Month: May 2018

Some fantastic new features. Both fenced code blocks and a new deadline feature for sheets are tops. I’ve been testing this for a while and the deadline feature has a lot of potential.

Since I track all my writing in in Ulysses I’ve been setting deadlines as “at most 1,500 words, deadline DATE” this not only keeps me at a reasonable word count but let’s me plan out my writing better. Good stuff, can’t wait to see how this feature evolves.

I own two, and it’s all I can do to not buy another.

Weed is legal in Seattle, in case you wondered how they came up with this explanation.

Out today is Obscura 2. I had a chance to play with the beta version and came to like it quite a bit, and it has become a home screen app for me. More information on the blog post here. I don’t know what it is about this app, but it’s really stuck with me, I like the controls and the amount of control it gives me — while at the same time working like “normal” when I don’t have time to futz about.

Nick Statt:

Instapaper happens to be owned by Pinterest as of 2016, which does add a bit of a wrinkle to the situation as it’s not entirely clear what type of data on users’ reading habits or any other behaviors Pinterest may have gleaned from its subsidiary. When questioned by Williams on Twitter about the subject, Brian Donohue, a product engineering manager at Pinterest, said, “I can’t comment on specifics other than to say that I’m actively working on resolving it.”

Sketchy.

There’s a new version of Castro out, which switches the app to the now popular subscription model. Castro, as far as I am concerned, is the best podcasts app you can get. But also don’t take it from me because I so loathe podcasts.

One thing to note here is the additional features of the app: silence trimming and chapter support. These are both features you only get if you pay for the app.

Ryan Christoffel in his overview of the app for MacStories writes:

Eventually though, I became more selective about the portions of podcasts I listened to, and Castro’s lack of chapter support sent me elsewhere.

The line cracks me up, because you need to think about this in terms of what you are paying for with Castro. Listening to podcasts is free, it always has been. You are now paying, and not a small amount of money (but not much), a subscription fee so that you can make podcast listening better because the podcast producers themselves don’t. I know that sounds harsh, and like another slam from a guy who loathes podcasts, but think about it.

Podcasts are too long, but instead of podcaster doing the hard work to shorten them, listeners use hacks like trimming silence (ruining the tempo, not that there was any) and playing at faster than normal speed playback. Listeners (and this was literally news to me today) also use chapters to jump about in the podcasts to skip over the boring bits.

Isn’t the entire point of a podcast that the entire podcast is relevant and entertaining?

Why are people paying to get these “features” instead of demanding better content? This entire thing reads to me like people saying “that book is too long, where’s the Cliff’s Notes version of it?”

Antonio Garcia Martinez:

Facebook is to real community as porn is to real sex: a cheap, digital knockoff for those who can’t do better. Unfortunately, in both instances use of the simulacrum fries your brain in ways that prevent you from ever experiencing the real version again. But we’ll take what we can get.

I’m not one to defend pornography — it does strike me as poor wording to say “for those who can’t do better” above. Both for pornography, as well as for community. Because I don’t think “doing better at community” is what not using Facebook is.

That notwithstanding, the analogy is interesting, because like pornography everything is amplified to a fictitious level on Facebook. Which then creates real problems, like porn does for sex education and expectations, in the real world. It’s not people flock to Facebook because they are incompetent at finding real people to talk to, its that when you go to talk to real people they are buried in their iPhones. It’s that when you go to talk to real people, they ask you if you saw what they just posted on social media.

The other interesting analogy here is that not only can people be “thine true self” on Facebook as with porn, but they are also far more likely to see and desire to see the limits. “What crazy shit can I post to get people to like it?” Which becomes problematic because it normalizes the extraordinary.

Bruce Schneier:

Why is anyone using encrypted e-mail anymore, anyway? Reliably and easily encrypting e-mail is an insurmountably hard problem for reasons having nothing to do with today’s announcement. If you need to communicate securely, use Signal. If having Signal on your phone will arouse suspicion, use WhatsApp.

I wondered the same thing, though I do use ProtonMail. Signal is great, I question WhatsApp’s long term changes which might cause encryption woes later on. But I can answer why use encrypted email: for many people it’s easier to type out emails on a laptop than tap them out on a phone. Signal is trying to overcome this, but I think it is an uphill battle. Still, way better than encrypted email.

Cale Guthrie Weissman:

It’s true that ad-based digital media is unsustainable, but bringing on journalists and editors and then killing their revenue in the name of a business pivot hardly seems like the appropriate fix. As one person impacted by Medium’s business changes in 2015 told me, the company is “throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks.”

That’s probably the most accurate take on Medium I’ve seen.

Paywalls are not sustainable, but he’s got everything else in this post wrong. The notion that article size in kbs bloat means there’s a greater cost, is bullshit. Content is the expense, not the hosting. What’s changed is that no one believes any longer that if you put in the sweat equity that you’ll cash out later.

Turns out, you need to pay rent, and rents are going up everywhere. Turns out, sweat equity isn’t very liquid, wait it technically is, never mind.

Look at podcasting or the App Store, both more recent and over a shorter timelines hit the same wall. When these were small places it was easy to make money, and thus you didn’t need to charge people. But when there are now 5,000 podcasts which are essentially two white guys talking about tech, it’s pretty hard to demand money for that content. When there’s 3 clones of your app in the store, and 15 competitors which are slightly different, it’s hard to to convince people to pay for your app.

The bottom line is that just as paywalls don’t scale, neither does advertising. At least not if you want to afford rent. If money is to be had from ads then competition for that money increases and the shares to most are diluted to the point of not mattering. With paywalls, no one can afford them all. The audience is, the patron pool, is smaller. What’s the ideal? No clue, if I knew I’d be doing it.

Martin Evans:

Researchers, who analysed the Facebook activities of a thousand Isil supporters in 96 countries, discovered users with radical Islamist sympathies were routinely introduced to one another through the popular ‘suggested friends’ feature.

Move fast and break things?

Robinson Meyer:

And blame for this problem cannot be laid with our robotic brethren. From 2006 to 2016, Twitter bots amplified true stories as much as they amplified false ones, the study found. Fake news prospers, the authors write, “because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it.”

The conclusion is essentially that social networks cater to, amplify, and rapidly spread disinformation and there’s no obvious way to solve it because it’s really a human problem made worse by these networks.

Unless, of course, we agree social networks are terrible and get rid of them. That seems rather obvious.