Technology

You get a bonus, and you get a bonus, and you get a bonus

https://www.theverge.com/command-line-newsletter/756561/openai-employees-bonus-sam-altman-ai-talent-wars

The bonus amount for each qualifying employee will vary based on role and seniority, according to my sources. The highest payouts will be in the mid, single-digit millions for OpenAI’s most coveted researchers, all of whom already make millions per year. Engineers, meanwhile, are expected to receive bonuses worth hundreds of thousands of dollars on average. The bonuses will be paid out every quarter over the next two years, with the option to receive the money in OpenAI stock, cash, or a mix of both. Roughly 1,000 employees, or about one-third of OpenAI’s full-time workforce, qualify.

That's crazy. The AI hype train is one hell of a train. Should've been an engineer.

UX

Consistency

Right around the time when the multitouch trackpad was announced, Apple introduced natural scroll. Natural scroll reversed scroll behaviour (move content instead of viewport) and set it to default while offered a setting so you can change it back if you want. Importantly, that setting affects all scroll behavior in macOS, which of course it should.

Enter iOS 26 beta 1 and its new UI, including its new camera app design. Instead of picking camera mode by sliding it into the middle like before, you move along a sliding tab bar with a highlighting piece of glass UI. It reversed the behaviour from before and took some getting used to. But with beta 2, they reversed course. Now you manipulate the tab bar behind the glass piece. While it mimics the original camera app more closely, it creates an issue because the glass highlighter isn't abstract, it's very much something on top of the different modes. So now you're moving something that is positioned below something while interacting above it, on a UI element that is not interactive, which is definitely not intuitive. And it get's worse by the fact that if you look at the tab bar in Safari, or any app with the new glass tab bar, it does the opposite. So you have two tab bars with glass highlighting your selection that operates in two different ways. That's a mess.

For camera modes, drag tab bar to change.
For Safari tabs, drag the glass selector to change.

With a recent beta, they also included an option to toggle how you want the behaviour in the camera app, but unfortunately it defaults to the non-consistent one. And adding settings for such obscure things? That is distinctively non-Apple. Decide what's best and stick to it. I hope this part sees some improvement in the coming betas or later.

This is just one small thing in a new design language that is objectively problematic in so many ways. Subjectively, I just think it looks really bad.

Böcker

A running list comparing TV shows and movies to the book(s) they're based on

I've always enjoyed reading books that I knew had a movie or TV show adaptation. It's fun to see how others choose to present and tell a story that you have your own mental image of. I've kept reading, and studios have kept producing and I thought it would be fun to keep track. So this is my running list of thoughts on how well the source material was adapted. I will update whenever I've seen anything I've read or vice versa.

If there are books out there with good adaptations you think I should read and watch? Let me know!

Dark Matter

Pretty good! It's been a while since I read the book, long enough to have been surprised by the plot twists I had forgotten about. It's a good show, good set of actors too, and it sticks to the main points of the book. No complaints. Show and book recommended. Begin with either.

Foundation

It has been said that it's impossible to film these books. It's a complicated set of books. But impossible, I think not. But this adaptation, even though it's visually grand, is hell bent on keeping a set of "main characters" around, when the source material basically only have one single character that keeps returning. That demands some real shuffling around and serious creative manipulation of the source material. And that is exactly what they have done. And it's a mess, I think. You're constantly struggling to match what you see with what you know from the books, and fail. At times I think this show is better suited to people who've never read the book. That will at least lessen the distraction. Because even though surely 80 % of everything in the show is based on the book, it's simply reusing elements to tell a largely different story, which creates a disconnect. I don't know a whole lot of others who've read the book, would love to hear others take on this.

Silo

Wool is the original title of this first book in the series. But they all revolve around a silo, so I don't mind the more clear cut name. It's largely a good representation of the book. It has all the main components, and somehow an extra bonus that it visually appears about the same as I imagined it. That's never a given. Where I do however think it's lacking, is that it's playing the grand mystery of the silo and the people in it much like a cat-and-mouse challenge-slash-crime-of-the-week. It makes it all feel... smaller, somehow. Like the straight-to-DVD version of a blockbuster, if I make any sense. Also, I get all itchy when supposedly smart people do dumb things, and this show is full of it, to increase drama. It's off-putting!

That said, it's a fairly good thriller tv show. The books are much better, and I'm looking forward to how they'll address the next two books. Looking forward to see it play out! Great book, decent show. Definitely read book first if you can.

The Power

When teenage girls around the world suddenly develop the ability to emit electric shocks, the global balance of power between genders is violently upended (aka primarily: men lose their shit).

This show was excellent! It's a fair adaptation, it sticks very close to the book in terms of story and style. The only problem is that they didn't get to finish the whole story, only like two thirds of it. And the show is supposedly cancelled so you're left to the book to learn how it all goes down. Still worth a watch though.

Three Body Problem

This book, or rather the trilogy, is my favorite sci fi book series of all time. So a TV show will likely not be able to meet or exceed my expectations both on that ground, but also due to the scale of this story: It traverses universe, dimensions and time. Not spoiler free, but not at all spoiling it. Call it a teaser: When a signal from Earth reaches an alien world, humanity learns it’s been marked for invasion. But the attackers won’t arrive for centuries, leaving science, faith, and civilization to slowly unravel under the weight of knowing what’s coming.

There are two TV shows in existence. One made in China, called Three-Body, covering only the first book. And one Western one called 3 Body Problem,

Three-Body is a Chinese TV production focused on the first book. I've only seen about 10 episodes of it and while it sticks very true to the first book (which is the book possibly easiest to film), it's rather slow. They spread that story over 30 episodes and that's too much runtime. My plan is to see them all, but it's simply not very inspiring when I expect the rest to be similarly paced.

3 Body Problem however, a Netflix product, has higher pacing, and takes a whole lot of freedom with the source material. Most of it I'm fine with, the combine a few people, shift things and places around, pick things from the second and third book into the first season elegantly to make the story coherent. You get the sense the showrunners are really loving the source material, but they seem to have missed the mark of making intellectual TV visually appealing. I believe these people has a background in Game of Thrones, so they should be familiar with striking visuals. While the show fires on all cylinders to cover the story, the settings feel very uninspired, and doesn't properly align with the content. Mostly this annoys me because the way to secure your job with more seasons, is to make your first season memorable. And while the story is very unique and memorable, the visual style of this series doesn't match it at all. Now, it seems the show was renewed for another season, which is good news. Because if they're moving into book 2 or 3 next, there's no way the shows visual can't be one of their highest priorities. So, my expectations are high for what's coming. As most times, I recommend reading all the books before seeing anything.

Divergent

If memory serves me well, this series of TA books came out around the time Hunger Games were peaking. They are almost written to be filmed, and filmed they were. The first film is very very closely adapted to the book. However, I found the book quite average, and as a result, the movie is just as average. But if you did like the book, you should ideally enjoy this movie. Sources tell me that the movie adaptations of the rest of the books are not following the source material as closely, but I don't know if that has made them better or worse movies. I'll have to get back to you on that.

The Martian

Fun book, lovely tone of voice, inspired writing. And it translated almost perfectly to movie. Great work by everyone involved. I'd read the book first, but you'd do fine either way.

Ready Player One

A book aimed squarely at my age bracket (born in the 80'ies). A fun read in and about virtual reality, that is a bit more of a mystery than the movie counterpart. I feel Spielberg took a few too many unnecessary liberties with the source material. What was on the pages seems pretty easy to make into a movie, and the bits that was removed or sometimes completely replaced with fabricated content, didn't actually improve on the source material. That seems like a waste of time and an easy way to annoy fans.

Wayward Pines

This book is excellent, Blake is a great writer. About a man that wakes up in a town without knowing how he got there. And everything and everyone feels wrong, and it seems difficult to leave this town. It's an awesome read, and it has translated perfectly into a TV show. But here comes the warning. Well, two warnings. See only season 1, avoid season 2 at all costs. Season 1 is based on the book. Season 2 is based on... I don't know, it's a mess and a travesty. Season 1 is so strong and nails the story and vibe of the book perfectly. I don't know what happened. And the second warning; no googling. Don't spoil this book or show. Just get started with either.

Seen, read but not written about yet

  • Hunger Games
  • The Lovely Bones
  • Time Traveller's Wife (The Movie)
  • Time Traveller's Wife (The TV show)
  • Å han älskade dom alla
Livet

ChatGPT och högskoleprovet

Har av olika och outgrundliga anledningar anmält mig till högskoleprovet den 5 april. Har också insett att Mediaprogrammet anno 1999 inte lade så himla mycket vikt vid matte, så jag tränar kvantitativa delar på ledig tid och misstänkte att ChatGPT kunde hjälpa mig, på en nivå som motsvarar mina förutsättningar. Och det gör den, den är otrolig. Men bara ca 95 % av gångerna. För den räknar regelbundet fel, den ger svarsalternativ som inte stämmer, och när jag räknat rätt så säger den att jag räknat fel, och vidhåller det tills jag påvisat att jag har rätt.

Helt plötsligt sitter jag och lär ChatGPT matte, det var ju inte riktigt tanken. Jag trodde naivt att matte, som lämnar så lite utrymme för tolkning, borde vara enkelt för ChatGPT. Men tydligen inte.

Music

Feature request: Spotify twin users

The Spotify algorithm has always served me well, recommending music to me that makes sense to recommend. I've discovered artists and music I don't see how I would've ever found without the help of Spotify.

However, mycket vill ha mer as the the Swedish idiom goes, which lazily translates to "much wants more".

At times, Spotify recommendations feel artificial and clinical. This point bothered my previous podcast co-host Johan so much that he left Spotify for Apple Music, with the argument that he'd take recommendations primarily based on human curation thank algorithms any day of the week even if the hit rate was lower.

The upside is, of course, the element of surprise.

You can categorize music with endless attributes to make the algorithm calculate similar music to recommend to it's user. That covers the broadcasting end of the music listening experience pretty well. The problem lies in the other end, the listener. You can inform the algorithm of what you think of recommended music based on behaviour such as repeat listenings, saves to playlists, songs skipped. That covers the receiving end, but not very well. Because it's harder to quantify taste. It's more likely than not that you'll like a song that's similar to the attributes of music you've saved than a song that's not similar. But the mind doesn't always respect the boundaries of it's own taste, and it's hard to artificially extrapolate into the unknown when taste is so fickle.

I digress, what I'm trying to say is that it's hard to guess what else you like when you don't even know yourself what else you like... until you hear it.

And that's where humans come in handy. They can throw curve ball recommendations at you without caring for any of the actual metrics that matter, only based on their own hunches, vibes, mood, feelings or any other hard-to-quantify quality. There's a high risk a lot of music recommended to you that doesn't match your preferences will not be of interest to you. But it might! High risk, high reward.

So I have a feature request for Spotify. It's not likely that they will leave the artificial space of music recommendation. It's truly a fantastic tool (side note, I'm so looking forward to the AI prompt playlist feature), but like with all products, there's room for improvement, so here's my proposal:

Looking at my saved music, my playlists, and my stats. My music taste likely doesn't make sense. It's all over the place, which is a good definition of how I'd define it myself. And I think there are many others like me, and many of those might have overlapping data with me. If there was another user our there that shared similar traits in their saved music, playlists and stats, let's say we have a 50 % overlap in some arbitrary metric, I would be HUGELY interested in listening to what that other 50 % was.

So I would love access to digital twins in Spotify. A way for me to browse other Spotify users, anonymised of course, to learn more about what they like. Perhaps even ways to sort and filter based on metrics, like show me best matches in a specific genre. Or find my a digital twin for a specific playlist. Or time of day.

This would allow Spotify to offer a human element. Crowdsourced automatically by it's users, to recommend music, to extend upon or beyond it's own algorithmic recommendations, to provide that much needed element of surprise.