UX researcher. This account is dormant because this place has become too full of shouting. Follows are not endorsements.
San Francisco
Joined August 2008
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Here's our field report from running a ritual design studio at Burning Man this year: link.medium.com/a5vz7BQDu0
Curious about ritual design? Check out our project and toolkit at ritualdesign.net
Arvind Venkataramani is letting go of conditioning retweeted
Remember the backlash against all AI voices being feminine—Siri, Alexa, etc.? Now, companies use a wider range of AI voices with ambiguous names like “alloy” and “shimmer.” Bias solved forever—ha, no. What happens when people hear these supposedly neutral voices?👇
My act of quixotic optimism this week is watering & fertilizing the moss growing in-between the roofing cracks on my apartment’s balcony so it survives but also thrives during this heat wave.
(It survives every year without my help but this year I’ve decided that is not enough)
ALT A close-up photo of green moss with mottled brown spots growing in between cracks on a black tar and grey crushed stone tiled roofing level on a balcony/fire escape. It has been freshly dampened and is actively absorbing water, and the dried spots are slowly rehydrating.
PSA: don’t get your primary embodiment experiences from your spiritual practice — that is a prime pathway to institutional hacking of your psyche.
My kingdom for a usable daily notes app!
Obsidian is structurally hampered by markdown
@reflectnotes is good but has odd defaults & poor scheduling
@tana_inc has over-engineered supertags and clunky task interaction
@CapacitiesHQ is promising but has high starting complexity
↓
Arvind Venkataramani is letting go of conditioning retweeted
And, last but not least, we’re planning some in-person workshops focused on deriving a “grand theory” of protocols. The first one will focus on the intersection of distributed AI and blockchains 🤖
Here’s the donation page for the LA mutual aid network
(the organization whose affiliated mask bloc was asked by the LA government to donate masks, in case you needed to understand why ableism is bad).
Anyway, help each other out.
hcb.hackclub.com/donations/s…
Arvind Venkataramani is letting go of conditioning retweeted
This is awesome. Who would think innovation was possible in teaching kids to read 200 years after it became common in the West.
A fascinating story of unblocking value when crossing borders.
It’s also interesting to see this kind of deeply technical and creative hacking from India (the Indian s/w industry isn’t usually known for devs breaking things).
Feels like software culture there is changing.
Apple released a hearing aids feature for the AirPods Pro a while ago. I bought a pair for grandma, but then realized that the feature was geoblocked in India
So we at @_lagrangepoint decided to unblock it. It ended up involving a leaky microwave and building a Faraday cage:
ALT An Airpods case, an iPad, and a Faraday cage made of copper and aluminum
Arvind Venkataramani is letting go of conditioning retweeted
#H5N1 #birdflu symptoms may include fever or feeling feverish or chills, eye redness or irritation, and respiratory symptoms, such as cough, sore throat, runny or stuffy nose, muscle or body aches, headaches, and tiredness. More: cdc.gov/bird-flu
As I'm poking around running LLMs locally to develop a feel for how to fine-tune them for an honest research analysis pipeline, @msty_app has been pretty dang great for exploring a variety of interaction methodologies quickly. It's amazing how accessible this tech has become!
Arvind Venkataramani is letting go of conditioning retweeted
On Thursday, the SFMTA was notified of QR code stickers on a machine in Fisherman’s Wharf. We then found 5 machines with the fraudulent QR sticker. The URL has been disabled. We the public to be aware of this scam. Find info on how to pay correctly here: sfmta.com/getting-around/dri…
Arvind Venkataramani is letting go of conditioning retweeted
Good morning! A new cheat code just dropped to get a real person at CVS over the phone.
1. Voice menu: "Are you calling the pharmacy?", you say “No”.
2. Voice menu: "Okay, how can I help you?", you say "Store".
3. Voice menu: "Do you need store hours, address, etc", you say "Speak to someone”.
4. The automated system transfers you. A person picks up.
5. At this point, you can either ask them to transfer you to the pharmacy, or you can ask them to check with the pharmacy if they have 2024-2025 Novavax.
Be clear that it is not Moderna or Pfizer. If you want, you can give them the single dose syringe NDC: 80631-107-01. It comes in a 10 dose box with NDC 80631-107-10.
ALT Vintage Phone Vector.svg from Wikimedia Commons by Videoplasty.com, CC-BY-SA 4.0
Gotcha. Don’t press any #s.
I use the voice option and say in “quotes.”
CVS-Are you calling the pharmacy?
“No”
CVS-Okay how can I help you?
“Store”
CVS-Do you need store hours, address, etc…
“Speak to someone” then automated system will transfer. Then a person picks up.
Arvind Venkataramani is letting go of conditioning retweeted
7 years ago, my brother Aparajith embarked on an extraordinary project. I’m thrilled to announce that it’s finally complete. His book Engineering a Nation is not merely the first authoritative biography of India’s most celebrated engineer/devt thinker, Sir M Visvesvaraya…
I’m fascinated by how the “Steve Jobs hated user research” BS is still doing the rounds. UX research really has been bad at explaining ourselves to a broad audience. Maybe one of us should start a YouTube channel or such.
It’s like this entire industry has never heard of UX research.
Great rant from @petewarden on why the "Internet of things" failed. Basically, setup of "smart appliances" is a hassle and the benefits are slim to none.
We've been trying for weeks to set up smart power switches and still only have a 50% success rate
petewarden.com/2024/08/23/wh…
