Pea Bee #9: Deep dark fear of typing on unfamiliar text input interfaces
Wordle
I too want to say a few words about Wordle. If you haven’t heard of it yet, which I very much doubt, I will suggest you go and play it right now. It’s a simple guess-the-word game that has taken over the internet. Here is the link.
You can only play it once every day and the word is the same for everyone, which is what made the game so viral. And I love the game’s unique share feature - it is beautifully done. It has the right amount of difficulty to make it challenging and is satisfying on solving it. Don’t mean to brag, (no, I am totally bragging!) I am on a 20-day winning streak as of today and it is something I look forward to every day.
There are no ads, no popups, no signups, no dark patterns.. he made something that is just meant to be for fun. And apparently, this has broken the minds of many tech bros. Here are some of the replies to the HN discussion on why is he not monetizing the game. It’s everything that’s wrong with the whole tech hustle culture, IMHO.
The same guy also created Reddit Place in the past, which is still one of my favourite internet things. I really recommend you to read about how cool this project was. It showed the true power of the internet community and what belonging to it is all about.
I read the interview that Josh Wardle did with TechCrunch. The way he speaks about what creating in tech means to him resonates a lot with me. Back in the early noughties, people made all sorts of things on the web, just for the sake of it. It’s amazing how accessible and open the web was back then for everyone to create. The same cannot be said about the current state of the web. Yes, I am looking at the past with my rosy goggles. So whenever I come across something really cool, that’s not trying to sell me anything, like this game, it really warms my heart. For me, using tech is a medium of expression, a tool to create cool things, and this is how I will always view it.
When I read the whole talk of web3 and crypto, I see so many people only here to try and make a quick buck out of the whole hype. I don’t mean to sound like a cynic or a progress adverse dinosaur. But I don’t see how these people who are leading the web3 and metaverse race are going to make the internet any better for anyone but themselves. Things, as they are, will change, and I can only hope the new web will remain open and accessible for everyone EQUALLY to create and express.
r/roomdetective
Every now and then, I keep finding a niche and obscure sub on some far corner of Reddit. One such sub is r/roomdetective. Where people post pictures of their rooms without any context. Then others have to do the detective work to figure out things about OP’s life who lives there. It’s fun and I discover so many cool and strange things people from different parts of the world keep in their rooms.
In a totally normal way, I love looking at pictures of other people’s work/study desk setups. In the WFH era, it has become even more interesting. I love to see the various things they keep on their desks, the tech accessories they use, the little personal touches they add to it, how messy it is (messier the better!).
One of the things that I keep on my table, and for which I massively overpaid, but absolutely love is a USB volume controller knob. I only need to press a key on my keyboard to change the volume but to do it by rotating this dial is very very satisfying.
The code editor
I love writing on my code editor. I use it not only to write code but also to write general text. The “is typing…” alert that the receiver gets whenever I am typing on chat apps such as WhatsApp/Slack/IG gives me low-key anxiety. It feels like the other person is watching over me while I type, waiting on me to finish typing and send my reply. Thinking about this breaks my brain and I lose my thread of thought.
I find that if I have to write a longer text, I like to first draft it from the comfort of my code editor and then paste it into the chat box. My editor feels like a safe, familiar and no-pressure zone to me. I am able to think better and more freely from the confines of my editor. Any other UI or text input box and I get that same uncomfortable feeling come over me. So there you go, I’ve shared with you my deep dark fear of typing on unfamiliar text input interfaces.
While we are on the topic of code editors, some time back I started using Github’s Copilot. It is an AI assistant that lives inside of my code editor and helps me in writing code. If my employer ever did an employee of the year kind of a thing, my vote will go to this AI assistant.
It has progressively become better and better since the time I installed it. I have now come to depend on it so much that if it generates something that does not look right, instead of doubting the AI, I first question myself. Did I do something wrong that the AI is not able to understand what I am trying to do here? And more often than not, it is me who is at fault.
I’ve recently found out, it’s not only great at assisting me with code but also good at general writing too. It sometimes helps me in drafting messages and if given the right prompt, pretty good at conversations too. And that’s why Github Copilot is also my friend of the year.
This makes me wonder, at what point does what I write stop becoming my own thoughts but those of the AI assistant that was trained on billions of words of text on the internet and comes with its own biases? Since GPT-3's release in 2020, there has been ever so blurring of the line between human and AI-generated texts, and it is only going to get blurrier.