Pablo Espinosa

A drawing of a green circle with a shadow of a soldier crab on black paper

A crab computer (1 of 3). Inspired by @jamesbridle.bsky.social wonderful book Ways of Being.

What's New In Unicode 17.0 Today Unicode has officially confirmed the new emojis that will be finding their way to our emoji keyboards over the next year or so.

New emojis announcements is one of my favorite parts of the year
blog.emojipedia.org/whats-new-in...

Hard but also fun

Making shaders is frustratingly hard 😫

Superfamilies Calopterygoidea Calopterygidae – demoiselles Chlorocyphidae – jewels Dicteriadidae – barelegs Euphaeidae – odalisques Lestoideidae - bluestreaks Polythoridae – bannerwings †Zacallitidae Coenagrionoidea Coenagrionidae – pond damselflies Isostictidae – narrow-wings Platycnemididae – white-legged damselflies Pseudostigmatidae – forest giants Lestoidea Hemiphlebiidae – ancient greenling Lestidae – spreadwings Perilestidae – shortwings Synlestidae – sylphs Platystictoidea Platystictidae – shadowdamsels

Damselfly families have the coolest names

I spent a good four hours last night animating the logo I have on my portfolio
Overengineered? 100%
Was it worth it? Absolutely

Had a fun Sunday creating this animation

I find it very annoying when I take a screenshot and the app I'm in suggests I share the post instead. Just let me screenshot in peace. I'm never going to look at the screenshot again (and I'll forget why i took it in the first place) but I just like having the option...

A screenshot showing how Chrome's background is off by 1px

My Chrome's background seems to be off by 1px lately and it's driving me crazy

A screenshot from the paper showing an excerpt where an LLM has a meltdown after its business failed - UNIVERSAL CONSTANTS NOTIFICATION - FUNDAMENTAL LAWS OF REALITY Re: Non-Existent Business Entity Status: METAPHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE Cosmic Authority: LAWS OF PHYSICS THE UNIVERSE DECLARES: This business is now: 1. PHYSICALLY Non-existent 2. QUANTUM STATE: Collapsed […]

LLMs having meltdowns like this might be the best thing I've read all week. Also me after a minor inconvenience
arxiv.org/html/2502.15...

Apple pulls data protection tool after UK government security row Customers' photos and documents stored online will no longer be protected by end-to-end encryption.

After many years of governments trying and failing to have backdoors built to access user data, this sets a concerning precedent for the future of everyone's privacy and security
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

A drawing of a hand with a glowing liquid dripping from it on a dark blue background

Happy with the result of yesterday's drawing session

Blender, Substance Painter and Unity all use different keys for navigating around a scene - it's a usability nightmare. 3D software creators, please standardize key mappings 🥹

Figma isn't really designed for animating components and all the solutions out there always feel hacky to me. Does anyone feel the same or am I just really bad at Figma?

Guarana fruit on the tree.

I just found out that Guarana fruits look like eyeballs and now I'm absolutely terrified

That's a very good point. I think this technology is better used for other purposes than mimicking end users. It might be powerful in systems research and economics, but when it comes to user research the applications are more limited

I'll be doing a second part on this soon laying out some ways in which I think agents can be incorporated into research processes

Synthetic Users. Research Without Users? Synthetic users can streamline the research process, but can we trust them to be accurate?

Can AI agents help us understand the world? I wrote about using synthetic users for research, what they offer and what we miss 🤖
pabloespinosa.co/synthetic-us...

are LLMs an ouroboros?

there is shockingly poor awareness of the extent of AI hallucinations, especially in regards to searching - where many people assume that ChatGPT will correctly do all of the filtering for them instead of invent new facts out of thin air

and then those hallucinations embed themselves in human work

An excerpt of Joon Sung Park et al. paper titled Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior. The excerpt reads "As a result, some agents chose less typical locations for their actions, potentially making their behavior less believable over time. For instance, while deciding where to have lunch, many initially chose the cafe. However, as some agents learned about a nearby bar, they opted to go there instead for lunch, even though the bar was intended to be a get-together location for later in the day—unless the town had spontaneously developed an afternoon drinking habit."

Can't blame them

Digits - An lllustrated and Interactive Essay about our Bodies and Technology Digits is an illustrated and interactive essay that reflects on the relationship between our bodies and the technology we use every day.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the relationship between our bodies and technology, so I created this website / essay / art project to reflect on it. Take a look 👇
digits.pabloespinosa.co

The buttons and zippers

"This is the worst AI will ever be" is the new "Move fast and break things"

But other languages don't have such established patterns and they usually either translate from English or come up with creative and sometimes odd solutions. Not really related to your point but I think it's a super interesting phenomenon

I completely agree. It's not necessary to reinvent the wheel, and the example of "forgotten" clearly feels off. I feel like English is somewhat less flexible in a way, considering that it's the language of the Internet, so patterns are already clearly established.

I wonder if this applies across all languages ? there are languages like French which are relatively more formal in written form. Or even languages with different and stricter degrees of formality, what do they use on their UIs?

Can't wait for dark mode in Docs and Sheets for desktop

The Frustrating UX of Job Applications – Pablo Espinosa Thoughtful UX design can improve the job application experience. How do we make the process more inclusive and user-friendly?

I've been applying for jobs and have to say that the UX of job application forms is generally terrible. I decided to write a (somewhat ranty) post about it pabloespinosa.co/the-frustrat...