Notes

If the EU starts regulating attention-manipulating design we are going to end up with a fascinating arms race between dark pattern innovation and regulatory agility.

Simon Willison’s state-of-AI talk is getting attention for many good points, but my favorite is his observation that we really need to consider new UIs for LLM interaction. Because:

chat is kind of a terrible interface for these tools.

Maggie Appleton has already explained why and I’m looking forward to new methods emerging.

Why is it so easily accepted that pricing is limited by “what the market will bear” but scale is not?

Is anyone using AI to make graphic games out of the old Infocom text adventures?

This exhaustive review of paper-based microfluidics technology has me thinking about how interesting the biosensing industry is becoming (and where investment opportunities lie). Also, though, it made me curious about laser-cutting microfluidic logic gates, which has led me to rediscover liquid computing, bubble logic, and the Center for Bits and Atoms.

I have a (poorly-informed) sense that people studying this space end up in exciting research about metamaterials and other exotic, quantum physics. I wish there was more hacking around with things an average person can understand, which can have educational merit and feels more likely to change the world at scale.

As a longtime vegetarian, I am used to people asking me if I’d eat cultured meat. It’s not a very interesting question, and answering “show me the environmental impact” doesn’t make for a long discussion.

Raising intelligent animals to sacrifice for human organs, though? That is a fun topic to kick off some philosophical conversation.