AI
A whole bunch of AI tools were developed to “help” with Covid.
They were… less than good.
some AIs were found to be picking up on the text font that certain hospitals used to label the scans. As a result, fonts from hospitals with more serious caseloads became predictors of covid risk.
Types of Fun
Kelly Cordes, who seems to know what he’s talking about:
Type 1 Fun is enjoyable while it’s happening
Type 2 Fun is miserable while it’s happening, but fun in retrospect.
Type 3 Fun is not fun at all. Not even in retrospect. Afterward, you think, “What in the hell was I doing? If I ever come up with another idea that stupid, somebody slap some sense into me.”
Coffee?
Michael Pollan, on Coffee:
Few of us even think of it as a drug, much less our daily use of it as an addiction. It’s so pervasive that it’s easy to overlook the fact that to be caffeinated is not baseline consciousness but, in fact, an altered state. It just happens to be a state that virtually all of us share, rendering it invisible.
Its mode of action, or “pharmacodynamics”, mesh so perfectly with the rhythms of the human body that the morning cup of coffee arrives just in time to head off the looming mental distress set in motion by yesterday’s cup of coffee. Daily, caffeine proposes itself as the optimal solution to the problem caffeine creates.
I’m generally against altered mental states, so this is problematic.
I’ll ponder it over a good flat white.
You need more slack than you expect
In general, you need more slack than you expect. Unless you have a lot of practice, your estimations of how long things will take or how difficult they are will almost always be on the low end. Most of us treat best-case scenarios as if they are the most likely scenarios and will inevitably come to pass, but they rarely do.
– Farnam Street, Efficiency is the Enemy
Dried Pasta and Garden Gnomes
I look at the weather, here, and think of the ancient viruses being thawed out in the permafrost, a thousand miles away, and this is basically the rest of my life now isn’t it. Always keep a cache of dried pasta and garden gnomes in the back room, you never know.
– Matt Webb, Welcome to the Entroposcene
Stewards of Complex Social Systems
The culture of risk aversion in gov leads to public servants viewing themselves as stewards of taxpayer dollars, responsible for accounting for precisely how money is spent; rather than stewards of complex social systems, responsible for enabling ppl to live flourishing lives.
— Thea Snow (@theasnow) July 26, 2021
Iterative mindset
Fascinating thing just now — I’m writing a usability testing report with a client. We had a prototype, tested it, made changes to the prototype and then tested it again. He pointed out that his stakeholders would not read “we made changes after round 1” as normal iteration.
Instead, they would see any instance of “we made changes” as “we made an error and we needed to correct it”.
On Twitter
Some users think they’re in a global Slack room for journalists, creatives, and other media people to share ideas and pass the time and many others believe they’re in a 24/7 info war for digital supremacy.
– Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day
I'm @bjkraal@aus.social on Mastodon