Is there any professional software that wouldn't benefit from high information density? Most software design is optimized for the non-users who have to approve it.
You can have high information density and still not have words running into each-other. Taking all of the space out from around text and information graphics makes them less legible, even for experienced "power users".
I think the goal here is more an aesthetic of being for "serious traders only" rather than a UI optimized for speed and clarity. The UI designers probably have little choice but to match the preferences of the user group though, even when those preferences are empirically detrimental.
Yeah safety critical software needs to avoid high UI density for the interface itself. For diagnostics and monitoring or general stats you can still do high density but the actual "action space" needs to be kept as low density as possible and preferably with physical separation in the UI (i.e. via physical buttons and displays instead of just a big touch screen or monitor+Mouse and kbd).
Higher information density is ideal but when people are working in less than ideal conditions (stress, lack of sleep, alarms going off, etc) you need to prioritise information clarity and clarity of actions over raw density.
"non-users" are also big targets for software. If you run a software business, chances are you want people who've never used your software to start using your software. In that case, discoverability trumps high information density.
It only adds discoverability for the things that fit the screen. In other words, you have to make it simple. I.e. the lazy way to make something "user-friendly", do as little as possible and force the user to adapt to your ways instead.
It has to be the right information, filtered and presented in such a way that supports the task. Any kind of human in the loop UI has to manage user cognitive loading. Task saturation is real.
this - most of the internal software at my job that's actually important is very dense, with keyboard navigation and shortcuts. The ones that somebody makes to sell themselves to upper management while angling for a promotion look very pretty, and never get used.
And yet, we make such beautiful and vacant software ourselves for our clients, because again, its b2b, so you aren't selling to the people who actually have to use the software. Im glad at least we arent forced that often to use specific internal tools, the better ones just get adopted organically
I haven’t encountered this bug, but I have been frustrated that there’s no way to give a babysitter temporary access to the cameras in the kids’ rooms.
I ended up hosting a local site that embeds the RTSP feeds, which works pretty well, but I was surprised that there’s no native way to do it
It’s funny that this is probably due to bias in the training texts, right? Humans are way more likely to publish their “Eureka!” moments than their screwups… if they did, maybe models would’ve exhibit this behavior.
Now that AI labs have all these “Nevermind” texts to train on, maybe it’s getting easier to correct? (Would require some postprocessing to classify the AI outputs as successful or not before training)
I think it's more explicit than that, part of post-training to enforce the kind of behavior, I don't think it's emergent but rather researchers steering it to do that because they saw the CoT gets slightly better if the model tries to doubt itself or cheer itself on. Don't recall if there was a paper outlining this, tried finding where I got this from but searches/LLMing turns up nothing so far.
My understanding is that it’s the result of these companies making sure to keep you engaged/happy less than the result of data these companies train with.
I don’t know if it’s true or not but it certainly tracks given LLMs are way more polite than the average post on the internet lol
"At some point I realized that rather than do something else until it finishes, I would constantly check on it to see if it was asking for yet another permission, which felt like it was missing the point of having an agent do stuff"
Why don't Claude Code & other AI agents offer an option to make a sound or trigger a system notification whenever they prompt for approval? I've looked into setting this up, and it seems like I'd have to wire up a script that scrapes terminal output for an approval request. Codex has had a feature request open for a while: https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/3052
When using Claude Code in Ghostty on macOS, I get notifications if it is waiting on my input (accept changes, questionnaire, run bash command). Dunno what combination (if any) of my setup is needed for this to happen, but I certainly didn't configure anything special. Maybe I'm giving CC too much free reign to do things.
> wants it moved over to the others side of the utility closet so that when you open the door it is easier to put clothes from there into the dryer
That's when you swap the hinges so the door opens the other way, and you thank the manufacturer for providing such an easy solution to a common problem. It's good to keep things flexible and user-configurable.
Now quick, someone reply with a counterexample of how user configuration complicates the product and increases cost. It's design tradeoffs all the way down...
I don't know the answer, but there's a famous lost camera owned by a team that perished on Everest before Hillary/Norgay successfully climbed it. It's possible that the camera contains proof of an earlier first ascent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mallory#Reaching_the_su...
