- Why Should I Trust You?: Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier (PDF) — LIME, a novel explanation technique that explains the predictions of any classifier in an interpretable and faithful manner, by learning an interpretable model locally around the prediction. Torkington’s Second Law: there’s no problem with machine learning that more machine learning can’t fix.
- How Etsy Formats Currency — I’m saving this one because it chafes every time I do it, and I do it wrong every time.
- Magic Leap in Wired — massive story by Kevin Kelly on the glories of Magic Leap, which The Verge noted still left a lot of open questions, such as “what the hell IS Magic Leap’s technology” and “why does everyone who works for Magic Leap sound like they’re on acid when they talk about the technology?” Everyone who wants their pixel-free glorious VR to be true is crossing fingers hoping it’s not another Theranos. The bit that stuck from the Wired piece was People remember VR experiences not as a memory of something they saw but as something that happened to them.
- Curing Our Slack Addiction — an interesting counterpoint to the “in the future everyone will be on 15,000 Slacks” Slack-maximalist view. For AgileBits, it distracted, facilitated, and rewarded distracting behaviour, ultimately becoming a drain rather than an accelerant.
"slack" entries
Four short links: 20 April 2016
Explaining Classifier Predictions, Formatting Currency, Questioning Magic Leap, and Curing Slack Addiction
Four short links: 12 February 2016
Slack's Voice, Accessible Experiences, IoT Design, and What I Learned
- Webstock: Bug Fixes & Minor Improvements — notes from Anna Pickard’s talk about being the voice of Slack, recorded by Luke Wroblewski.
- Webstock: The Map & The Territory — notes from Ethan Marcotte’s talk about making accessible experiences, recorded by Luke Wroblewski.
- Webstock: The Shape of Things — notes from Tom Coates’s talk about designing for the Internet of Things, recorded by Luke Wroblewski.
- Today I Learned — A collection of concise write-ups on small things I learn day to day across a variety of languages and technologies. These are things that don’t really warrant a full blog post.
Four short links: 10 July 2015
King Rat Brain, Emojactions, Dead Eye, and Cloud Value
- Computer of Wired-Together Rat Brains — this is ALL THE AMAZING. a Brainet that allows three monkeys connected at the brain to control a virtual arm on screen across three axes. […] Nicolelis said that, essentially, he created a “classic artificial neural network using brains.” In that sense, it’s not artificial at all. (via Slashdot)
- Reactions — Slack turns emoji into first-class interactions. Genius!
- Pixar’s Scientific Method — If you turn your head without moving your eyes first, it looks like you’re dead. Now there’s your uncanny valley.
- AWS CodePipeline — latest in Amazon’s build-out of cloud tools. Interchangeable commodity platforms regaining lockin via higher-order less-interchangeable tooling for deployment, config, monitoring, etc.
Asynchronous now!
Everyone wants an alternative to email, but do we really need one?
Editor’s note: this post originally appeared on Medium; it is republished here with permission.
Conventional workplace wisdom declares email a daily scourge. We receive too much of it. We spend too much time replying to it. We concoct elaborate strategies to cope with it and avoid incurring a debt that downward-spirals to email bankruptcy.
We bow down at the altar of Inbox Zero, the methodology that dictates we take prompt, concrete action to dispatch with every single message we receive. Reply to it. Or file it. Or delete it. We turn the drudgery of processing the flood of correspondence into a game. Inbox Zero, FTW! Achievement unlocked … till the next time we hit refresh. Because emails are like gray hairs: for every one we send packing, five more will soon arrive in its place. Any client-side strategy we take to conquer our inboxes is thus limited by the fact that it’s palliative, not ameliorative. Perpetuating Inbox Zero means living in a constant state of vigilance, aggressively and swiftly responding to every incoming message. It means becoming an email answering machine!
Four short links: 7 August 2014
Material Design, Stewart's Slack, Sketching in Javascript, and Neural Networks and Deep Learning
- Material Design in the Google I/O App (Medium) — steps through design thinking as they put Google’s new design metaphor in place. I’ve been chewing on material design. It brings an internal consistency and logic to the Android world that Apple’s iOS and OS X visual worlds have been losing over the years. How long until web users expect this consistency too?
- Stewart and Slack (Wired) — profile of Foo Stewart Butterfield and his shiny Slack startup.
- p5js — a new Processing-inspired code-as-sketching in Javascript. Using the original metaphor of a software sketchbook, p5.js has a full set of drawing functionality. However, you’re not limited to your drawing canvas, you can think of your whole browser page as your sketch!
- Neural Networks and Deep Learning — a free online book to teach you … well, neural networks and deep learning.