D&T Issue 11

Hi! I hope you’ve been well. Here’s some bittersweet news, Christopher Nolan’s Tenet is now pushed indefinitely. It’s bitter because it was something I was looking forward to. It’s sweet because I said so.

Anyway, here’s the content we have been tossing around at Canvs this week.

Open AI brought us the Original GPT (Generative Pre-Training) language model in June of 2018. Last year they brought us GPT-2 and became notorious for claiming that they aren’t releasing the actual trained model because they believe there might too many misuses of the tech. People laughed at Open AI. This May/June they released GPT-3 and people have gone nuts at the things the monster can do just via some of the APIs Open AI has released. It can write code based on a one-liner request you put. It can draw UIs from Wireframes. It can converse with you as a celebrity of your choice. It shows common sense and can hold a conversation. Rightfully, people are losing it. Some have gone on to suggest its one of the biggest leaps in AI research we have seen recently. They aren’t simply in awe, they might be rationally reasonable in stating that

Fun link: Add a word in the URL slug and let GPT3 say something about it.

Fun link: Bunch of face-melting stuff the model is doing.

This might be a very interesting read of those involved in Insurance and Actuarial sectors. This drop in births rate is attributed more to lifestyle choices than health.

Have you wondered why we perceive sharper buttons and card styles differently than round ones? Maleficent has sharp features while Genie is a blob. Venom is visibly pointy while Spiderman isn’t so much.

The perception of a shape defines the psychological perception of its nature and what it stands for. There’s ages worth of research and testing behind it as well. Have a read!

Would you like to see how the surface of Kepler 16b feels? Take a look at this experience built by NASA to give us an essence of many of the exoplanets along with the famous JPL built retro posters of these destinations.

De-duplicating audiences in research findings, data portability, working with new privacy benchmarks, Neilsen is looking to change the way it is going to deliver it’s well trusted platform usage metrics. Readership/Usage Analytics for digital audiences is getting a much needed revamp. Read this article to get some insight on how Neilsen plans are for their new era of data analysis.

Elon Musk’s bet in Human-Machine symbiosis is finally seeing some light of the day. Neuralink’s tech is supposed to be a tiny hardware, a few millimetres wide to be injected via robotic surgery to become a high bandwidth brain-machine interface. They aim at solving major nerve disorders using this tech and hope to start trials by the end of the year.

With markets and digital products becoming more and more sophisticated, there is an ever-increasing need for the Product design to evolve in order to satisfy the growing needs of the market. Of course, it’s impossible to redesign the entire design process overnight, but it is possible to do it over time, iterating with the goal of making it better at each stage.

Tools like Figma, places like Fiverr and open education has allowed more heads to discuss Design and it’s deliverables. So does it make sense to have everyone be a part of the design process? Well no, there are experts for a reason. Well yes, otherwise you have vague requirements coming from a place of ignorance. The latter is a stronger point. There are more designers out there today, Design has come out to be a defining function in major organisations. This topic hits home for us. Have a read.

We don’t think much of badly designed, poorly written web pages and mobile apps. But the collective digital weight in terms of bandwidth consumed by loading pages and poor JS code has impact. This article deals with this otherwise very rarely written topic of digital obesity of our products.

What is the state of design pixel perfection today? What makes the same website look like another website? How do you make very subtle changes in HTML-CSS and ruin the visuals? This is an angst inducing topic. Someone has penned it down for you to finally breathe.