Helsinki, it's great to be here. But do you know, as a matter of fact, there is an ongoing mental health crisis in the world? It's such severe that actually 35% of the population is suffering from moderate to severe anxiety or depression syndromes. 15% of the American population are eating antidepressants medication. And there is a sharp rise of teenage and young adult suicide rates that has actually risen by more than 60% over 10 years. Yet, our societies fund mental health with a mere or like a meager 4.4% of the total healthcare budget.  But luckily, we have entrepreneurs who are addressing this tremendous challenge. And one of those is April Co here. Welcome. Thank you, PJ. So you are the CEO of Spring Health, one of the leaders in a platform for mental health in the US market. But there is more to that, and we will certainly start talking about that. You have a very interesting background. Being a musician myself, there's one particular part on your CV that really, really impresses me. And that I would die to have. She attended Juilliard School. I did. Isn't that awesome? For oboe. Yeah. Yeah, but anyway, apart from Juilliard School and Yale, that's where you founded Spring Health. Yes. And now April here is not only 30 under 30 on the Forbes list, but she's also the youngest female leader of a unicorn in the world. I think she deserves a applause for that. So and before we turn over to to April, there needs to be full disclosure here. The reason why I'm sitting here, it's because I'm on the board of directors of Spring because we invested in this phenomenal company. And why did we do that? Well, of course, exceptional founders in April and her co-founder, Adam. There was also a combination of a strong product that really was differentiated from from the rest in the market and obviously a huge need, huge need and where the product that Spring offered could actually demonstrate that it actually helped as opposed to many other products in the market. So that was the reason we invested and we're extremely happy we did that two years ago because we have seen change and the growth that we've seldom seen. And I know I've been close to many, many exceptional founders and founder stories, including the likes of Avito, Spotify and Isettle and Fubo TV and others.  So tell me, let's talk about founder market fit. Got it. And how did you get here? Yes. First of all, I love the framing of this conversation, the three fits, and so I'm really excited to talk about that. But before I do, I wanted to just comment on how surreal this is. Like when we first met, I asked you, you know, what kind of board member are you? And you said to me that you are generally the board therapist. And I was like, Oh, I wonder what that means. And and, you know, you really delivered on that.  And, you know, I think this is surreal for me because, you know, you have this uncanny ability to ask me like exactly the right questions and then leave me thinking about the questions for a very long time afterwards. And I just think it's amazing that, you know, we're having one of those conversations on stage here in Helsinki in front of all these people. So this is a really surreal moment for me. But let me start off by introducing the company and a little bit about how we're different and what we do. So I founded Spring with the founding idea that faster access to mental health care is meaningless if the care doesn't actually work for you.  And it's not because the care is bad or because the providers are bad or the treatments don't work or it's not that necessarily. It's because the care is poorly matched to the individual.   And I personally went through this journey of trial and error, of trying to find, you know, the exact provider and resource that would work for me. And, you know, this is an incredibly painful problem. This causes so much suffering, unnecessary suffering in the world. But it's also an incredibly expensive problem. And, you know, when I started the company, no one was talking about mental health care in this way. Everyone was very obsessed with faster access. It was all about break down the barriers to access, faster care, faster, faster, faster. And, you know, faster care, as I was saying, is meaningless if it doesn't actually work for you. So I partnered with the world's foremost expert in computational psychiatry, Dr. Adam Shekrut, who is my co-founder. And he was actually the first to prove that we could use data and machine learning to outperform the average psychiatrist in matching people to the right treatment for them. And so we basically took that IP and embedded it into, initially, an employee benefit product.  And we are so fortunate to work with some of the largest and the most important employers in the world today, like Adobe, Pepsi, General Mills, Bain, Instacart. And it's just been an incredible journey so far. I think I've heard that we are Tiger's fastest growing healthcare portfolio company.  And we now have the privilege and honor of, you know, covering the mental health care of millions of lives. And so it's just been an incredible journey. I'm sure there are entrepreneurs in the audience who are also curious to know, how did you know that you and Adam were, you know, a really strong founder team? Yeah. So, so the founding story, I love telling it, it started with a cold email. I, so I was at Yale, I had dropped out of school for a few years to start another company. And then I was back, I had one year left of school to finish my bachelors. And my co-founder Adam, he was finishing his PhD. And we're the same age because he's a child prodigy, like literally a genius and I was late. So we met in the middle, we're same age, and we met at Yale. And I came across a paper that he wrote. It was a landmark paper. It was a groundbreaking paper, and it made him famous, basically. And it was describing, you know, the first machine learning model proven to outperform psychiatrists. And so I just reached out to him cold. I just sent him an email and I said, Hey, I think that your research represents the future of mental health care. I think this is where mental health care is headed. Well, you meet with me? And he replied, saying, Why do you want to meet with me? And, but ultimately, you know, I guess I convinced him because we went for coffee.  And I talked about my startup experience. And there were three co-founders at the time at the, when we founded the company. And we were all technical. So in the early days, we kind of all kind of got together and hacked the early product together. And that's how we got started. But, you know, going back to your question around, like, how did I know Adam was the right co-founder? It was, I varied deliberately since this was my second company. And in my first company, I realized, like, co-founding relationships are everything. They will make or break your company. And so, you know, in the early days, even before we incorporated, even before we had, you know, official name, we very deliberately chose, like, mini projects together. So we would apply for grants or competitions or pitches. And we went out for all of these things. And it was an opportunity for us to experiment with working with each other and see if we were compatible. And we just won all of these, like, grants and prizes together. And so, and it was just a delight working with him. And so the chemistry was there very quickly. We're very complimentary in many ways. And he's just a brilliant, genius man. And I'm just so privileged to work with him. And I can attest that both of you are equally intense people, which I think has served me well as entrepreneurs in this very, very competitive space. So it's clear that you had strong, you know, founder market fit. Let's talk about product market fit for a while, which is a concept that I think most entrepreneurs know fairly well. And why do you think you found product market fit? And what sets it apart, you know, your product from from others? Yeah, so our journey to product market fit was a long one. And so basically we came together at school and incorporated May of 2016. And keep in mind, like, I had no, I had basically no professional experience. I didn't have any health care experience. And so the first two years was really just us, like, learning health care. It was obviously we had a subject meta expert in computational psychiatry or precision psychiatry in Adam, my co-founder. But none of us knew about the business of health care. And in the US, health care is a cluster. It's incredibly complex and it takes years to really understand the ins and outs of the US health care system. And so for two years, it was really an exploration of the business of health care and really understanding how we could package this incredible IP that we had to go to market. And so actually our first product looked very different from the product that exists today. So we had this algorithm that could predict what treatment would work for you. And we thought, OK, 80 percent of antidepressants are prescribed by primary care providers. And so why don't we go to primary care providers and sell them a clinical decision support tool that helps them make decisions for their patients who are struggling with mental health issues so that they can be better prescribers? Because we know that primary care providers don't specialize in behavioral health care and there's so much trial and error that goes into prescribing these medications. And so we created a software and we sold into health systems. And it was a slog. Like it was like people would fall asleep in sales pitches. Like people would just be on their phones all the time. Like it was clear like no one cared about the product. And and so, you know, but we kept at it because, you know, we're resilient and we just kept trying to make it work. And and and I don't have to get into the details of why it didn't work. But one in one pitch to a health system after, you know, the decision maker was like on their phone the entire meeting finally looks up.  And I think you're I think you're honest and something. But I think you should talk to our HR department. And, you know, at the time, we knew we did not have product market fit because there was like no momentum behind the business.  And we definitely we definitely didn't have it and we knew it. So we were open to anything. So we took the HR meeting and it was the first time in any sales pitch where they listened and where they leaned in and like actually listened to what I had to say. And it was like I knew that that was like we were on to something and that was like the the moment. And so it's so ironic that we were like selling the health system. They punted us over to HR and, you know, and then that's how it got started. And it's ironic because we never sold that HR health or sorry, we never sold into that health system to HR ultimately. But we immediately after that meeting tracked down every HR person we could find in our network. I begged all my angel investors and all my investors to give us any interest to any HR people that they knew. And we just started pitching and pitching and refining and refining and refining. And very quickly it was it was very clear that there was a tremendous need among employees for better mental health care. And so even with like an MVP, we were able to sell that very quickly.  And that leads automatically to the go to market. Yes, that you actually found relatively quickly as a consequence of this. Right. Yes. So go to market fit is not as well known as a concept as product market fit. But in enterprise sales, go to market fit. Well, in enterprise sales, especially, but generally in sales, go to market fit is imperative to driving a good business. And go to market fit is basically like a repeatable, predictable growth engine for your business. It's taking whatever your market wants in your product, which you've already proven out with your product market fit and figuring out like what is the repeatable, predictable way of getting this to as many people as possible. And I actually heard of a concept from one of my mentors, who's Bob Tinker, who actually wrote an entire book about go to market fit. But basically we we got to go to market fit by essentially reviewing every quarter or every month, even all of the conversations that we had in in our sales, like every single conversation, we would do a retro and we would say, who did we talk to? You know, who which conversations did we have? What worked? What didn't work? And we we went through every single deal in great detail. And it was so laborious and so just it just was so boring to do that. And like we had like a few sales reps at the time. And I'm sure they hated me for this process because it was like so boring. And we would just like drill into every single deal and try to understand and really dissect, you know, what each deal felt like and what the process was. And we tried to glean patterns from every single conversation. And especially what we were looking for was the wow. Like what is the moment of wow? Like when when in the sales conversation or when in the sales process does the the prospect kind of like have that wow moment? Like wow. Like when when you went when in the sales pitch does that appear because that's what you have to actually replicate because a lot of founders like they get product market fit through their magnetism as founders. And there's something called like fairy. Magic pixie dust founder sales, right? Like where the founder is so charismatic and they go on site and they give this amazing pitch and then, you know, the customer buys. And and that's that's OK in the early days, but we couldn't scale that. And so we needed to figure out, like, what are the those wow moments? What are the patterns in our sales cycles and processes that we could use to create a very defined playbook that we would then roll out? And that took, you know, a few quarters, I would say, to really establish and then once we got it was like, yeah. And the growth has been nothing short and remarkable. But let's also talk about your personal developer development as as a leader, because when we invest two years ago, since then you have 10 X the number of employees. And that puts great demands on you as a leader. How has that been for you? Yeah. Wow, there are so many ways I can answer this question. You know, first off, I think it's incredibly important to talk about how I'm a I'm a very different person from when I started the company. So I am the youngest female CEO of a unicorn. I'm twenty nine. I started the company when I was twenty four. And like, start up experience aside, it's just like a very different person, you know, I had different priorities. I wasn't married, like I and but even as a founder and a CEO, I was incredibly different. And I think that the the the mark of a successful founder and CEO as as you know, so well as such a successful early early stage VC is like the founder's ability to to essentially reinvent themselves every every year if you're hyper growth, right? Because every year you have a fundamentally different company. And so, you know, I have changed hugely. And like I would say, you know, I have two big reflections and like learnings from from the journey so far. And it's been five years. And I would say the first big learning that I came to about a year ago was that there is a natural tension between hyper growth and mental health. And I think that they are not incompatible, but they can live out of harmony with each other very easily and very naturally, unless you're incredibly intentional about harmonizing the two together. And intentional means throwing resources behind it and prioritizing it as as a CEO. And I think that I think that I didn't think about it enough, frankly.  And I don't think that I part his day as I should have. And so, you know, now we've fundamentally changed the way that we run the company. You know, we explicitly stated as a goal that we want to be the mentally healthiest company in the world. And we want to be the highest performing company in the world. And, you know, I haven't seen any companies that really have kind of talked about those things together. They're usually talked about very separately, but we we have a new framework now, a whole framework around people operations or people philosophy that essentially tries to marry those things together. And so every time we have a people policy or a process or a benefit, we ask ourselves three questions. One, does it advance the mental health of our employees and the performance of our organization? Two, does it advance the performance of the organization while accidentally hurting the mental health of our employees? And three, vice versa. Does it actually advance the mental health of our employees while inadvertently hurting the performance of the company? And we asked those three questions now for every every decision. So, for example, we just changed our parental leave policy. And it was a really interesting exercise to approach parental leave from that lens. We asked ourselves, you know, what is the mental health impact of, you know, different lengths of parental leave? And like, what are what is the performance impact? And what is the turnover impact? So that's an example of something that we've changed. But yeah, that's an example of a learning. And I mean, having that kind of responsibility, you have now a two billion dollar valuation you have in hundreds of employees. You have lots of expectations on your shoulder. How do you recharge? How do you make sure that your your your superpowers aren't sort of spent too soon? Yeah. So I recently did something which was apparently very scandalous. I took a very long vacation and I auto archived every single email that hit my inbox during the vacation. And I didn't check email. Well, I did for one urgent thing for you. But I didn't check email and I didn't check Slack. And that was incredibly rejuvenating. And I had a number of breakthroughs on the business and on me personally, just because I was able to really tune out. So that was incredible. And I would highly recommend it of any founder and any CEO and any leader, frankly. So so that's one thing. I also kickbox love kickboxing. I have taken it up. And so who's also on the other side? Is that the investor or the customer? Or, you know, it depends on the day employees or, you know.  So I've been taking that up. I exercise a lot. I have one day a week for the entire company where we don't take meetings. We call them calm Fridays. And what else do I do? Oh, I hang out with my family. Like family is is everything to me. It's the most important thing. It's way more important than work for me. And I make sure to make it a priority. So these last minute here, do you have any advice to aspiring builders of billion dollar companies, what they should do? Yes, I give the same piece of advice to everyone every time I give any of these talks. But I read this life changing book called The Dip by Seth Godin. I think it's the last name I should know this. I recommend it to everybody. It's like this little it's very, very fast to read. And it changed my life because it told me how to quit. And it basically talks about how the most successful people quit often, but they quit very deliberately. And before people are not successful because they're not they're not successful because inevitably there's always a dip in the journey of whatever you're doing. And, you know, there's a hard place. It's you go through rough patches where you want to quit. And then most people just quit when it gets hard. But if you start a journey and anticipate that there will be the dip, then you can basically set for yourself in advance kind of parameters or criteria for when you will actually quit and you hold yourself to that. And I've held myself to that to this day. When I started Spring Halls, I made a promise to myself that I wouldn't quit unless this thing happened. And I'm not going to talk about what it is. And it hasn't happened and I haven't quit. And and so I recommend that for everybody. Well, thank you so much, April and a big round of applause to an entrepreneur that's really changed in the world for the better. Thank you.


Welcome and thank you all for joining Yeah, let's talk and let's get to through this the quest to round caps This is very dear to my heart and I'm also let me check just like I think some faces are working also on this really good. So First let's say hello. I'm Alexander Mitzkos some people might know me as a tzuga master in the blender community and I'm a lead-free artist at Denkvac where I yeah, I usually do 3d stuff, but also sometimes More of a general tinkerer and helping them do stuff. I've been at the blender conference before I've had a talk on a meta balls and it was Really well received. I said meet a ball instead of meta ball for a long time, which is alright afterwards I tried to bring a bit more of animation to the illustrator's mind Which was really fun to do then I went back to meta balls because there's a lot of stuff to talk about and also hard surface modeling with meta balls, which was really well received like This person was not really happy that I talked about hard surface modeling in blender with meta balls and This next talk will be in line with all of this because it has the tag story time and community on it So you're not going to learn anything except you knew here But I want to guide you through this little experience of mine for the last two years And also maybe explain how to interact with developers how to not interact with developers and Just how how things work from an outside and inside perspective Let's start with the case study So, you know what I'm talking about and what is this round cap curve thing if you haven't followed the last two years of my journey So imagine you have a really great colleague and designer in your company and he sends you this thing And he's also intrigued to do this in blender, right?  He's not a modeler. He's not like into procedure generation He just wants to export his fantastic outlines To blender so this is my case study and let's just go through this really quick So you'll notice what will happen and what will not so first thing is if your design software can export SVGs You're good like SVGs are Weird you can put I think executable stuff inside there You can write them by hand you can export them out of professional software or blender itself, but first export them Next step is you import your SVG file to blender and that's really easy the import comes pre-installed with blender It doesn't even says no properties. So Send it in there and now I Did this for this presentation. I import my file Fantastic nothing happens This is my imported design. So turns out I need to scale this up I've been using blender for 10 years now so or even longer So I figured out like scaling is a good idea if I don't see anything, but a beginner might not Next thing is perfect. My file is there. Just now. I need my outlines back and extrude everything. So That happened And it even happens even worse you sometimes get like this flicker. That's like Rounding precision errors Not really fun. So your next step is research How to get things right you may be put in like in your favorite search engine blender curve size to big flicker help Next thing, you know You can even scale things in edit mode. So we do just that and Get our curves back wonderful Can even go back now and Make them thick Darn it. That's not what somebody expects if you want to get his curve extruded. So Let's do this again research blender curve extrude all curves Get more information. We can hold down the alt button and scale everything up Fantastic and now the first people will notice that this does not have what I expect It does not have the round caps. We can look inside this tube And we did not import the design as it was intended But what we can do is we cannot go in and clean up this file and just make sure that it looks perfect So again Research Let's now the the next time we went into a favorite search engine put in blender 3.1 bevel multiple curves selection sphere caps round help Like now we're getting anxious because we're trying to do this basic task, but we're still not done. Good thing There's nice people on the internet there's on gumrod an add-on spherical caps for blender curves by look and It's really nice. You can get it for free. You can pay The person some money problem is if you get it for free once you cannot pay afterwards I figured out and I'm sorry I need to still pay your money because it's really awesome, but I need to do a new account for this and So two minutes later. This is not a one-click solution I need to go to a website find this person get an account on the website to download this Stuff happens in between But after we did this everything works as intended we can append the geometry notes tree and Have all my curves selected here can paste it I can even copy the Geometry notes to all the other outlines and it basically well, let's stop too early and it works as intended so We got there in the end, but this is not really an experience that any of us want to go through like this is Even if I did this now once the second time I will have some of the problems again Even if I have everything set up. I still need to re-import this setup So success we have done our job, but I talked to an industry professional Julian Glander illustrator and We were came to the point like I could make his or you all could make his life 2% easier If this would not a solution that needs like multiple steps and just to be really quick because for what do we need these? Round caps on our curves the example It's really easy for beginners to model basic shapes that look a bit more friendly are a bit more Round it's really easy to get your own neon signs and typography typographic experiments It's highly used in things like motion graphics where you have animated strokes And I put this also here from the side and it's really important for all the solutions that we create But we can't do things like that that we can build up the curve around our spline that we set up and also to make sure That that things don't flicker that we don't have step interpolation because if we have again steps or interpolation arrows We can do things by models, but we want to have the splines and like the parametric Information and then again also just a quick test. It's really great for small characters and for even articulated characters So because I don't want to show you only the big issues. I also want to show you some solutions There's add-ons. There's geometry notes now and there's workarounds So animation notes is an add-on that's really dear to my heart It opened the world of procedural animation and procedural generation to me And I even made a video on that in the past and shared a setup that does exactly the job So you can have multiple splines inside of one curved object. It will copy over the round caps to the system Manu Yavinan, you may know him from old Blender projects was so nice and Took my file and made it publicly available on his website as CC zero and I was really happy that Somebody was archiving this experiment for others to use so in preparation of this talk I downloaded this exact same file and I did not have animation those installed so No problem. I'm just going to go back and install animation notes, but Somehow I was not able to install animation notes in the most recent version, which is an error on my side This is not that the animation notes add-on is not really well Done, but I had to install the add-on. I had to install the right version. It might break between Blender versions and it's also as all add-ons Really good for highly specific tasks and it's also good for heavy lifting So if you have something that really needs to happen outside of Blender or as a really specific job that just only One person or like one group of people needs to do then an add-on as a really valid option But there's a little helper now in Blender and it's called geometry notes geometry notes Make procedural generation of geometry and also again animation with a few tricks possible It comes built in with the Blender versions and it's really nice But then again, it also broke in between so geometry notes as you might notice or even know Did like a few versions so there was backwards competitive compatibility issues Which is okay if you know about it But a colleague of mine got an old file from me and wanted to re-render it and just got stuck with this screen Which is okay because again, you just need to re-import and a valid notary and everything will like line up again automatically, but Geometry notes is close to be perfect. It's high stability really good performance It's like the most valid option you can exchange files You can link files, but it has been overhauled a few times in the past So it's still breaking in a few spots and like your setups need to be Imported from outside like they do not come ship with Blender Which is okay because that's how Blender works, but it's no one-click workflow like there's no like do this now so next up There's more work arounds. So this one is like I Really don't like this, but I'm going to show you there's some few tricks And I will not show you which tricks exactly but you can make something like this out of a regular curve without an add-on Without animation notes without geometry notes, but it's also not really perfect. So one of the tricks is to have the better resolution to zero so it's just a triangle then you can extrude it and have the ends welded together with the caps and It's round, but that's not what I wanted. So there's intention and precision in this thing There's a lot of ways to get rounded or smooth and caps So by just shading things move and it may look round, but it's like the geometry is not round They are often tied to a specific level of subdivisions or meshing. So this Example I showed you before Works really well in like some cases, but these cases are so small and you need to be so precise to get them It's maybe not for everyone and also I should have always asked for spherical caps instead so It's actually the quest to spherical caps because just round caps is not really enough I was expecting and also the designers. I showed you before to have a actual sphere Showing up on that curve end So then that happened During my presentation preparation Dalai for linto just wrote me a small whatsapp message. It's like hey sugar You're working on this round caps presentation, right? I'm not sure if you'll notice or no, but I'm using a geometry knows round caps set up for the hair tools I can just like oh hatches like this is inside of blender There's somebody using a workaround to get this feature done. I think but this will be nothing, right? It's not Mind-changing or anything. It's like, okay. Yeah, this is the icon. Just like try it out. No problem We are importing the No tree again. I missed the click here and then we're connecting it to the curve and then some something clicked Because in the very first screen that we did I imported an SVG file that had actually outlines and was like a Graphic but as soon as I import it into blender will not render like you get the the file from an SVG or from a design inside The software and you will not have this so I completely miss that there's also 2d outlines for splines That are not happening inside of blender right now, which is okay. There's 500 workarounds There's things to do with it but also again here the caps are usually not mashed and evaluated so this has been done by Dalai and Imported into the file by hand So how did and this is like I've been working on this for two years and just one day before my talk that I came around And told me about this. So Anyway, where did we stop? It's actually the quest to spherical caps. So for two years. I've been doing small videos I've been tweeting I've been on other platforms And so I want to try to tell you how it is nice and good to interact with developers But maybe I haven't done always correct. So please don't do this It's you can write as many question marks and exclamation marks as you want But they're not getting a feature into blender. Also just saying hey software X does it differently or better? It's not helping anyone But also don't do this like even if you're nice and you get a lot of retreats You cannot expect the blender developers or generally Blender to scan everything that's going on on social media on Twitter or wherever like you need to somehow find a way to interact with developers in a way that they can read stuff they can interact with stuff and also give you feedback and Also, it's not really working the screenshot where Tom answered me me that the feature should be there soon is also one year old so Twitter is nice, but it's not getting you a feature instead of blender So I talked about a place where you can get feedback where you can interact with developers and some might think It's developer the blender org But that's not correct. So the thing that I would show to the developer would just get the answer This works as intended because the file is not breaking the file is imported valid The spline is imported correctly from the SVG file and there's no error message. There's no crash but there's help so Go to blender developer org and submits a bug if it's a bug, but if you have a feature There's right click select. So The blender org a developer the blender org is a bug tracker rights click select is for features. So right click select as part of the Blender community and Is like a separate part but a really really nice part of it the blender community consists of Blender news Right click select graphic or where the builds also for animation nodes are stored Then there's a Spanish speaking community and also it stores or is the place for communications with the Blender chat Regarding Blender chat. It also does not help to bug people on the Blender chat and ask for the feature Even though Tom will give you lots of love and other people Will give you lots of love so You have a bug inside Blender, so it crashes you get an error message something explodes Get an example file ready and head over to developer the blender org and make sure you fill out the necessary details. That's like a Explanation how to do that in video form by Pablo, but there's also written manuals how to do this correctly if You have a feature request then you can go to right click select and Basically have a big playground to describe your feature you can describe it at example images You can example link to videos and we even paste like your iMockups and not only Do these things but you can also vote on them discuss with others and get the stone rolling and the good thing is it's Monitor it by some of the Blender developers and it's a spot where you can actually get traction for something and have like a Yeah a useful interaction and not something that goes down into a Twitter stream and it's lost forever Just for you as an example how this works on the right hand side is one of the Initial posts I wrote For the feature you can get embed gifts. I also made like a cringy video that put in there and also it says it's pretty cut off close status in development Which it is in which it maybe isn't But the important part is writing this blog Writing this blog post basically. I thought I had everything done. It was two years ago I thought like this is all the information I need to know about this feature But then just one day ago. Dalai wrote me like maybe there's like a 2d problem And also when preparation of the talk there were so many questions still open And so I understood more and more why this feature is not like a one click I would put this line of code inside Blender and we have a new feature because What's with this so right now all the solutions I found are adding the curve and so You import a spline from your design and depending on how your initial software behaves your spline will be Extended so maybe we need to inset the Round caps to the curve for some users Then there's the thing I was talking yesterday with somebody there's continuity arrows So in Blender the curve cannot be one thickness, but it can be a very unthickness So you can have a really tiny end and the really thick middle part So there could be continuation arrows between the line and the around cap and there's also I always expect it is super clean loops and it's just like a UV sphere as an end But you cannot be really sure if this is what the user wants so maybe some people want like a more tapered and with Loops that go around and interact with each other so The result of this presentation and I'm really happy to tell you I Stand in you in front of you with empty hands and that's completely fine There's been so many good things happening in Blender development and also in Yeah, general Blender projects be it from the Institute or From other people around we now have geometry nodes So they have been overhauled a few times, but now it's a really solid system This really solid system allows for creatives and other people to build tools inside of Blender and help other people We have generally progress on the curfew eye and also on the behavior of the curves So there has been like the profile settings and like it's getting much better now to render these curves in the meantime cool PowerPoint just crashed. I'm just trying to go back now Okay, and we have a full new modifier and even other modifiers and it's super important to have stuff like this because this modifier only allowed for Crazy works arounds like this and I cannot make this Line of new things in Blender complete. So there's just a slide of stuff. That's happening your I stuff performance cycles the flamenco Render management. There's bug fixes. There's focus animation and rigging. So Thank You Blender deaths Maybe let's talk and figure out how to make this happen and how to make this part of Blender more approachable and In general, that's all. Thank you for coming and I hope you enjoyed the talk


It is really great, you know, to actually be in here and to see every instrument, instrument details. Lysai Deng is a professor and principal investigator at the National Astronomical Observatories in China. Today is an exciting day for Professor Deng on the island of Tenerife. I've been following the whole process, but it's really amazing. I mean, this is the first note. The small telescope behind the Chinese astronomer is the first and brand-new note in the Danish-led Song Network, a global stellar research project that aims to bring us even closer to the stars. Professor Deng is the leading scientist in building the second Song Telescope in China. The Chinese note started about two years later than this one, but because taking all the designs from Danish group, we actually made it in a short time. We didn't have a mirror cover. We probably need to make one. You don't have this? Yeah, we don't. This network can get, for the first time, direct information about the internal structure of stars. The network is designed to follow, let's say, the oscillation of stars continuously without stop. So it's 24 hours. That can be only, let's say, made possible by a network. The second goal of Song is to discover exoplanets, especially the solar-like, high-beautiful exoplanets. And we have a special instrument on this telescope which is capable of doing that.


For any YouTube video, you can download a written transcript or the subtitles of the video. This is especially useful, for example, if you want to study what someone is saying, or you want to edit your own video into a blog post. So let me show you an example using one of my own videos, and here it is, I just uploaded this video a few hours ago, and the transcript is already available. It only takes YouTube a few hours to have their artificial intelligence sense into what the person is saying and create a transcript. So when you go to any YouTube video, scroll down, and underneath the video, by the way, I'm assuming you are using a laptop or a desktop computer to do this, scroll down and then click the three dots underneath the video, three dots there, and then click on Open Transcript. Alright, so here's what you do. You're going to have to, if you want to, for example, edit this into a blog post, you want to toggle so that the timestamps are no longer there, and you do this by clicking the three dots here. Once you've opened the transcript, click on the three dots here inside the transcript, and click on Toggle Timestamps. Alright, now that the timestamps are gone, what I'd like to do is I'd like to scroll down to the very bottom. So quickly scroll down to the very bottom, and then once I'm at the very bottom, whoops, at the very bottom here, I click and select going upwards. I find that this is easier and has fewer sort of mouse errors if I do it from the bottom up instead of from the top down. You could experiment yourself, but anyway, try that. And once you have selected it, what you need to do then is to do Command-C on your keyboard, if you're on a Mac, or on Windows, it's Ctrl-C to copy it to your invisible clipboard, and then open up a new tab, and what I like to do is use Google Docs. So I'm going to type in doc.new, and in case you don't know, that automatically opens up a new Google document in your private Google Drive. So now that I have copied the transcript, I'm going to click on Edit, Paste without formatting so that it just plain text, and there it is. There's the entire video transcript based on YouTube's artificial intelligence. It's not going to be perfect, but it's certainly a great start to editing this into a blog post. All right, I hope that's helpful, and I'll see you in the next video.


Hello everyone. This is Alice Gell. In this video, I'm going to discuss some limitations of perceptrons. Let me talk a little bit about history. From the 1950s to the 1960s, there was a huge hype around perceptrons. At the time, people believed that AI is solved if we can make computers perform formal logical reasoning. Recall that we can use perceptrons to represent simple logical functions. Like and or or not.  This made people really excited about perceptrons. Unfortunately, in the 1960s, people discovered some limitations of perceptrons. This discovery had a huge impact on the research towards artificial neural networks. Despite the hype around perceptrons at the time, some people were skeptical about it. For example, Marvin Minsky, who was the founder of the MIT AI lab, and Seymour Poppert, who was the director of the lab at the time. Minsky and Poppert were skeptical about perceptrons, so they studied them, trying to understand the limitations of perceptrons. Other things that we cannot do with perceptrons. They found a significant limitation, and they wrote a book about it. The book is called Perceptrons and Introduction to Computational Geometry. The book says that it is not possible to represent an exclusive or function using perceptrons only. We need a deeper network with at least two layers. Recall that the exclusive or of two inputs is true whenever the two inputs are different. They're either 1 and 0 or 0 and 1. Now, this fact by itself is not a problem. If we need a deeper network, then we can construct a deeper network, and train it to learn our target function. The problem was, at the time, nobody knew how we could train a neural network with at least two layers. People only knew how to train a perceptron, which is a single-layer network. So these two results combined together suggest that pursuing perceptrons may be a dead end. It was believed that this book, this significant limitation, led to the first AI winter. There was a freeze to funding on neural networks. It also became challenging to publish any research paper on neural networks on perceptrons, since people didn't think that it was a promising research direction. I found this story very interesting. While it may appear that Minsky and Popperd saw the research progress on AI, I believe that they made a huge contribution by discovering and publishing this significant negative result. Although the result temporarily stopped research on artificial neural networks, it motivated researchers to eventually develop efficient algorithms to train multilayer neural networks. I wanted to share a personal story here. One of my favorite papers from my PhD was a paper on negative result. At the time, I was very interested in a class of algorithms called the peer prediction algorithms. These algorithms are used to motivate people to contribute their opinion about something honestly. Most work on peer prediction methods were theoretical. People proposed many variants of these methods and proved that they had nice properties. Of course, they also had some undesirable properties, but theoreticians who were working on this method dismissed the undesirable properties. They claimed that these properties won't arise in practice. I was skeptical of this. I believed that the undesirable properties would be problematic in practice, and I set out to prove it. With a few other people, we designed and conducted an online experiment to test these methods with real people. Our program allowed people to play a game in real time and rewarded them using the peer prediction methods. And our results showed that the methods didn't work in practice. They had significant problems and the participants recognized the problems and took advantage of these problems to improve their rewards without doing the work. So this huge negative result of mine helped push the field forward. After I published the result, people developed improved peer prediction methods that no longer have these undesirable properties. This is one reason that I'm very proud of this work. My takeaway from this story is that negative results are not all bad. A significant negative result may push the field forward by motivating people to develop better ways to solve the problem. Let's come back to perceptrons. Given history, there are two questions you might be thinking about. First, why can't we represent the x-word function using perceptrons? And second, how can we represent the x-word function using a multi-layer neural network? It turns out that we only need a two-layer neural network to represent the x-word function. First questions first. Why can't we represent x-word using a perceptron? Let me give you a short and intuitive argument. A perceptron is a linear classifier, given that we use the step function as the activation function. However, x-word is not linearly separable, so we cannot use a perceptron to represent x-word. Let's take a look at this graphically. I'm going to draw three graphs corresponding to and or and x-word. Each logical function is a binary operator, and the two axes represent the two inputs to each function. So we have four data points for each function. I've drawn all the data points on the graphs. A shaded circle is a positive example, so when the function is true, and the empty circle is a negative example when the function is false. For and or, it's easy to see that we can draw a line to separate the positive and negative examples. Many lines will work here. I've shown you two examples on the two graphs. Now for x-word, it should also be easy to see that there is no way that we can separate the positive and the negative examples using one line. If we really want to separate them, we'll have to draw a circle or using two lines. I'm showing you both examples on the graph, two red lines or the yellow circle. This means that x-word is not linearly separable, and we cannot use a perceptron to represent x-word. It's possible to prove this rigorously. For example, you can use a proof by contradiction. Start by assuming that we can represent x-word using a perceptron. This will lead to a series of inequalities, and the inequalities should lead to a contradiction. If you're interested, try writing down this proof yourself. I've included detailed explanations of the proof in a separate video. Question two, how can we represent x-word using a two-layer neural network? This slide has an example of a two-layer network. It looks like we have three layers, the input layer, the hidden layer, and the output layer. However, the input layer is not a real layer since it is not performing any computation. It simply contains the input values. The middle layer is called the hidden layer since it's not visible. The input and output are the two visible layers. If we have a bigger network, then any layer in the middle is a hidden layer. Given this network structure, how can we set the weights such that the network represents the x-word function? For now, the best approach to solve this problem is to reason mathematically. Think back to your logic class. Can you break down x-word into simpler logical functions that we already know how to represent using a perceptron? Once we do this, we can set the weights to represent the simpler logical functions. Pause the video and try solving this problem yourself. Then keep watching for the answer. Here is one possible solution. There are many solutions to this problem. I've rewritten the x-word function as a combination of and or and not. We already know how to represent all of these simpler functions using perceptrons. Please watch a separate video for detailed explanations. That's everything on the limitations of perceptrons. Let me summarize. After watching this video, you should be able to do the following. Explain what caused the first AI winter. Explain why a perceptron cannot represent the x-word function. Construct a two-layer neural network that can represent the x-word function. Thank you very much for watching. I will see you in the next video. Bye for now.


Now Jiren's, and again, these are the two scary characters. This is where things get intense. Oh, how's it going everybody? Dot, today I hear back with some more Dragon Ball fighters continuing on with our main team dilemma. This time playing Krillin, Bardock, Beassist, and Yamcha. This is our latest main team for sure, and obviously it's really good. It's hard to go wrong putting Bardock on a team. He's just such a quintessential fighters character that no matter what team he goes on, he'll probably have a place. Krillin, I'm gonna skip your intro. I always forget that Krillin's half of his intro is just embarrassing to himself. Hold him down, Yamcha, I'm gonna go for the after image. You know I gotta go for it early. Hold on, if we get him close enough to the corner, we can easily go for the rock stuff. I'm gonna go for it. Overhead, I didn't attack in time, bait it out, nevermind. Why did I wait so long after that reflect? It scared me, dude, I was not trying to play. I think we just let this rock, right? I was gonna get cornerback, but I think this is over for Vegeta anyway. Spirit ball, come on out. One, two, three, four, five. And everything on top just to go for that. Yeah, we're looking good, this is a strong start. Speaking of Bardock, I might try to Bardock. It didn't work, but Bardock follows it up with his auto combo. Yeah, it's just, that's what I mean when I say Bardock is quintessential fighters. You cannot go wrong with him. The auto combo is too good. I think in order to nerf Bardock, they would have to change something about him. For sure. Yeah, I messed that combo up. Oh, why am I like this? I was like, you know what? This medium might hit, I barely missed. Yeah, they would have to change something fundamental about the character. They can't just nerf frame data, I don't think. Well, if they did it within reason, they can't. I'm gonna take this, I know you're gonna drag a rush. I know you're gonna drag a rush.  Hey, speaking of Bardock. Oh, I let that drop. Oh, wow, that didn't connect. Oh, that was sick. Six bars to spend. This is definitely gonna be the end of Goku, especially if we get sliding here. Switch out to Yamcha. And thankfully, because this team works like this, Krillin with enough bar, you can just kind of save on the level three. Go for a level two instead. That's why Krillin's destructive. This is such a versatile tool. I'm so glad they made that his DHC. Oh, not the spark, I'm getting looped. I'm getting looped, he's got him. Let me see him. No loops, never mind, okay, okay. Two S, Bardock, get back out here. In the air, level three, talking about versatile. Now he's gotta take the hard knockdown. He's gotta block the mix, but does he even know what I'm going to mix with? Oh, I tried to go for the... Nah, it's over. I tried to go for the instant air dash media. I should have gone for the light though. If I went for light into Key Blast, I probably could have gotten it, but I will take that. I will take a strong game one. Strong game one. Hopefully game two is just as strong. Also, I really want to show off some more of the reasons why this team... The reason I won with this team in particular is because of what you're able to do with Krillin on block with Bardock B. We'll see if we can get him to block midscreen because that's really where it matters the most. Oh, he knew I was gonna go for it twice. I wanted that second overhead. I will take this punishment. Nice blue Vegeta cut. Blue Vegeta is also pretty cool.  Oh, I was gonna say, he can't go out like this. No, I got adult Gohan. Krillin's gone. So much for showing off that beam block string. It hurts. It hurts to see Krillin go out like this. But man, we had a little bit of a comeback to do. Blue Vegeta kinda just decimated us. Do we Bardock again? Yeah, we gotta be Bardock players. Hold on, we gotta be Bardock players real quick. Let me Bardock. That's fine, take it. That's not how that was supposed to go. That combo dropped. He just happened to get hit by the overhead portion of my special. All right, now you're gonna dash it, right? No, but I'll take it. Finish. Can't really afford to go for anything. So two L's hitting low. Another good combo. I'm worried about this. Yeah, I knew that would be a blue combo. I'm glad he didn't.  I messed it up too much. Oh, nice whiff punish. Yeah, I knew that was gonna be a blue combo. I just, I really wanted the extra damage. I wasn't thinking, so vicious. There was really no need for that. I'm gonna do it again though. Look at that, man. This is why I love this mate. This might still end up being the main team. It's just so strong. Shouldn't have wasted this level three when he's still a spark, but whatever. We can get something to fall here. I got a few spark and reads in my book. I don't. I do. I didn't think that would actually work. Can I get this here? Yes, I can. Sliding guaranteed. Don't switch. Keyblast game. This is probably where Bardock lacks the most. But standard Keyblast isn't bad. He's gonna Superdash. Oh, holds it goes for the mix. Bardock, he's gone. It's too late for him. But we bought a little bit of time for Yoncha. And that's all I really need is a bit of time. Sparking hit, but at a weird angle. Yes, give me that vanish. I'm so glad I didn't click a button. Was that game two? Are we already moving on? Are we moving on to the next match already? Let me see the stars. Let me see the stars before I confirm anything. I need to see him. Yep, there they are. We're moving on. Great games to that opponent. Okay, we have found another God of Destruction rank opponent and he is using a terrifying team to be honest. I'm going in. Okay, good. I definitely was risking it there. Something about that Superdash did not sit right with me. I was panicking. Let me see if I can't run those rocks. You know we got, it always works. The first time I feel like you do that in a set, I feel like it's going to work regardless. But it is always nice to see. Can we kill here? No, probably not. Dude, Krillin is so cool in this game, man. Krillin is my favorite Dragon Ball character, by the way. I know a lot of people, I am a huge dragon. I don't know why I'm explaining my backstory, but I get a lot of comments and questions like this. But I was a huge fan of Dragon Ball before I was a fan of fighting games. And then I became a fan of fighting games. And then I liked both of them. And then they made this game. That's why it's my favorite game of all time. But yeah, Krillin was already my favorite Dragon Ball character before the game came out. So I was playing him regardless. I thought for sure he would wake up counter. I don't know why. Maybe it's because it's what I would have done. But we try to go for the true optimal stuff. I know he missed it, but it's kind of scary knowing that he wants to go for that. This might be a real Jiren player. Oh no, big mistake. Ooh! Stuff Super Dash. I don't want to see it. We're in a bad way. We're in a bad way. Oh, I put myself in the corner. I feel like we were playing really smooth there. If I had just timed that Yamcha assist a bit better, we would be in a different scenario. I don't want to attack. I don't want to attack him there. I'm really looking out for any possible. Right there. That was sick. This is why Jiren is sick. Gonna switch out into Roshi. Probably just a level one. I don't think he needs a two. We'll see if he goes for it. Nah, he's smart. He's smart. He's smart. He got me. He got me. Hold on, hold on. We're gonna have to make some adjustments. We still have Spark. I don't want to mess with Roshi too much. I wanted to test him though. I wanted to test what he'd do on Vanish. I blocked it. Gblast could have gone for the 2H. Oh, oh, why'd he get on that side? Oh, he's really mixing me now. I don't know why I'm so afraid of Roshi. He attacks so fast for an old man. Oh, that was an interesting route. I don't know why that impressed me, I guess. It was pretty basic, all things considered, but it was interesting, I guess. He was gonna try to do something I don't know what I'm trying to do here. That's fine. I don't know why I'm so afraid. You're both these characters put fear into me. I'm afraid. Okay, I'll admit it. I'm afraid, I'm afraid. Hopefully that helps pull the storm. Switch me on to Krillin. I would actually, I appreciate that. I do appreciate that.  For some reason, I want to get rid of Krillin so I can level through Spark, if I'm being honest. Obviously, I'll keep fighting with Krillin, but drag, come on, that one felt a little cheap. That one felt a little cheap. I was born in 19 frames. I can see through that, I can see through it. I just gotta train my eyes.  It's fine, if we just super dash at him, we might win. I'm just trying to limit break, I'm trying to limit break cheese my way into a victory here. I think we might've got it. I'm not gonna go for that. Yes! Woo, that was clutch. Oh man, that was intense. I didn't want to go for the level three off that. I thought I messed it up. Maybe I could've gone for it, but I got a weird spirit ball input that I did not want. Game one goes our way, but I would be lying if I said it was clean. I'm pretty sure the main reason we won is because we did get you. I Goku out a little early. See, that was what I mean, risky super dashes, man. I should've kept that one true. Should've kept that one true. Jiren assist, pretty good. Yeah, I should've kept that one true. My bad, my bad. Sorry, Bardock, you're gonna have to take a beating from me here. Not putting us in the corner though, I appreciate that. Get me out of there. Oh, that is so good! That is so good you can opt out into that and catch that. Good, good, I don't know what to, I always want to call that on the ball, but it doesn't really apply. There is the, ah! That was sick. Good jab range, able to take advantage of that straight hit from heavy. This is not looking like the greatest game for me. Jiren stop, please, appreciate it. He can't kill here. Oh, that was a waste of three bars. I thought I would catch him slipping right there. Yamcha, our most important anchor is gone. You can still get it, we can still win here. Oh, where are you going, you I go? You think I can't see that? Again, it works. All right, so we just gotta run that. If he can't deal with it, that's where we gotta use more. We gotta try to set that situation up. Now Jiren's, again, these are the two scary characters. This is where things get intense. Oh, you know I'm taking that, dude, you know I'm gonna take that. Come here, let me get Roshi. Come here, let me get him. The reset, dude, the cheekiest reset I've ever gone for. Ah, he hit a button. Okay, I respect that, I respect it. Dang, that was so clutch, dude. Man, let's go, that dash was clean. That recovery's really bad though. The speed of the move is okay, but the recovery is pretty bad. Double rock, that's it. Hold on, let me try not to mess this up. Saiyan spirit, nice. That was a really good game. If it wasn't for the happy birthday, I don't know if we'd be a double Sunday, sorry. If it wasn't for the double Sunday combo, we might've been in a bad way, but we chandled our inner ratted spirit, was able to get it, that was too right, I'm not. Yeah, that was two great games to that opponent. That was so much fun. Woo, what a happy birthday combo, saved me. If you enjoyed it, definitely let me know down below in the comments what you thought of it. While you're down there, make sure to like, button and subscribe, and let me know your main team down there as well. You can also check out more videos that should be on your screen right now if they catch your eye. Other than that, I've been out to do it. Thank you so much for watching this one all the way to the end, and I will see you in the next video.


I spent $32,000 last year learning from all the big gurus. Here are the three things I learned from them. Number one, your confidence decide that level and scope of your thinking. Number two, people do not pay for what you deserve, they pay for the value you sell to them. Number three, average people spend 35% of the income to pay for taxes. Instead, you also pay 35% of the income to yourself to invest in yourself and invest in assets so that you're able to become yourself main millionaire as well. If you like the content I made today, please make sure to like, share, and subscribe for more tips. This is Dr. Nancy Lee from PMExcelerator.io. I'm gonna see you next time. Bye, guys.


The infinite spinner. Some people will be. OK. Welcome, everyone, to today's Webmaster Central Office Hours Hangouts. My name is John Mueller, and with us is Martin Split. We're a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google here in Switzerland. And part of what we do are these Office Hour Hangouts. We have a slightly different setup this time, which is more like a meeting room, because we're expecting one more person to join. So that'll be pretty cool. But I have all of your questions here, so we can go through those. Or if any of you want, you're welcome to jump in with the first question from your side. Hi, guys. Hi, Ely. I asked a question about the ranking of one of the biggest domains, Amazon.com, and their product pages, which lack the content part, but get the high SERP positions. Can you please give some information on how it really works, or is there a secret why they're getting all those top ranks without even having a proper content on the web pages? There's not really a secret. So I looked at those pages. So you mentioned the query there, and I looked at that. And from my point of view, there's content on there, there are reviews on there. It feels like there's stuff on there that would make sense to show in the search results. So I don't see anything specifically problematic with those pages where there would need to be some kind of a secret Amazon bonus or anything like that. Sometimes really large sites do have pages that aren't really perfect, but the rest of the site is really good. So sometimes it can happen that we rank pages that individually might not be fantastic, but are otherwise on a reasonable website. So that might be happening to some of those pages that you're seeing, but even the kind of for the query that you mentioned, that content looks reasonable. You can buy the product there, like it has the technical details from my point of view. Well, that's basically the case, the certified interview. So technically, there is no technical information. There are like five sentences, and there are short, two-word sentences, and there are five of them. Basically, it's like 15 words of description of the product and everything else is completely links to other PDPs. And in terms of review, there was just one review. That's why we kind of get kind of concerned, because we started working on the platform, then we close our products. But this kind of weird PDPs just simply appear from nowhere. And there is no useful content, because I work in this field currently for the specific products. And that's really surprised when I saw just really 10 to 15 words, and it's not even like, looks like to be a proper description of the product. That's why I asked this question. Maybe I saw a different page, or maybe they serve different pages to different users. But from my point of view, looking at that query and looking at the product, it looks OK. And I think in general, it's always possible to find pages that are kind of suboptimal on larger websites. And when you're competing with a really large competitor like that, it's always going to be hard. So that's something where I wouldn't purely focus on the number of words or the amount of technical information that you have there. If you're competing one to one with a really big website that does a lot of stuff really well, then that's going to be really hard. So my usual recommendation would be to try to find angles that are unique that you can cover that they're not interested in even trying to cover. Also, I wouldn't fall for the, oh, it's only 17 words. So as John said, we might see a different page. But the page that I'm seeing, if I would be a user and wanting to buy this camera, it tells me the video resolution. It tells me the frame rate. It tells me the interface, the measurements, the price, the shipping information. It has reviews. It has answered questions. It has all the manufacturer data. It's not the length of a product detail page. It's the content. And as far as I'm aware, the content pages I'm being served looks pretty decent. I think what you might also want to keep in mind is that we generally crawl from the US. So if, for example, they serve an empty page to users outside of the US, but they serve the full content to users in the US, then we would still be able to index that full content page. And that sometimes throws things off for our side because nobody likes to do things for Switzerland. So we always see empty stuff or you can't buy it. But we would still index that in Google and show it worldwide because we only see the US version because technically that's where our data centers are that do the crawling. And at least my search results is on position seven for that query. So there's a bunch of other pages that are ranking higher, at least for me right now. Something changed during the last week, honestly. I was going to start dropping down. I don't know if it's a coincidence or something else. It was surprising to me, but yes. And you see top two results is our pages, basically. That's a good news, but also bad news. So I was really curious if there is a small secret orages because they have a large volume of pages and links everywhere. Like they have a very high rank for the overall domain. OK, good to know. Thank you very much. Sure. All right. Any other questions from you all before we jump in? Hello, John. Hello, Martin. Hi. Yeah, so I have a client and it is a federal medical center. And all content obviously goes through the doctors before it publishes on the website. So do you think it is a good idea to let users know that information was checked by doctors and also put relevant structure data? What I mean, it's a medical center, after all. And it is a logical assume that you can trust the information. So for example, a page which provides information about a surgery. We can read about a surgery, check prices, and make an appointment. And the content of such pages also checks by doctors because it contains medical facts. So do I need to put information about this particular doctor who checked the page there? I think you don't need to do any of that. But if you're doing something good for your users, then I would highlight that and tell people what it is that you're doing and highlight the value that is behind your content. I think in general, if you're spending time and money to make things better, then don't hide that. Don't be shy with that. I realize with all of the EAT things, people would want to do that especially. But I think just generally from purely a user point of view, if you're doing something good and it's not directly visible on your pages, then users might not realize that you're actually doing that. OK, OK, I get it. Thank you. Sure. OK, let me run through some of the submitted questions so we don't lose track of them completely. Let me just refresh the list so that we get the newer ones. When I select the domain property in Search Console, the property has no disavow tool. Yes, that's true. Some of the tools in Search Console are only available in the older version of Search Console. We're working on moving everything over. But as some things are still in the old one, you still need to use the traditional properties. Usually verification is pretty easy, so that should be less of an issue. With the desktop version, I have structured data, but no AMP version. So it doesn't violate Google's policy because of two different versions. It doesn't violate our policies, but we really, really want you to have the AMP version be equivalent to the normal version of your website. So structured data is usually less of a problem, but especially content-wise, navigation-wise, internal linking, all of that should be equivalent on AMP so that when users go to your AMP page, they're not served a stripped down page that doesn't serve their needs. I know that's something that the AMP team is always kind of struggling with because people think, well, I'm just making a really fast page, and to make a fast page, I will show no information. But for users, that's a terrible experience. And in the long run, that's not going to be good for your site. When the 90 days is up after you've used the URL removal tool, does Google try to re-crawl the URL directly? If so, does it see the robots.txt file? Or is it only when it spiders the site? So the URL removal tool only hides a search result in the search results page. It doesn't change anything with crawling and indexing. So usually what happens is we hide it in the search results and we will continue to crawl the page. And if that page is blocked from indexing, if it has a no index or if it's blocked by robots.txt or it's a 404, then we'll drop it from our index and we won't have to crawl it as much anymore. So it's not after the 90 days, it's more that during this time, we'll work to kind of reprocess that page. So I think the question kind of goes in the same thing and also covers the quirk about robots.txt and no index. So if you have a no index on a page and you block it by robots.txt, then we don't see the no index because we can't crawl it. So I recommend doing either or. If you do both of them, then we just don't see the no index. Question about JSON schema markup for my handmade one of a kind products. I don't have a global identifier and Search Console gives me a warning for not adding one. I refuse to just make one up. So there are two things here. On the one hand, this is a warning. So it's not an error that will block everything. It's basically just saying, well, it would really help us to have an ID here. So if there were multiple versions of this product or multiple people selling the same product, we could group them together, potentially. So that's kind of the one thing. It's not that we would not process it at all, it's not an error, it's just a warning. You don't have to fix all warnings. A lot of sites have warnings with structured data and that's perfectly fine. On the other hand, depending on how much or how many products you're selling, it might make sense to try to get one of these IDs so that you can use that. Especially if you're selling something that other people are reselling, then maybe that makes sense. But ultimately, that part is definitely up to you. I certainly wouldn't go out and just make them up. Apparently, you just register your company and then you can start enumerating your product. So maybe it's not that much of a hassle. I don't really know. But again, it's a warning, it won't break everything. I'm working. Yeah. I wanted to quickly ask you since you touched the products and catalog. Question about the jackpot position. We see that one of our products that we manufacture basically has the wrong name and descriptions just because it was launched or submitted to Google a long time ago. And all other distributors use the same wrong name. Is there a way that we can just feed Google the correct product description, its correct GTI and number, or whatever unique identifier so it fixes the overall index so it fixes the major product information. So it doesn't use the legacy one. No, I don't know. That's something you'd probably need to check with the folks from the shopping side. I don't know who would be best to get in touch with that. If you want, you can drop your information in the chat and I can forward that on to the shopping team. Maybe there is something that they can send back to you. Would be great. Thank you. Cool. I'm working on geographical pages. For UX, I hired a photographer to capture relevant images of the region. I'm wondering how Google distinguishes between new photography and existing stock photography and if this can change search results. So what would definitely happen is we would see these as separate images and we would index them as separate images. In Google images, we would show them individually. They're unique images. Even if it's the same scenery, even if it's a similar view to existing ones, they're new images. The lighting is different. Everything is slightly different. So that's something from that point of view we would treat them as individual things and rank them individually. From a web search point of view, we would not really care what you use with regards to the images. So in web search, we focus on the textual content there. We don't have this differentiator where we'd say, well, this image is stock photography. Therefore, it's bad. We essentially just say, well, there's an image here. There's an alt attribute. We can index the image for Google images. We can double check to see if that's a unique image that we need to index individually. But for normal web search, we wouldn't really need to take that into account. So from a web search point of view, that would probably not change a lot for Google images. It would change things for users. I imagine it would change things as well. With EAT, how much value do external links carry? Surely providing that you're an expert on page is not sufficient. What else matters? Mentions or external links from relevant sites? So we don't have any explicit information with regards to what you need to do there. A lot of this comes from the Google radar guidelines, which are not direct search results or search ranking factories, but rather, this is what we give folks when they evaluate the quality of our search results. So from that point of view, it's not that you would need to gain this through links or anything like that. But rather, this is something that normal people look at when they review the quality of the search results, and which, perhaps, normal users would think about as well. Can I trust this website? So from that point of view, it's not a matter of you need to put these five words on your website and then get a link from this other site. That's definitely not the case. But more a matter of really how you present your website overall and how users would perceive that. My website is still crawling with desktop Googlebot. How much time will it take to change to mobile Googlebot? So we've switched over a significant part of the web to mobile-first indexing, but we haven't switched everything over. You don't need to do anything to kind of force that switch over. Our systems use a number of algorithms to try to determine when a website is ready overall. We do that on a per-domain basis. And when we think that it's ready overall, we'll switch things over. So that's kind of the setup that we have there. There's no specific time where we say, well, this. So from that point of view, you don't need to do anything specific. Hi, John. Hi, John. This is Alex from Greece. How are you? I. Can you hear me? Yes. OK, I have a question regarding this crawling issue with the desktop bot. We had switched to mobile-first indexed on November of 2018. But a couple of months ago, we have switched back to desktop bot. Do you think that is normal? Is this something that you have seen before? Usually it wouldn't be happening. But I don't know exactly what you're seeing. So it's really hard to say. Would you be able to add the URL maybe in the chat? Then I can take a look at that afterwards. Yes, of course. I have made a comment with the whole situation. So you might read my question later in the conversation. OK? I saw your question, but I think you did mention the URL. So I don't know which side it is. But I'm dropping it to the chat. Thank you. Cool. Thanks a lot. Hi, John. Just a quick question here. Yeah, so this is with regard to content duplication. We usually understand that duplication is not on the Google guideline. And I think that's a very, very fair point to put across. But we were facing an issue where, if I could put it, a very unique product was being offered by multiple brands. And we were creating the pages for those brands. So if I think from a content perspective, the technical specifications or the way the product is structured will be the same. The only thing that it will be differentiated is by the brand name that is offering. So how is that content being treated as duplication or how it will be handled? We treat it on several levels, the duplicate content. On the one hand, if the whole page is copied, then that's easy, like the whole HTML page. Then we can see that it's a duplicate. On the other hand, if a part of the page is copied, then we can see that that part of the page is duplicate. And what happens when just the part of the page is duplicate is we will index the whole page. We will index all of those versions. And if someone is searching for a specific part that is only in that duplicated section of the page, then we will try to pick one of those pages to show. So that's, from our point of view, that's kind of normal. Because we can recognize that the same content is available on different sites. It doesn't make sense to show all of the different versions of the same content. Usually what happens, especially with e-commerce sites, is that there are other things involved that help us to pick the right one. So if someone is searching for something local and we can recognize a store as local, then we know it's duplicated content. But this is the local version, so we'll try to show that one. So those are kind of the things that come up there. In general, when it comes to making sites, oftentimes you don't have time to write product descriptions for everything. So it makes sense to try to add additional value through other parts of the page, maybe through reviews on the page. Maybe you have your own product photos. Maybe you have something else that you're doing unique to your website, to unique to those specific products. And highlighting all of that makes it a lot easier for us to say, well, this is actually unique version. We need to make sure that we don't just filter it out because it has a small description that's the same across different sites. OK, question. Say if you wanted to change from language region to just region and you redirect that respective URL, would you lose ranking within that region because you're no longer region targeting? It just goes to the dot com? So if you're using geotargeting, then that would be kind of a generic page instead of the local page. And for queries where we can tell that a user is looking for something local, then that might have an effect. But if you're not using geotargeting or if people are not explicitly looking for something local, then that wouldn't change anything. Sure, thank you. Sure. Hey, John. Hi. Hey, Dan. Greetings from Dublin, Ireland. I have a question for you regarding site maps. So I wanted to get a couple of pages in a XML site map. So I ran a crawl in Scream and Frog and lashed them up to the developers to put on our server so that I could submit it in Google Search Console. But when I got it, it was actually on a subdomain and not on the domain itself. Now it's in the site map index. So I was just wondering, will Googlebot come in, find the site map index, finds that even if it's on a subdomain and the URLs are for the actual main domain, can it find that XML site map and will it crawl those URLs, or does it have to be on the domain itself? If we get the site map submitted individually, then it has to be within the same path. On the other hand, if it's submitted through Search Console and you have the subdomain also verified in the same account, then that would work. So that's the way that site maps works is for unauthenticated submissions, I guess. Like if you don't do it in Search Console, then the URLs within the site map have to be below the path of that site map file. If you're doing it through Search Console, then the URLs in the site map file can be for any valid property within your Search Console account. OK. Thank you. All right.  I mean, I have more in this list, so I can continue running through those. But up to you. Do you have JavaScript questions or specific technical questions? Oh, you do. I feel that this is what happens. OK. My site is still being crawled with the desktop crawler. How much time will it take to switch to mobile Googlebot? OK. And take a while. There's another question in there that asks, can I switch to mobile Googlebot? There's no way to opt in or out. We're just progressively changing or moving sites to mobile-first indexing, but there's no way to tell you, oh, yeah, next week it's going to be you. Be patient. It'll happen. It'll be fine. Hi again. Hi. I've asked this a couple of minutes ago, but I think you weren't in the conversation regarding the switch from Google Smart phone bot to the Google Desktop one. We have switched to a Google Smart phone bot on November 2018, but a couple of months ago, we have switched back to a Google Desktop. Do you think that this is something normal? And why this might have happened? Yeah, I don't know. I think you dropped the link. I dropped the URL. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, I need to check with the team kind of what the status is there. Did you get a notification in Search Console? No notification or whatsoever. And what is more? But for the Switch to mobile, did you get one? We had a notification that we have switched to a Smart phone bot, but never a notification that we have switched back. OK, I don't think we have notifications that we switch back, but it's something. In talking with the team, they generally wouldn't switch sides back. So that's something where from discussions with them, if they switch one side over and it turns out the website does a redesign and then doesn't work so well on mobile anymore, then it's tough luck like we switched over. So I think maybe something weird happened in your case. What is strange is that we are still top performance at Google Search. We are top performance at Google News. Our AMP pages are at top performance, 99% accessibility, say, rankings, et cetera. But and the crawling from the crawling we see at our logs from Google Smart phone bot is at about 70%. And the Google desktop bot is about 30%. That's why we are a little bit skeptical. Yeah, it's normal, but why is it mentioned as a Google desktop? And I can send you the screen search. Yeah, I mean, screen shots would be useful. But in general, when we switch to mobile first indexing, we still have a split of 80, 20, or 70, 30 desktop and mobile. So it's not purely mobile then. And for some kinds of requests, we just use a desktop Google bot. For example, I think the shopping requests are done with desktop Google bot. I think for a new site, that doesn't really matter. But depending on the website, if you look at the overall traffic, then it won't be 100% mobile or even 90% mobile. There will also always be 20%, 30%, 40% still with desktop. But I can definitely take a look at that with the team. OK, thank you. Thank you very much. Sure. You also, I think, asked about the Chrome. What was it, the new? Google Chrome Suggestions, yeah. Yeah, I have no information on that, how that comes together. Because in the Discover feed, that's something where we do use the normal crawling and indexing. And it's kind of separated out, but I don't know how the Chrome Suggestions works there or how you would rank there. And I suspect it wouldn't be a matter of a technical issue, but rather that, I don't know, some fancy Chrome ranking factor, which apparently is now a thing. Yeah, cool. I will double check with that, too, with the team, though. Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot. Sure. All right. We're kind of running low on time. But if any of you want to ask more questions, it's like we have a bunch of you here, so. I have another question. OK, go for it. You mentioned before that the version of the desktop should be exactly the same as the mobile one, in regard of content or markup-wise as well. Because we don't have the exact same template on desktop and the mobile. We detect the user agent, and we are using a separate desktop template and a separate mobile template to be more optimal for the user. It's much better performance if you are using less markup, more optimized images, smaller images, et cetera. What is your opinion on that? That's perfectly fine. OK, thank you. So the thing I would watch out for is with mobile-first indexing, when we do that, we will only use the mobile version for indexing. Like I said, we still crawl with the desktop sometimes, but we use the mobile for indexing. So things like internal linking, we would use the mobile version. So if on the mobile version you don't have any of the navigation, then that would be your problem. If the navigation is there and the layout is different, the HTML is different, that's totally fine. Thank you. One last JavaScript question. OK, so I was just wondering. I know you don't just, it's a little bit close to my previous question, but what's the factor? What's the metric that looks, OK, you look at that. OK, this website is going to go into two waves, and this one is easing. So we see that quite a lot of JavaScript websites are not within two waves. Maybe there is not enough JavaScript or whatever. Actually, we have quite a lot of bots recently to play with that because we're investigating that. Do you want to answer that or do I answer that? I can hand wave. I know that John answered some of the worst questions. So these days, the two waves of indexing play less and less of a role. So basically, generally speaking, you may see a lot of websites that are not using JavaScript that are still going through basically two waves, and you might see some. You might see a bunch of. Wait, wait, wait, wait, explain that. Right. OK, so how do I put this? Basically, every pretty much, no, so here's the thing. Pretty much every website, when we see them for the first time, goes through rendering. So there's no indexing before it hasn't been rendered. And there are certain heuristics that if we see after a while, like, oh, this page, actually, the renderer does not diff as much or doesn't diff. Like, it looks the way before, like, we get. So what happens is we do a crawl, right? We do a crawl, which means, yeah, let's say you get a new domain. You learn how much CPU this new domain was taking. No, that's not what we do. What we do is we do an HTTP request. We get something back, right? Some HTML. Maybe it's a bare-bones HTML, and all it does is to load some JavaScript and run the JavaScript. Then this HTML that we got from the original HTTP get request from the crawl goes into rendering. Rendering lines to JavaScript, boom, a lot of content happened that wasn't there before. So we're like, aha, OK, so this needs to be rendered. But there is a heuristic that is very, very. You look at the difference between the initial HTML and then after rendering, you see extra content. And the interesting thing is that, so what I want to make very, very clear. Because I talked to the team, and I was surprised about this. I thought this is still a lot more frequently happening that we are going like, oh, all right, we're going to skip rendering. It is not as frequently happening anymore. So for many, many websites, even if they do not run JavaScript, they might still go through the render phase, because it doesn't make a difference as much. Because it's cheaper. It's cheaper than the complexity that we infer. So there's very, very few cases. And the internals of that are very complicated. And I still haven't fully grasped what exactly triggers the heuristic. Because what we see, there are quite a lot of JavaScript websites that never go through two waves. And there are some websites that go through to the wave. Again, we don't see really a difference. So one of the factors for you is the difference between the initial crawl and the rendered DOM and crawl DOM and render DOM. And I wouldn't say that two waves of indexing are dead, but it's definitely something that they absolutely not. But it's definitely, I expect eventually rendering, crawling, and indexing will come closer together. We're not there yet, but I know that teams are looking into it. No plans, no deadlines, no roadmaps to be announced yet. But you winked twice. What about link juice, Martin? How does link juice play into a row with rendering? Just to finish that, because I have this concept in my head that JavaScript S series is dying slowly. It's going to eventually dissolve because you guys are getting better with that. So basically, you are on the path of just killing two waves, eventually completely, right? Can we? So I would say that we're hoping to make it all a little bit better, and so that you don't have to do more things. But kind of like with normal technical SEO, I don't see JavaScript SEO dying. Because there's just so many things that you can do wrong, and it takes a lot of experience to be able to debug and find out and improve things. And it keeps changing, right? There's new stuff coming in. And with every new bit on the web platform, you're like, does this work with Googlebot? So this is interesting. Sorry, sorry, sorry. But I want to follow up on what you said. So you're saying that even if you guys get so good with JavaScript, obviously, basically resources, and I'm guessing some kind of technology that you used to optimize that, you still think that JavaScript SEO is going to be?  Because I had this concept that it's going to dissolve. I mean, it's going to be a thing in that it will be better at it, but there are always technical details that you can get working well or get working kind of as well. Kind of terribly. Oh, yeah, with JavaScript. With normal technical SEO, it's already hard. And it's something that a lot of people struggle with, where it's like the internal linking and you have new unique URLs and all of these things. And with JavaScript, it's all hidden away, so you really have to know how JavaScript works. And when something goes wrong, that's really not going to be trivial to find. And new frameworks, like new elements in Chrome, all of these things, they kind of come together. But my logic was that you guys are using, sorry, the latest version of Chrome. Yes. So with new frameworks, they actually work when the latest version of Chrome. So eventually, it's going to be one-to-one. They are still yes and no. Is it like naive thinking here? It's a little naive to think that, because the thing is that you're in the end still not. It's not that there's a human being sitting in front of it looking at your website and going like, huh, OK. It is a technical infrastructure. No, I know. There is technical infrastructure. And there are so many interesting implementation details that can interact with the web platform in interesting ways. To give you a very simple example, what we're doing with web components, I'm writing the guidance right now. So excuse me if I'm not having a very polished answer at this point. You get the raw answer from me. Well, web components work fine in Chrome. We have the latest version of Chrome. Chrome 76, as of today, actually a couple of days ago, in Googlebot, that's fine. The thing there is we have to make a decision what to index. So as the user, depending, let's say like if I go to a website that has a web component and there's something in the shadow DOM, then I see the shadow DOM content. If I would run an Internet Explorer 10, I see the light DOM content, which gets overwritten. So some people might be like, oh, yeah. So if I have a fallback for crawlers that do not understand JavaScript, I think I'm going to be in the first wave of indexing first. I put my fallback content into the light DOM. But then Googlebot never sees that. So that's still something that you need to know and be aware of. So you might end up with some person coming to you and going like, this content is there. It's in the DOM. We don't understand why it's not showing up. And then you have to know, oh, that's because of JavaScript specifically, because of shadow DOM. The shadow DOM overrides the light DOM. And the way that the Googlebot works is it flattens the shadow DOM into the DOM overriding the light DOM in this specific case. So to make my point from earlier, JavaScript SEO is not going to go away. It's going to change. It used to be a still much more technical. That on one hand. And the thing is like, today, JavaScript SEO is about finding the pitfalls and the gotchas in today's technology and working around them or figuring out a better way to do them. And in the future, it's going to be more like, this is what can go wrong. It works out of the box. But these are the things that can still go wrong. And these are the things that we need to do to debug them. Because we got a little bit geeky here. So just to summarize that, I know you are trying to simplify that, but just to simplify that even further. Basically, what you're saying, in the future, JavaScript SEO is going to evolve into making your job, so Google's job, a little bit easier and making sure that everything we push out to clients is basically very easy to crawl, index, and understand. I think that's one thing. But also all of the troubleshooting stuff kind of comes in that. And that's something where we can provide some tools to help. But things like Shadow DOM, Light DOM, it's like, how are you going to figure that out unless you already know that this is a thing. Or things like you're using Canvas to put content out there.  So we index it as an image.  But right now, it's more figuring out what's going wrong, probably, and helping troubleshooting. And it's going to turn more into there's 10 ways of doing this in JavaScript. Nine of them are terrible because developers are trying to figure out the right way. That's one of the reasons why I want developers and SEOs to sit on the same freaking table. Because developers are like, OK, so this is really hard for us. This is making everything slower. And they are not necessarily thinking about, can Google index this? Or can Search Index Engine see this? Because I've found out that for a while that a lot of developers in the SEO sphere, JavaScript SEO, is just advising developers to pre-render. I was waking up at night crying. I mean, I think that was a good first step. What's happening? I think that was a good first step. Good first step. Three years ago, maybe. I'm sorry, but I know the huge fun of doing that. I mean, it's also one of those things where in the first step, you have to know what the limitations are. And when you know the limitations, you can kind of work around them. And if you have a website and you need to get an index, you can say, well, Google will figure it out in a couple of years. That's not a good business model. I was actually completely looking at how quickly you catch up to technologies, how well you were doing compared to like a few years from a year ago. I had this vision with my head, OK, in one or two years. That's warm in my heart because you're one of the few people who say we quickly catch up. Oh, we're going to publish that quickly. We're going to publish that soon because the heavy lifting you did with indexing is tremendous. Because just two years ago, you couldn't index six pages of JavaScript when the link was nested in JavaScript. So, yeah, sorry. So basically, you're saying it's going to evolve into being much more complex. I actually, sorry. Sorry. I got excited. I like that idea. It's going to be technical. OK, let's take a break here. I'll pause the recording before we fill up YouTube.  And probably there are a million questions from your side as well that you want to shove in. But we have to take a break somewhere. So I'll stop here. I'll set up the next sessions. You're welcome to drop the questions there. Or of course, ping us on Twitter or post in the Webmaster Help Forum. Folks are really helpful as well. With that, let's take a break. And wish you all a great weekend. Thank you very much. Have a great weekend. Bye. Now if I could find the stop button.