Category: Links

Zeynep Tufekci:

It’s important to realize that, in using these dark posts, the Trump campaign wasn’t deviantly weaponizing an innocent tool. It was simply using Facebook exactly as it was designed to be used. The campaign did it cheaply, with Facebook staffers assisting right there in the office, as the tech company does for most large advertisers and political campaigns. Who cares where the speech comes from or what it does, as long as people see the ads? The rest is not Facebook’s department.

Almost like these tools are the assault weapons used by politicians and advertisers.

A few people have asked me this question since I recommend both. I did some testing over at EDW.

Ben Yagoda, writing about why reviewers are often so off base:

Here’s the heart of the problem: The set of critics’ and audiences’ interests do not perfectly overlap but rather form a Venn diagram. In the audience circle, the pressing question is, “Should I spend some number of the dollars I have to my name and the hours I have left on Earth on this thing?” Critics get in for free and by definition have to read or watch or listen to whatever’s next up. So their circle is filled with relativistic questions about craft and originality and wallet quality and the often unhelpfully general “Is it good?” (Some of them even have an idea of what they mean by “good”; the rest are winging it.)

I loved this article because in my head it’s the crux of the problem with most review sites. I try very hard to answer the questions I would want to know about something before I bought it, which is why eschew bullshit like scoring. The above also perfectly encapsulates why sites like The Verge, or Carryology fail so miserably at writing helpful reviews. I’ve sent more backpacks back to companies than I care to think about because they are bad, and rather than contort myself to talk about the x thing that bag gets right, I move on. I am, however, by no means perfect.

Great recommendation from @hisaac on this DM only Twitter app. I started using it this morning and it’s just what I needed: access to the only useable part of Twitter.

Maya Kosoff:

Regardless of whether its justification is sound, the fact remains that Twitter is beholden to Trump, and it will continue to make up rules that accommodate his erratic behavior.

That’s the kind of shit that would keep me up at night.

Just finished this book, and while some elements feel a bit dated (it was published in 2015), it offers a good comprehensive look at what humans face at some point in the future as machines get better at doing things.

This is a terrible guide from Wirecutter, and their top pick — hell most of their picks, are a waste of your money. Bad guide, even for “most people.” I’m not alone in thinking this either.

I didn’t order one of these because it looks massive, but if you don’t like to pack light, and still want to fit it all in a bag. This is probably a good option. Either way, so,e interesting design choices in it.

John Gruber:

I feel like it keeps me on my toes to read the comments from people who don’t like Daring Fireball.

I used to read every comment someone made in reference to my site, by way of seeing an incoming link in my analytics and heading over to the source. I’d still do that if I had analytics to work from. It’s invaluable to see that commentary and downright painful to read it. (If you do link to the site, never be shy about sending me the link, even if it’s in disagreement with me.)

Yair Rosenberg on Twitter shutting down he bot he co-created which pointed out neo-nazis who were impersonating other people:

The real threat, apparently, was not these trolls — who today continue to roam the platform unchallenged — but our effort to combat them.

Absurd.

MG Siegler talking about his comfort and like of Alexa devices, has this to say about Siri:

Yes, I could ask Siri to do this as well. But, well, that’s not the relationship I have with Siri. Our relationship is more about pulling up random facts about a city when we’re out and about, walking around.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that I loathe Alexa devices. I don’t want one in my house, and if I showed up to a hotel room with one — I’d promptly unplug it. Same goes for a Google based device, or Facebook — these companies don’t have my privacy in their best interest. I question Apple’s HomePod too.

But I don’t get the non-use of Siri here. Hang on, let me step back first.

I’ve been around Alexa devices, used them enough, to know exactly what you get from them. I find them annoying at best. “ALEXA!” They aren’t overly smart if you ask me.

Neither is Siri.

But, Siri is always there. On your iPhone/iPad with a simple “Hey Siri” command. What’s more is that it’s tied to my voice on my devices. It’s not uncommon for there to be 2-3 iOS devices in a room at once in our house, and for one of my wife or me, to shout “hey Siri” to set a timer/remind/whatever. And the right device is the only one to respond.

Why would you prefer Alexa over that?

I don’t get this love of Alexa at all.

John Gruber, in a footnote about the iPhone X gestures and navigation coming to iPads:

As for how the iPhone X-style Face ID/no-home-button experience will work on iPad, it’s unclear to me whether Apple has already thought this all the way through. Why, for example, did Apple just this year introduce a new small-swipe-up-from-the-bottom gesture for the iPad to show the new Dock, when the iPhone X suggests that a small swipe up from the bottom is the future of getting back to the home screen?

That swipe up in the iPad would be a disaster to lose. It’s so convenient and fast, it would be, hard to go back. I can see two scenarios here:

1. iOS further splits with the iPad lineup retaining some sort of multi-swipe cruft to maintain the productivity values of what we currently have, while also allowing for swipe to go home.
2. The home screen as we know it dies.

The first option seems too obvious and is a cop out. But the second, seems to line up with rumors of widgets/live tiles coming to the home screen. What if the home screen isn’t where you start, but rather is merged with the Today and the Lock Screen?

Swiping up to multi-tasking on an iPad could then show a home screen to switch to, as if it is another app. The more I use iOS 11 on my iPads, the less I need the home screen at all, it is almost a waste of, I don’t know, but a waste nonetheless. So too is the today screen which goes unused by me on my iPads.

And this would work nicely too with Face ID on iPads. Tap to wake up, while looking at the screen your lock screen morphs into a hybrid today-notification center. Then when you unlock, if you haven’t tapped something there, you pick up where you last left off, or worse case, in the multi-tasking chooser which is far more powerful and useful than the home screen has ever been. The only thing missing then is a dedicated spotlight button.

Personally, I can’t wait to see where Apple iterates in the iPhone X.

Vernon Silver, and Sarah Frier:

Facebook has embedded itself in some of the globe’s most controversial political movements while resisting transparency. Since 2011, it has asked the U.S. Federal Election Commission for blanket exemptions from political advertising disclosure rules that could have helped it avoid the current crisis over Russian ad spending ahead of the 2016 election, Bloomberg reported in October.

Unless, and until, Facebook shuts down it’s bullshit “Global Government and Politics” team — or perhaps substantially changes who and how the team works with politicians — you should not believe a word Facebook says about anything as it relates to politics. Facebook embeds itself with politicians with nearly zero care for whom they work with.

In short: they have helped to put a lot of people in power, who have then gone on to kill a lot of people once they came to power.

In yesterday’s link I mentioned a poster I saw, this is the link to the story behind that. Thanks to Tony.

Mike Monteiro:

Jack, and to an extent Twitter’s pet porg Biz Stone, have always believed that absolute free speech is the answer. They’re blind to the voices silenced by hate and intimidation. The voices that need to be protected.

There’s this photo, in a children’s doctors office I saw once, where it said “equal”. The image for equal was three kids of very different heights looking at a baseball game from the back of the stands. All of them standing on, say, a one foot tall step. Only the tallest kid could see perfectly, the middle somewhat, and the shortest not at all. And yet, this is equality, one foot for all.

Next to this image is another frame titled “fair”. In this frame the tallest kid still has the one foot step, the middle a two foot step, and the shortest a three foot step. This is inequality, as the shortest gets more help, but we all agree this is fair, because the one who needs less help, gets less help, and the one who needs more help gets more help.

What’s equal is not often what’s fair. These words are not the same, and too often companies hide behind the guise of “equal” and pretend that this means fair. That’s bullshit.

Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks believe in equality above all else because it’s the easiest way to cop out. You can’t be wrong if you treat everyone the same, right? This is ideal, but not reality. The reality is that there are some who need more help at times than others.

How users are treated in social networks generally gives the taller set of steps to the biggest users, the very users who do not need the help. While at the same time digging a hole for those who do need steps. This is the problem with a business needing “attention” and “engagement”, above all else, because they are not motivated to make the system a good system for users and the world. They are motivated to do what they need to do to make money, they would argue to stay in business, to later change the world.

Bullshit.

Don’t trust any of them, they have every intention to do something world changing later, without realizing they’ve already fucked the world now. And all the while, no idea what or how they will change the world later. Sounds cool, bro, but maybe fix what you’ve already done?

Rebekka:

This has now been fixed, and here’s how we fixed it: We will now try to out-smart the operating system, by doing educated guesses on when, exactly, a user might not want to use Smart Punctuation at all. For example, we now auto-disable Smart Punctuation within code blocks, and we prioritize paragraph tags such as “divider”, so that the system can’t naively interfere. Let’s see how that works out in the long run.

Yess. Finally.

While we are on the topic of stupid:

Default security settings for S3 buckets usually allow only authorised users to access the contents; however, UpGuard reports the bucket was configured via permission settings to allow any AWS “Authenticated Users” to download its stored data.

What’s that mean you ask?

Authenticated users are any user that has an AWS account.

Basically, all kinds of stupid from both sides.

Good news:

Drinking three to four cups of coffee a day is associated with health benefits across a range of diseases and conditions.