We all know of someone who's given up on The Faith for one reason or another. Fr Thomas reminds us that our love for God and for one another must be the bond that brings us together and keeps us together. (Thirtieth Sunday after Pentecost)

When we hear about Old Testament Temple worship, we can sometimes think we're far removed from it. Fr Thomas reminds us that Orthodox Christian worship is, in fact, directly related to Old Testament Temple worship, because it's the fulfillment of those old forms and rituals. (Great Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple)

The Parable of the Publican and Pharisee is the Church's herald to prepare for Great Lent. To begin, Fr Thomas presents three important principles to bear in mind when approaching God in prayer. (Sunday of the Publican and Pharisee)

As cultural changes rapidly sweep across the Western world, the question of who we are as individuals becomes a persistent theme. Fr Thomas reminds us that one of the central doctrines of our faith, growing in the likeness of God, reveals who we truly are in Christ. (19th Sunday after Pentecost)

The parable of the Lazarus and the Rich Man is a story rich with lessons about life and about death. Fr Thomas focuses on the implications of living with unprecedented wealth in our modern society.

The parable of the Good Samaritan is universally known as an encouragement to good works, to serve those who are in need. Fr Thomas reminds us that behind the parable is a deeper meaning which helps us experience the Church as a spiritual hospital.

The image of Christianity is being sullied by TV preachers who justify their desire for riches under the guise of a distorted piety. Hence, prayer, which allows us to ask God for good things, is instead cheapened to demand things which are self-serving. Fr Thomas teaches us the riches of prayer mined from the story of the healing of blind Bartimeaus.

The first parable that Jesus taught is the beloved Parable of the Sower. Fr Thomas explains its place in the scripture and its crucial importance in our lives.

Bobby interviews Fr. Lawrence Farley, author of The Gospel of Luke: Good News for the Poor.

Bobby Maddex interviews Fr. Lawrence Farley, pastor of Saint Herman of Alaska Orthodox Church in British Columbia, the host of the AFR podcast Coffee Cup Commentaries, and the author of The Gospel of Luke: Good News for the Poor, published by Conciliar Press.

Bobby Maddex interviews Luke Mayernik, composer of The Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom performed by the Festino Chamber Choir. Together they discuss Luke's background in both music and Orthodoxy, his valiant struggles with doubt, and the long creative process that led to this composition. If you want to learn more about Luke Mayernik and stay up to date with his projects you can visit his website. Listeners can stream or purchase The Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom on Spotify or iTunes/Apple Music

Using stories found only in Luke, Fr. Pat looks at features quite prominent to this Gospel. (From October 18, 2015, the Feast of St. Luke)

An untimely net-cord winner sets Tomas Martin Etcheverry on his way to victory against Dan Evans in Great Britain's opening match against Argentina at the Davis Cup in Manchester.

The Welsh Hollywood star has written a memoir called Boy from the Valleys.

Beverly Hills 90210 was one of my favorite shows growing up. I mean, I was definitely a bit too young to be watching it, but my mom didn’t really seem to mind. I wanted to be Brenda Walsh or Kelly Taylor, and Brendan Walsh and Dylan McKay were like my sexual fucking awakening. All these […]

The post Luke Perry has Passed Away at Age 52 appeared first on HecklerSpray.

Drake Maye was a star, but the defense stole the show. Reporter Khari A. Thompson examines if it was a turning point for New England.

The post Watch: Is the Patriots’ win a sign of improvement? Or a fluke? appeared first on Boston.com.

Luke Lombardi was recently honored with the Structural Engineers Association of Southern California Emerging Leader Award, recognizing his leadership on sustainability and innovation in California.

The Fluke 810 helps you locate and diagnose common mechanical problems and prioritize repairs. Tester includes laser tachometer, triaxial accelerometer and quick disconnect cable.

Taking home the golden honors in the Testing and Monitoring category of this year’s Dealer Design Awards is the T6 Electrical Tester from Fluke Corp. The product, first introduced to the marketplace in September 2017, went through years of research before launching.

Fluke Corp.’s Fluke Connect received the gold award in the Testing & Monitoring category of the 2015 Dealer Design Awards.

In this episode we talk about the relationship between software architecture and the business. Based on his book, Beyond Software Architecture we discuss how things such as branding, licensing, updating or different deployment scenarios influence the technical architecture of a system. We also discuss issues such as portability that add a huge amount of complexity, although from a business perspective it often does not make much sense. In the second part of the interview we discuss how the technical team and the business team can improve the way they work together. We look at some of the games (such as Buy a Feature or Give them a Hot Tub) from his new book Innovation Games, which discusses how to use collaborative play to be more creative and innovative in product creation.

This episode is a discussion about F# with Microsoft's F# program manager Luke Hoban.

Luke Kysow from Hashicorp does a deep dive into the key features of Consul with host Priyanka Raghavan.

Luke Hoban, CTO of Pulumi, joined host Jeff Doolittle for a conversation about infrastructure as code (IAC), which allows software development teams to configure and control their cloud infrastructure assets using code in contrast to other approaches...

Plus 12 more new releases to watch at home this week on 4K UHD, Blu-ray, and DVD!

When appearing on 'The Ellen DeGeneres Show', the 'American Idol' judge sets the record straight on the tabloid tale, recalling that he got a call from his mother when having a coffee.

The implications for some of Kaiser’s other hospital partnerships remain unclear.

The Bermuda Friendly Societies Association hosted their 21st Annual Sportsmanship Award. The award is to recognize and perpetuate the link between the Friendly Societies and the Origin of the Annual Cup Match Classic. The Umpires make the recommendation to the organization and this year winner was Luke Horan of the St. Georges Cricket Club. Bermuda […]

Luke Robinson, the Bermuda national team footballer, has rejoined English non-league side Whitehawk. Robinson, who plays as a defender or winger, featured in Whitehawk’s goalless draw at home to Billericay Town in the Isthmian League Premier Division on Saturday [November 2]. The 26-year-old helped Whitehawk win promotion from in the Isthmian League South East Division […]

1. Hallo kroket! Mike De Decker vermorzelt Michael Smith en treft Luke Littler in Grand Slam of Darts  Gazet van Antwerpen
2. Sterke Van den Bergh en De Decker stoten door in Grand Slam of Darts, onverwachte exit Van Gerwen  sporza.be
3. VIDEO. Hallo kroket! Mike De Decker vermorzelt Michael Smith en treft Luke Littler in 1/8ste finale Grand Slam of Darts  Het Nieuwsblad
4. VIDEO. Dimitri Van den Bergh flitst naar 1/8ste finales Grand Slam of Darts, met dank aan een muntje: “Ik ga iets uit mijn achterzak pakken...”  Gazet van Antwerpen
5. Mike De Decker bij laatste 16 op Grand Slam of Darts  RTV

Leukocidin ED (LukED) is a pore-forming toxin produced by Staphylococcus aureus, which lyses host cells and promotes virulence of the bacteria. LukED enables S. aureus to acquire iron by lysing erythrocytes, which depends on targeting the host receptor Duffy antigen receptor for chemokines (DARC). The toxin also targets DARC on the endothelium, contributing to the lethality observed during bloodstream infection in mice. LukED is comprised of two monomers: LukE and LukD. LukE binds to DARC and facilitates hemolysis, but the closely related Panton–Valentine leukocidin S (LukS-PV) does not bind to DARC and is not hemolytic. The interaction of LukE with DARC and the role this plays in hemolysis are incompletely characterized. To determine the domain(s) of LukE that are critical for DARC binding, we studied the hemolytic function of LukE–LukS-PV chimeras, in which areas of sequence divergence (divergence regions, or DRs) were swapped between the toxins. We found that two regions of LukE's rim domain contribute to hemolysis, namely residues 57–75 (DR1) and residues 182–196 (DR4). Interestingly, LukE DR1 is sufficient to render LukS-PV capable of DARC binding and hemolysis. Further, LukE, by binding DARC through DR1, promotes the recruitment of LukD to erythrocytes, likely by facilitating LukED oligomer formation. Finally, we show that LukE targets murine Darc through DR1 in vivo to cause host lethality. These findings expand our biochemical understanding of the LukE–DARC interaction and the role that this toxin-receptor pair plays in S. aureus pathophysiology.

Check here each week to keep up with the latest from John MacArthur's pulpit at Grace Community Church.

Check here each week to keep up with the latest from John MacArthur's pulpit at Grace Community Church.

Check here each week to keep up with the latest from John MacArthur's pulpit at Grace Community Church.

Check here each week to keep up with the latest from John MacArthur's pulpit at Grace Community Church.

Check here each week to keep up with the latest from John MacArthur's pulpit at Grace Community Church.

Check here each week to keep up with the latest from John MacArthur's pulpit at Grace Community Church.

Check here each week to keep up with the latest from John MacArthur's pulpit at Grace Community Church.

Check here each week to keep up with the latest from John MacArthur's pulpit at Grace Community Church.

Check here each week to keep up with the latest from John MacArthur's pulpit at Grace Community Church.

Chairman of the Board of Partners of PwC Australia, Michael Happell, has announced that Luke Sayers will continue as Chief Executive Officer of the Australian firm for a further four years.

Manchester : Manchester University Press, [2018]

New York : Scribner, 2024.

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.

State incentives boost scrappage uptake, but space limitations hinder progress