Coby Almond
coby.bsky.social
Coby Almond
@coby.bsky.social
Testing
Reposted by Coby Almond
UX writing is often underappreciated but vital for a great experience. Sometimes, it’s not needed at all. Every part of the interface always communicates, intentionally or not. Nick DiLallo highlights this with great examples:

https://uxdesign.cc/this-is-good-ux-writing-10c4b956a6c3
This is good UX writing
Eight principles for every interface you’ll ever write.
uxdesign.cc
December 29, 2025 at 2:00 AM
Reposted by Coby Almond
This is your brain on AI
another robot highlight for 2025: man wearing humanoid mocap suit kicks himself in the balls
December 27, 2025 at 5:56 PM
Reposted by Coby Almond
Shout out to my road dogg Pot Bear
December 26, 2025 at 12:08 PM
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LLM consciousness is exactly the same in character and quality as Pot Bear, a pot that I own that looks exactly like a friendly bear when viewed at a particular angle while drunk
"they will be, one day"

no, they won't, any more than tires can help you fly. They're not built for that. They're a fundamentally different technology. An LLM does not exist to model conscious thought, it exists to take advantage of your willingness to see faces in things that aren't there.
December 26, 2025 at 12:00 PM
Reposted by Coby Almond
"There are no separate systems. The world is a continuum. Where to draw a boundary around a system depends on the purpose of the discussion.”
— Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems

#AdventOfSystemSeeing Day 17: Systems and Boundaries

www.ruthmalan.com/Advent/2025/...
Advent(ure) in System Seeing
Pick a (socio)technical system to focus on. Write a brief description of its primary purpose (or role or identity in the ecology of systems).
www.ruthmalan.com
December 17, 2025 at 6:41 PM
You just died.

The 6th picture in your phone gallery is what killed you.

No. He would never.

I mean, maybe only from floofy cuteness overload.
November 27, 2025 at 2:33 AM
Reposted by Coby Almond
There is so much good work out there on embodied cognitive science.
But it really hasn’t hit mainstream understanding.
This gets right at my core opinion about AGI: we're not going to get anything like actual "intelligence" from a brain in a jar (or a chip in a computer). Intelligence is ultimately about interacting with the world; only embodied creatures can develop it.
The most basic is that Cartesianism, broadly speaking, is false. The mind is embodied and embedded in the physical world. Meaning is not in the head. Reference, truth, and rational belief require the right kind of causal relationships to the world.
November 25, 2025 at 11:01 PM
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When you are using the "AI" framing, does the way you talk about "AI" carry water for the Sam Altmans of the world? That is, are you helping to paint a picture of their tech as inevitable, all powerful, and/or anything other than commercial products?

>>
November 10, 2025 at 8:35 PM
Reposted by Coby Almond
Hype pins the blame — unfairly — on you.

Hype says, "by spending the money on magic beans instead of the things you need, we are actually helping." Hype says, "the magic beans are magic. if you still have problems, you must be prompting it wrong."

This is about AI, but not *just* about AI.
November 7, 2025 at 4:02 PM
Want to teach your kids the glory of search engines before AI summary trash happened?

scholar.google.com is actually ideal. All the results are just the articles of other curious minds urging you to go get out there and learn for yourself.
Google Scholar
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. Search across a wide variety of disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions.
scholar.google.com
November 8, 2025 at 3:51 PM
Reposted by Coby Almond
A friend recently texted me the same thing. “Do you really not use ChatGPT?!” It was a sign of where we are culturally on this. People are compelled to use it but also starting to question the normalcy?
Recently met someone who was very surprised to hear I didn’t use ChatGPT or any LLM.

I said my job depended on doing distinctive work. That was my selling point. If I started to sound like ChatGPT and turn out what it did, then how on earth could I justify doing it? What would that make me?
November 8, 2025 at 12:32 PM
My kids love this movie.
It’s hard to believe but there was a cartoon about an immigrant mouse and it was seen as totally fine and not controversial and not woke because it was an aspirational and nice thing about America that people could come here and find a better life
November 6, 2025 at 1:29 AM
Reposted by Coby Almond
From a banger paper written in the wake of Enron. The last thing Ghoshal wrote before he died.

20 years later, spot on. Link is PDF.

www.corporation2020.org/documents/Re...
October 28, 2025 at 2:19 AM
October 27, 2025 at 1:38 AM
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It’s time to make chili
October 23, 2025 at 11:34 PM
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The male loneliness crisis will never end until men are willing to hear loved ones tell them "bro you are wrong."
The actual public service chatgpt provides is in demonstrating the effect of never hearing the word no on the human psyche, it has made billionaire brain pudding a condition accessible to everyone irrespective of net worth
October 13, 2025 at 1:30 AM
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Picked this one off the pile to read on the bus and holy shit just the introduction.

Image Control by Patrick Nathan
October 12, 2025 at 11:00 PM
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💯🏆
Lots of us work in these fields. Selling an LLM chatbot and saying it's "AI" is like selling a Slinkie and saying it's "physics" while also strongly implying to your customers that it can levitate.
September 27, 2025 at 12:43 PM
Reposted by Coby Almond
i made a helpful reference
September 24, 2025 at 3:23 PM
@erikahall.bsky.social I wore the DESIGN IS MY P̶A̶S̶S̶I̶O̶N̶ JOB t-shirt today and my middle child asked "do you not like your job, daddy?".
September 27, 2025 at 2:51 AM
Design Blinking
Disservice Design
September 27, 2025 at 2:31 AM
Ruin a book with a car:

For Whom the Buick Tolls
September 26, 2025 at 1:57 AM
Remove a letter, ruin a movie.

Oy Story
May 3, 2025 at 2:40 AM
The gal of some folks
March 11, 2025 at 1:54 AM