'It was a very disorganised industry back then and people were very disrespectful towards actors.'

'You have to keep working hard.''The universe sees that in you and the higher power puts those opportunities in your way.'

'The kind of things they were writing, 'Oh, what is this, she's overacting at her wedding.' 'Why is she not covering her head?''The kind of liberty people take to comment on what I should be doing in my personal life is not something I'm okay with.'

'Out of sight, out of mind happens.'

'If you're a person who's not comfortable going out to parties for networking, don't do it.''It's not like you're getting a film at a party.'

'The maximum struggle that I have gone through in this industry was to try to get a film made which had a female action star.''And that film never got made, despite reaching out to some of the biggest actresses.'

If you’re unfamiliar with LIFX it’s basically a smart wifi enabled led lightbulb. Lifx recently released a Ruby gem to communicate with it and give it instructions. With winter looming in the southern hemisphere and the sun being up for what feels like 4 seconds at that time of year it’s really hard to get … Continue reading "Creating a sunrise alarm with the LIFX lightbulb"

While the OnePlus 13 has only been revealed in China so far, speculations are that it will arrive on the global market in the coming months. In India, the phone is expected to be launched in January 2025.

Sachin Samrat Medavarapu, a recognized leader in AI-enhanced security and performance optimization, has built an impressive career marked by a series of significant achievements.

A dance festival dedicated to former President Kalam, hosted by Aatmalaya Academy, invited dancers to experiment with an unconventional theme

Refreshing interpretations of ‘Krishna Bharatam’ marked the Natyarangam festival.

The Modi Govt drew up a blueprint for 25 focus sectors

TT Srinath reviews Sankarasubramanyan Ramamoorthy's book

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

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

The government subsidised the sale of a few commodities to improve domestic supply and arrest the sharp spikes in retail prices of wheat, rice, edible oils, pulses, tomato, and onion

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

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

At some point in their career, every designer has heard the request to make an element "pop more". The premise is simple: to draw attention to a particular element in a layout, make it stand out. However, in practice, the opposite effect often occurs.

Consider the overlaid promotions, tips, or call-outs typically found in an interface. To get these elements noticed, designers will apply contrasting colors, shapes, fonts, and more. All in an attempt to make things pop. But if a pop-up or any element of a user interface for that matter looks too different from the rest of the design, people will often perceive it as something that doesn't belong (like an ad) and dismiss it.

"
We see overlay avoidance consistently in the research we conduct with mobile users. Especially when people are task focussed. Then when they do come to use a new function they can't find the help and don't recall seeing the help previously."
-Lisa Duddington 
Co-founder, Keep It Usable

As Lisa points out, when people are task-focused, they ignore and quickly dismiss overlays assuming they aren’t there to support their core flow but instead to distract from it. Some of these dismissals may even be accidental. That is, people just get rid of dialog-like things by instinct and without thinking.

"We saw this all the time at Facebook. People very often, instinctively, dismiss tooltips. On occasion even accidentally. By the time they realize the message may have been helpful, it's already gone and there's no way to recover it."
-
Tanner Christensen 
Product Designer, Facebook

In cases where the overall actually had useful information, when its gone so is the useful information. And there's usually no way to get it back. Probably not the intended effect of making an overlay more noticeable through design.

On the other hand, if the pop-up looks like an integrated part of the app or website, it's much more likely to be considered and perceived as relevant. In Red Laser’s case, making the primary action button huge and red led to users completely ignoring it. In subsequent redesigns, they toned down the shape and added a label, making it feel more like part of the core navigation. They even dropped the different color.

"We made our ‘scan’ button huge and a different color from the rest of the nav menu and users entirely ignored it."
-Miles Skorpen, Head of Business Development, Red Laser

As these examples illustrate, instead of making elements visually distinct to be noticed, designers should focus on integrating important elements seamlessly into the user interface. This ensures that crucial actions and information are perceived as part of the overall user experience, rather than distractions to be dismissed.

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.

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.

Like your wine? Here are a few places you can visit for the best — paired with just the right kind of food

This year around, the Watch Oscars threw up some surprises by independent watchmakers

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

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

As the Telugu film ‘Balagam’ wins hearts and international awards, director Venu Yeldandi talks about how he wanted the film to reflect native culture and relationships in Sircilla, Telangana

The trial against actor Saif Ali Khan is likely to begin from June 15 as the court issued summons to witnesses in the case

Laptop is ‘crafted with US military-grade certification’ for mobility

On January 31st the Centre cut import duties on certain mechanical components such as battery covers, camera lenses, back covers to zero, from the earlier 7 per cent import duty on these components.

Tokyo ; Rutland, Vermont ; Singapore : Tuttle Publishing, 2020.

London : Faber and Faber : Profile Books, 2009.

London : Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.

[Paris] : Éditions Gallimard, 2005.

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México, D.F. : Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1981.

Pátzcuarao, Michoacán : Programa de Etnolingüística : SEP : CIESAS : INI, 1981.

Paris : Khéops, 2021.

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Edinburgh : Ian & Averil McHaffie, 2024.

London : The Bodley Head Ltd, 2024.

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Washington, D.C. : ICS Publications, [2016]