Some software interfaces are windows into collections of features. The Uber app, for example, literally opens with a screen full of buttons, each of which take you to a different screen with yet more buttons and inputs. Google Search is also built with features – inputs, buttons, and links that take you to different capabilities in the app – as the building block. In both of these cases, there are a few clear and obvious tasks the user wants to accomplish when they open the app. In the ca...| thesephist.com
A big library holds a kind of strange faux-infinity, spanning across hundreds of topics with voices from millions of authors. Good libraries can contain in their finite space a feeling that, even if you read for centuries and centuries, you would never exhaust the knowledge contained within their walls, not only because there are simply so many books, but because there’s so much to learn when you take the ideas from one book as a lens through which to read others. Infinities assembled out o...| thesephist.com
Suppose you’re a product engineer working on an app that needs to understand natural language. Maybe you’re trying to understand human-language questions and provide answers, or maybe you want to understand what humans are talking about on social media, to group and categorize them for easier browsing. Today, there is no shortage of tools you may reach for to solve this problem. But if you have a lot of money, a lot of compute hardware, and you’re feeling a little adventurous, you may f...| thesephist.com
When I get stuck on a really hard problem, whether it’s some impossible bug in my code or my sofa not fitting through my front door on moving day, I close my eyes and … think really hard. Somewhere behind my shut eyelids and confused eyeballs, things are happening. Electricity is flowing through the vat of brain-stuff and spindly wires that somehow make up my thought process, and for a few seconds, they just kind of do their thing. Until, if I’m lucky, an answer pops into my head a few ...| thesephist.com
Monocle is a full text search engine indexed on my personal data, like my blog posts and essays, nearly a decade of journal entries, notes, contacts, Tweets, and hopefully more in the future, like emails and web browsing history. It lets me query this entire dataset to look for anything I’ve seen or written about before, and acts as a true “extended memory” for my entire life.| thesephist.com