Let’s get those ideas out of Figma and into the world.UnsplashWe’ve all seen shiny prototypes, hype videos and slick decks depicting cool visions of the future of a product. But how many of them actually see the light of day?Let’s dive into some tips and resources to craft a compelling vision, get stakeholder buy-in, and avoid the common pitfalls of vision work.01 — Align vision work to planning cycles.While there’s never a bad time to work on a vision, there are some times of the year that make it more likely to succeed.Understand your company’s planning cycles. Time the work such that the outcomes can feed into defining priorities for the next sprint, quarter, or fiscal year. Work with your manager and team to understand how this works and for advice on timing.At my last company, quarterly planning would start 1–2 months before the start of the quarter and annual planning would start in the last quarter (Q4) of the fiscal year. Working backwards, the best time to embark on vision work for bigger initiatives was typically end of Q2/Q3 so that the outcomes of the vision work could spark conversations that then feed into planning for the next fiscal year.What other key dates should you be aware of? Think about recurring design reviews, leadership reviews, quarterly planning, annual planning, and other meetings that can serve as opportunities to get visibility and feedback.02 — Make time to work on it.In my experience, most vision work starts off as a side project outside of day-to-day work. It can therefore be easy to kick the can on this work, especially when there are more urgent deadlines looming. But if it’s important, we gotta make time for it.Put your project manager hat on. This is a skill in a designer’s toolbox that doesn’t typically get talked about. However, the ability to align the team on goals, scope, timelines and move projects forward is an incredibly useful muscle as you level up.Create a plan. Think through what work needs to be done (e.g. competitive analysis, customer interviews, workshop planning, etc). Sequence the work (what needs to be done before other activities or decisions). Finally, set timelines for each milestone along with who is driving each piece of work.Keep the plan updated. It’s perfectly normal for plans to evolve. Perhaps customer interviews is taking a little longer. Or you find that you can re-use some past work instead of starting from scratch.Account for vision work in your priorities every sprint just like you would with other work. How much time will you/your team be able to dedicate to this? What deliverables will you/your team work on? Share updates with your team during stand-ups and check-ins to hold everyone accountable.Resources: Make Time by Jake Knap, Eisenhower Matrix (important vs urgent), The Four Phases Of Project Management03 — Co-create the vision with your stakeholders.The more you involve your stakeholders from the start, the more invested they’re likely to be.Ensure cross-functional representation so that you can tackle the problem from different angles. It also helps avoid surprises later on that typically result from the right people not being part of the process.Define roles. Who are the drivers? Who is in the core team? Who needs to be kept in the loop? Get your team’s for advice on who should be involved and to what extent.Well planned design sprints and workshops are great for getting the team together for a short, focused period of time and making a lot of progress.Think about what makes sense to do before, during, and after the workshop or sprint. For example, working with your data analyst to pull relevant customer demographic and behavioral data before a workshop can help your team focus on using the insights to identify opportunities and brainstorm solutions. The goal is to ensure you’re using your team’s time for the most important decisions and activities.Resources: IDEO DesignKit’s Facilitator’s Guide, The Design Sprint, Workshop Bot 5000, DACI framework for assigning roles and accountability04 — Stay grounded in customer empathy.A good vision is grounded in a clear and specific customer problem or insight. It’s hard to design the future without a deep enough understanding of the audience you’re designing for.Get clear on the customer problem you’re setting out to address. Who are you designing for? What do they care about? Having this foundational knowledge will help you and your team move faster and make informed decisions along the way.Balance qual and quant data to give you deep customer empathy as well as a broad enough understanding of customer behavior, demographics and opportunities.You don’t need to know everything about your users but you do need to know enough to make a confident start. It’s helpful to keep track of and explicitly call out assumptions you’re making and open questions that need further validation.Resources: When to use which research methods and Recognize Strategic Opportunities with Long-Tail Data by NN/g, Universal Methods of Design by Bruce Hannington, IDEO DesignKit Methods05 — Align the vision to business goals.Build business empathy (just as you would customer empathy) and use it to speak the language of your stakeholders.Understand the competitive landscape you’re playing in. Who are your direct, indirect and potential competitors? What are their strategies? How does your product compare? What are the trends happening in your industry?Understand the True North goals of your company, product and product area.Use these learnings to inform your process. Look at your decisions from both a customer and business lens. Showing how your vision can address an important customer problem while also achieving business goals will set you up for success for getting buy-in from your stakeholders.Speak the language of your stakeholders. Frame your vision in terms of business impact and outcomes. How will it help your team/company achieve its True North goals? Will accelerate the path to achieving them? How will it help your product stay competitive?Resources: d.mba Strategy Design Sprint activities, Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard P. Rumelt06 — Choose the right time horizon.Have you ever seen a vision prototype that’s so far into the future that no one actually takes it seriously? Aligning your team on the time horizon you’re designing for can help your vision resonate better with your audience.Define how far in the future your designing for. What makes sense for your team given where you’re at? This will likely also tie back to the purpose of this work in the first place. Are you painting a picture of what the product could look like a year from now? 2-5 years? 5–10 years? This will dramatically change the altitude of your conversations and the kind of constraints you’re working with.Balance challenging constraints and being grounded in what’s realistic for your team/company. For example, if you’re at a bigger company and designing for a year out, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to completely overhaul the design system or completely change the tech stack you’re working with. But there may be opportunities to expand or re-work key parts of it and bring new features to market. Whereas 5–10 years out, is a significant enough time for big technological shifts to happen and for today’s constraints to matter much less.Talk to your team and leaders to get clear on what makes sense for your given company, project, and stage in the product lifecycle. It’s better to get these things ironed out earlier on in your process.Regardless of what timeframe, I like mixing in a few near, medium and long term ideas. This way, at least a few things feel doable right now while also feeling bold and aspirational enough to inspire people.07— Make it feel real.Use your design superpower to make the abstract idea feel real. Seeing people light up when they see your vision come to life, is not only rewarding but also one of the best ways to get people excited in a visceral way.Choose the right medium that works for the story you want to tell. From Figma prototypes, to short videos, to working prototypes, there are so many options to choose from.Tell a compelling story that shows how your vision addresses an important customer need and opportunity.Share it with your team early and often for feedback and iterate. I’m a fan of sharing things early (even with leadership) for feedback rather than doing a big reveal at the end. With the latter, I have no idea whether the work will resonate — that’s way too much suspense. Getting feedback sooner helps me feel confident that the story and vision will resonate when we do a more formal presentation.Focus on communicating the core idea; the moments that matter. Remember, you’re not designing the final experience that you will ship. It’s okay to leave things out and remove details that get in the way.Resources: Future press release, prototyping with AI, storyboarding08 — Socialize the vision.Share it. Talk about it. Ask for help.Bring your team along on the journey. Your immediate team should be key contributors early on. However, it’s also helpful to keep other stakeholders informed along the way. Keep them updated on your progress, learnings, and decisions. It’ll help pique their curiosity and build interest in the work.Create a shared understanding of what you’re working towards. Sharing vision work can be a great way to begin all-hands, kick-offs and other milestone meetings. Share it in slack threads, newsletters, and 1:1 conversations with anyone who’ll listen .It can also spark conversations and opportunities for collaboration with other teams.Find your champions along the way; the people that really get it and are excited about what you’re saying. Get their help. Let them amplify the work and find opportunities to build onto it.Let your excitement show in how you talk about the work and your body language. It’s sure to spread to your team. If you’re thinking “…but I’m not exactly excited about it”. Then find something in the vision — the customer problem, the opportunity to build a new skill, the chance to work with a new technology–that excites you.09 — Think big, start small.One of the reasons vision fail to gain traction is that they’re too big, intimidating and risky. Breaking the big vision into small but meaningful steps can help de-risk the endeavor.Identify the biggest assumptions/hypotheses to test. These are the things that absolutely need to be true in order for your vision to work. I find it helpful to break them into customer, business and technical assumptions.Get some quick wins to build momentum. Identify experiments, proof-of-concepts, MVPs, or pilots you can build and launch in a short amount of time. The wins will help validate key elements of the vision and keep the momentum going. If you’re having trouble getting this prioritized on the roadmap, think about ways to break it down into the tiniest chunk of work that you/your team can work on on the side. Or, find ways to incorporate these ideas into work you’re already doing.Prioritize the most important and impactful aspects of the vision. If you could only do one (or two.. or three) things from the vision, what would you start with? How might you break up the work into phases? Work with your team to sequence the work.Resources: The Lean Startup, Impact-Effort Matrix, The art of de-risking innovation, How to design experiments for your product10 —Keep the vision alive.Your vision shouldn’t be something that’s done once and forgotten about. Keep its spirit alive in your day-to-day.Use it to frame your designs and thinking. For example, show your product’s current state, your near term design solution, and vision/ideal state side-by-side. It’s a simple but powerful way to highlight how you’re setting the product up for the future and help bolster your design rationale for near-term work.Re-visit the vision and iterate on it as you run experiments, launch new features and gather feedback from internal and external stakeholders. What would you change given what you’ve learnt? What would you evolve to make it relevant for the next [timeframe] years? As you iterate, share how you’ve evolved the vision back with stakeholders to show your progress.Make envisioning the future a regular activity. You probably don’t need to do this every quarter but thinking about, visualizing and aligning on a shared vision is something teams can benefit from doing every year–even if it’s not necessarily re-imagining the whole product from scratch.Reference the vision in day-to-day conversations, incorporate artifacts into Figmas, slide decks, and other mediums that are easily shareable.Parting thoughts…As our design tools become increasingly powerful at producing design artifacts, I believe it’s our ability to think strategically, influence people, and shape the future of our products that will help us continue to play valuable roles on the team’s we’re on 💪Create a vision that actually gets built was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Air fryers are fast becoming a staple gadget in many people’s homes, likely because they are fast, convenient and don’t cost a small fortune. And with recent technological advancements, there are air fryers on the market that can cook, bake, sauté, dehydrate, pressure cook and more. If you’ve been mulling over the thought of investing in an air fryer, now’s the time to jump on the bandwagon — let us help you choose the best air fryer for your needs. Whether you’re up for roasting a whole chicken, making a meal for the entire family or want to try your hand at the infamous air-fryer muffins (yes, you read that right), there’s an air fryer to suit everyone. Table of contents What does an air fryer do? Best air fryers for 2025 Buying guide for air fryers Air fryer pros and cons Best air fryer accessories How to clean an air fryer How to find air fryer recipes How we test air fryers What does an air fryer do? Let’s clear one thing up first: it’s not frying. Not really. Air fryers are more like smaller convection bake ovens, ones that are often pod-shaped. Most work by combining a heating element and fan, which means the hot air can usually better crisp the outside of food than other methods. They often reach higher top temperatures than toaster ovens – which is part of the appeal. For most recipes, a thin layer of oil (usually sprayed) helps to replicate that fried look and feel better. However, it will rarely taste precisely like the deep-fried or pan frying version when it comes out of the air fryer basket. Don’t let that put you off, though, because the air fryer, in its many forms, combines some of the best parts of other cooking processes and brings them together into an energy-efficient way of air fryer cooking dinner. Or breakfast. Or lunch. Read more: We’ve also rounded up the best pizza ovens and the best sous vide machines. Best air fryers for 2025 Buying guide for air fryers Convection ovens You can separate most of these machines into two types of air fryers, and each has different pros and cons. Convection ovens are usually ovens with air fryer functions and features. They might have higher temperature settings to ensure that food crisps and cooks more like actually fried food. Most convection ovens are larger than dedicated air fryers, defeating some of the purpose of those looking to shrink cooking appliance surface area. Still, they are often more versatile with multiple cooking functions, and most have finer controls for temperatures, timings and even fan speed. You may never need a built-in oven if you have a decent convection oven. They often have the volume to handle roasts, entire chickens or tray bakes, and simply cook more, capacity-wise, making them more versatile than the pod-shaped competition. The flip side of that is that you’ll need counter space in the kitchen to house them. It also means you can use traditional oven accessories, like baking trays or cake tins, that you might already own. Pod-shaped air fryers Pod-shaped air fryers are what you imagine when you think “air fryer.” They look like a cool, space-age kitchen gadget, bigger than a kettle but smaller than a toaster oven. Many use a drawer to hold ingredients while cooking, usually a mesh sheet or a more solid, non-stick tray with holes to allow the hot air to circulate. With a few exceptions, most require you to open the drawer while things cook and flip or shake half-cooked items to ensure the even distribution of heat and airflow to everything. That’s one of a few caveats. This type of air fryer typically doesn't have a window to see how things are cooking (with only a few exceptions), so you’ll need to closely scrutinize things as they cook, opening the device to check progress. Basket-style air fryers also generally use less energy – there’s less space to heat – and many have parts that can be put directly into a dishwasher. Some of the larger pod-shaped air fryers offer two separate compartments, which is especially useful for anyone planning to cook an entire meal with the appliance. You could cook a couple of tasty chicken wings or tenders while simultaneously rustling up enough frozen fries or veggies for everyone. Naturally, those options take up more space, and they’re usually heavy enough to stop you from storing them in cupboards or shelves elsewhere. As mentioned earlier, you might have to buy extra things to make these pod fryers work the way you want them to. Some of the bigger manufacturers, like Philips and Ninja, offer convenient additions, but you’ll have to pay for them. Air fryer pros and cons Beyond the strengths and weaknesses of individual models, air fryers are pretty easy to use from the outset. Most models come with a convenient cooking time booklet covering most of the major foods you’ll be air frying, so even beginners can master these machines. One of the early selling points is the ability to cook fries, wings, frozen foods and other delights with less fat than other methods like deep frying, which gets foods the crispiest. As air fryers work by circulating heated air, the trays and cooking plates have holes that can also let oil and fat drain out of meats, meaning less fat and crisper food when you finally plate things up. For most cooking situations, you will likely need to lightly spray food with vegetable oil. If you don’t, there’s the chance that things will burn or char. The oil will keep things moist on the surface, and we advise refreshing things with a dash of oil spray when you turn items during cooking. Most air fryers are easy to clean – especially in comparison to a shallow or deep fryer. We’ll get into cleaning guidance a little later. With a smaller space to heat, air fryers are generally more energy-efficient for cooking food than larger appliances like ovens. And if you don’t have an oven, air fryers are much more affordable – especially the pod options. There are, however, some drawbacks. While air fryers are easy enough to use, they take time to master. You will adjust cooking times for even the simplest types of food – like chicken nuggets, frozen French fries or brussels sprouts. If you’re the kind of person that loves to find inspiration from the internet, in our experience, you can pretty much throw their timings out of the window. There are a lot of air fryer options, and factors like how fast they heat and how well distributed that heat is can – and will – affect cooking. There’s also a space limitation to air fryers. This is not a TARDIS – there’s simply less space than most traditional ovens and many deep fat fryers. If you have a bigger family, you’ll probably want to go for a large capacity air fryer – possibly one that has multiple cooking areas. You also might want to consider a different kitchen appliance, like a multicooker, sous vide or slow cooker to meet your specific cooking needs. You may also struggle to cook many items through as the heat settings will cook the surface of dishes long before it’s cooked right through. If you’re planning to cook a whole chicken or a roast, please get a meat thermometer! Best air fryer accessories Beyond official accessories from the manufacturer, try to pick up silicone-tipped tools. Tongs are ideal, as is a silicon spatula to gently loosen food that might get stuck on the sides of the air fryer. These silicone mats will also help stop things from sticking to the wire racks on some air fryers. They have holes to ensure the heated air is still able to circulate around the food. Silicone trivets are also useful for resting any cooked food on while you sort out the rest of the meal. And if you find yourself needing oil spray, but don’t feel like repeatedly buying tiny bottles, you can decant your favorite vegetable oil into a permanent mister like this. How to clean an air fryer We’re keeping clean up simple here. Yes, you could use power cleaners from the grocery store, they could damage the surface of your air fryer. Likewise, metal scourers or brushes could strip away the non-stick coating. Remember to unplug the device and let it cool completely. Remove the trays, baskets and everything else from inside. If the manufacturer says the parts are dishwasher safe – and you have a dishwasher – the job is pretty much done. Otherwise, hand wash each part in a mixture of warm water, with a splash of Dawn or another strong dish soap. Use a soft-bristled brush to pull away any crumbs, greasy deposits or bits of food stuck to any surfaces. Remember to rinse everything. Otherwise, your next batch of wings could have a mild Dawn aftertaste. Trust us. Take a microfiber cloth and tackle the outer parts and handles that might also get a little messy after repeated uses. This is especially useful for oven-style air fryers – use the cloth to wipe down the inner sides. If Dawn isn’t shifting oily stains, try mixing a small amount of baking soda with enough water to make a paste, and apply that so that it doesn’t seep into any electrical parts or the heating element. Leave it to work for a few seconds before using a damp cloth to pull any greasy spots away. Rinse out the cloth and wipe everything down again, and you should be ready for the next time you need to air fry. How to find air fryer recipes Beyond fries, nuggets and – a revelation – frozen gyoza, there are a few ways to find recipes for air-fried foods. First, we found that the air fryer instruction manuals often have cooking guides and recipe suggestions for you to test out in your new kitchen gadget. The good thing with these is that they were made for your air fryer model, meaning success should be all but guaranteed. They are often a little unimaginative, however. Many of the top recipe sites and portals have no shortage of air fryer recipes, and there’s no harm in googling your favorite cuisine and adding the words “air fryer” on the end of the search string. We’ve picked up some reliable options from Delish, which also has a handy air fryer time converter for changing oven and traditional fryer recipes. BBC Good Food is also worth browsing for some simple ideas, as is NYT Cooking, with the ability to directly search for air fryer suggestions. Aside from that, you can also grab plenty of cookbooks from your local bookshop with lots of recipes that you can use in your favorite air fryer. And if you have a killer recipe or unique use for your air fryer, let us know in the comments. What’s the air fryer equivalent of the Instant Pot cheesecake? We’re ready to try it. How we test air fryers We put each air fryer we test through its paces by cooking a variety of foods in it including raw proteins like fish and chicken, raw vegetables like potatoes and cauliflower and frozen snacks like mozzarella sticks. We attempt to use each cooking method that the machine has pre-programmed, and when possible, follow a couple of recipes in any provided recipe booklets that come with the air fryer. We also clean the cooking basket and all other removable components as many times as possible, and will put those components into a dishwasher if they claim to be dishwasher-safe. We also make note of how loud the machine is when using different cooking settings and how warm the surrounding area becomes.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/home/kitchen-tech/best-air-fryers-133047180.html?src=rss

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Music is everywhere—playing in coffee shops, on hold lines, in Ubers, behind YouTube ads, and of course, in your earbuds while you work. It’s so constant, we often treat it like harmless background noise. But the brain doesn’t. Whether we realize it or not, music is processed across multiple brain regions tied to attention, memory, and emotion—meaning even passive listening can impact how we focus, feel, and make decisions. “Background music” is never truly in the background. It either supports or competes with your mental state. And that means we have a choice. In today’s fast-paced work culture, where multitasking is the norm and focus is scarce, how we use music can either support or sabotage our goals. The good news? With just a little intention, your playlist can become one of the most powerful productivity tools you already have. Think about how you’re listening to music Music is one of the most overlooked productivity tools. The key isn’t whether you listen to music, it’s how. There’s a difference between active listening and what we call purposeful passive listening. Both are powerful, but for different reasons. Active listening is fully engaging with the music—tuning into the melody, rhythm, harmony, or lyrics. It’s nearly impossible to multitask during this kind of listening, and that’s the point. Use active listening when you need to regulate stress, reset emotionally, or refocus. Breathing with a steady beat, or allowing a favorite instrumental piece to quiet your inner noise, can activate the brain’s attention and emotional regulation systems. Over time, practicing this kind of deep listening can even strengthen interpersonal relationships, as it helps reinforce our capacity to “tune in” to others. Purposeful passive listening, on the other hand, involves choosing music to support a task or shift your mental state, without fully focusing on it. This is not about letting an algorithm autoplay. It’s about intentionally selecting tracks: maybe lo-fi beats while cleaning out your inbox, or ambient strings while brainstorming. This kind of listening taps into the brain’s default mode network, the system that activates during daydreaming, introspection, and idea incubation. Engaging the default mode network can help you step back from focused work and allow space for insight, creativity, and big-picture thinking. Music, when used intentionally in the background, becomes a bridge between tasks and a subtle support system for imaginative work. Turn music into a mental habit Music also plays a surprising role in executive function—the cognitive control system that helps us switch between tasks, regulate impulses, and manage working memory. Background music can enhance learning outcomes by improving arousal and mood, which are closely linked to cognitive performance. Listening to familiar, patterned music while working can help create structure for the brain, making transitions smoother and sustained attention more accessible. It’s why some people instinctively reach for a playlist before writing an email, prepping for a meeting, or transitioning into a different type of work block. And it goes deeper. Have a go-to song that gives you a burst of energy? Don’t just save it for the gym. Drop it into the middle of your workday, right before a presentation, during an afternoon slump, or when motivation dips. When you use the same song consistently with a particular task, your brain starts building an association. Over time, the music becomes a cue, like a mental shortcut into a focused or energized state. Maybe it’s “We Will Rock You” before a big pitch, or “River Flows in You” for concentration. Music activates the brain’s reward system, releasing dopamine, the same neurotransmitter associated with motivation and pleasure. The more consistently we attach meaning to a song, the more powerful its effect becomes. Use music enough, and your brain doesn’t just hear the notes, it knows what to do next. Sound can be a strategy Music isn’t just something we hear; it’s something that actively shapes our brain states. When used with intention, sound becomes a strategy: for focus, for recovery, for creativity, or for connection. In a world full of noise, it’s not about turning the music off. It’s about tuning in. How to use music more intentionally at work Create a 3-track playlist: one for focus, one for a reset, one to energize. Pair a consistent song with a task you want to build into habit, like writing, prepping, or unwinding. Avoid music with lyrics when doing language-based tasks like writing or reading. Use instrumental or ambient music to transition between meetings or block your day. Try “bookending” your work day with music. Use the same track to start and end, and signal your brain into a productive rhythm. With just a little intention, your daily soundtrack can become one of the most effective tools for doing better work—and feeling better while doing it.

The Nintendo Switch 2 is unsurprisingly dominating headlines in the gaming industry, though not always in a positive light. There was some uncertainty about its price and availability due to US tariffs, and though that fortunately didn’t come to pass, accessories are a different matter. Of course, the first major upgrade to Nintendo’s hit handheld console is no longer the only game in town, and some handheld PCs might actually have an important advantage the Switch will never enjoy. As the first major PC vendor to follow in the Steam Deck’s footsteps, the ASUS ROG Ally brought handheld PC gaming to a wider audience. The two-year-old portable computer is by no means old at this point, but there is definitely room for improvement. This new kit, for example, lets you replace its battery, not only solving one of its biggest weaknesses but also extending the machine’s life and value a bit longer. Designer: JSAUX Handheld gaming PCs like the ROG Ally are significantly more powerful than the Nintendo Switch, but that also means they’re considerably bulkier and have shorter battery lives. For its size, the ROG Ally only has a 40Wh pack that would be good for roughly 2 hours on very moderate settings. Unlike the Nintendo Switch, however, this isn’t the end of the story, fortunately. This JSAUX Battery Upgrade Kit proves that the ROG Ally design is closer to laptops than it is to mobile devices. It includes everything you need to swap out the original battery for a 65Wh hour pack, raising the uptime by about 50%. In addition to the tools, JSAUX also includes an in-depth guide on how to perform the process, which the brand promises will only take around 15 minutes and doesn’t require any technical expertise. The kit’s primary purpose is to, of course, upgrade the ROG Ally’s battery, but it also means it’s now possible to replace dying or damaged batteries as well. With handheld PCs generating a lot more heat than a thin Nintendo Switch, batteries tend to die faster in these cramped devices. Coincidentally, the kit also includes a precision-engineered aluminum heat shield to improve thermal management over the original. If there’s one downside to this upgrade, it would the fact that you will be limited to a smaller 2230 SD. The adapter needed to switch to a 2280 SSD is not compatible with the new heat sink, and that adapter will also compress the battery cable underneath. Owners who already use such an adapter, unfortunately, will have to stick with their original batteries or find a way to migrate their installation to a 2230 SSD.The post ASUS ROG Ally Battery Upgrade Kit Will Let You Keep Your Handheld Longer first appeared on Yanko Design.

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Macworld At a glanceExpert's Rating Pros High data transfer rates Compact dimensions Long USB-C connector fits with thick protective covers Cons Fan always runs Our Verdict The M.2 NMVe Mini SSD enclosure is a good solution for power users who are looking for a fast but compact SSD enclosure. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today Price When Reviewed52,49 Euro Best Prices Today: Satechi M.2 NMVe Mini SSD-Gehäuse Retailer Price 54,99 € View Deal €62.96 View Deal €69.99 View Deal €69.99 View Deal Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide Product Price Price comparison from Backmarket The Satechi M.2 NMVe Mini SSD enclosure is a hybrid USB stick and external SSD enclosure. Since it’s an enclosure, it doesn’t include the SSD module; you provide your own. You have to use the small 2230 mm M.2 SSDs, which can be tricky to find. The enclosure has a very compact design, measuring 4.5 by 3 by 1.3 centimeters, and weighs just 35 grams. The housing is made of aluminium, and you can see the SSD through an integrated tempered glass window. A fast SSD in a small housing often results in a device that gets warm (sometimes hot) to the touch. An active fan and air slots are used for cooling. The fan is temperature-controlled and the volume should fluctuate between 40 and 60 decibels. At 50 degrees Celsius, it reaches up to 10,000 revolutions per minute. Together with the integrated air slots, this should prevent thermal throttling. However, the fan runs continuously. If you use the M.2 NMVe Mini SSD enclosure with the iPhone, you should avoid using the internal iPhone microphones and use external microphones. The USB-C device offers speeds 897MBps when writing and 995MBps when reading. Satechi includes a 20-centimeter extension cable. Should you buy the Satechi M.2 NMVe Mini SSD? If you are looking for a compact 2230 mm M.2 NVMe SSD enclosure that can be used on Mac, iPad, and iPhone, there are not many alternatives to the Satechi enclosure. It offers good speed, but its continuous fan might be an issue if noise is a concern.

Generative AI (genAI) tools — especially those like OpenAI’s ChatGPT — are being used by many job seekers to enhance, exaggerate, or outright fabricate parts of their resumes, cover letters, or even responses during job interviews. “We’re seeing this a lot with our tech hires, and a lot of the sentence structure and overuse of buzzwords is making it super obvious,” said Joel Wolfe, president of HiredSupport, a California-based business process outsourcing (BPO) company. HiredSupport has more than 100 corporate clients globally, including companies in the eCommerce, SaaS, healthcare, and fintech sectors. Wolfe, who weighed in on the topic on LinkedIn, said he’s seeing AI-enhanced resumes “across all roles and positions, but most obvious in overembellished developer roles.” Cliff Jurkiewicz, vice president of Global Strategy at Phenom, an HR technology vendor, said he’s also seeing a rise in fraud during job applications and interviews. “It is definitely something we have seen for a while, but are seeing a lot more of [now],” Jurkiewicz said. Candidates are even turning to tools like ChatGPT during live remote or recorded video interviews — sometimes reading answers off a second screen fed by an AI assistant. In some cases, it’s not even the real applicant being interviewed, but someone more qualified standing in. “This is happening globally and across industries, with the goal of getting a more capable person to pass the interview while someone else shows up for the job,” Jurkiewicz said. “Clients report that 10% to 30% of interviews — especially for roles like engineering — involve some level of fraud.” Workers admit exaggerating their skills A 2023 survey by UK-based StandOut CV, a resume writing service, found that 73% of US workers would consider using AI to embellish or lie on their resumes — and that was before genAI tools had become as common as they are now. The survey also showed that nearly two-thirds of respondents (64.2%) said they’d lied on their resume at least once. Conversely, only one-in-five said they’d not been caught lying on their resumes. In a separate survey by Resume Builder, 45% of respondents said they exaggerated their skills with AI tools during the hiring process: 32% lied about skills on their resumes and 30% lied during the interview process. In general, employers generally say they don’t have a problem with applicants using genAI tools to write a resume, as long as it accurately represents a candidate’s qualifications and experience. ZipRecruiter, an online employment marketplace, said 67% of 800 employers surveyed reported they are open to candidates using genAI to help write their resumes, cover letters, and applications, according to its Q4 2024 Employer Report. Companies, however, face a growing threat from fake job seekers using AI to forge IDs, resumes, and interview responses. By 2028, a quarter of job candidates could be fake, according to Gartner Research. Once hired, impostors can then steal data, money, or install ransomware. For example, North Korean IT workers are reportedly flooding tech companies with fake resumes and often use names that sound American, such as Mike Smith or Thomas Williams. The North Koreans utilize stolen American identities, often obtained through dark web marketplaces, and employ VPNs to mask their true locations. In some instances, they manipulate session history files and transfer potentially harmful files to company systems. These “workers” are typically based in countries like China and Russia to avoid detection. In January, the US Department of Justice indicted five people involved in facilitating this operation. The Justice Department has also seized $1.5 million and 17 domain names linked to these activities. The FBI and other agencies continue to monitor and disrupt such schemes. Legitimate IT job applicants might be more confident using genAI technology as AI coding tools become more common. Gartner predicts 70% of developers will use them by 2027, up from less than 10% in 2023. Two sides of the genAI coin Emi Chiba, a senior principal analyst in the Gartner Human Resources practice, said genAI makes it easy to create tailored content, so many job candidates use it for resumes and cover letters. “At this point I would assume the majority of candidates are submitting applications augmented by AI,” Chiba said. “I’ve spoken to organizations who also noticed candidates using it during interviews or assessments where the candidate may read an answer generated by AI, or use it to help craft an answer.” Some candidates use AI deepfakes — changing their voice or appearance — to hide their identity, location, or so someone else can do the interview for them, Chiba said. “This happened to me personally,” Jurkiewicz said. “We hired someone in Texas who was secretly outsourcing the work overseas for a fraction of her pay.” The counterfeit employee was repeating the deceptive practice with four employers at once, earning $300,000 to $500,000 a year while doing almost no work herself, Jurkiewicz said. “It was purely a money grab, and with little to no consequences; there’s no real deterrent,” he said. “That’s why we need better tech to detect this kind of fraud.” GenAI, Jurkiewicz said, is both a problem and a solution. It helps screen applicants, and can also detect fraud. The company recently announced it would be launching a built-in AI agent for spotting deepfakes around May or June. Fake candidates make it harder for qualified workers Another downside to the growing flood of AI deep fake applicants is that it affects “real” job applicants’ chances of being hired. “What if you are getting passed over for jobs by ‘fake’ candidates?” Jurkiewicz said. “There’s an interesting dilemma.” Job applicants who fake their credentials will in all likelihood eventually be uncovered and fired, Jurkiewicz said — but by then they’ve accomplished their goal. “It’s a numbers game: people submit hundreds of applications, hoping some will slip through undetected. Even if only a few succeed, that’s enough to exploit the system,” he said. After working three, four or six months, the fake employee leaves with the pay he or she has earned, and moves onto the next employer, Jurkiewicz said. The financial impact can be huge. The US Department of Labor says a bad hire can cost 30% of their first-year salary, with some HR firms estimating losses between $240,000 and $850,000 per fake employee. “Now, imagine the cost of hiring a fake candidate,” Jurkiewicz said. “They go through training, do all this orientation. You’re three months getting paid, and let’s say you do that across the board for 100 different employers, because you built this fraudulent network. You’re making a lot of money before they detect it.”

Architecture often assumes a binary between built projects and theoretical ones. What physics allows in actual buildings, after all, is vastly different from what architects can imagine and design (often referred to as “paper architecture”). That imagination has long been supported and enabled by design technology, but the latest advancements in artificial intelligence have prompted a surge in the theoretical.  Karl Daubmann, College of Architecture and Design at Lawrence Technological University“Very often the new synthetic image that comes from a tool like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion feels new,” says Daubmann, “infused by each of the multiple tools but rarely completely derived from them.” “Transductions: Artificial Intelligence in Architectural Experimentation,” a recent exhibition at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, brought together works from over 30 practitioners exploring the experimental, generative, and collaborative potential of artificial intelligence to open up new areas of architectural inquiry—something they’ve been working on for a decade or more, since long before AI became mainstream. Architects and exhibition co-­curators Jason Vigneri-Beane, Olivia Vien, Stephen Slaughter, and Hart Marlow explain that the works in “Transductions” emerged out of feedback loops among architectural discourses, techniques, formats, and media that range from imagery, text, and animation to mixed-­reality media and fabrication. The aim isn’t to present projects that are going to break ground anytime soon; architects already know how to build things with the tools they have. Instead, the show attempts to capture this very early stage in architecture’s exploratory engagement with AI. Technology has long enabled architecture to push the limits of form and function. As early as 1963, Sketchpad, one of the first architectural software programs, allowed architects and designers to move and change objects on screen. Rapidly, traditional hand drawing gave way to an ever-expanding suite of programs—­Revit, SketchUp, and BIM, among many others—that helped create floor plans and sections, track buildings’ energy usage, enhance sustainable construction, and aid in following building codes, to name just a few uses.  The architects exhibiting in “Trans­ductions” view newly evolving forms of AI “like a new tool rather than a profession-­ending development,” says Vigneri-Beane, despite what some of his peers fear about the technology. He adds, “I do appreciate that it’s a somewhat unnerving thing for people, [but] I feel a familiarity with the rhetoric.” After all, he says, AI doesn’t just do the job. “To get something interesting and worth saving in AI, an enormous amount of time is required,” he says. “My architectural vocabulary has gotten much more precise and my visual sense has gotten an incredible workout, exercising all these muscles which have atrophied a little bit.” Vien agrees: “I think these are extremely powerful tools for an architect and designer. Do I think it’s the entire future of architecture? No, but I think it’s a tool and a medium that can expand the long history of mediums and media that architects can use not just to represent their work but as a generator of ideas.” Andrew Kudless, Hines College of Architecture and DesignThis image, part of the Urban Resolution series, shows how the Stable Diffusion AI model “is unable to focus on constructing a realistic image and instead duplicates features that are prominent in the local latent space,” Kudless says. Jason Vigneri-Beane, Pratt Institute “These images are from a larger series on cyborg ecologies that have to do with co-creating with machines to imagine [other] machines,” says Vigneri-Beane. “I might refer to these as cryptomegafauna—infrastructural robots operating at an architectural scale.” Martin Summers, University of Kentucky College of Design“Most AI is racing to emulate reality,” says Summers. “I prefer to revel in the hallucinations and misinterpretations like glitches and the sublogic they reveal present in a mediated reality.” Jason Lee, Pratt InstituteLee typically uses AI “to generate iterations or high-resolution sketches,” he says. “I am also using it to experiment with how much realism one can incorporate with more abstract representation methods.” Olivia Vien, Pratt InstituteFor the series Imprinting Grounds, Vien created images digitally and fed them into Midjourney. “It riffs on the ideas of damask textile patterns in a more digital realm,” she says. Robert Lee Brackett III, Pratt Institute“While new software raises concerns about the absence of traditional tools like hand drawing and modeling, I view these technologies as collaborators rather than replacements,” Brackett says.