THOM — Thomas Valadez
AI Factory
Three foundations converge into the Knowledge Factory, then branch into ontology and cognition.
Laws
A working set of principles for designing interfaces, software systems, organizations, and intelligent tools.
View all lawsAesthetic-Usability Effect
Users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as design that’s more usable.
Cognitive Load
The amount of mental resources needed to understand and interact with an interface.
Hick’s Law
The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices.
Law of Uniform Connectedness
Elements that are visually connected are perceived as more related than elements with no connection.
Conway’s Law
Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it.
Goodhart’s Law
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Gall’s Law
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked — a complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched to work.
Shannon’s Information Theorem
The information in a message equals the surprise of its outcome — the negative logarithm of its probability — and entropy is the expected surprise of a source.
The Bitter Lesson
General-purpose methods that exploit scale keep defeating clever domain-specific tricks — the bitter lesson researchers relearn with every generation of AI.
Garbage In, Garbage Out
The quality of a system’s output is bounded by the quality of its input — bad data or bad prompts produce bad results, no matter how good the machinery.
Curse of Knowledge
Once you know something, it becomes nearly impossible to imagine not knowing it — so experts misjudge what novices can understand.
Second Law of Thermodynamics
In an isolated system, entropy never decreases — disorder tends to grow, and useful work is what it costs to push against that tendency.