fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Star Wars: Squadrons has me Feeling like a Kid Again
By: Eric Pierce
Tags: Gaming, Film, Movies, Star Wars, Writing

We are a squad of five mismatched starfighters: a zippy A-Wing; a ponderous but powerful Y-Wing; and three X-Wings, the most ubiquitous ship in the Rebel fleet. We are the very definition of ragtag. We form up as we move to engage the Imperial TIEs even now screaming towards us.

I’m in an X-Wing (naturally). I double-check that my wings are locked into attack position, and glance at the astromech through the rear glass. I’m ready for battle.

The only thing missing is the call to report in. You know the one.

Red leader: All wings report in. Red 10 standing by. Red 7 standing by.

I so desperately want this exchange at this moment that I call for it myself, speaking to myself, and supply all the call signs. I could brave the wilds of Xbox Live voice chat, I suppose, but some dangers are better left alone.

If the game had a canned bit of dialogue in which all pilots checked in, it would be nearly perfect. That, and perhaps some dew-behind-the-ears remark about the size of an Imperial installation (lookit the size of that thing!).

For everything I love about A New Hope, one of my absolute favorite parts is the dogfight that kicks off the climax. It is frenetic and exciting and just plain cool.

It’s therefore no coincidence that my favorite part of the Battlefront games was the space combat. Star Wars: Squadrons takes that formula and turns it up to 11. For one, Squadrons eliminates external views and puts players right in the cockpit. It further ups the immersion by introducing a number of systems to make gameplay fiddly enough to evoke the real thing. You can swap power between shields, engines, and lasers on a moment by moment basis. You can angle deflector shields to the front or back. And, naturally, you can punch the throttle for a temporary speed boost. Ships can be upgraded with new engines, different hulls, or several varieties of weaponry, each with its own pros and cons.

The included campaign is fine but mostly a long tutorial for the main event: turning other players into space dust. As a lifelong Star Wars fan, few things are as thrilling as weaving through space debris while chasing enemy starfighters — and trying to evade pursuit of my own.

The move to limit each side to only 5 ships makes dogfighting a more intense dance than what Battlefront offered. You are much less likely to be blasted out of the sky within moments of spawning. And with the ability to boost shields and temporarily zip out of danger, each life tends to last longer. The result: games are more drawn out and deliberate, with the decision to prioritize one subsystem over another having real consequences. While not a true simulation, it’s no longer pure arcade either.

Squadrons also launches with support for VR.

I always knew Star Wars would be the avenue through which VR would finally enter my life. Getting a PlayStation VR has suddenly become a major priority. Just in time for Christmas!
Write Better JavaScript by Separating Side Effects From Logic
By: Ekrem Aktaş
Tags: JavaScript, Software Development, Software Engineering, Functional Programming, Programming

Write Better JavaScript by Separating Side Effects From Logic

When the logic is pure, it’s easier to understand and test

Image credit: Author

The code in the software systems we write every day creates side effects.

Some of the side effects it creates are permanent, such as creating records in the databases and modifying file systems. Others are temporary, such as updating the user interface, printing to console, or caching information in the memory. Lighting up a smart lamp or launching a rocket into space are also side effects.

A software system with no side effects would probably have no value. Even if it calculates the meaning of life, it can’t communicate without creating a side effect. Such a system would be a black box where no one knows what’s happening inside.

But side effects also make the code harder to reason about. Functional programming (FP) aims to minimize side effects as much as possible.

How are we going to create side effects in our JavaScript code?

This article will show you the transformation of a simple validation function with side effects to a more pure, functional version. I will delay the side effects as late as possible to achieve that. Through this example, I aim to show you the pattern to use in your everyday code.

Let’s start.
How to save UX for mobile.. These days everyone uses smartphones…
By: Evert Martin
Tags: Mobile, UX Design, Design, UX, UX Research

These days everyone uses smartphones, which have become rather large computer screens. They come with a wide range of new and innovative apps. We have to try and find solutions that match these apps to large smartphone screens.

That sounds obvious. But. One thing seems stuck in an Older Age. The basic mobile UX principles. We, designers keep designing these fascinating new day-to-day solutions in ‘pocket’ sizes.

And doing so, we keep holding on to what we know and what (we think) our users know.

No new advances are made in mobile UX. Not on a large significant scale at least.

Sidenote: Skeuomorphism, Neumorphism, Glassmorphism are dribbble based UI trends that are not UX and even make UX worse on most occasions. And thus can not be seen as an “advancement” in UX.

Yes, we do create new technologies, but no new advances in personality and what is actually improving the users’ experience on a basic UX level.

The biggest and easiest example of this is the continued use of the basic hamburger menu for important features. Furthermore, we also use the mobile header for other features. Instagram for example uses it now to make a post, share a post, and direct messaging.

This is deadly wrong and bad for user engagement.

Why do we do this? Why do mobile UX designers, including myself, keep using these old basic principles? Because it is easy and it is “What the users know” because “Everyone else does it”.

The hamburger was a quick and easy solution when we needed to put away large quantities of information with limited screen space. And I do believe it still has its rightful place within websites and desktop apps.

(Read more about the origin of the hamburger here)

Back to the observation mentioned above: people have larger and larger and larger phones. Now, it is incredibly difficult to reach those header positions on such large phones while using one hand.

We all know the thumb range in mobile UX, but no one actually seems to take this into account. Apps keep putting important features in the ‘reach’ area of this thumb range.
An Illustrated Look at the Booker Prize
By: Surasti Puri
Tags: Art, Books, Reading, Data Visualization, Authors

Sign up for The 'Gale

By Nightingale

Keep up with the latest from Nightingale, the journal of the Data Visualization Society Take a look
1:37 AM
By: Princella Talley
Tags: Writing, Creative Writing, Poetry, Culture, Life

Photo by Brina Blum on Unsplash

Eyes wide open during closing hours. Something is different tonight.

My eyes find focus in a corner of the living room, fixated on my collection of plants. 16 to be exact.

My plants look so dead. Withering, neglected. And that’s so unlike me. I care deeply about my plant family. Staring at the green and brown congregation, I realize I can’t rest until I fix my fixation. I start with the plant that looks most disconnected from its once joyful existence.

I begin to water it, but quickly bring myself to a halt.

Looking around, I notice something new. I feel it too. I feel the imbalance. I feel the emptiness of small plants in large pots, isolated from the closeness — no familiar leaves brushing up against them throughout the day. Silent. Still.

All plants need space to grow and extend

Some need to grow alone

Some need to be next to their friends

Thriving together in their shared elements

I turn on the music in my mind and I hear Erykah Badu.

This is strange because the last time I heard her mainstream, my eyes couldn’t hear her and my ears couldn’t see the words being spoken directly to me.

The song in my mind is Bag Lady. Is this song about me? Of course, it is. The Bag Lady is all of us to some degree.

Track by track as my mind reacts, I pick up one of the spider plants. Chlorophytum Comosum.

When I first bought this plant, it was already dying

The woman at the store said it wouldn’t live, no use in trying

but I knew in my spirit she was unintentionally lying

I couldn’t accept her advice as truth

Three years later, that same plant speaks with vibrancy and youth.

The underlying issue was multiple plants overcrowding one pot — treated as if they were all the same. Nothing left to gain.

Lacking attention and love

I uprooted those plants, finding hope in each bulb

I knew they would be just fine

One story gently divided into five

And each story thrived

A similar thing happened with the mass cane plants. Dracaenas. The plants I’m now pruning. Overcrowded without enough light, I created new space for them. Now they sit just right.

Epipremnum aureum. Devil’s ivy plants are supposedly some of the easiest plants to grow. Adaptable. Versatile. Living in water without soil, I bear witness to their roots growing longer and stronger through the transparent shallow glass. Vines sprouting forward in beautiful overlays.

The money trees. Pachira aquatica. Watered. Leaves spritzed. They stand strong even when dismissed. Rise up. Resist.

On to the Jade plant. Crassula ovata.

A small stem and one leaf when we met, I thought you would die

I was never certain I could keep you alive

Upon first glance, little to no progress

Until I looked a little closer to the left

New leaves. Evidence emerged

This one moves quickly when love is the verb

This cycle continued until all 16 plants were watered.

And by the next day

They look so much more alive

More green, less grey

With a new realization, I apologize to them all

When I lose my footing, everything close to me feels the fall
How to Build Desktop Applications the Right Way Using Electron
By: Juan Cruz Martinez
Tags: Programming, JavaScript, Electron, Typescript, Nodejs

How to Build Desktop Applications the Right Way Using Electron

Kick off your next project with Electron

Photo from Electron.

If you are like me, you love JavaScript and its ecosystem and have been building amazing web applications using frameworks like React or performant web servers with Node.js. Now you want to develop a desktop application and you don’t want to learn a new programming language. Or perhaps you want to reuse as much as you can from existing web projects.

Here is when Electron enters the picture to save the day.

Electron allows you to build desktop applications using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. There are many arguments on the internet against Electron, some of them being its performance and often low-quality apps, but don’t blame the framework. Electron is powerful and can be performant. Today, many popular applications run on top of Electron, such as VS Code, Slack, Skype, Discord, and more.

But why is it then that many people argue against it? The problem starts with the apps and the way people use Electron. For many, porting a web application to an Electron means taking your existing code as is and embedding it into an Electron container. Is this a terrible thing to do? Maybe not, but you are not taking full advantage of the power of Electron. You are merely changing a browser tab for an independent application.

What can we improve? In this article, we will explore the basics of Electron and build a sample application to show some of the Electron ways.
BitGreen Chain Swap Information
Tags: Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, Bitgreen, Sustainability, Proof Of Stake

We finished testing our new wallet (and completely new blockchain protocol), and have a simple way for everyone to restore their balances on the new chain.

Remember — Never accept wallet advice or help via direct message — use public channels only, and accept help from verified team members who you messaged first and confirmed as a team member.

NOTE: The Chain Swap has started. Click below for the guide:

How will the swap work?

The old and new chains are not directly compatible; however, the addresses where your coins are now are generated and balances restored on the new chain. The result is a semi-automatic coin swap process. The addresses on the new chain will match your old addresses. You will need to generate your address on the new chain using old chain private keys, contained in your wallet.dat file.

You will have to “dump” your wallet to get the private keys, and import all keys into the new wallet to restore your addresses and balance. This process will expose your private keys. There may be impersonators trying to steal your coins. Be extremely careful with support requests. Do not screen share or copy your private keys to any other user or you will lose your coins.

The swap is done with 2 console commands — it is really simple.

Coin Swap Process

This graphic outlines the process of the coin swap which will occur after the snapshot at block 870,000:
Improve MongoDB Performance Using Projection
By: Tek Loon
Tags: Programming, Database, DevOps, Mongodb, Software Engineering

Experiment 2: If the Experiment 1 Result is No, Find Other Scenarios on How Projection Improves Query Performance

Since my first hypothesis was wrong, then I tried to do some research and re-visit the performance course offered by MongoDB University. The course is free — check it out if you are interested in learning MongoDB performance.

And I discovered Covered Query. Covered Query is a “query that can be satisfied entirely using an index and does not have to examine any documents”, according to MongoDB’s official documentation.

We can use the cooking metaphor to understand Covered Query. Imagine that you’re cooking a meal with all the ingredients are ready and inside your fridge. Basically, everything is covered, and you just have to cook it.

Before we create any indexes for the database, let’s start by asking: What is the field that we want to return to the application? Let’s give the following scenario:

Admin would like to know all the flight bookings to a specific destination. The information that Admin would like to know is their respective booking_no , origin and destination .

Given the scenario above, let’s start by creating indexes. We can create two indexes.

Destination — Create an index on the destination field only.

Destination, Origin, and Booking No. — We can create a compound index with the sequence destination , origin and booking_no field.

Refer to the command below on how to create the index.

Query without projection

First, let’s start to query the booking where the destination is “Gerlachmouth”. The screenshot below shows the execution time for the query. As you can see, the total execution time reduced to 5ms. It was almost 100 times faster compared to one without indexes.

You might be satisfied with this performance, but this is not the end of the optimization. We can improve the query performance, and make it 250 times faster using Covered Query compared to without indexes.
The Best Part of the Job Search Is NOT Eventually Getting the Job
By: Tim Denning
Tags: Work, Careers, Startup, Hiring, Self Improvement

First Occasion

It first started when I wanted to leave finance and try my hand at a career in digital marketing. It was a nine-month process that I told everybody at the start would take one month. Boy was I wrong about that too :)

I got down to the final three choices. One of those choices was the result of contacting an old colleague from the finance world who had also made the transition and had remembered me when I contacted them. It felt as though we had worked together for many years — when I work it out, it was probably more like five months.

She became someone I looked up to for the way she approached new technology in the context of an old company and an even older industry. Every encounter with her was special because she made you, and your client, feel as though you mattered. Nothing could replace that feeling.

When I had coffee with her at about month seven of the search, she suggested I have another coffee with one of her colleagues.

It seemed like it would be a complete waste of time given I’d already had so many coffees with so many random strangers in the previous months.

Image Source: memysuitandtie.com

Still, I said yes. The person she introduced to me was cool and we got on well. There was an opportunity to join him in digital marketing, except nothing happened. The opportunity led nowhere.

A few weeks after the coffee, I was introduced to someone from HR. There was no role, just lots of questions about my career and what I was looking for. I answered each question as honestly as I could.

There were several more chats which oddly enough all seemed to bring me to roughly the same place — outside of an office building near the dentist.

These conversations, late one Wednesday afternoon, transpired into an offer and a big change in career that didn’t look like it would be possible.
Mentoring Program
By: Kelly Eden
Tags: Self, Self Development, Writing Tips, Freelance Writing, Writing

Mentoring Program

We’re making some changes (Updated 13 August 2020)

Photo by Clark Young on Unsplash

At Inspired Writer we are making changes to how we offer mentoring so we can encourage a wider range of new writers.

We will no longer be accepting mentoring applications each month. However, writers who contribute to Inspired Writer have the opportunity to get some support and feedback on their work. We offer small suggestions, changes, and work alongside writers as required. This means more emerging writers get the support they need to progress in their craft.

New writers can read our guidelines here:

Other Feedback and Mentoring Options

If you want in depth individual feedback and prefer to learn at your own pace, there are three other options available:

Personal Essay Writing

The Personal Essay Workshop. This workshop is a self-paced video course with 3 sessions of individual feedback on your writing. (This course is currently full. We will let you know when it’s open for new students. In the meantime, the Creative Nonfiction course below also covers Personal Essays).

All Creative Nonfiction

For writers interested in developing your Creative Nonfiction, check out the Creative Nonfiction Writing School. Creative Nonfiction covers memoir, personal essays, history, narrative nonfiction, travel and nature writing, and more. A basic definition of CNF is “True stories told well.”

You can sign up for one month or as long as you like. As well as weekly lessons, you also receive monthly feedback on your work for a very affordable price. It’s like doing an MFA without the debt!

Fiction or Nonfiction Mentoring

One-on-one mentoring. More in depth mentoring for developing ideas, writing, and pitching your work. Developmental editing of your stories — fiction or non-fiction. Email me at inspiredwriter.kelly@gmail.com for a quote. (Up to 2000 words at a time)

What to expect from one-on-one mentoring:

Developmental editing goes beyond the basics of checking grammar and spelling.

You may have to cut paragraphs, rearrange, or rewrite. It can be a difficult thing for writers to do — we tend to hold onto our words like they are our babies.

Obviously, it’s your writing so you need to remain in charge of it — if you don’t want to change something, that’s your call. I do find that writers who are most open to suggestions improve their work the fastest though. If you are the type of writer who doesn’t like to take on feedback, you may not enjoy mentoring.

Free Writing Tips

My free writer’s newsletter Because You Write also has weekly tips, resources, training, and inspiration.
Struggle vs Surrender: The Writer’s Way
By: Cara J. Stevens
Tags: Meditation, Haiku, Zen, Writers Block, Writing

Throughout the busyness of a day, thoughts fly in, unbidden, searching for a place to land. I push them aside. Not yet. Not yet. I reply. I will myself to wait until dusk when my mind is not standing at attention, ready to pounce if called to action.

I tend boo boos, urge progress, respond, reply, reach out, deliver, convey, complete, speak in full sentences. I am distracted. I am needed.

Dusk falls. Family fed. The dishwasher hums emitting a lemony-clean fragrance that signals the day’s work is done. Obligations complete. My vigilance is rewarded with silence and peace.

I sit, pen in hand, but the blank page mocks me. Mind empty. Where are my lofty thoughts now? Where is the inspiration? It is elusive. It has fled in the midst of the chaos. I do not know when it left, nor when it will return. Yet I trust the process.

I stare at the empty page which mirrors my mind until the peace of blankness washes over me.

Photo by César Couto on Unsplash

Effortless effort. Thoughtless thoughts. Slowly, cautiously, ideas creep in. Small at first then, emboldened by the new peace that surrounds me, bigger ones follow. They crowd and jostle each other in an effort to be front of mind.

My pen flies across the page, recording their urgent calls to be seen and heard. My mind is active. The room in my head is full. The page now mirrors its state, filled with black symbols.

I have achieved a singularity.

I am one with my pen and paper.

I write because I am.

I finally collapse, spent and exhausted. The words have had their day.

Tomorrow it will happen all over again.

And so it goes.
The Art of Testing: Where Design Meets Quality
By: Jose Maria Valera Reales
Tags: Software Testing, Testing, Software Engineering, Software Design, Software

The intention of this post is not to explain the different testing techniques out there that we can use. I’m not going to tell you what the differences are between unit, integration, feature, or end-to-end testing.

I’m going to tell you why we should consider testing as part of our daily development and how it’s directly linked to the software quality.

I’m still amazed by the lack of experience about testing in software in general. Common ignorance in this world about best testing practices for us as developers. Inexperience that you can easily see if you have already worked on some different projects and teams.

Software testing

Some horrible patterns I’ve seen (and done):

Testing for the sake of testing: testing every single file, sometimes wrongly considered as a unit.

Mocking every class that we intend to test, overriding the real implementation, and creating a fake-behavior, therefore providing a false coverage perception.

Coupling production code with tests everywhere so it’s impossible to change anything without breaking some tests, even if the feature itself it’s working as intended.

Not testing at all because “why should we even test anything if the feature it’s done and it works? Why should we spend more time on this if it’s done?”.

One of the main reasons for software testing is actually verifying a suite of proofs for the expected behavior of the final software piece. However, testing can (and should) be more than that.
7 tips to help improve your web Typography skills
By: Marc Andrew
Tags: UI Design, UI, Visual Design, Design, Product Design

Originally published at marcandrew.me on October 29th, 2020.

A good understanding of Typography (more than imagery, and colour in my opinion) is so important in the design of strong UIs.

Why?

Because the majority of what you see on the web is content-based, so having a better understanding of typography can enable you to keep the reader’s attention, bring them a much better user experience, and strengthen the meaning of the text that is being presented.

With this article, I wanted to show you a handful of tips that will not only give you a better understanding, but also feel more confident when working with type on your next project.

Let’s dive on in…
The Thing That’s Costing You the Most in Life? Your Insecurities.
By: Maddie Mcguire
Tags: Self-awareness, Insecurity, Life Lessons, Personal Development, Self Improvement

I used to think it was some myth artists would spew…

“I’ll get a million positive comments and affirmations about my work. Then I’ll get one negative comment and it gnaws at me. You might as well erase all the compliments I’ve received. Because these few worthless, negative words are overstaying their welcome.”

And then it happened to me.

I was fed a handful of supportive positivity, alongside a small dose of pesky criticisms.

To my disbelief, it really affected me.

I’ve been working in the entertainment industry for a decade. I thought my conditioning to navigate rejection was on fleek.

But I couldn’t shake it from my thoughts.

My higher self was cooing, trying to comfort me. “Let it roll off your back. Don’t worry about what anyone says. A dose of rejection is healthy. Focus on WHY you’re doing it and keep on keepin’ on. You’re a badass and YOU GOT THIS!”

While my child self, who is the keeper of my creativity, and also the keeper of my deep dark insecurities, couldn’t help but start antagonizing me…. “Maybe they’re right…. What are you doing anyway? Why would your words mean anything? Accept that you’re an imposter and your words may never be worthy of anyone's time.”

I texted a brilliant friend to help curb the cyclone of negativity that was taking over my evening. “How could I get these sweet, thoughtful responses from people, but get consumed by a few words of negativity?”

“We harp on the negative because it pokes at the insecurities we already have.” She reminded me.

Ah, yes…. These insecurities that already exist inside of me are getting something to snack on. And it’s fueling their unwanted energy.
Oui: Facebook’s local news problem
By: Matt Carroll
Tags: Journalism, Media Criticism, Matt Carroll, Media, Spotlight Movie

By Matt Carroll <@MattCData>

Dec. 8, 2018: Cool stuff about journalism, once a week. Get notified via email? Subscribe: 3toread (at) gmail. Originally published on 3toread.co

Journalism has a focus problem: How to combat ‘Shiny Things Syndrome’: In an era when change is a constant, it’s easy for newsrooms to be distracted by the latest and greatest promise to … engage with the audience, restore revenue etc etc. Yet Julie Posetti calls for newsroom to slow down, take a more measured, strategic approach to change. Interesting read, based on her research published in the Journalism Innovation Project for the University of Oxford.

Interesting tips on dealing w newsroom editors: A common complaint, from both young and seasoned reporters, is how to deal with editors who dismiss ideas out of hand or who run roughshod over copy. Here’s some tips on how to deal with what can be a difficult situation, by Wilson Lievano for The GroundTruth Project. Interesting ideas on a perennial problem.

The “Yellow Jackets” riots in France are what happens when Facebook gets involved with local news: Ryan Broderick for BuzzFeedNews argues that changes in the Facebook algorithm to emphasize local news helped lead to the recent riots in France. I’m not entirely convinced by the claims, but it is more evidence that Facebook is fairly clueless about what they have unleashed and are amazingly sluggish about reining in bad actors. It seems they still think of themselves as engineers playing with software, when in fact they are a media company.
6 Tips To A Successful Code Review
By: Antoine Solnichkin
Tags: Teamwork, Programming, Productivity, Code Review, Soft Skills

In every software development life cycle, the code review remains one of the key steps in delivering a successful and qualitative product.

In most of the cases, the code review is a ‘ Make It Or Break It ‘ moment.

Often neglected, regularly underestimated, the code review is sometimes skipped for deceptive reasons.

Today, we are going to enumerate the 6 best tips in order to perform a successful and fruitful code-review.
How To Use Microsoft LUIS With Bot Framework Composer
By: Cobus Greyling
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Chatbot Development, Conversational UI, Machine Learning

How To Use Microsoft LUIS With Bot Framework Composer

Here Is A Simple Tutorial To Get You Started With NLU

Introduction

How can we integrate Composer with LUIS…

Firstly, we are going to run Composer locally on my machine and connect to LUIS in the cloud. The NLU configurations we create on Composer will be deployed to a LUIS account. What is LUIS?

Language Understanding (LUIS) is a cloud-based API service that applies custom machine-learning intelligence to a user’s conversational, natural language text to predict overall meaning, and pull out relevant, detailed information. A client application for LUIS is any conversational application that communicates with a user in natural language to complete a task. Examples of client applications include social media apps, chat bots, and speech-enabled desktop applications.

And, Composer is a tool from Microsoft which allows for graphic development of a conversational application; with language generations, state management and integration points.

Setup Composer Recognizer

Within Composer you can setup three recognizer types:

None (Of course)

Regular Expressions

LUIS

Composer Has Three Recognizer Types

It has to be stated that the regular expressions are very powerful and handy.

Without using any NLU, you can build a decent conversational interface merely based on regular expressions.

You will see the moment we select LUIS a text editor appears.

This text editor is where the intents and entities are defined which will be uploaded to LUIS in the cloud.

The file format is very simplistic and the editor alerts you to syntax errors.

Whenever a change is required, you can update the LUIS configuration file and the changes will be deployed to LUIS. Successful deployment can be verified by logging into LUIS.

LUIS File Format

This simple demo cover all the aspects you will require. This demo can easily be built out into a larger application.

The language understanding file we will use:

# BookFlight

- I want to book a flight

- I need to book a flight

- book a flight for me please #FlightDetail

- My family and I want to go on holiday to {toCity=Seattle}

- We are thinking of traveling to {toCity=Denver}

- Our destination will be {toCity=Milan} for our holiday

- We want to visit {toCity=Lisbon}

- On our trip our first stop will be at {toCity=Lisbon}

- We want to travel to {toCity=Lisbon}

There are two intents in the file, BookFlight and FlightDetail.

Bookflight does not have any entities, and we merely want to capture the intent for directing the dialog. This intent can be used to determine which dialog to invoke.

The FlightDetail intent has entities defined. There is only one entity of toCity type. The aim is to capture the city name which will be the travel destination.

Three things need to be noted on these entities:
3 to read: ‘Deep fakes’ are coming | 2d & 3d subscriptions? | Behind the curtain: FB’s big fail
By: Matt Carroll
Tags: Media Criticism, Journalism, Journalism Ethics, Spotlight Movie, Journalism Innovation

By Matt Carroll <@MattCData>

Nov. 20, 2018: Cool stuff about journalism, once a week. Get notified via email? Subscribe: 3toread (at) gmail. Originally published on 3toread.co

You thought fake news was bad? Deep fakes are where truth goes to die:Fake news is about to get a lot faker. Improving technology means it is getting more and more difficult to tell doctored videos from real life. Heck, even badly edited fake videos are taken for the truth — what happens when people can’t tell the difference? A chilling look a the future of fake news by Oscar Schwartz for The Guardian. Extra: World’s first AI TV news anchor unveiled in China.

How many people will pay for 2d or 3d news #subscription?:Quartz and New York mag just put up paywalls, joining a lengthening list of high-profile, quality news pubs that have done so, such as the NYT and WaPo. But how many people can afford to pay for two, three or more news sites?, asks Joshua Benton of NielamnLab. He’s pessimistic, citing research that says only 16% of Americans will pay for any news. (Myself, I’m more optimistic. As more paywalls go up, people will of necessity read fewer sites. But from the perspective of the newsrooms, they don’t care, as long as they have enough paying customers. We’ll see how it plays out.)

Delay, deny & deflect blame at others — How Facebook’s leaders handled crisis: This story will only reinforce your worst fears, if you’ve had doubts about Facebook’s ability to come up with a successful solution in the wake of the Russian election scandal and the company’s unscrupulous handling of data from millions of users. FB’s top leaders were slow to realize they had a problem, slow to realize the breadth and depth of the issues, including the anger of the public, and seemed mostly interested in wallpapering over concerns. The NYT story paints a picture of a dysfunctional platform. Not pretty, but a great read.
For the Love of Food, People, and UX
By: Katie Chen
Tags: Design, Eat24, Case Study, Product Design, Yelp

For the Love of Food, People, and UX

A usability case study on food delivery app Eat24

Objective

My goals for this UX study were to:

Critically analyze problems in an existing app Back up my decisions and solutions with sound reasoning and data Communicate my thinking and design process Show, not just tell, my ability to do the above things Learn to identify the unsuspecting civilians most likely to be convinced into doing a usability test (and then bribe them to get them to spend 5–10 minutes with someone they’ve never met)

Why Eat24?

Food delivery is arguably the most breakthrough idea anyone’s ever had. It’s even better now with smartphones. Not having to talk to anyone to order food? The dream.

Eat24 has the power to leverage Yelp reviews and ratings to help hungry users pick the best place to order delivery from. I thought this was a great chance for me to flex my design muscles and explore how I can improve the experience of the app (but most importantly, stare at pictures of food).

This is all of us. (Source: Yelp Eat24 Twitter)

User Research

On a rainy day, I approached strangers to run usability tests on Eat24 (see Goal #5). Using a GoPro to record their voice, fingers, and the screen, I interviewed 7 people and later compiled the insights drawn from the interactions. I approached users with the prompt:

Imagine a night where you’d more likely order delivery than go out to eat. Show me how you would order delivery using Eat24.

Throughout the process, I encouraged participants to express general thoughts, many of which were laments about how freakin’ good a side of garlic bread sounded.
To The Novice Writer From The Hobbyist Writer
By: Riku Arikiri
Tags: Writing, Advice, Life Lessons, Life, Self Improvement

Writing Advice For The Noobs, All of Us Started As One

To The Novice Writer From The Hobbyist Writer

A piece of advice learned after a few hundred failures, and many successes while writing online.

Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash

I know we have read a bit too many articles on how to get better at writing.

Heck, I see them every day, in my feed. There are at least ten different types you see here. But it has decreased for a few weeks.

But the crux of the matter is there isn’t much applicable advice for the novice from the underdog. They are just too confused how or what to do with it.

The fact of the matter is the advice is just a detailed explanation for “how it worked for them” and selling it “how it can work for you?”

It can but chances are it won’t. The chance of succeeding at writing on the first try are slim. Unless you’re Seth Godin of course.

The man writes one 2 minute article and the algorithm just puts him on the front page. Whew!

And then some writers try hard to break it, but the algorithm never seems to fare them at all. I have read hundreds if not thousands of writers on medium as of this year.

From poets to comics, self improv gurus to mental health advocates, life lesson advisers to “America is on fire” mind bangers. You know who I’m talking about. 😉

There is a diverse set of variety on medium and I take my time exploring every part of it. I usually search topics through google’s advanced search when reading good stuff on medium.

You’d be surprised google favours medium a lot, especially when it comes to ranking humour pieces if you know what you’re searching for.

Chances are you’re going to find it on medium.

What irks me though is that these writers are barely not even famous. Their writing blows me away, and their style is highly addictive to read.

So much so I save them in my reading list; they deserve a place to be read and shared hundreds of times.

Well, where was I, oh yeah when it comes to writing on the medium platform?

Things have changed; in my life so much so it has broken my habit of writing. Or I just become severely depressed that takes the life out of my writing.

And then I stop writing.

And that’s that.
It’s okay to not thrive during all… 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴.
Tags: Humor, Comics, Self Improvement, Productivity

Just do what you can, okay?

https://www.dieselsweeties.com/ics/1053/
Live the Present
By: Ivette Cruz
Tags: Self-awareness, Mindfulness, Spirituality, Poetry, Spiritual Secrets

Surrender

to the

present

let go

of the

past

and have

faith

in the

future
Explicando aprendizaje supervisado a un niño (o tu jefe)
By: Cassie Kozyrkov
Tags: Machine Learning, Data Science, Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Ciencia Y Datos

Head of Decision Intelligence, Google. Hello (multilingual) world! This account is for translated versions of my English language articles. twitter.com/quaesita

Follow
Back to Legacy Transform in Photoshop CC 2019
By: Veerle Pieters
Tags: Photoshop, Design

Are you also annoyed by the change Adobe added in the latest version of Photoshop that you don’t have to hold down the shift key when you want to scale an item proportionally?

Don’t hold the shift key when scaling

The old way is so engraved in my brain that this new way of scaling just doesn’t work for me personally. Luckily it is an easy adjustment to have the original way back.

Here’s how you can undo this change:

Use Notepad (Windows) or a text editor on macOS to create a plain text file (.txt). Type this text in the text file: TransformProportionalScale 0 Save the file as ‘PSUserConfig.txt’ to your Photoshop settings folder: Windows: [Installation Drive]:\Users\[User Name]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CC 2019\Adobe Photoshop CC 2019 Settings\ macOS: //Users/[User Name]/Library/Preferences/Adobe Photoshop CC 2019 Settings/ (Hold down the Option key and go to the ‘Go’ menu to reveal ‘Library’ in the menu).

This article first appeared on Veerle’s Blog 4.0
How to Generate Multiple Sources of Income
By: Jordan Mendiola
Tags: Motivation, Finance, Money, Work, Inspiration

The only way to truly find work supporting your lifestyle is by trying several different career paths and side hustles.

I would not be making strides towards achieving my financial goals and doing work; I genuinely enjoy it if I always played it safe. As kids, we were taught to be safe. We were taught not to color outside the lines.

We were told we could do anything we wanted.

But life and the system tells us we need to find something stable. We need to go to school, get a degree, work at a job, climb the ladder, get promoted, and then we’ll be happy.

As someone who didn’t finish college and follow the crowd, I’m here to tell you that there are other ways to make a living besides doing what everyone else does.
Call for Submissions to New Promposity Challenge — July /August -Write a Transcendental Piece
By: Natalie Frank
Tags: Essay, Writing Prompts, Poetry, Promposity, Writing

Perhaps, like me, you are a fan of the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. While some find his poetry harsh, I often find it to be beautiful. He frequently turns to nature to display his views of life, the spiritual self, independence, and loss. One of my favorites, Threnody, written about the son he lost to Scarlet Fever when he was just five years old, is filled with the rudiments of New England hills, gardens, and scrub forest which reminds me of the time I spend in Rhode Island and Connecticut. In the grief-stricken language is described the perfectly distinct New England winterscape.

The following passage taken from the essay, “The Poet”, is for me, the epitome of the creative process and what results. It is inspiration, life experience, expression and the outcome not just for ourselves but for others. While it speaks specifically of the poet, I think it can just as easily apply to any type of creative expression:

The poet has a new thought: he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune. For, the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you read the essay, you will likely see why Emerson was known more for his prose than for his poetry. His poetry formed the basis for a new type of poetry and his prose explained the principles of it.

This was the beginning of the Transcendental Movement. Emerson’s essay “Nature,” published in 1836, presented the Transcendentalist philosophy. In this essay, he expressed the belief that the natural and material world exists to reveal universal meaning to the individual soul through subjective experiences. He promoted the poet’s role as seer, a “transparent eyeball” that received insight intuitively through their perception of nature.

In other words, the most important reality is what is sensed or what is intuitive even if it can’t be explained in words, rather than what is thought and analyzed, such as scientific knowledge. This is the basis of transcendentalism. There are five primary characteristics that are embodied in the movement. These are nonconformity, self-reliance, free thought, confidence, and the importance of nature.
WFH is now SOP. Design leaders share creative ideas to make it work.
By: Susie Hall
Tags: Design Leadership, Remote Work, Aquentinsideout, Design, Leadership

With the renewed and heightened anxiety caused by a resurgence of COVID-19 cases, remote workers enter a new — and possibly worse — phase of working from home. Already facing burnout caused by isolation or the overwhelming responsibility of caring for kids and loved ones, the uncertainty of this next wave seems unfathomable.

Leaders of design teams face the challenge of reassuring staff, while simultaneously keeping them engaged amid predictions of more economic pressures on the way. The prospect of more homeschooling ahead adds yet another layer of complexity.

Notoriously collaborative problem-solvers, design leaders are coming together to find solutions. In July, our InsideOut Design Leader Community gathered to tackle this very real challenge. Below are some tips we hope will help meet these new leadership demands with insights from senior leaders at high-profile brands.

Start by Assessing What’s Happening

There’s a lot of focus on the downsides of this pandemic, and there are many. From endless video calls to the creation of silos that stall progress to the sheer monotony of these endless days, it’s easy to get lost in the negatives. And if these are the roadblocks that prevent the team from hitting goals, they’re certainly worth addressing. But first, leaders have to dig in to determine which issues will have the greatest impact on success.

Several leaders suggest hosting an open discussion with teams, allowing them to both identify the highest priority problems to solve and engaging them in uncovering solutions. One leader shared the experience of discovering that a mission critical part of their hiring process was crippled — in-person coding exercises just aren’t feasible right now. By determining the real benefits of being in the room with candidates, they were able to reimagine their system to not only reap the positives but also broaden their recruiting options and reduce hiring costs in the long term!

On the bright side of this global health crisis, change can be accelerated, providing a springboard for previously unbelievable progress. Companies are adopting new technologies for communication and transparency in record time, which will yield improvements for years to come. In addition, many leaders are reporting that decision-making processes that took weeks to complete can now be moved into production within days, as time pressures remove unnecessary layers and steps. Leaders who haven’t yet reviewed their own communication and decision-making systems should take the time to do so.

Bottom line, bringing together design teams and stakeholders to identify hurdles, opportunities, and innovations should be the first step in moving forward.
Liderazgo y Innovación hacia la sostenibilidad
Tags: Fssd The Natural Step, Sustainable Development, Leadership, Formación, Sustainability

in In Fitness And In Health
DIY: A Web Version of the Fluent Design System’s Acrylic Material
By: Joe Day
Tags: Fluent Design System, Design, Web Development, Microsoft

DIY: A Web Version of the Fluent Design System’s Acrylic Material

Using backdrop-filter on Microsoft Edge and other modern browsers

“It’s the dark arts.”

That’s what a colleague of mine said one day as we were walking to lunch talking about people with CSS expertise. He went on to compare it to the more traditional forms of computer science (math) and visual design (art). “But people with CSS skills, man…” he sighed, “it’s the dark arts.”

This has been especially true for those of us who make web sites work across browsers and operating systems. All the cross browser hacks, CSS feature detection, positioning tricks, etc… a front-end dev must collect and manage a library of spells to be successful at their work.

Well, here’s another one for your book of incantations. I’m going to show you how to use backdrop-filter today. Grab your pointy hat.

What is backdrop-filter?

Light theme acrylic

Dark theme acrylic

Here’s what caniuse.com says:

“Method of applying filter effects (like blur, grayscale or hue) to content/elements below the target element.”

You’ve seen this effect in the Fluent Design System’s Acrylic Material as well as in iOS. If you wanted to bring this effect into your designs on the web, well, you had to hex your users into using only Safari, and of course you didn’t because you’re a good wizard, we know. This is because Safari was the only browser that supported backdrop-filter out of the box. Until now, anyways. With the April 2018 release of Windows, Edge 17 supports backdrop-filter using the -webkit prefix.

The how-to part

backdrop-filter is still very new and if it had widespread browser adoption, this article would be a very short one consisting of the following:

Put this on your CSS element if you want to blur whatever is behind it

backdrop-filter: blur(20px);

Of course, if your element has a solid color background, you won’t see any difference, so make sure you’re using a color formula (RGBA, HSLA, etc…) where you can control the opacity like so:

backdrop-filter: blur(20px);

background-color: rgba(255,255,255,.3);

But this only works in Safari. To get that goodness in Edge, use the -webkit prefix:

-webkit-backdrop-filter: blur(20px);

backdrop-filter: blur(20px);

background-color: rgba(255,255,255,.3);

Of course, a quick trip to caniuse.com confirms something we might already know: this only works in Edge and Safari (and iOS). What about the others? Firefox and Chrome don’t support it yet, so we’ll have to use a fallback for that.