🧑‍💻 Noteworthy Bits -- 8/29/22

How to Use Notion, the Do-It-Yourself Productivity App Embraced By Gen Z from the Wall Street Journal

We are big fans of Notion as it serves as the core collaborative workspace for the EBH team, and we’re not alone as the app was downloaded over 9 million times last year. It requires some effort to drop this in to your company, but you can try using it as a personal productivity app to start to understand how it works. It’s free to get started.

{Open: How we design and build digital products at The New York Times

Newspapers are dead, right? Well, The New York Times would have you believe it’s not a newspaper company but rather a digital content company and it’s hard to argue with their position. This website gives you a super cool, behind-the-scenes look into the people, processes, and technologies that make the NYT a digital first company.

How Recommendation Algorithms Actually Work from a16z Future

The use of recommendation algorithms on social media apps like Facebook, Twitter, and Tick Tock has been a hot topic of debate recently. The author, Thomas Dimson, built Instagram’s original ranking algorithm and in this post he sheds light on how this algorithms work and how to achieve more transparency.

Modern algorithmic ranking models take into account millions of these features to spit out each prediction. Some models depend on numerous sub-models to aid them; some will be retrained in real time to adapt to shifting behavior. These algorithms are complex to make sense of, even for the engineers working on them.