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Lost in Cult has another great book in the works that is very relevant to my interest, both professional and personal: a whole book about Game UI and UX. What I especially love is that it features interviews with the UI designers and is not only a collection of all the interfaces. It is always great to learn from the people who actually went and had to build these interfaces, and not only read reflections on the finished product.

From Why No AI Games?:

I think what’s really going on here is that these new models just aren’t the natural source of fun I thought they would be when I first encountered them. Some forms of computation end up being a deep well of fun. 3D rendering is fun. Physics engines are fun. But these new AI models, despite being powerful and useful and fascinating, don’t seem to be intrinsically fun. Which I think is kind of surprising!

Frank Lantz wonders why we don’t see more “AI native” games. I’m wondering this myself: Games are often the first way we learn to deal with new technologies. So by now we should have seen some that incorporate the technology in interesting ways (Frank has some examples, but there are really not that many).

Reading this article by Christopher Butler had me nodding along the whole time.

Our world treats information like it’s always good. More data, more content, more inputs — we want it all without thinking twice. To say that the last twenty-five years of culture have centered around info-maximalism wouldn’t be an exaggeration. (…) When every moment is filled with new inputs, we can’t fully absorb, process, and reflect upon what we’ve consumed. Reflection, not consumptions, creates wisdom. Reflection requires quiet, isolation, and inactivity.

This is a sentiment I’ve seen echoed by a lot of people lately – and something I feel deeply myself. What started as a drizzle in the early days of the web, a chance to explore different viewpoints, get fresh ideas, or learn new things, has turned into an unrelenting tsunami. One that sweeps our attention away as it rushes endlessly through our minds.

Everything that made the web exciting is still possible, sure – but now it takes effort and discipline not to get swept up in yet another algorithmic feed, carefully crafted to keep us “engaged”. Making us angry, anxious, or afraid we’re missing out are great shortcuts for the platforms to get more “daily active users,” but they do little to nurture what Butler calls “wisdom.”

The chance to gain even a little bit of that wisdom is something I hope for myself – and for my kids. To see past the constant rush of the now, and learn to apply our attention intentionally.

If our attention is our currency, then leverage will come with the capacity to not pay it. To not look, to not listen, to not react, to not share.

Something to remember.

From Craig Mod in Ridgeline:

Back to the movies: When a movie ends in Japan, a miraculous, truly miraculous, almost otherworldly thing happens — nobody moves. The credits roll. The lights stay off. Nary a smartphone light can be seen. I went to MI:7 (FUN) last week and the IMAX theater was packed. The movie ended, the credits began and I looked and looked — I was seated in the back row with a view of pretty much every seat. Hundreds of people. Nothing. No shifting. No peeking at messages. No rushing back to scrolling. And the credits were long! These were not quick credits. And yet, we all sat in spectacular shared boredom.

Two things:

First, I really love how Craig tells these stories. Always a delight to read.

Second, the appreciation for the craft by all these people staying seated is otherworldly! Yes, we should all be doing this! But I can not recall that I was ever in a theatre where this happened. Not even with the incentive of a "post credit scene" – we could always just "watch it on YouTube" later.

Having moments where we can cultivate this appreciation – and share it with other people in the same location – are increasingly rare, I find. Even museums feel like just another chance to "snap a post for Insta".

From "Why Chatbots Are Not the Future":

There's an ongoing trend pushing towards continuous consumption of shorter, mind-melting content. Have a few minutes? Stare at people putting on makeup on TikTok. Winding down for sleep? A perfect time to doomscroll 180-character hot takes on Twitter. Most of the products I've seen built with LLMs push us further down this road: why write words when an AI can write that article for you? Why think when AI can write your code? (...)

I believe the real game changers are going to have very little to do with plain content generation. Let's build tools that offer suggestions to help us gain clarity in our thinking, let us sculpt prose like clay by manipulating geometry in the latent space (...).

Lots of great observations and ideas in this post. The point of AI making it too easy to simply turn off your brain strikes me as very relevant. Yes, we totally should offload rote, mindless tasks to an AI. But the AI shouldn't do the thinking for us – it should augment it; making us better at it.

From Alexander Obenauer's Lab Notes 35:

"It isn’t good enough for our systems to be capable of beautifully perfect organizations; we will find their messiest allowable state at some point."

I love that term: The "messiest allowable state".

Thinking about the perfect user journey is often a joy – even if we throw in fixes for common pitfalls. It's just so easy to be wrapped up in imagining how everything clicks together and how the user will just flow through the experience that we have layed out for them.

Reality is often different. We are dealing with humans after all: We're in a rush. Not reading carefully. Just wanting work to be over. Thinking about the "messiest allowable state" for our systems accounts for that in a way that is so much more evokative to me then simply calling it "edge cases". It puts the actual humans who interact with the machine back at the center – with all the messiness that comes with that.