Scott Jenson’s Post

This talk my Marcin Wichary is a complete delight. It works on so many levels. The ideas of course, but the slides, OMG the slides had me slack jawed. And then the interactive session! And the sorting! It just kept building. I dream of building slide decks like this. https://lnkd.in/gnQTNGiZ

I'm looking into how #LLMs are working and finding that, like any tech, they have pros and cons. FIgma's recent announcements are a perfect example. The things most focused on "text based" interaction, e.g. renaming layers, appears reasonable functions as expected. Not earth shattering, but nice. The 'build from a text prompt' is a toy and everyone that has used it, so far at least, is less than impressed. The "find something like this" functionality however, looks amazing as it allows me to find a fully fledged, human created example with components and autolayout (something the AI tools either don't do or are very toy-ish) So understanding what #LLMs can do well and what they're kind of "meh" at is important. I'm not saying you're wrong, we CAN build some of these features, but the rush into 'it'll be awesome' is looking a bit premature. It's understandable that people want to see the tech prove itself out. People are just SO FOCUSED on being first, being the thought leader ahead of everyone else. You don't HAVE to be first. The mobile apps that had the most success were the ones that came much later, after the dust had settled.

How dark mode killed good design https://lnkd.in/guNdcSJE I love this Youtube channel and I love how a person that is NOT a UX designer can explore and understand a topic that is actually better than most that discuss this issue on social media. There is nothing ground breaking here, but I felt it was very well told.

Early alpha tester of the #Figma "AI tools": "Those of you worried about the AI functionality, hopefully this eases your mind a bit: it’s pretty useless and gimmicky in its current state. Very few of us in the test group even cared about it. Did not speed up my workflow at all whatsoever." This doesn't mean proper generative AI will never come, but like I've been saying for awhile now, it's actually much harder in visual domains than people think. https://lnkd.in/ghrHWQA3

My post asking you all for volunteer resources to keep me busy in my retirement was a great success. LOTS of suggestions, Thank you! I've summarized them into a github repos: https://lnkd.in/gjnuJ8nd There is a mountain of people in the tech space that want to help and having a resource like this could be helpful. Any suggestions/improvements are welcome!

There is a huge untapped market of #retired technology folks. I'm curious if anyone knows of any groups the help match up tech talent with #opensource or #nonprofit organizations. Please reshare for reach. edit: Just to be clear, this is for *me*, I'm the retired guy looking!

#Figma Config 2024 Keynote Comments Recently, I've posted about the pros and cons of #LLMs. Many people are over-inflating the capabilities, declaring that entire job categories will be eliminated. For me, that fear feels overblown. My go-to example was the recent crop of Figma plugins. They demonstrated how hard it is to apply LLMs (trained only on text) to something as nuanced as visual design. My point wasn't that LLMs would never work in Figma, only that they are an imperfect fit. Here are a few comments from watching their keynote: 1. Classic LLM Fill-Ins Some compelling examples of extending a list with new content, finding an image, and language translation. Obvious and helpful applications, nothing surprising here. 2. Renaming Layers By pulling content from your design, it can rename layers. This looked very impressive. Again, nothing earth-shattering, still sticking to the core value of LLMs. 3. Suggest Auto Layout This was impressive. It took a flat collection of items, grouped them, and used auto layout. This is clearly new territory. It's not at all clear if this uses LLMs or is just a collection of clever rules. They also made a point that it doesn't work well on large examples, which hints at its limitations. But still, it's an eye opening start. 4. Create A Starting Example This is what everyone was worried about: a starting design from scratch. It actually did a reasonable job. Noticeably absent was any use of components (a key sign of design prowess). It's just a starting point and they clearly downplayed it (which was interesting). I'm not worried yet. 5. Find Things Like This This was by far the most impressive feature. You can use an image to search for a file in your organization, but better still, you can find things by text from the broader community. Why settle for a poor LLM version when you can have a full version from a seasoned Figma designer? This feels much better than using the 'create a starting example' feature. 6. Need for Training Data Clearly the most controversial announcement. Free and small company Figma accounts opt in (!!) by default to use all of your files for training. This is why the current crop of LLMs is so poor at "design": they are based on text and have little to go on. By collecting millions of Figma files and training on them, Figma is actually finding the data they need to fix many of the issues mentioned above. This is likely to make many people nervous. It's impossible to predict the future but this keynote showed not only the promise of #gAI, but also it's limitations. It's clearly much better at augmenting our work, not replacing us. Too many people are at the extremes of super positive or aggressively negative. I'm in the middle. How we understand and discuss it is critical.