Sam Bond

sharing my thoughts… with the 9 people who see my posts.

[Sam Bond @sambond_]

@joshpuckett There’s usually the gaslighting that comes with notion that this level of design crit (care) is a trade off with speed

[Sam Bond @sambond_]

Fanboying the hardware, but can’t stop thinking about that new breakpoint 🥲

[Sam Bond @sambond_]

“If all the above is true, then sure. OpenAI independently found a solution to the Naiver-Stokes equation. But they seemingly did it for maximally icky reasons.” 💯

[Tyler Johnston @tyler_johnston]

I was avoiding weighing in on this, but does anyone at OpenAI dispute that:

(1) They heard rumors of a Millennium Prize breakthrough (the rumors I heard were that it was about Naiver-Stokes specifically, from Anthropic, and under external review. Who knows if they knew this, the blog posts suggests they didn't, but even so...)

(2) They then spent millions of dollars in a week-long sprint to... scoop the (unknown) authors who made the breakthrough? Or at least push hard in that direction knowing there was a chance they would do so?

(3) They then learned that Levant/Tristan were the authors in question and intended to offer them co-authorship? For a result that was presumably already achieved? Then they learned Levant/Tristan only had a resolution of the forced Euler problem (i.e. a key step on the way to a Navier-Stokes solution, but not the full milestone) so they published alone?

If all the above is true, then sure. OpenAI independently found a solution to the Naiver-Stokes equation. But they seemingly did it for maximally icky reasons.

I don't know the professional norms in math but something about this reeks of... silicon valley mindset/zero-sum thinking. Why not spend the millions of dollars pursuing a totally new problem, rather than directly competing with progress on a problem that you know is about to be announced, even if you don't know the exact shape or origin of the announcement? Even if you want to explore problems in the region of "millennium prize," why not give it two weeks to see what the pending result is so you can build off of it, not scoop someone, not waste millions on potentially duplicative efforts, etc. Seems like a waste, unless the goal is to beat someone else to the announcement, i.e. "I don't want to live in a world where someone else solves millennium prize problems better than we do."

[Sam Bond @sambond_]

It's interesting how the wave of case studies after a new model mimics the launch video or the first thing people see.

Since Astra, I've seen countless Blender or 3D modelling examples, an echo of earlier flight simulator copies. (Shout-out to Gen Brand tools, Dither and Stamps.)

We've been given tools that can meet our endless imagination, but we're not holding up our end of the bargain. 😂

We don’t have a taste problem, we have a creativity one.

[Sam Bond @sambond_]

It doesn’t have to be another stamp or dither idea…

[Sam Bond @sambond_]

Proud Pinterest lover 🥹

[Sofiane @sofianedesign]

Who's still using Pinterest?

I see a lot of designers hate on it for some reason, but I've always used Pinterest for inspiration.

Others sites come and go, but Pinterest always stays 👌

[Sam Bond @sambond_]

@Jason Will provide a terrible painting for 10k. Message me for details

[Sam Bond @sambond_]

@joshpuckett Love the movement applied to the paper on scroll 💌

[Sam Bond @sambond_]

@disco_lu @brian_lovin Me 3!

[Sam Bond @sambond_]

Many of the strongest designers I’ve spoken with aren’t primarily chasing 10x speed.

Their core work still revolves around deliberate space to try things that succeed or fail. The “messy” nature of design isn’t just a temporary inefficiency waiting to be optimised away for high-craft work the time and emotion spent between iteration are often the point.

I think the tension lies more in the daily flood of new AI features and tools that mismatches the expectations that you should be adopting and mastering everything while still needing slow, generative time.

[Sam Bond @sambond_]

@DannPetty The best news? Design thinking/UX, whatever the current label, just requires us to be human and solve shared problems with empathy and intuition.

The one thing we should all have in common: easy to adopt and will forever be an advantage over machines!

[Sam Bond @sambond_]

@DannPetty Dann the mann

[Sam Bond @sambond_]

@brian_lovin “Did I cook??”

[gradient background and generic logo]

[Sam Bond @sambond_]

Beauty inspires us to create and protect.

In this case there’s a whole “Adopt a Kiosk” scheme that offers to transform red phone boxes into thriving little free libraries, defibrillator stations, or other community hubs.

Thousands of them across the UK have been given this second life precisely because people feel an instinctive desire to preserve and activate something beautiful.

@patrickc

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

Someone asked me recently why I’ve become interested in aesthetics after having spent most of my life more interested in STEM-adjacent topics. I hadn’t really considered the question consciously before, but I’m certainly thinking about aesthetics more than I used to. I think it’s a confluence of things:

• Many things today are ugly and far uglier than they used to be or need to be. Once you see this, it’s kinda hard to stop perceiving it. (Early twentieth century phone boxes versus modern phone boxes; old water fountains versus new water fountains; etc.) As someone with a naively meliorist assumption that most things should be getting better rather than worse, it’s all a bit perplexing: why did we stop doing things nicely? Is it a choice? Was there a malevolent spell cast upon us? This vein led me to think more about modernism and why much of art became more intentionally "challenging", grotesque, opposed to prettiness, rebarbative, dissonant, etc. Can or should anything be done about this? Is this just how things ought to be?
• Relatedly, much of modernism involved a kind of explicit repudiation of cultural continuity and represented a schism with prior practices. This is maybe most evident in American architecture, where the International Style exhibition in 1932 initiated the displacement of a rich tapestry of prior styles. This cultural break seems important and interesting to me, and I suspect that the rejection had important consequences outside of the aesthetic domain. Samuel Hughes has been exploring this question in his recent writing at @WorksInProgMag; @RuxandraTeslo is also pulling on this thread. Elaine Scarry wrote about how beauty inspires creation. If so, the inverse may also be true: ugliness inhibits it.
• It’s clearly the case that changes in the aesthetic domain can at least inspire progress in other places. Petrarch helped set some of the preconditions for the Renaissance which in turn fostered the scientific revolution and Enlightenment. Things like World Fairs (the 1851 Fair at the Crystal Palace recorded 6 million admissions when the population was 21 million) reflect the popular interdependency that used to exist between aesthetics and material development.
• @tedgioia and others have written about stuck culture and how so many domains seem to have ceased to straightforwardly advance in the way that they did up until the nineties or thereabouts. This is obviously peculiar and interesting. What changed, and what does it mean? Is it about the internet and fragmentation? Is it about a loss of supply? Is it just about having reached the zenith of various mediums?
• I’m generally interested in markets and the dynamics of creation. In aesthetics broadly, I find the reflexivity between supply- and demand-side factors to be very thought-provoking. There’s a natural desire to view satisfaction of individual preferences as the yardstick to measure market success, but things get interesting and even a bit unsettling when we start to think about how the supply might start to shape the demand. I often think about this in the context of food. Why is food so much worse in Germany than many of its neighbors? Germany certainly doesn’t have less material ability to produce good food; indeed, Germany is richer than the countries around it. There’s probably something about German food supply chains that is impoverished relative to France and Italy, but the Germans themselves don’t seem too upset about it. It just seems that the Germans are stuck in an objectively worse market equilibrium than their neighbors: the food is bad and they’ve gotten used to it. The obvious question then is where else these kinds of reflexive patterns apply, and where else we’re stuck in some objectively inferior equilibrium, even if preferences are in some superficial sense being sated.
• While this is an extremely banal and obvious point, I hadn’t until recently thought much about or internalized how much one can study reasonably objective things ("the status of women in society", say) through artwork. (Thanks to @_alice_evans for opening my eyes here.) In this vein, I’m pretty excited about the possibilities over the coming years in computational art analysis. I want something that’s conceptually similar to Google Ngram timelines but for the visual arts.
• We've always tried to do things well at Stripe. I've come to see that attempting to do them beautifully is often a helpful way to break out of standard practices and to do something with greater novelty and in a way that might have other benefits besides. (Also, excellent people want to do great work because it is intrinsically satisfying. Explicitly allowing aesthetic considerations to carry weight avoids having to justify every assessment with some kind of torturous empiricism.)
• In his Nobel Lecture, Solzhenitsyn said that, among the Platonic virtues of goodness, truth, and beauty, that beauty is special, for it possesses a unique kind of irrefutability. He notes that arguments, writing, and philosophical systems can all be predicated on misapprehensions, but that “a true work of art carries its verification within itself.” He proceeds to observe that when goodness and truth are threatened, the “ever surprising shoots of beauty will still force their way through.” There is a lot of specious and motivated reasoning in the world today and plenty of questionable value systems. I don’t think that beauty directly reflects any definitive trait, but I’m intrigued by the idea that it can be a marker of deeper metaphysical coherence.

[Sam Bond @sambond_]

@soulegit Verrrry cool

[Sam Bond @sambond_]

@AlexAperios Still the one of the most fun tools I find myself coming back to when I just need a play 😂