👨🏽🚀Five Link Friday #3
DALL-E, NASA's plan for planetary defence, virtual reality vs reality, prosperity vs skepticism, A soft murmur.
Hi Friends 👋🏼
I hope the first week of January, at least on a personal level, has been kind to you.
My year started with my M1 MacBook Air finally arriving after almost 3 weeks. Suffice to say, this is the best laptop I’ve ever owned. That might sound like hyperbole but this device calls for it. I have a fully spec-ed out 15-inch 2018 MacBook Pro that I use as a home computer and every time I’m on it, I just want to get back to the M1 Air. It is the pure speed and power. Opening applications, surfing on Safari, using Powerpoint with a 100 images on a slide, editing photos on Lightroom, handled with absolute ease and buttery smoothness. Its a difference you can definitely tell.
If you’re planning on getting a new laptop and you work mainly on office/google suite and on the internet, this is without a doubt the device for you. And the price (surprisingly for Apple) is not too shabby either.
But enough about laptops and back to the Five Links you came here for. (If you want more qns or want more feedback on the M1 MacBook Air before purchasing, just reply this email or DM me).
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Let’s get into it.
Five Link Friday #3
🖼️ DALL-E, from the same guys that brought you GPT-3
LINK
Imagine a world where you, as a product designer, could tell a computer what you were envisioning in your mind, and the computer could provide you a variety of visualisations of it? Well, with OpenAI’s DALL-E, we are one step closer. DALL-E, put simply is a neural network trained to generate images based on text and image descriptions provided to it. (The images are created by the DALL-E, not just pulled off the internet). The blog post provides tons of examples of the system’s various aspects of comprehension and you can even change some of the input text and see the different results. While this is just a consumer friendly packaged blog post and not the full research paper, its still impressive. I’m especially wow-ed at the fact that the system has “perception” of time. For example you can ask it to show you: A photo of a phone from the XXs and you get:
Honestly it’s generated phones for the future seem a little suspect but still, pretty impressive stuff. Another aspect I think would be extremely useful for designers, was demonstrated in its ability to combine unrelated concepts such as asking DALL-E to show you “An Armchair in the shape of an avocado”:
With further refinement, I can see this being applied as an idea/concept visualiser or a starting point/brainstorming tool as one develops new products.
(DALL-E works hand-in-hand with CLIP if you want more additional reading)
🚀 How to build a spacecraft to save the world
LINK
This is a peek behind the curtain into NASA’s planetary defence project in the event of a potential earth-bound asteroid. *cues Armageddon theme song*. To be honest, before reading this post I had no idea we even had a global partnership between NASA and its sister space agencies committed and funded to protect the planet from earthbound threats. Enjoy reading this one.
🥽 Escaping Virtual Reality by Anirudh Pai
LINK
This post made me reflect on my own views regarding the inevitability of a future where most of us are living much of our lives in some form of metaverse.
On the effects of kids today spending hours a day in virtual worlds:
This effect is compounded when we look at the impact of these worlds on future generations. Will kids today see this change as merely a minor aberration or a better path for them to follow: Don’t build anything with atoms because it's too difficult or complex.
A must read.
🧋Two Worlds: So Much Prosperity, So Much Skepticism by Morgan Housel
LINK
Morgan Housel’s latest beautifully written Long Form which is basically a masterful explanation of the K-shape recovery, how our future expectations of politicians change with every “emergency” action taken during the pandemic and so much more. You start to understand how today, Americans have more wealth than every before but there is also a section of the populace that sees it as a bunch of BS as they’ve never been in a worse place financially in their lives.
A great quote from the post on the evolving expectations of the population with each crisis:
Barack Obama writes in his recent memoir that when he wanted to do a $1 trillion stimulus his own chief of staff responded, “there’s no f**cking way.” It just seemed impossible. Now we do that and people yawn, and the biggest part of the story is that it’s only $1 trillion when it could have been $3 trillion.
🔊 Get some focus with: A Soft Murmur
LINK
With working from home alone everyday, I usually need some ambient sounds running in the background to keep me from going insane. While my go-to has been the ever-popular Lo-Fi Beats, this week I discovered “A Soft Murmur”. Its basically a free site (with a paid section) where you can mix your own background noise depending on what you want to hear be it: rain, thunder, crickets, waves, coffeeshop or birds. Combine them in various ways, vary the volumes to your hearts content. My personal combination is coffeeshop at full volume with a hint of rain and waves.
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Hope you found those links as mentally stimulating as I did. As always, if you're finding this newsletter interesting, give me your feedback; you can respond to this email or tweet at me!