Structure

I find it helpful to think about language models as a “squishy”...

What do I mean by “squishy”?

Language models feel like something organic and biological rather than something mechanical. It feels like we grew them, rather than built them.

...So given that these models are untamed, squishy, biological things, we have a core tension we need to navigate when we’re designing and building with them: squish vs. structure

We’re trying to make an unpredictable and opaque system adhere to our rigid expectations for how computers behave. We currently have a mismatch between our old and new mental models for computer systems.

A complex structure is a result of, and to a large extent a record of, its past. Though a proton and an electron may, as a pair, be able to spring full-panoplied from the head of Jove, more complex things cannot, or at least do not.

Everything complicated must have had a history, and its internal structural features arise from its history and provide a specific record of it. One might call these structural details of memory “funeous,” after the unfortunate character in Borge’s story “Funes the Memorious” who remembered everything.

In Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style, Virginia Tufte presents — and comments on — more than a thousand excellent sentences chosen from the works of authors in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The sentences come from an extensive search to identify some of the ways professional writers use the generous resources of the English language.

The book displays the sentences in fourteen chapters, each one organized around a syntactic concept-short sentences, noun phrases, verb phrases, appositives, parallelism, for example. It thus provides a systematic, comprehensive range of models for aspiring writers.

...To write is to bring structure to ideas, information, feelings. Here are many creative strategies, in a unique book that is informed, affirming, lively, and of lasting value.

I’ve always understood one reason why development-led products turn out the way they do (bad): developers get excited by making something work. That’s the payoff. Once it works, the motivation for everything else dries up.

Building Tootbox, I’ve realised another reason: developers think in data. When you’re looking at database fields and need to design a way for users to fill them, the easy way out is a form that maps inputs 1:1 with those fields. This makes for a very uninspired UI.

...I once read that almost all software is just displaying lists of items. This is true. Think about Twitter; you follow a list of users, those users have lists of tweets, and those tweets have lists of likes. It’s lists all the way down.

Developing an app that allows users to add to lists and then displaying those lists back to them isn’t hard — at least not at first. And because it’s not very hard, everything else about making the product successful gets more difficult. What’s the angle? How is it different than the next thing? Messaging, marketing, and design are key differentiators. The only real difference between Goodreads and Letterboxd is the niches they’ve chosen.

A Code Graph is a visual representation of a codebase as a Knowledge Graph that helps one explore entities in code (functions, variables, classes) and their relationships. By mapping out these connections, it becomes easier to understand the structure and flow of the code, identify potential issues, and improve overall code quality.

The concept of representing code as a graph data structure has its roots in the early days of software engineering when researchers explored ways to model and analyze program structure and behavior using graph-based techniques. Modern Code Graphs, incorporating Knowledge Graphs and Large Language Models (LLMs), are a recent development.

• Improved Understanding: Helps trace the flow of data through functions and identify interconnected components.
• Impact Analysis: Assesses the ripple effects of code changes, predicting potential issues before they arise.
• Autocompletion: Suggests relevant functions, variables, and types based on the current context.
• Code Search: Searches for functionalities not just by keywords, but by understanding the relationships between code elements.

Here's one way to think about how a Johnny.Decimal system works. In this simple analogy, an area is a shelf, a category is a box, and an ID is a manila folder.

Step 1: Buy ten shelves
Step 2: Add some boxes
Step 3: File your stuff in folders

...Let's return to our computer. The shelves have become our area folders. The boxes are category folders. And the manila folders are the IDs where we save our files.

Benefits:

• It provides structure
• They're easy to communicate
• Things stay where they are
• It imposes limits (The 'no more than ten' concept is at the heart of Johnny.Decimal)

We believe this is the most general data structure, able to replace tables, arrays, spreadsheet and relational database, and intrinsically offering built-in visualizations and hands-on controls.
That structure we call zzstructure, or hyperthogonal structure. Like a table it is composed of cells which are connected in rows and at right angles. But there are no overall spatial coordinates.

In a conventional table, the bottom of one cell is connected to the top of another, the left side of once cell is connected to the right side of another.

We generalize this, and say the top of any cell can be connected to the bottom of any cell, and the left edge of any cell can be connected to the right edge of any cell.

...You may think of hyperthogonal structure as:

• sculptures of cells in three dimensions or more
• crossed lists in multiple dimensions
• irregular constructions of cells at right angles and side-by-side
• crystals of lists in corresponding connection

Overlap alone does not give structure. It can also give chaos. A garbage can is full of overlap. To have structure, you must have the right overlap.

This, I think, is the brilliance of Notion, and what makes it one of the best examples of “fidelity to digital information” that I’ve come across. The structure of the app reflects the structure of the web itself: digital content is purposefully formatted, like semantic HTML elements, and exists in a hierarchical structure (directories on the web, nested pages in Notion), yet can be linked and referenced to create a complex network of information. And pages in Notion reveal the structure of the information: when nesting a page within a page, the child page always displays on the parent page. There’s no way to create a child page that doesn’t display on a parent page, no way to obscure the structure of the information. The semantic structure of Notion reflects the semantic structure of the web itself.

Is grammar prescriptive and conventional, something one learns to impose on language through trial and error? Or do sentences, in a sense, diagram themselves, revealing an innate logic and latent structure in language and the mind? More than a century before Noam Chomsky popularized the idea of a universal grammar, linguists in the United States began diagramming sentences in an attempt to visualize the complex structure — of seemingly divine origins — at their mother tongue’s core.

Designing UI is designing an organization.

You can only design and make real a UI that matches an organization’s capabilities to deliver on its promise.

This is why startups are best suited to these kinds of radical UIs tailored to reality. Their entire organizational structure, which is small, can orient around a single idea and deliver on it — then build to scale.

Your UIs, and the real life experiences they deliver, can only ever be as good as an organization’s capabilities to deliver on them.

I see in the complex structure of any material—biological or geological, natural or artificial—a record of its history, a history of many individual events each of which did predictably follow physical principles. Nothing containing more than a few parts appears full panoplied, but it grows. And as it grows, the advancing interface leaves behind a pattern of structure perfection or imperfection which is both a record of historical events and a framework within which future ones must occur.

The nineteenth century saw an increasing separation between the treatment of the surface and the structure of designed objects. Mass production and a mobile market economy encouraged the production of heavily ornamented yet cheaply fabricated products. Affordable manufacture allowed the burgeoning middle class to acquire “luxury” goods fashioned after objects formerly reserved for an elite.

[We observed that] most people just used Excel to make lists. Suddenly we understood why Lotus Improv, which was this fancy futuristic spreadsheet that was going to make Excel obsolete, had failed completely: because it was great at calculations, but terrible at creating tables, and everyone was using Excel for tables, not calculations.

Bing! A light went off in my head.

The great horizontal killer applications are actually just fancy data structures.

Spreadsheets are not just tools for doing “what-if” analysis. They provide a specific data structure: a table. Most Excel users never enter a formula. They use Excel when they need a table. The gridlines are the most important feature of Excel, not recalc.

Word processors are not just tools for writing books, reports, and letters. They provide a specific data structure: lines of text which automatically wrap and split into pages.

PowerPoint is not just a tool for making boring meetings. It provides a specific data structure: an array of full-screen images.

Architecture equals structure. Design is also important, but structure is the basis of architecture.

By taking the good aspects of both traditional and conventional construction methods, we assemble it securely...So the reason we lay out the marking lines, and carve by hand, is to utilize the good aspects of wood framing from the past when building contemporary wood-framed structures.

Everything that we can see, everything that we can understand, is related to structure, and, as the gestalt psychologists have so beautifully shown, perception itself is in patterns, not fragments. All awareness or mental activity seems to involve the comparison of a sense or thought pattern with a preexisting one, a pattern formed in the brain’s physical structure by biological inheritance and the imprint of experience. Could it be that aesthetic enjoyment is the formation of a kind of moiré pattern between a newly sensed experience and the old; between the different parts of a sensed pattern transposed in space and in orientation and with variations in scale and time by the marvelous properties of the brain?

It is what is left over when what is expected has been canceled out.

Put together with odd bits of the useless Clarice, a survivors’ Clarice was taking shape, all huts and hovels, festering sewers, rabbit cages. And yet, almost nothing was lost of Clarice’s former splendor; it was all there, merely arranged in a different order, no less appropriate to the inhabitants’ needs than it had been before.

Most objects which we are accustomed to call beautiful, such as a painting or a tree, are single-purpose things, in which, through long development or the impress of one will, there is an intimate, visible linkage from fine detail to total structure.

The idea of overlap, ambiguity, multiplicity of aspect, and the semilattice are not less orderly than the right tree, but more so. They represent a thicker, tougher, more subtle and more complex view of structure.

Almost all fields today are concerned in one way or another with hierarchical structure, and a theory, or perhaps more usefully a metaphor, common to all may emerge if the features of many are compared.

Though the units in different fields are different, in all of them meaning comes through communication: patterns of communication are common to all, with aggregation leading to diversity or unity, and the clumps of unity themselves serving in turn as units in larger structrures based on more complex but still direct communication.

You've been taught to overlook the character of the prose in front of you in order to get at its meaning.
You overlook the shape of the sentence itself for the meaning it contains,
Which means that while you were reading,
All those millions of words passed by
Without teaching you how to make sentences.

The resistant virtues of the structure that we make depend on their form; it is through their form that they are stable and not because of an awkward accumulation of materials. There is nothing more noble and elegant from an intellectual viewpoint than this; resistance through form.