Is it actually better to not study UI design at all?

Was rummaging through old files, and found one of the early LookUp designs that was very colorful and changed background colors with different modes.

I miss how I could go crazy about my designs when I didn’t study design and didn’t know any better. Back in 2014, I had very little design awareness, I had taken one coursera course and that's about it. So I had no idea what "platform conventions", "consistency" meant. I was just too happy to be designing something. So the first iteration for LookUp was a massive change. It involved crazy colourscheme changes and a completely navy-blue and dark color theme.

Ofourse now I know better and now software must support a 1000 other modes, including light and dark, and every platform has its own convention and want not. It makes me wonder, how much of design education is seeking conformity to norms and how much is it really about expressing yourself.

Consistency is a term that's been borrowed, weaponised and industrialised in teh last few years. From meaning that two similar things should look similar so that people are not confused, it's gone on to mean complete conformity with the interfaces ordained by the company's star designers and the branding that the OS provider uses; more recently it also means taking the fun out of your icons because everything must look the same and everything must support the 10 other modes that the OS provides. Right?

Anyhow. Here's LookUp 2. I had so much fun making this design, more than 10 years ago.

Missed post: More Shader Fun

Missed yesterday's blogpost of the day, as I was working on a major redesign for my app LookUp (which I now realise I haven't talked about at all on this blog) but for the last 13 years I have been working on a dictionary app called LookUp which enables english Learners to build their vocabulary. I am frantically working to ship a major redesign of the app currently. So more on it later.

But here's some fun stuff I did with shaders. I like to think of it as the Liquid from the Liquid Glass. ;)

Philz fall blends are ok.

Had the Vanilla soul the other day, not too bad, nothing extremely special but nothing terrible either, unlike their summer blends which were basically sugar syrup.

A little bit of Notting Hill in the middle of mission

Was walking on Mission, and found these group of houses that were way too remniscent of Notting Hill!

TIL Oracle Park also hosts Soccer (Football) matches

And they host it pretty well! Had a lot of fun watching the soccer game at Oracle Park, SF today. A venue that's usually reserved for Baseball.

Everyone is the Steve Jobs of their own startup

The best quote on Steve Jobs came from one of his biggest rivals, Bill Gates. "So many of the people who want to be like Steve have the asshole side down. What they're missing is the genius part." I wish more people realised that.

Every startup in the silicon valley thinks that they need at least one of them to be Steve Jobs. They play the the asshole, overconfident, uppity designer part to the tee, they will not even acknowledge your presence in the room, unless you have the social clout. The other one has to play the technical nerd guru. Expert in their own right, the Woz to the Jobs so to speak.

This was true 10 years ago. This is true today. The number of idiots who think being an asshole and overconfident about their little products will have them reach some sort of cult status is crazy.

The thing is, it's easy to be the asshole in the room, it's more difficult to be the genius person. Which ironically is the wrong lesson to take from Jobs' life. Steve Jobs was one of the greatest product people to exist on the planet. He knew computers from inside out. He had a vision for what he wanted computing to be, he had the knowledge, and most importantly he spent 40 years of his life doing that; but his personal life was a mess. His behaviour towards others should never be glorified. Like every other person on this planet, him being good at one thing didn't make him an expert at others. I wish more people chose to be as disciplined as him, chose to master their craft as he did. But instead, people wake up one day, and decide they'll just take all the wrong lessons from his life.

Sometimes a break is necessary

Sometimes, even if you haven't achieved anything in the day, even if there's a ton of work left, even if it feels like you've not 'earned' a break--It's necessary to take one.

Why? breaks are great to put you at ease, and offer a change of perspectives.

Love watching movies for that reason. But offlate I had become a bit sluggish with my work, and I was wondering the other day, how much of a two hour gaming session helped me mentally time things back in 2021 - 2022. It's crazy but a high pressure cricket match teaches you a lot, even if it's a game simulation.

Any how, booted up my Xbox again and had a great time playing my favourite game.

Clanker is a unique slur

In the last few weeks the Clanker a Star Wars fandom slur used against the robots in the franchise, has become popular for its derogatory nature and imminent robophobia, that will come once robots start coexisting with humans. In short, If robots become sentient, and if robophobia is rampant, and if humans want to express their hatred towards a robot, a slur they can use against them is "clanker". This is a lot of ifs.

Sadly the tech community loves making wild assumptions about the future of consumer technology. A few years ago it was the Metaverse and VR (one of the wildest theory I heard at the time was that it's gotta be successful if enough people put enough money into marketing it, we all know how that went), Right now it's robots. People look at LLMs, People look at its "human-like" capabilities, and people go "Ah! Robots are coming soon". That's not happening. Humanoid Robots with sentience are not a thing of today, they'll not be a thing for a long time (maybe ever), for the simple reason that machines can't mimic human-to-human interactions as they lack any affordance of shared context. But I digress.

You can't use a slur against inanimate objects. They don't have sentience, so they're not being insulted. So Clanker is really just a made up slur, for a made up future, it's someone's figment of imagination that people have decided to collectively play along. Or is it?

Well first, most of English is a figment of someone's imagination that people decided to collectively play along. Words have meanings because someone decided what something means, and everyone in power agreed. Slurs are no different. But this power goes further back. Robots don't have sentience unless we don't collectively start thinking and acting towards them as humans. Sentience is as much about a person's feelings towards the bot as it is about the bot's feelings towards the person. If a person strongly feels something about a bot, that feeling is just as valid to the person as it is about any other sentient being. So if they feel extreme hatred towards the bot, it's a real feeling, that should not be ignored. And if that feeling manifests in a slur, the differences between that and a slur against a human are smaller than you think.

Both slurs are about a person's feelings towards something or someone. Slurs are problematic because they're a symbol of extreme hatred. They're more about the person giving them than the person on the receiving end. They're a mirror to a person's feelings. So is Clanker problematic? It's a reflection of a person's extreme hatred towards a technology.