DOGE, Death of Product Development, Image Generation, and Dark Matter
Weekly Review of News in Technology, UX and AI
Here’s the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology. Let’s go:
📊 AI Research
🫨 DOGE
☠️ Death of Product Development
🤖 Image Generation
✍️ Tracing LLMs
📚 Research
🎖️ Military Planning
⚫ Dark Matter
Podcast
Revolutionizing Investment Research with AI
In this episode of Prodity: Product by Design, Kyle interviews Andrew Einhorn, CEO and co-founder of LevelFields, an AI-driven fintech application that automates investment research. Andrew shares his unique background in epidemiology and data science, detailing how it led him to create LevelFields, which focuses on event-driven trading strategies. The conversation explores the importance of user feedback, the role of AI in investment analysis, and how LevelFields differentiates itself from traditional investment platforms. Andrew emphasizes the need for continuous innovation and the lessons learned from his previous ventures.
News and Useful Reads
DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Code Base in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse
There is a lot of awful stuff happening with DOGE, and with the US government, but this one feels very relatable to anyone who works in tech. Like a cross between gross incompetence and unrealistic expectations. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked to rebuild or refactor entire applications in unreasonable timelines. The difference is that my applications never risked the lives of millions of people.
The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is starting to put together a team to migrate the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) computer systems entirely off one of its oldest programming languages in a matter of months, potentially putting the integrity of the system—and the benefits on which tens of millions of Americans rely—at risk.
The Death of Product Development as We Know it
Much has been written about what AI’s magical powers can enable — whether engineering, design or documentation. But I believe something just as interesting is happening with how teams build in the era of AI.
Introducing 4o Image Generation
OpenAI released new image generation this week, and it is much more powerful than any other image generation we’ve seen so far.
Tracing the thoughts of a large language model
Language models like Claude aren't programmed directly by humans—instead, they‘re trained on large amounts of data. During that training process, they learn their own strategies to solve problems. These strategies are encoded in the billions of computations a model performs for every word it writes. They arrive inscrutable to us, the model’s developers. This means that we don’t understand how models do most of the things they do.
The real problem with research
Research is critical, but are we outsourcing our thinking and decision-making?
I believe the main problem is that research shifts responsibility for decisions from designers to users. We cover our asses with these studies instead of realising a simple fact: we can’t influence everything. And things are chaotic beyond Figma screens.
Here’s what military planning usually looks like — and why it doesn’t include Signal
Don’t plan your wars in a group chat. That’s going to be good advice to remember.
he Trump administration planned a military strike in Yemen the way normal people plan a surprise birthday party: in a group chat.
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Other Interesting Finds
Evidence mounts that universe's dark energy is changing over time
It’s getting more likely that we may have to rethink our understanding of the universe—and that one day it might all collapse on itself.
New data involving millions of galaxies and luminous galactic cores is providing fresh evidence that the enigmatic and invisible cosmic force called dark energy - responsible for the universe's accelerated expansion - has weakened over time rather than remaining constant, as long hypothesized.
