Issue 58: Years of incompetent advices

AI which may become the main competitor of ChatGPT; How to conduct user tests of AI products; Why increasing the security of AI can lead to the opposite result and so much more!

Hello, dear readers! 👋

In this issue, among other things:

• 9 problems when working with neural networks like ChatGPT

• How to conduct user tests of AI products

• Example of creating a unique icon using Midjourney, Blender and Figma

• A powerful free tool for storing information

• Why increasing the security of AI can lead to the opposite result

• AI which may become the main competitor of ChatGPT

• A selection of original posters and covers from 1960s

• Tutorial on working with various grids in Figma and InDesign

• Quotes from "Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals" by Oliver Burkeman

Enjoy reading!

📚 Book quotes

This week I suggest you another book by Oliver Burkeman "Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals" Review the quotes and decide whether to read or not:

Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved “work-life balance,” whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the “six things successful people do before 7:00 a.m.” The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control—when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about. Let’s start by admitting defeat: none of this is ever going to happen. But you know what? That’s excellent news.

mortality makes it impossible to ignore the absurdity of living solely for the future.

what you pay attention to will define, for you, what reality is.

choosing curiosity (wondering what might happen next) over worry (hoping that a certain specific thing will happen next, and fearing it might not) whenever you can.

The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder.

It’s alarming to face the prospect that you might never truly feel as though you know what you’re doing, in work, marriage, parenting, or anything else. But it’s liberating, too, because it removes a central reason for feeling self-conscious or inhibited about your performance in those domains in the present moment: if the feeling of total authority is never going to arrive, you might as well not wait any longer to give such activities your all—to put bold plans into practice, to stop erring on the side of caution. It is even more liberating to reflect that everyone else is in the same boat, whether they’re aware of it or not.

Convenience culture seduces us into imagining that we might find room for everything important by eliminating only life’s tedious tasks. But it’s a lie. You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results.

We’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action.

There is an alternative: the unfashionable but powerful notion of letting time use you, approaching life not as an opportunity to implement your predetermined plans for success but as a matter of responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history.

the noblest of human goals wasn’t to become godlike, but to be wholeheartedly human instead.

One can waste years this way, systematically postponing precisely the things one cares about the most.

The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.

In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be?

If you try to find time for your most valued activities by first dealing with all the other important demands on your time, in the hope that there’ll be some left over at the end, you’ll be disappointed.

🗞 News and articles

9 *Human* Challenges with Using AI Co-Pilots

Steven Anderson spoke about 9 human problems when working with neural networks like ChatGPT.

9 problems:

• Generators can do at best 80% of the work by creating a draft. Incompetent people may mistake this draft for the result

• Incompetent people may not notice gross errors and inaccuracies in the text from the neural network

• The neural network provides general information, ignoring important nuances, which significantly reduces the value of such a text

• Receiving ready-made information from a neural network, instead of searching for different sources, a person is inclined to continue thinking in the direction that is already laid down in the text. This deprives us of the opportunity to reason independently and creates "mental blinders"

• Independent writing of a text is an important stage of the thought process. Turning to the neural network, people give this stage to the machine for "outsourcing"

• Neural networks are not well suited for research. Communication with a car will not replace communication with real people, in the process of which empathy appears

• The neural network always responds very "confidently", even if it reports false information. This can play a cruel joke with those who trust her

• As a rule, people communicate with the neural network one-on-one. This eliminates teamwork and brainstorming, which are an important part of designing

• When creating code using a neural network, we cannot check the relevance of the solutions embedded in it and how people responded to them. Thus, a neural network can create code that is not worth using

⚡️ Briefly

Icons8 talked about creating a 3D icon of its own plug-in for Figma, which tells about its capabilities and stands out noticeably among other icons. To create it, they used Midjourney, Blender and Figma.

The US Federal Trade Commission proposes to establish rules for paid subscription services, according to which users should be able to describe themselves as easily as they subscribe.

This event is a signal that people have an explicit request for simple ways of unsubscribing and there is a strong rejection of the mechanics of artificial complication of unsubscribing that have spread in large products in recent years.