A release said the award signifies the station’s unwavering commitment to maintain the highest standards in quality seed production and has emerged as a front runner setting an example for excellence in the field of seed production

Government allocates ₹1.52 lakh crore for agriculture and allied sectors in the Union Budget 2024-25; Finance Minister announces that the Centre will work with States to promote digital public infrastructure for agriculture

The new MSP for a quintal of wheat is ₹2,425 in comparison to ₹2,275 per quintal, which was in place for the previous rabi season

The Centre added that shipments by rail rake to Lucknow and Varanasi will be scheduled in next few days

How H&M, Zara and Marks & Spencer are buying viscose from highly polluting factories in Asia. By Natasha Hurley.

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.

The guerrillas are handing weapons over to the UN, but they are in fear. Thomas Mortensen reports from Urabá.

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

For years, designers have used Lorem Ipsum text as a placeholder in interface design layouts. But unless you're designing a pseudo-Latin text reader, using actual content provides a much more realistic picture of what a UI design needs to support. Today Large Language Models (LLMs) can provide designers with highly relevant content instantly so Lorem Ipsum can finally die.

It's long been argued (well at least by me in 2019) that using Lorem Ipsum text to mock up application interfaces fails to represent real content, often leading to usability issues and unrealistic designs that don't account for actual text lengths, line breaks, or content hierarchy in a final product. But Lorem Ipsum persisted as a design tool of choice because getting real content was hard.

To get very realistic content, designers would need access to where real content existed or pester engineers or domain experts to collect realistic content for them. It's not hard to see why some of these requests took a while or never got prioritized. And while some teams took the time to build tooling that enabled more realistic content in the design process, Lorem Ipsum was a much easier path for most.

Today, Large Language Models (LLMs) can not only generate sample content but also create highly specific and relevant content for just about any application you're designing. And given these tools are fast, widely available and free, there's no excuse to not use very realistic content in application designs. For example, if designing a food delivery app. A few prompts will give you real content, real quick.

So there's no excuses for Lorem Ipsum no more.

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.

In his Is Atomic Design Dead? presentation at Smashing Conf New York, Brad Frost discussed the history of design systems and today's situation especially in light of very capable AI models than can generate code and designs. Here's my notes on his talk.

• Websites started as HTML and CSS. People began to design websites in Photoshop and as the number of Web sites and apps increased, the need for managing a brand and style across multiple platforms became clear. To manage this people turned to frameworks and component libraries which resulted in more frameworks and tools that eventually got integrated into design tools like Figma. It's been an ongoing expansion...
• There's been lots of change over the years but at the highest level, we have design systems and products that use them to enforce brand, consistency, accessibility, and more.
• Compliance to design systems pushes from one side and product needs push from the other. There needs to be a balance but currently the gap between the two is growing. A good balance is achieved through a virtuous cycle between product and systems.
• The atomic design system tried to intentionally define use of atoms, molecules, organisms, templates, and pages to bridge the gap between the end state of a product and a design system.
• As an industry, we went too far in resourcing design systems and making them a standalone thing within a company. They've been isolated.
• Design system makers can't be insular. They need to reach out to product teams and work with them. They need to be helping product teams achieve their goals.
• What if there were one global design system with common reusable components? Isn't that what HTML is for? Yes, but it's insufficient because we're still rebuilding date pickers everywhere.
• Open UI tracks popular design systems and what's in them. It's a start to seeing what global component needs for the Web could look like.
• Many pattern libraries ship with an aesthetic and people need to tweak it. A global design system should be very vanilla so you can style it as much as you want.
• The Web still has an amazing scale of communication and collaboration. We need to rekindle the ideas of the early Web. We need to share and build together to get to a common freely usable design system.
• AI models can help facilitate design system work. Today they do an OK job but in the future, fine-tuned models may create custom components on the fly. They can also translate between one design system and another or translate across programming languages.
• This methodology could help companies translate existing and legacy code to new modern design systems. Likewise sketches or mockups could be quickly translated directly to design system components thereby speeding up processes.
• Combining design system specifications with large language models allows you to steer AI generations more directly toward the right kind of code and components.
• When product experiences are more dynamic (can be built on the fly), can we adapt them to individual preferences and needs? Like custom styles or interactions.
• AI is now part of our design system toolkit and design systems are part of our AI toolkit.
• But the rapid onset of AI also raises higher level questions about what designers and developers should be doing in the future? We're more than rectangle creators. We think and feel which differentiates us from just production level tasks. Use your brains, your intuition, and whole self to solve real problems.

Conference: 3 Sep 2018 - 7 Sep 2018, Mainz, Germany. Organized by wikonect GmbH.

Breakthrough could lead to new type of energy source

New device could boost telecommunications and be adapted for photonics

Though emergency has not been clamped in the country now, the situation is as despondent as it was in 1977. That’s why it is possible that the results in the coming Lok Sabha polls could also go that way: the North may give the BJP a big hand.

The Chennai Corporation Mayor last week said vacant lands will be used to construct Amma theatres. It would be, instead, better to come up with small playgrounds that can stand in good stead on a long term.

A trek through one of the more memorable national parks of the US

With a slew of gadgets entering the smart spectrum, companies are pushing for AI assistants that sound like real people within them

A no-meat, zero-dairy challenge turns out to be a boon for this Maldivian lunch, as a happy diner finds out

A winter afternoon sparkles in the presence of lovely seasonal fare, cooked with indigenous techniques

The ancient art of making carpets becomes a tool for women empowerment in Jaipur

A village in Darjeeling turns out, surprisingly, to be the perfect setting for Land Rover’s 70th anniversary celebrations

Spa cuisine is the new mantra for healthy eating. Luxe turns the spotlight on some of the places where the food is as delicious as it is beneficial

Family car to speedster, the Audi RS6 brings a smile to your face

The Jaguar F-type downsizes its engine but upsizes the handling

In conversation with Jean-Marc Pontroué, CEO of Panerai, which recently opened its third store in India

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

Ace couturier Raghavendra Rathore on his eponymous label completing 25 years, expanding his brand and plans for the future

Montblanc Summit 2 comes with a range of features — and oozes style

The 2020 Lamborghini Huracan Evo is a smart car that really gets to know your driving style

Gone are those days when eating out meant digging into a steak with buttery potatoes on the side. Increasingly in the big cities, restaurants are offering a host of healthy food

The time has come for men to stop and smell the roses. And wear them, while they are at it

Fruit teas are caffeine-free, rich in antioxidants, low on calories and versatile

Singapore : Springer, [2024]

Bloomington, IN : Solution Tree Press, [2023]

Cincinnati : University of Cincinnati Press, 2021.

Lynnfield, Massachusetts CAST [2024]

London : Bloomsbury Academic, 2024.

Cham : Springer, [2024]

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

Toronto : Canadian Scholars, 2024.

Bloomington, IN : Solution Tree Press, [2024]

Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge , 2025.

New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, 2024.

Cham, Switzerland : Springer Nature, 2024.

Dorchester, Mass. : National Association for the Education and Advancement of Cambodian, Laotian, and Vietnamese Americans