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
There is a concept in physics called resonance. In lay terms, it describes the fact that for any given object there are natural frequencies at which the object “likes to vibrate”. A simple pendulum’s natural frequency is the rate at which it swings back and forth; if you wiggle the pendulum at the same frequency, the pendulum will swing farther and higher, but if your movements don’t match its own natural rhythm, it will only dampen the swing instead.| 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