No matter where you are in your career, it is always important to evaluate your current role, how you envision success, your steps to achieve it, and ultimately, get to where you want to be

Standing Committee also questions the high GST rate on components of fertilizers

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

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

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

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

India’s banana export destinations extend beyond the Middle East, with potential opportunities in major global players like the USA, Russia, Japan, Germany, China, the Netherlands, the UK, and France.

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

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

Outbound shipments now feasible if global buyers pay at least $770 a tonne for Indian onions

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

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

The government initiated the sale of onions at a subsidised rate through mobile vans and outlets of NCCF and NAFED.

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.

Britain’s largest festival about refugees and sanctuary is more relevant than ever, writes Lydia Noon.

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

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

A gesture of love and solidarity from estates and communities in East London to Grenfell and their local community.

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

When working through the early stages of a product design, it's common that labels for objects and actions emerge organically. No one is overly concerned about making these labels consistent (yet). But if this proliferation of terms doesn't get reined in early, both product design and strategy get harder.

Do we call it a library, a folder, a collection, a workspace, a section, a category, a topic? How about a document, page, file, entry, article, worksheet? And.. what's the difference? While these kinds of decisions might not be front and center when working out designs for a product or feature, they can impact a lot.

For starters, having clear definitions for concepts helps keep teams on the same page. When engineering works on implementing a new object type, they're aligned with what design is thinking, which is what the sales team is pitching potential customers on. Bringing a product to life is hard enough, why complicate things by using different terms for similar things or vice versa?

Inconsistent terms are obviously also a comprehension issue for the people using our products. "Here's it's called a Document, there it's called an Article. Are those the same?" Additionally, undefined terms often lead to miscellaneous bins in our user interfaces. "What's inside Explore?" When the definition of objects and actions isn't clear, what choice do we have but to drop them into vague sounding containers like Discover?

The more a product gets developed (especially by bigger teams) the more things can diverge because people's mental model of what terms mean can vary a lot. So it's really useful to proactively put together a list of the objects and actions that make up an application and draft some simple one-liner definitions for each. These lists almost always kick off useful high-level discussions within teams on what we're building and for who. Being forced to define things requires you to think them through: what is this feature doing and why?

And of course, consistent labels also ease comprehension for users. Once people learn what something means, they'll be able to apply that knowledge elsewhere -instead of having to contend with mystery meat navigation.

New technology companies often have grand ambitions. And for good reasons - ambitious plans help recruit talent, raise capital, and set the bar high. But progress toward these high-level goals relies on identifying and excelling at much lower-level use cases.

It's very common for new technology companies to aspire being "the platform for... the Internet of things, AI analytics, mobile testing, etc." Being a platform means you capture a lot of uses cases or to put it more simply... people use your service for a lot of different things. And more use equals more value.

But vision is not the same as strategy. Vision is about the end goal. It paints a picture of the future state you're aiming for. It’s what you want to achieve. Strategy, on the other hand, is how you get there.

When you use a broad vision as a strategy, you end up having a hard time making decisions and rationalizing a never-ending set of opinions. With a strategy like “we’ll be the platform for the Internet of things”, everyone has an opinion on how things on the Internet should work -which one do we listen to?

Consider instead a specific market for the Internet of things, like home automation, and an even more specific use case for home automation like "controlling the temperature in your house". It's much easier to evaluate decisions about what a good experience for controlling the temperature in your house is than for "we’ll be the platform for the Internet of things”.

But if you focus on such a narrow use case, how will you ever build a big business? I'm not suggesting abandoning the big vision instead I'm advocating for having a strategy based on solving concrete uses cases to get there. Let's look at another example: Yelp.

Today, Yelp is used for recommendations for all kinds of services: skydiving training, auto body shops, tea parlors, and more. But it didn't start that way. Yes, Yelp likely started with the ambitious vision of being a platform for all service recommendations. But it first launched in San Francisco with restaurant reviews. A very specific market and very specific use case.

Why start with restaurants? A good starting use case is the one with the most acute pain. In the context of services, people need to eat three times a day. They get their hair cut once a month and maybe need a plumber once a year. So where should Yelp start? Probably restaurants.

When solving for a specific use case, it's important to build with the bigger vision in mind and not paint yourself into a corner of only being useful for one thing. But you definitely have to be great at solving each use case your platform supports. How else will you convince people to adopt your solution? Once you can demonstrate clear value for a specific use case, you can tackle more (likely adjacent ones).

This way of scaling ensures your solution is actually good at addressing a concrete problem people have not just an abstract vision. When you hear "What's your platform for? Well... you can use it for pretty much anything." in a sales pitch, that's a warning sign.

When you instead address specific use cases well, you learn what parts of your platform matter the most by identifying patterns and doubling down on them. It's only from solving highly specific use cases that you actually get to a platform that can be broadly used for many different things. And why Amazon started by only selling books on the Web.

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.

Exhibition: 28 Mar 2018 - 29 Mar 2018, London, United Kingdom. Organized by The IET.

Technique could be used to create quantum-information systems

Revamped accelerator will soon be smashing electrons and positrons together

Diplomacy is like a woman. You never know what diplomats think or feel. The recent Ford controversy also makes us wonder whether Italy gave up its humour for tough diplomacy

A visit to the 160-year-old Minerva watch factory in Switzerland is a revelation for the watch enthusiast about the many complex components that ultimately makes for a fine timepiece

A walk through the University of Leuven in Belgium throws up insights, brews and delicious food

When in Bavaria, drink up

The best cameras in the market, and why Sony gets the top spot among the Nikons and Canons

Camera phones that will help you take your Instagram game up a notch this festival season

A travel list for anyone who loves petals and blooms

For those who want to get away from it all, there’s always the Maldives

Lanham, MD : Rowman and Littlefield, 2024.

Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, [2023]

Edmonton, Alberta : Brush Education Inc., [2023]

[Cambridge, England] : Ethics International Press Limited, 2024.

Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge , 2024.

New York, NY : Routledge , 2024.

Bloomington, Indiana : Solution Tree Press, 2018.

London : Bloomsbury Academic, 2024.

New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2024]

New York : Peter Lang , 2024.