Hey there! Hope you’ve been well.
One of the reasons this newsletter hardly feels like work to us is because it is a simple compilation of things that we talk about through the week at Canvs. Another reason is that it gives us a chance to brag about our big brains.
So here are a few links that are indicative of why when we indulge in humour its only high brow.
All (popular) things that are false about programming, art, business, education, geogrpay, emails, identity and whatnot. What a compilation.
“We are here because the editor of this magazine asked me, ‘Can you tell me what code is?” Experience this stellar article explaining the fundamentals of computer science that nearly anyone can understand (and enjoy). Paul Ford, a guest technology writer at Bloomerg had spent 3 months designing and developing this enthralling interactive masterpiece.
“Covid-19 is like a burglar who slips in your unlocked second-floor window and starts to ransack your house. Once inside, though, they donβt just take your stuff β they also throw open all your doors and windows so their accomplices can rush in and help pillage more efficiently.”
A genetic study of COVID-19 patients, powered by the Summit supercomputer, may have taken us a step towards understanding how the new coronavirus causes disease. While the machine is the second-fastest computer in the world, the process required it to analyse 2.5 billion genetic combinations β a feat that took over two weeks. Its results pointed to the fact that bradykinin, a natural chemical compound that regulates blood pressure, could explain many facets of COVID-19 and some of its symptoms.
Icons are an omni-present in all UI designs, may it be Mobile or Web. The article discusses some subtle approaches to tweak the usage of icons to maximize conversion and improve overall user experience
User onboarding is a crucial part of the design process and it is particularly one where different teams need to collaborate with designers in order to produce effective experiences. Here’s a list of some mistakes your design teams should avoid while creating onboardings.
Arduino, the company best known for open-source hardware is making TinyML available for millions of developers, and now together with Edge Impulse, they are turning the ubiquitous Arduino board into a powerful embedded ML platform, like the Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense and other 32-bit boards. TinyML gives small devices the ability to make smart decisions without needing to send data to the cloud. In a recent showcase, Edge Impulse and Arduino published a project that had the power and simplicity of running TinyML on an Arduino Nano BLE Sense that can detect the presence of specific coughing sounds in real-time audio, including a dataset of coughing and background noise samples, and applied a highly optimized TinyML model, to build a cough detection system that runs in under 20 kB of RAM on the Nano BLE Sense.
We often wondered when it will be possible to zoom in/cut out specific sounds from real environments. FB’s Reality Labs has developed tech that allows headsets to enhance targeted sounds while dimming loud background noises. At the moment, the technology exists as an in-ear monitor that pairs with an eye-movement tracking device.
Jigsaw is a unit within Google that intends to keep people informed about the rising threats in our modern world which are evolving and morphing with technology as an enabler. Jigsaw intends to spread information and hence use technology as a force of good. These are threats like Disinformation, Harassment, Violent Extremism etc.
Here’s a website that shows business ideas being generated by GPT. Don’t be bogged down, we all know ideas are worth pennies. What matters is whether you act on them.
Have you seen the Glob on Stripe’s website? Apparently, before a recent release when Patrick Collison asked his team: “what would you build if you had the time to do it the way you wish you could?” The team ended up building the rotating globe showing the global connections made via Stripe as a financial service. Why a globe? It occupies approximately 17% of a Map’s spread, is more realistic and is really cool to explore when animated. The designers used three.js for this. Great read, 100% recommended for builders.
Hope you have a great week ahead!