This is Robin Sloan’s lab notebook. It’s about media and technology, creative computing, AI aesthetics, & more. Here's the RSS feed. My email address: robin@robinsloan.com
Today’s “ask for what you want”: a rich visual research report on “box logics” in print media, from the beginning of time until today. I’ll put my full prompt in a details element below. The short version is: I am interested in a broad family of graphic design ideas, and I wanted an AI agent to fetch me examples.
No particular sense of “best practices” here — I share the prompt only because it can be interesting to see how other people approach this. As usual, I put mine in its own little file, RESEARCH-IDEA.md, and I spent 5-10 minutes writing it. I find this more effective and frankly tolerable than plunging directly into a back-and-forth with an AI agent.
Here it is.
We’re working on some refreshed design concepts for use across both print and web, for a series of books AND stationery items that are accompanied by a ton of web content.
Here are some threads of inspiration, in no particular order.
One is the book cover system used decades ago by Faber & Faber, with example PNG files in this dir. Note the simple stacked boxes, the way they become the visual anchor placed over rich, full-bleed images.
Another is TV guide grid layouts — the interesting sort of information design that emerges from the need to show all these different channels, streams, of information.
A third is “nerdy data displays” on things like baseball cards, comic book character guides, the backs of toy boxes, collectible trading card games … anything that wants to show you “the stats”, whether real or fictional.
Yet another one is 1980s and 1990s computer GUI designs, especially those with hard corners and edges. NeXTSTEP is an example.
Here’s what appeals to us about these “box logics”:
They go against the grain of modern “round, friendly” digital design. The right angle! The hard corner!
They offer an extensible system for different needs and contexts.
They can easily “float above” richer graphical content – as seen in the Faber & Faber book covers. Our materials WILL be highly graphic, so having a design scheme that’s more sober, minimal, even severe, makes for a nice mix.
I should stipulate, we’ll be using these grid systems essentially in the context of “covers”, both in print and on the web … putting the key data about a content item into these boxes: title, author, publication date, other little fun bits of metadata, taglines, summary lines, etc. AT THE SAME TIME, it should “scale” to handle other forms of information … metadata at the bottom of a web page, the content on a book’s copyright page, etc. The point however is that these materials aren’t going to wall-to-wall grids. This will be a tool used sparingly, but always in the spotlight.
Okay that’s are starting point. We’re interested in doing a few things. The outputs here will be standalone web page reports with a focus on visual examples.
Here’s what we want:
A comprehensive survey of “box logics” across print media, going back as far in time as we can. We are looking for hi-res, useful visual examples of things including baseball scores, stock market reports, TV guide listings (as mentioned) … anything and everything that “puts text and data in a neat little box”. Tabular data, too. Let’s dig up a TON of good/interesting examples. This survey should be global — be aggressive about searching beyond English!
A survey of flexible grid-based graphic design in digital systems specifically — various UIs, GUIs, OSes, tiling window managers, etc. So, this is the “digital / screen-based” analog to the print research run above.
Finally, a “what if?” exercise, one that combines our starting impulses with the results of #1 and #2 above and synthesizes them into some weird/wacky ideas about potential box logics, grid systems, etc. Creative formulations and applications. Notions that take my assignment here and sort of twist it through another dimension. These should be live HTML/CSS as appropriate. Expect the unexpected! You get it.
Okay, that’s a good bundle of work. Please research very widely and take your time. Ask me any questions needed, then proceed with the project.
I recommend setting these kinds of queries to run overnight, so you can enjoy the results over coffee in the morning. (My overnight computer grind, years ago, was language model training runs. In the morning, I’d see how low the loss had dropped, generate some sample output. We’ve come full circle.)
You’ll find it’s like reading a little magazine, just for you. Is it the world’s best magazine? No. Is it weirder and more specific than any magazine could ever be? Yes! I prefer local web pages, HTML files on my laptop, to Claude’s “artifacts” or any other proprietary format.
I’m now reviewing mine, and already I’ve discovered something new to me, that I’m sure I wouldn’t have found on my own: the banzuke, a graphic grid used to display sumo rankings, widely adapted (and parodied) in Japanese graphic design.
Is this a world-shaking discovery? No. Yet my view towards research in books has always been that one single, gleaming, new idea — or scrap of language — or salient image — justifies a book’s entire purchase, and the time it took to read it. That’s clearly a writer’s calculus; we build new work from those scraps. In that view, I’ve already gotten my salient image from this report, and there’s still more to digest, so we’ll call it a smash success.
The “creative” part of the report fits a familiar pattern: there’s nothing I’d ever actually use, but I still find it productive to consider the agent’s work … the way any combinatorial or even quasi-random exploration can be productive. In your assessments — “That’s so dopey … ”—you discover your own opinions and ideas.
Goes without saying, any of these reports should be treated as definitionally incomplete — plenty of the really good stuff isn’t available online. Even so: what a cool magazine!
Gemini 3.7 Flash is now deprecated and no longer available as an independent model in the Gemini API and Google AI Studio. All traffic is automatically redirected to Gemini 3.8 Flash.
I could be wrong, but I don’t believe there was any advance warning about this.
I assume the justification here is that 3.8 Flash is, as they say in trading card games, “a strict upgrade”—i.e. there’s no situation in which 3.7 Flash is better than 3.8 Flash. And yet … how would they know?? The whole value of these models is that they are useful in a breathtaking variety of contexts … so, who’s to say there isn’t some niche application that just broke, because 3.8 Flash has a subtly different opinion of pictures of radishes than reliable old radish-loving 3.7?
I will note that 3.7 was introduced in early August. It was barely two months old. (Update: I just received the same notification about 3.5, which now redirects to 3.6.)
I don’t know … I wonder sometimes if any of these companies really expect anybody to build anything on top of these models at all. If all you’re doing is yakking with a coding agent: easy enough. But if you’re using them programmatically, as steps or gates in a larger process, their organic complexity makes the concept of “a breaking change” basically impossible to reckon. Who knows? Who can know?? Nobody.
I suppose the really AGI-pilled response is, so what? If it breaks, get 3.8 Flash to fix it.
Forty years after its imagining, cyberpunk has arrived, emphatically, totally for real. The configuration of global power is different than the cyberpunks imagined — in a way, it’s less interesting — but the tech is even better. Ghosts of language in the machine; recalcitrant bot swarms; gleaming nodes of compute, dense with possibility.
I’m still running the “deep learning rig” I built back in 2016. Its three Titan X GPUs (purchased used on eBay; hot shit at the time) can run some of the smaller language models, barely, and very slowly, so I don’t bother, allocating my precious 36 gigabytes instead to more playful applications. Art stuff. My rig, called clash—get it? … of Titans? — is big and black, as functional and unlovely as I could make it. I invited an AI agent to poke around the server the other day. I didn’t really understand how many digital-archaeological traces remained littered around the system; the agent’s reaction was, basically, “Damn, you’ve been up to some weird stuff in here … ”
Slabs of compute running hot in offices, basements, dorm rooms … not a new thing, exactly, but their capabilities are new — their inhabitants are new — and the whole scene is just great. Exciting and strange. Gleaming and haunted. Pile on the adjectives, the vibes: it’s somehow all richer and weirder than anybody ever dreamed in 1984.
P.S. Somehow Oxide fits into this too, even though that particular gleaming node isn’t for AI …
Today’s “ask for what you want”: a simple one-page web app to explore all the parameters of a supercool variable font. (Font not linked because I might use it for something and I don’t want to give it away yet.) Variable fonts offer tons of expressive potential, but, in my usual design setups — Photoshop and/or a block of CSS — I find it difficult to explore the “possibility space”. In fact, I barely use variable fonts at all, mainly for this reason!
But, I found this particular font very compelling, if a bit confusing … so, I asked an AI agent to make me a little one-page app, not for exploring any/all variable fonts, but for this one in particular.
The process was fast, simple, and revelatory: tinkering with the parameters, even animating them, I was able to find my way to the look I wanted. Pretty cool.
The olive harvest is here, so I am not available for interesting SF events until 2027, BUT, if I was, I’d be going to this: a small symposium on “character design” in language models, discussing and exploring the alternatives beyond “helpful assistant”. It’s hosted by the enigmatic Moving Castles, terrific.
If I was experimenting with new/weird language model characters, I think I’d use Talkie as my starting point …
Update on the Cloudflare Cache API dilemma documented here: the model of Worker as web server is so light and clean and appealing that I have decided to accept its limitations, and embrace the brutal simplicity of “purge everything” 😌
The Chinese tech ecosystem is closed, for two compounding reasons. First, B2B SaaS never worked in China, so there is very little shared surface for work in the first place. Second, every company competes with every other company, and there is a real fear that if any company touches another’s data it will be “eaten.” The consequence is that there is nothing for an agent to practice on.
And then, the other side of the coin:
This matters to anyone building here: the American interoperability we treat as a convenience is actually [an AI] training asset. Open APIs made integrations easier; they also create the environment for agents to learn in. That is not a gap that closes by spending more on post-training. It closes only if the underlying ecosystem opens, and the underlying ecosystem is closed for reasons that are competitive and structural rather than technical.
(Emphasis his.)
I think often about the contingent developments that made AI agents of the LLM variety possible at all. Among them: the development of an open web, which is to say a scrapable web. The internet absolutely didn’t have to be this way — it could easily have been a giant AOL, a massive Minitel. In many ways, those shapes would have been more consistent with tech history. Also: the success of open source, which larded that open web with huge piles of code to study. Again, this wasn’t destiny, and as recently as the 1990s would have seemed improbable.
Based on David’s note, I might now add a third lucky stroke: the relative ubiquity of open APIs. Really, what it means is, “Web 2.0” came home to roost at last — its ultimate value totally unforeseen in the 2000s, bigger than anyone could have imagined.
In my last post, I talked about the fun of making native macOS apps with AI agents. I have made a few macOS apps before, all on my own, but I found the process very taxing; I simply don’t know the idiom. But, I love a good, simple, fast desktop app! So this new power has been very exciting.
And, it has made me think: one could, at last, acquire a stupid, brilliant, dorky, glorious Vision Pro … and escape the trap of “there are no interesting apps, because there aren’t enough users, because there are no interesting apps” … by simply making one’s own. I am 100% sure the AI agents would bang this out. The process would be more “collaborative” (cybernetic scare quotes) because the AI agents would have a tough time “seeing” what was happening in the app. But … good! That’s a better process, anyway.
I imagine adding a third app to my custom notetaking collection, a labyrinth of ideas to explore in 3D …
I am not really going to do this. I don’t need more gear, or more notes apps, for that matter. Maybe, MAYBE, if Apple discontinued the Vision Pro, and if it therefore became a strange, high-tech relic, forever ahead of its time … a 2020s DeLorean, the better to build a time machine … maybe then.
This is an update to my post about apps as home-cooked meals, which has found a large audience over the years. That post, published in February 2020, discussed personal software, designed and built in different ways, for different reasons, than industrial apps.
What’s changed between 2020 and today? Oh, just the entire process and practice of computer programming. Here, right up front, I decree: building a personal app with the help of AI agents still totally counts as “home cooking”. You’re no longer grinding the flour by hand; fine. This is a cool development. You do still have to make the meal taste good, and this still requires care and effort. Fine.
The AI industry’s immediate future has more to do with exotic finance and gnarly politics than the underlying technology. I’m not invested in that future; most days, I think a minor bust would be a good thing. But, that underlying technology, in its development and flourishing this past year — yes, really that recently — is profound. It reframes computing entirely, replaces a stack of API reference docs with this simple invitation:
