Transmission #62: The Infinite Canvas, Bad Search, Low Nutrient Food and Not Knowing Anything Anymore.
Design, ideas and other flotsam.
Hello and welcome.
This is Transmissions by me, Marty Brown. It’s a fortnightly newsletter that collates some of the more interesting stories, links, and other curios that float my way.
After last edition, my retelling of the story of my grandfather — a German Jew exiled to Australia — I was overwhelmed by the response of the Transmissions community. Thank you to all who reached out. It was touching to know that the story moved you. It moved me too.
So we’re back to regular programming this week - I hope you enjoy what’s in store.
x
Marty
Design
Evolving the Infinite Canvas
Amelia Wattenburger • Link
Some of my fondest memories from working at IDEO in the 2010’s were the ever-encroaching stacks of dozens of foamcore boards, all covered with post-its and various scribbles, that would squish project teams tighter and tighter together like they were in the Death Star trash compactor as they progressed through a project.
With distributed working, that kind of spatial information indexing moved online to the bevy of ‘infinite canvas’ tools like Miro, Mural and Milanote. As Slack never fails to remind me, they too have a canvas tool.
The interaction patterns of these digital canvasses are still forming. Here, Amelia Wattenburger playfully experiments with how we might want to manipulate these objects: grouping them, ordering them, or embedding them alongside lists and tables.
How Bad Are Search Results?
Dan Luu • Link
Search is in a funk. By now, Google has endured a couple of decades of SEO pseudo-site spamming and a business model that kind of wants you to get the answers you searched for, but also kind of wants you to just click the damn ad.
So what we’re left with are distinctly mediocre search results from Google, Bing (lol!), a smattering of new entrants into the category, and the strange, unpredictable, hallucinatory results of LLM’s like ChatGPT.
Dan Luu dives deep into this landscape, testing a range of queries some of the models available. I’m summarising the results in this table below but you really should check out the article, as much for the completely minimal attention to styling on his site as for the excellent content.
Ideas
Nobody Knows What’s Happening Online Anymore
Charlie Warzel • The Atlantic • Link
Well, I certainly don’t know what’s happening. But neither do those who try to make sense of the web for a living.
The very idea of popularity is up for debate: Is that trend really viral? Did everyone see that post, or is it just my little corner of the internet? More than before, it feels like we’re holding a fun-house mirror up to the internet and struggling to make sense of the distorted picture.
One of my favorite places to unspool some of the collective internet brain was the Reply All podcast (RIP), and their ‘Yes yes no’ segment, which would explain complex twitter jokes to me like I was a child.
But what Warzel is describing here is something deeper and more pervasive than esoteric memes. The very nature of the perception of shared reality is seriously being questioned – insofar as reality is mediated by the internet. Which it is, a lot of the time. This strange state of affairs portends to a dark future, or perhaps not. Nobody actually has any idea.
We’re left shadowboxing one another and arguing in the dark about problems, the size of which we can’t identify.
How Not to Be Stupid About AI, With Yann LeCun
Steven Levy • Wired • Link
Amidst a deluge of AI articles, I am trying to be extremely selective with what I recommend. This is a good one. Yann LeCun is one of the OG pioneers of modern AI and Meta’s chief AI scientist. This interview cuts through the breathless fluff and talks to some of the thorniest issues we’re facing in this post-LLM landscape: regulation, superintelligence, AGI and what it means to make art.
Chart of the week
Other
🍫 A brief appreciation of the Tony’s Chocolate packaging design/logo. Link
👵 Turns out that the places who tend to have a lot of centenarians also have really shoddy birth registry records. Quinkydink? Link
🌽 Is modern food lower in nutrients? A satisfyingly nerdy deep dive. Link
👩🎨 Creating a design system that needs to span 100+ applications is just mind-melting. Adobe have done so with a new vibe: more contrast, more bubbly. Link
💣 Can we stop with the tech-doom stories all the time? Link
🔢 More wise counsel from my favourite data editor, Hannah Richie. Link
📋 End of the year means it’s listicle time. Here’s some good ones. Derek’s Thompson’s 9 Breakthroughs of the Year (Link), Kottke’s 52 Interesting Things I Learned in 2023 (Link), and Tom Whitwell’s 52 things I learned in 2023 (Link)
Thanks for reading! See you in a fortnight.