Government hopes the measure will ensure adequate domestic availability of rice, wheat and atta; it plans to bring down reserve price of rice by ₹200 a quintal, which will now be ₹2,900 a quintal

Hemant Sikka says the farm machinery industry is expected to grow from ₹9,200 crores in financial year 2022 to ₹15,000 crores in financial year 2026.

Farmers associated with as many as 16 farmer outfits from the States Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Uttarakhand would be participating

Traders claimed the central government's decision to impose 40% duty on the export of onions till December 31, 2023 will adversely affect the onion growers and its export

Food Secretary assures to curb price rise during festive season

A look at the various limits and bans on wheat and rice stocks and exports in the recent past, and their impact

The multi-state cooperative has so far earned Rs. 22 crore profit from April during the current financial year

Once a ubiquitous beast of burden, the donkey is slowly making its way out of oblivion in Tiruchi as the global beauty industry discovers the benefits of its milk

Farmers are afraid to go to the fields because of sporadic firing by armed miscreants from higher grounds 

Currently, the MSP on wheat stands at ₹2,125 per quintal for the 2023-24 marketing season (April-March).

The decision was informed by Information and Broadcasting Minister Anurag Thakur after the Cabinet meeting

Production of pulses, some coarse cereals and groundnut seen likely hitting a 3-year low as per initial independent crop estimates; rice, cereals seen buoying overall output this season

After dominating the region’s electoral stage for almost a decade, turmeric has lost its sheen; the PM’s announcement of a National Turmeric Board has not satisfied farmers, who also ask for MSP

On August 19, the Union government imposed a 40% duty on the export of onions until December 31,

Ministry directs all wheat stocking entities to register on government’s wheat stock limit portal and update the stock position every Friday

Growers in Punjab are worried over the drop in prices in the ongoing season and have demanded State intervention; many fear that they won’t be able to recover input cost

A higher MSP will not only ensure better remunerative returns to coconut growers but also incentivise farmers to expand copra production, government says

The Food Minister says the role of FCI is not only to deliver ration, but also to instill confidence in farmers and beneficiaries by bringing in transparency, efficiency and accountability

Food and fertiliser subsidies are expected to be increased in the Union Budget 2024, sources say

“The government under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is addressing systematic inequalities, which have plagued the society,” Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said.

They have to declare stock position of paddy and rice every Friday

‘We intend to bring a revolutionary change in the agriculture sector with a special focus on promoting animal husbandry,’ Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu tells the hill State’s milk producers

BKS terms the government’s attitude towards farmers’ demands “regrettable”; seeks MSPs, abolition of GST on agri inputs, and increase in Kisan Samman Nidhi income support payments for farmers

A group of developing and least developed countries want WTO to find a solution to the issue of public stockholding of rice and wheat

Karnataka Agriculture Price Commission headed by Prakash Kammaradi submitted a report on the legally backed MSP to the government in 2018

Centre allows export of 99,500 tonnes of onions from Maharashtra to six countries despite domestic ban

The decision assumes importance as it comes before the crucial Lok Sabha polls in key onion belts like Nashik, Ahmednagar and Solapur in Maharashtra

Limited availability of chickpeas in the world market could force India to import of yellow peas, which are available in abundance, say officials

This partnership is expected to enable farmers to avail hassle-free, affordable, and flexible credit facilities.

Reserve Bank of India’s annual report highlights MSPs, foodgrain stocks, and challenges faced by agriculture in 2023-24

Shivraj Singh Chouhan has also been allocated the Rural Development Ministry in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's new Cabinet

The data will be used for formulating policies and programmes for farmers and the dairy sector

Dr. Sitko warns that the West Asia and Ukraine situation will continue to impact fertiliser and oil prices. He urged reducing dependence on imported fertilisers and boosting domestic production

Power rests in the hands of a corrupt military and political oligarchy that denies people the right to self-determination, reports Hamza Hamouchene.

It’s against the Constitution, and means Norway will not respect the Paris Agreement, argues Tina Andersen Vågenes.

Kim Jong-un's headline grabbing aggressive irrationalism takes some beating (though he might have met his match in recent times...)

Rûwâhîne by Ifriqiyya Electrique; The Underside of Power by Algiers: our music reviews of the month.

He puts his life on the line to protect the Democratic Republic of Congo's national parks.

How Senegal is trying to involve the diaspora to curb emigration. By Sofia Christensen

KidZania is an unashamed shrine to the sterile, dystopian human-made landscapes, comedian Steve Parry writes.

As the number of highly capable large language models (LLMs) released continues to quickly increase, I added the ability to test new models when they become available in the Ask Luke conversational interface on this site.

For context there's a number of places in the Ask Luke pipeline that make use of AI models to transform, clean, embed, retrieve, generate content and more. I put together a short video that explains how this pipeline is constructed and why if you're interested.

Specifically for the content generation step, once the right content is found, ranked, and assembled into a set of instructions, I can select which large language model to send these instructions to. Every model gets the same instructions unless they can support a larger context window. In which case they might get more ranked results than a model with a smaller context size.

Despite the consistent instructions, switching LLMs can have a very big impact on answer generation. I'll leave you to guess which of these two answers is powered by OpenAI's GPT-4 and which one comes from Antrhopic's new (this week) Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

Some of you might astutely point out that the instruction set could be altered in specific ways when changing models. Recently, we've found the most advanced LLMs to be more interchangeable than before. But there's still differences in how they generate content as you can clearly see in the example above. Which one is best though... could soon be a matter of personal preference.

Thanks to Yangguang Li and Sam for the dev help on this feature.

Over the years, I've given more than 300 presentations on design. Most of these have been accompanied by a slide deck to illustrate my points and guide the narrative. But making the content in these decks work well with the Ask Luke conversational interface on this site has been challenging. So now I'm trying a new approach with AI vision models.

To avoid application specific formats (Keynote, PowerPoint), I've long been making my presentation slides available for download as PDF documents. These files usually consist of 100+ pages and often don't include a lot of text, leaning instead on visuals and charts to communicate information. To illustrate, here's of few of these slides from my Mind the Gap talk.

In an earlier article on how we built the Ask Luke conversational interface, I outlined the issues with extracting useful information from these documents. I wanted the content in these PDFs to be available when answering people's design questions in addition to the blog articles, videos and audio interviews that we were already using.

But even when we got text extraction from PDFs working well, running the process on any given PDF document would create many content embeddings of poor quality (like the one below). These content chunks would then end up influencing the answers we generated in less than helpful ways.

To prevent these from clogging up our limited context (how much content we can work with to create an answer) with useless results, we set up processes to remove low quality content chunks. While that improved things, the content in these presentations was no longer accessible to people asking questions on Ask Luke.

So we tried a different approach. Instead of extracting text from each page of a PDF presentation, we ran it through an AI vision model to create a detailed description of the content on the page. In the example below, the previous text extraction method (on the left) gets the content from the slide. The new vision model approach (on the right) though, does a much better job creating useful content for answering questions.

Here's another example illustrating the difference between the PDF text extraction method used before and the vision AI model currently in use. This time instead of a chart, we're generating a useful description of a diagram.

This change is now rolled out across all the PDFs the Ask Luke conversational interface can reference to answer design questions. Gone are useless content chunks and there's a lot more useful content immediately available.

Thanks to Yangguang Li for the dev help on this change.

The Ask Luke feature on this site uses the thousands of articles, hundreds of PDFs, dozens of videos, and more I've created over the years to answer people's questions about digital product design. Since it launched a year ago, we've been iterating on the core of the Ask Luke system: retrieving relevant content to improve answers.

The most important job of any product interface is making its value clear and accessible to people. Most apps resort to some form of onboarding to accomplish this, but it's exponentially more impactful to experience value than to be told it exists. Likewise it's much more effective to learn through using an interface than through a tutorial explaining it.

These two factors make the seemingly simple job of "getting people to product value" quite difficult. Compounding the issue is that fact that interface solutions that accomplish this often feel simple and obvious -but only after they're uncovered. So iterating to an interface that intuitively conveys value and purpose is usually an iterative process.

That's a long-winded introduction, but it's important context for the changes we made to Ask Luke. The purpose and value of this feature is to pull the most relevant bits of my writings, videos, audio, and files together to answer people's questions about digital product design. So we made a bunch of changes to make that even more front and center -to make how Ask Luke works more obvious.

Now as answers to people's questions stream in, we add citations to the relevant articles, videos, PDF, etc. being used to answer a question in real-time. We also add these citations to the list of sources on the right dynamically instead of all at once before a question is answered.

Before people were able to select any given source and view it in the Ask Luke conversational UI. With these updates, they are also taken to the relevant part of a source: to the relevant point in a video; to the relevant page in a PDF. Since this is easier to see than read about, here's a quick video demonstrating these changes and hopefully making the value and purpose of Ask Luke a bit more obvious.

• Integrated Audio Experiences & Memory: enabling specific content experiences within a conversational UI
• Expanding Conversational User Interfaces: extending chat user interfaces to better support AI capabilities
• Integrated Video Experiences: adding video-specific experiences within conversational UI
• Integrated PDF Experiences: unique considerations when adding PDF experiences
• Dynamic Preview Cards: created on the fly to improve sharing answers
• Text Generation Differences: testing the impact of AI new models
• PDF Parsing with Vision Models: using AI vision models to extract content form PDFs

Acknowledgments

Big thanks to Sidharth Lakshmanan and Sam Breed for the engineering lift on these changes.

Since launching the Ask Luke feature on this site last year, we've added the ability for the system to respond to questions about product design by citing articles, videos, audio, and PDFs. Now we're introducing the ability to cite the thousands of images I've created over the years and reference them directly in answers.

Significant improvements in AI vision models have given us the ability to quickly and easily describe visual content. I recently outlined how we used this capability to index the content of PDF pages in more depth making individual PDF pages a much better source of content in the Ask Luke corpus.

We applied the same process and pipeline to the thousands of images I've created for articles and presentations over the years. Essentially, each image on my Website gets parsed by a vision model and we add the resulting text-based description to the set of content we can use to answer people's design questions. Here's an example of the kinds of descriptions we're creating. As you can see, the descriptions can get pretty detailed when needed.

If someone asks a question where an image is a key part of the answer, our replies not only return streaming text and citations but inline images as well. In this question asking about Amazon's design changes over the years, multiple images are included directly in the response.

Not only are images displayed where relevant, the answer refers to them and often refers to the contents of the image. In the same Amazon navigation example, the answer refers to the green and white color scheme of the image in addition to its contents.

Now that we've got citations and images steaming inline in Ask Luke responses, perhaps adding inline videos and audio files queued to relevant timestamps might be next? We're already integrating those in the conversational UI so why not... AI is a hell of a drug.

Further Reading

Additional articles about what I've tried and learned by rethinking the design and development of my Website using large-scale AI models.

• New Ways into Web Content: rethinking how to design software with AI
• Integrated Audio Experiences & Memory: enabling specific content experiences
• Expanding Conversational User Interfaces: extending chat user interfaces
• Integrated Video Experiences: adding video experiences to conversational UI
• Integrated PDF Experiences: unique considerations when adding PDF experiences
• Dynamic Preview Cards: improving how generated answers are shared
• Text Generation Differences: testing the impact of AI new models
• PDF Parsing with Vision Models: using AI vision models to extract PDF contents
• Streaming Citations: citing relevant articles, videos, PDFs, etc. in real-time
• Streaming Inline Images: indexing & displaying relevant images in answers

Acknowledgments

Big thanks to Sidharth Lakshmanan and Sam Breed for the development help.