It's a new week! Today I am thinking a lot about making good decisions. Did you know that emotions form some of the strongest anchors for our decisions, which often happens intuitively without our realising?
Here are some of this week's highlights of ideas, to hopefully help us make better decisions!
Weekly Highlights
Ants & Aliens: Long-Term Product Vision & Strategy
Taking a futuristic big picture view may help to better orient actions in the present.
But what if I ask you to imagine your product in thirty years? Something appealing happens when you contemplate that time horizon. It’s so far into the future that the little details have to fall away. Who the hell knows what device we’ll be using to communicate in 2046?! It’s impossible to predict. Yet it’s easy to anticipate that we’ll be using something that will be even easier, faster, more powerful, and more ubiquitous than the smartphones of today. Zooming out to see the industry at a geological time scale brings things into focus: technology is progressing faster than most of us imagined, and will only continue to do so.
An update on Pixie, Pinterest’s recommendation system
Pinterest has been working on developing a way to recommend content that is less popular yet drives better engagement, sidestepping the popularity contest game for content.
Since we deployed Pixie online, we’ve seen a vast improvement in probabilities. In the pre-Pixie era, we needed to recycle popular content to Pinners because chances were that they would like it too. However, once we deployed Pixie we found, we were much more efficient and able to recommend more relevant content, increasing engagement by 37x. Where we had been serving Pins with a median of 90,000 saves, we were now serving Pins with a median of 1,000 saves. Despite recommending all content, including content that is much less popular, we saw much higher engagement.
Designing Programs
Designing Programs is an immersive and practical deep-dive into programming, tailored for visual arts students.
“Code is not purely abstract and mathematical; it has significant social, political, and aesthetic dimensions.” Based on what I've just written, some may say that our everyday programmer is just an operator of functional input. However, within the wider scope of code and the emerging methodologies of critical software studies , we are beginning to understand that this language system shares a dynamic and rich cultural dimension that has only just begun to take shape in our history.
Building a Second Brain: An Overview
We now have the ability to externalise our thoughts processes, to map out how our minds form connections and link ideas.
"Building A Second Brain is a methodology for saving and systematically reminding us of the ideas, inspirations, insights, and connections we’ve gained through our experience. It expands our memory and our intellect using the modern tools of technology and networks.
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