Imagine you’ve just stumbled into a Nordstrom at your local mall, lost in the Slenderman-looking mannequins and racks of overpriced coats. Or, more realistically, you’re browsing online because you’re too lazy to go to the store. You’re trying to find a birthday gift for your friend but you have no idea what they would like. What’s their style like? Do they want a ripped black shirt or a green and white striped sweater? You should know this, but you don’t.
No need to fear, because the customizable, artificially intelligent fashion police is here. We will be harnessing Microsoft’s “off-the-shelf” Custom Vision services to classify clothes as “cute” or “not cute” according to data you’ve given it. If you’re shopping online, you can just test this in the browser, but we’ll also make a simple React Native app to use the AI model on pictures you might take in-store. …
Don’t you just love automated emails? I know I do. I mean, who doesn’t enjoy waking up to 236 new messages from Nike, Ticketmaster, and Adobe Creative Cloud every morning? What a fantastic way to start my day! 🌅😍
Anyway, today I’ll be showing you how to drown your inbox in more clutter, for God-knows-what reason. We’re going to be using Python to create a custom Reddit email-notification system. That means we’ll be writing a script that looks for Reddit posts matching some keywords and then emails us when such posts appear.
There are a few reasons that you might be doing this. Maybe you’re really excited about some topic on Reddit. Maybe you’re trying to discover a new karma-farming technique because Internet points are important to you. Maybe you want to send annoying emails to your friends. Or maybe you just want more emails in your inbox to deal with your crippling loneliness. Oops, sorry — went too far. …
(Or, alternatively titled: How Memes Become Dreams)
In the beginning of 2018, I set a New Year’s Resolution for myself. Before the end of the year, I would make something — anything, really — that would be used by 1000 people.
I wanted to get comfortable with other people seeing my work, and I also wanted to hold myself accountable for creating something that people actually would use. I needed to grow up and expand past the fun projects I made just to show myself that I could. I was ready to create real world impact.
Little did I know, I would be achieving my goal with the most useless and unimpressive thing I’ve ever built. …
There are many reasons to be concerned about screen addiction. Maybe you have friends who can’t hold a conversation without reaching for their phones. Maybe you have neck pain from wasting too much time online. Maybe you have a gut feeling that we’re helpless against the barrage of endless notifications and addictive platforms in our daily lives.
These all ring true for me, at least. But I don’t think we’re helpless, and I don’t think “screen addiction” is exactly what we should be fighting. I believe that people building consumer-facing platforms can turn these screen-related problems 180 degrees by focusing on their content. …
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