1. Interesting rTMS Results in Healthy People by Sarah Constantin Overview of selected research on repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation on healthy people. rTMS is used to treat depression and other mental disorders, but some research suggests that it has cognitive enhancement effects on healthy people.
  2. Why 5 is the Magic Number for UX Usability Testing by Ellie Martin at Invision. New insights collected by each new user decreases fast and flattens out visibly at 5 test users. A Poisson Distribution with a, say, 31% binomial probability shows that once you add more than 5 users to a test group, returns diminish drastically. (The only point of contention may be the randomly chosen 31% as the average problem frequency).
  3. A Few Thoughts On China’s App Crackdown in China by Jay Goldberg at Dollars and Data. It’d be incredible to peek into the heads of some of the regulators in the CCP. The current alternative: Reading a variety of tech blogs to get a sense of what’s going on. Goldberg suggests that Chinese officials may emulate the Korean government, which jailed leading executives in the 60’s to ‘refocus’ their minds on the country’s development agenda.
  4. The User Experience Team of One by Leah Buley. UX is crucial when it comes to not only building the things right, but building the right things. Buley wrote a concise guide on the tools and tricks that give you optimal output when you’re the lone UX wolf in your team (including how to get buy in and enthusiasm from the rest of the team).
  5. Metaverses by Ben Thompson at Stratechery. The metaverse is going corporate — or rather “metaverse enterprise”, as Microsoft coined it. One of the biggest difference to the “metaverse” originally constructed by Neal Stephenson in his sci-fi novel Snowcrash is that it seems there will not be just one, but rather a selection of metaverses. “It is on the Internet, where anything is possible, that walled gardens flourish. […] today’s APIs have commercial intent built-in from first principles.”
  6. What Have Language Models Learned? by Pair Explorables Google. Test the performance of BERT, Google’s language model, in this interactive post. It also addresses bias (classic nurse/doctor – female/male scenario) and steps they take to mitigate this bias, such as training a version of BERT with an additional set of generated sentences that replaces the noun with its gender-partner. “The gentleman doth protest too much.”
  7. Eyes Wide Shut: How Newborn Mammals Dream The World They’re Entering by Bill Hathaway at Yale News. A new Yale study (published in Science) suggests that mammals dream of the world they will enter before they are even born. Imaging the brains of mice, they found retinal waves activity similar to that of an animal that was moving forward through its environment. While newborn mice mature much faster than humans, human babies can also detect objects and identify motion straight after birth — indicating that their visual system might also be primed before birth.
  8. The SaaS Org Chart by David Sacks. Sacks gives some benchmarks on how and whom to hire for a rapidly growing startup as it goes through Series A, B, and C. Including data on ARR per employee at the different stages.
  9. The Forgotten History of Alpha Brain Waves by Caitlin Shure for Bitbrain. Alpha waves were originally associated with tranquility and meditation, and gave rise to numerous alpha feedback devices. However, while the alpha state really can’t be reduced to one particular function, mood, or mental capacity, alpha feedback is now used to study various disorders such as ADHD or PTSD.
  10. How Figma Became Design’s Hottest Startup, Valued At $10 Billion by Alex Konrad at Forbes. Since first using Figma a year ago it’s become a part of my everyday work — wether it be mockups for quick user testing or long nights listening to podcast and creating tattoo designs. It’s one of those products that just feels effortless, from the various steps of design to the business model.