Safer Centaurs
Making artifacts, whilst building a toolbox.
I am exploring how to use AI better. I find for example that AI blurs concepts. New ideas tend to be reduced down to more mainstream versions, unless you keep pushing at the novel aspects.
AI excels at software. I built the code on this site with a great deal of assistance from AI. In the blog posts here I explain exactly how I did this, what worked and what didn't.
As well as working on the code I also discuss various topics with LLMs: Mars colonization, graphics that morph, machine-tools design. I talk about some of these discussions in these posts.
The LLMs are great at surfacing information. They work as 'a better web search'. Their logical reasoning about what they find is currently so-so. So this is a good opportunity for human-ai dyads, the AI to search and bring things together, the human to guide the process and wrap some better reasoning around what they find.
A year or so ago it was tenable to say 'AI is not creative'. Nowadays it no longer is. AI clearly can assemble original new combinations of things, and blend those combinations together nicely. Defining what AI can do well and what it can't, what kind of creativity it is capable of, has now become a more nuanced thing.
Better diagrams help with education, and they help with science too. AI provides an opportunity to rethink how we make our diagrams. With AI assistance our experiments flow more smoothly.
The diagram work in Safer Centaurs is proceeding via AI constructed spike solutions, small demos which are then worked up to be composable.
Making a Bar Chart morph into a Stream Graph; Making a visual correspondence between Heat Map and Sankey Flow. We can unify bar charts, heat maps and Sankey flows, treating Sankey as the unifying visual metaphor.
I didn't want to upload lots of different mp3 files. Instead I wanted to generate short simple sound effect client side. This is the result.
Finding the box drawing
│,├, ─,└
symbols and putting them together to make a tree pattern is fiddly and takes time - a perfect challenge for a small tool. Claude one-shotted it with a single prompt.
The LCARS user interface from Star Trek TNG actually has some desirable properties as a user interface.
AIs struggle with understanding shapes. Here I got Claude to make tags with the end shapes I wanted.
Cards are a fundamental part of the big diagram making code project I am working on. Here a spike solution begins to rework the card ideas, via a clicker-style Mars-base game.
This spike solution exploration is also part of exploring visual ways to track resource exchanges. The code co-produced with AI is a small step in progressing a card based dashboard.