2026-10-02 18:44:09
It has been a whole ten minutes since posting a color selection tool, so here is another. Phosphor by Joshua Stevens lets you enter hex colors and get a gradient with the gaps filled in between. Made with chroma.js, there are some familiar options, such as color space and color deficiency previews.
Tags: color, gradient, Joshua Stevens
2026-10-02 18:34:57
OKpalette is a tool to grab a color palette from an image. Load the image in the browser, set the number of colors, and define a region in the image and you get a collection of shades. Images stay on your computer and the color picking is in-browser. Nifty.
There will never be enough color-picking tools.
2026-10-01 19:20:18
Over summer break, MIT installed over 500 AI-enabled surveillance cameras around campus. In an act of defiance celebration, professors started a group to bedazzle the cameras.
That said, if any students, staff, or faculty still have pesky concerns about this unprecedented ratcheting-up of campus surveillance, now you know that there’s a committee to contact with complaints. Or, you could join us, the cheerful bedazzlers, by celebrating the beauty of our beholdenness to Big Brother Tech. Do you feel proud to be involved in the capitalist project of improving Ambient.ai’s services and enriching surveillance for all people, everywhere? Do you patriotically embrace the fact that Ambient.ai shares the data they collect with government and law enforcement when they receive subpoenas, without needing to ask or tell the institutions from whom they collected it? If so, there are hundreds of white plastic eyelids out there awaiting artistic adornment to enhance their visibility even as they enhance ours!
In sum, we thank our glorious administration for their brilliant technical solution to a social problem. This is how it should be, because all social and political problems definitely have a technical solution, and usually we just need to pay for something involving AI rather than have an open discussion as a community (what a waste of time that would be!).
2026-10-01 19:04:53
This is No. 408 of the Process. I’m Nathan Yau, and I’m hanging out somewhere in the middle of start and finish. This week is about finding your way by getting lost in the data.
Become a member for access to this — plus tutorials, courses, and guides.
2026-09-30 17:18:47
Large language models are heavily dependent on training data to determine what comes next in a series of choices. So when there is limited data for a given situation, the choices grow more uncertain. However, as Aatish Bhatia explains, this can lead to output that is “confidently wrong” instead of a highlighting random guesses.
Bhatia uses a puzzle (that you can play) to demonstrate training, processing, and the guesswork that brings you to the jagged boundary of a model’s accuracy. The boundary is surprisingly at the beginner level.
Tags: Aatish Bhatia, puzzle, training
2026-09-29 19:17:17
For NYT Opinion, Giorgia Lupi argues that the best ideas come from getting lost:
The same is true for a great recipe, a great story or even a thoughtful PowerPoint presentation. A.I. may be (mostly) accurate, but it’s not considerate. The greatest contributions to humanity — art, inventions, even products — show evidence of people who got lost in a problem and came out the other side with an idea they would not have found otherwise. That does not happen by taking a shortcut to the center. It happens in the detours.
AI promotes skipping to the answer, which is useful when the problem is well-defined and the solution is concrete. But even then, you’re missing out on the in between.
Christoph Niemann shared a similar sentiment last year with art: “Automating the creation of art is like automating life, so you can make it to the finish line faster.” Terence Tao said similar with mathematics.
Lupi, Niemann, and Tao all use generative AI tools in their process. Just not for the ideas and pathfinding.
Tags: Giorgia Lupi, New York Times, process
