural and botanical shapes. These peppermills, otherwise known as “table seasoners”, evoke tiny household sculptures, powerful individually, but most compelling when grouped and viewed in sets.
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Elegance and hustle – Aeon Essays
“Every newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a tissue of horrors. Wars, crimes, thefts, licentiousness, torture, crimes of princes, crimes of nations, individual crimes, an intoxicating spree of universal atrocity. And it’s this disgusting aperitif that the civilised man consumes at breakfast each morning … I do not understand how a pure hand can touch a newspaper without a convulsion of disgust.” […]But French writers’ loathing of journalism was underlain by a fundamental tension: those who criticised the press most vehemently were themselves journalists, and their novels of journalism were typically published in the same newspapers they excoriated. Journalism and literature were so deeply entwined that newspapers became ‘the laboratory of literature’ throughout the long 19th century, generating new literary forms, such as prose poetry and the serial novel.
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One for all and all for none – Notes, links, etc
You can look for available GP appointments using the NHS app. Pretty cool. Unless your local surgery has opted to use a different system. If that’s the case, you need to make sure you don’t click the ‘Check for available GP appointments’ button in the app because it will just say ‘No appointments available’. And when you phone the surgery, you’ll get a recorded message which says to use the app. So you’ll try again of course and get the same result: No appointments available. Perhaps you’ll feel bad for being a burden – because it’s flu season and the surgery must be flat out. Perhaps you’ll wait another day and when you try again you’ll find there are still no appointments available. -
Find awe and inspiration in thousands of public domain artworks – Hyperallergic
“Around this time last year I had the idea to gather all the images in the Public Domain Review into a separate archive, in a way freeing these images from their textual homes and placing them front and center for easier discovery, comparison, and appreciation,” Adam Green, PDR’s editor-in-chief, told Hyperallergic. -
An iPhone owner’s guide to living off the app grid – The Verge
I spent about an hour deleting icons, arranging widgets, and adding controls to create my new homescreen. The camera control button on the iPhone 16 renders that icon unnecessary; the action button launches the oft-used daycare app, so that could go too. When I was done, my haphazardly maintained system of folders with cute emoji labels was whittled down to just four apps in the dock and a handful of widgets spread across two pages, which I’m affectionately calling “Windows Phone 2.0.” Was it scary? A little. But you know what? I don’t miss those rows of icons at all. Nine out of ten times the app I’m looking for is in the Siri suggested apps that pop up when I open search. If not, I type in the first few letters of the app name and there it is. You could swipe over to the app library, I guess, but I hardly ever do. -
A treasure trove of tech history goes online with the unveiling of the Nokia Design Archive – Wallpaper
Now the Aalto University in Helsinki has launched the Nokia Design Archive, an online portal that lays bare two decades of the company’s history, including hitherto unseen sketches, concepts and marketing material alongside some of the most legendary, long-lasting and fondly remembered handsets of all time (depending on your age). […] ‘In Finland we have a tradition for being open with big data sets,’ says Anna Valtonen, lead researcher on the Nokia Design Archive. ‘The focus is often on numerical, empirical stuff, but what about people? What about how humans perceive things? How are ideas adopted into society? From a scientific perspective, this is the kind of qualitative empirical material we need more of.’ -
100 of the Best Book Covers of 2024 – PRINT Magazine
Here’s to all the striking book covers in 2024! There has truly never been a better time to get lost in a book—or a book cover. -
A miracle: Notre-Dame’s astonishing rebirth from the ashes – The New York Times
And wood rafters, protected by modern fire suppression systems, could last virtually forever. The original trusses had lasted for the better part of a millennium, the very definition of sustainable architecture. Restoring the roof would also enlist skilled carpenters, stone workers and artisans trained in ancestral techniques with roots in French and European history. Notre-Dame could help rejuvenate these fragile but precious crafts.After Macron’s announcement, a French organization of artisans called the Compagnons du Devoir, dating back to the 12th century, began receiving thousands of applications. “In France, as in America,” one of its former leaders, Jean-Claude Bellanger, told me at the time, “those who go into manual trades today tend to be considered failures by the elites. Notre-Dame has reminded everyone that such work is a path to dignity and excellence.”
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Hallucinogenic sci-fi movie: Inside the rather bizarre relaunch of Jaguar – Car Dealer Magazine
Unveiling a new concept car – the details of which are still under embargo until December 3 – Jaguar’s passionate team spoke for most of the day about how they plan to ‘delete ordinary’ and ‘live vivid’. Whatever that means… In what, at times, felt like a drunken dream, Jaguar personnel walked journalists through its plans to ‘reimagine’ the much-loved brand over the next few years. Calling it a ‘complete reset’, McGovern at one point told journalists that his team had ‘not been sniffing the white stuff – this is real’. -
Animations 2024 – bleuje
I’m Etienne Jacob from France, born in 1994. I’m a software engineer. I graduated from Ecole des Ponts and MVA Master where I have studied a blend of computer science, applied mathematics and data science. I’m also an artist who creates GIFs using programming and enjoys exploring creative coding during my free time. -
The Necronomicon – Propnomicon
After spending half an evening, this came out, and while I found it funny in a ridiculous way, I also realized this is probably so specific as to be funny only to a very specific intersection of demographics. I present, Penguin books’ post-war publication of The Necronomicon, well typeset and affordable for the common man. (I was pondering for a bit whether it would rather be a Penguin Classic, but the idea of the book of unspeakable horrors as an inexpensive nonfiction publication for a broad audience seemed way funnier.) -
Leon Eckert
Hallo! I am a German programmer, researcher and artist focusing on the critical discussion of technology and its impact on society. My work is inspired by the psychological, cultural and geopolitical processes at play in a time of large-scale data collection and analysis. -
Google Keep FAB redesign makes new notes a two-step process – 9to5Google
Previously, the bottom portion of Google Keep had a bar with buttons for creating a new list, drawing, audio, and photo note. Then there’s the cutout for a new note floating action button at the right. Google Keeps’ Material You redesign in 2021 changed that FAB from a circle to a rounded square, with the cutout feeling pretty out of place in Material 3.
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