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She saw her moment and got glossed up for it
Hello.
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.
Ernest Hemingway (via infjlogic)
No one seems to market tech products in the image of the most famous virtual assistant in film history. Hal from “2001: A Space Odyssey” was so brilliant and manly that it attempted to kill off the crew of the spacecraft it was built to manage. Instead, people build what I call “Stepford apps.” These are the Internet’s answer to those old sci-fi robots in dresses mopping floors with manufactured enthusiasm. The Amazon Echo voice-activated home-automation system is another Stepford-style device, with a woman’s voice and name, Alexa. Of course consumer reviews on the website either praise or complain about “her” with the feminine pronoun. A friend of mine who owns the device told me, “Sometimes I wish she’d just shut up.” If my friend says “weather” in the middle of a conversation, the device might interject — “Right now in New York it is 45 degrees …” Alexa sounds like a nag. Now I’m using sexist language to dismiss a gadget. Imagine if the plug-in devices that made housework more efficient were, like Alexa, sold with women’s names and talked about with female pronouns. “Could you hand me the Amanda? She’s in the hall closet.” “Please clean the Sarah when you’re finished with the onions.” “The Emily is broken.” That could easily lead to characterizing an overflowing dishwasher as a “bubbly,” garrulous woman, or a microwave slowing down because of “her” age.
Joanne McNeil, in the NYT
The Verge’s Russell Brandom on what, at first blush, looked like a security hole in Google Photos, wherein the URLs you get when you right-click an image appear to be fully public and accessible by anyone. Here’s why it’s not as big a deal as it seems:
The short answer is that the URL is working as a password. Photos URLs are typically around 40 characters long, so if you wanted to scan all the possible combinations, you'd be have to work through 10^70 different combinations to get the right one, a problem on an astronomical scale. "There are enough combinations that it's considered unguessable," says Aravind Krishnaswamy, an engineering lead on Google Photos. "It's much harder to guess than your password." Because web traffic for Photos is encrypted with SSL, it's also kept secret from anyone on the network who might be listening in.
More importantly, the photo isn't placed at that URL until you ask for it. Google Photos normally pulls its images through a more complex back-end system, but when a user right-clicks on one of their own images, Photos generates a public URL and places the image there. Essentially, Google has reverse-engineered the right-click. By right-clicking, you’re summoning the image into existence at a public (though impossible to guess) URL, a rough equivalent of clicking a "Share" button.
In other words, Google Photos are secure and private… until you do something that Google is taking as a rough proxy for intent to share. Every photo is assigned an un-guessable URL, and when you right click, they place a copy of the photo at that URL. URLs are just names for resources, like photos. When you right-click the photo, Google assumes you’re going looking for that name, so they work behind the scenes to make the name—the URL—functional by the time you can do something with it, like paste it into Slack or open a new tab.
Here’s why it’s still problematic:
For the most part, it's because there was no clear sign of permission from Photos. The web is littered with "Share This" buttons, so it's strange to find a way to pull down a photo without one. Those buttons usually also lock you in a particular network, whether it's Facebook, Flickr, or even an all-purpose site like Tumblr. Even if you share more than you meant to, it's still theoretically confined to other people using the same service, or more specific channels like an email address or local file.
In that light, the Photos URL looks like a blank check. It can go anywhere, maybe even farther than you meant it to.
This doesn’t bother me so much, but not only do I have a more nuanced understanding of internet privacy than a lot of people, I’m also a relatively affluent cisgender hetero white male with no enemies I’m aware of. I’m one of those assholes who can afford to be flippant about privacy because I’m not under threat.
Having said that, it may be enough to address this concern for Google to simply pop up a small, well-worded alert the first time someone right-clicks a photo, letting the user know that image URLs are effectively public forever, maybe with the option of disabling that feature.
I do appreciate them honoring the idea that publicly shared URLs should stay fresh. So long as public sharing is an intent and not a side effect, this is a good feature, cleverly done.
I’ve been playing around with React Native, an offshoot of Facebook’s React JS framework for native iOS development. It’s nice. React has its own HTML-like syntax for defining UI view hierarchies, and if you change your application state it takes care of redrawing the UI to reflect the change. And because the whole view hierarchy and the state it’s presenting are managed by the React framework, these changes happen extremely fast.
I’ve had limited patience for keeping up with the fast-moving world of JavaScript frameworks. It seems like there’s a new one every week, and they all require knowledge of fifty other things from the ragged, confusing modern JavaScript ecosystem. React, though, seems worth paying attention to. Facebook and Instagram develop and maintain it, and use it heavily internally. React’s tooling and documentation are very, very good; if you run into something confusing, there’s a decent chance Facebook has had an actual technical writer write something that explains the concept. React and React Native may not cover every single need you might have, but the things it does it does very well.
I’m still not sure if it’s worth using React Native, or any abstraction layer, rather than Apple’s own tools and APIs.
React is fantastic for creating complex view hierarchies, and if you’re more used to working with online data via Ajax than Apple classes like NSURLRequest, then voila—you can just use Ajax.
On the other hand, React prefers its own web-like abstractions for doing flexible UI layout to Apple concepts like Auto Layout or size classes. There are ways of bridging Objective-C (but not Swift) code to React’s JavaScript, but for the most part React is its own, JavaScripty world. Oddly enough, though React groks (something very much like) flexbox for creating flexible layout, it doesn’t have anything like media queries built in for responsive design. You can add conditionals to swap different view components in on larger or smaller screens, but those have to be based on pixel breakpoints—something Apple, for one, would rather you didn’t use in native apps.
This is a response to this article that’s going around regarding Beats headphones’ build quality (hat tip to Mike Baehr on Facebook). In quoted passages, bolds/italics are mine.
Beats has been extremely successful in marketing its headphones and now enjoys large market appeal. But with a sky-high retail price of $199, is there more to Beats than meets the eye?
This isn’t a headline, but it is the end of the opening paragraph, so I would argue Betteridges’s law of headlines applies. By describing the Beats Solo2 retail price as “sky-high”, they’re opening with the premise that Beats products are expensive, which begs the question whether they’re overpriced. This is a complicated statement, because Beats (now part of Apple) sells a shit ton of headphones. Clearly, the market has not found a $199 retail price excessive, which I’d think would be a pre-requisite to being considered “sky-high.” Really, all this says, right up front, is that the authors do not think spending $199 for headphones is normal. I’ll come back to this point.
One of the great things about the solo headphones is how substantial they feel. A little bit of weight makes the product feel solid, durable, and valuable. One way to do this cheaply is to make some components out of metal in order to add weight. In these headphones, 30% of the weight comes from four tiny metal parts that are there for the sole purpose of adding weight.
First, it’s hard to deny that Beats feel more expensively-built than they are, but are not as well-built as many people think they ought to be given their retail price. But let’s set aside the premise that Beats’s retail price has to bear some direct relationship to their cost of goods, and dig into this statement: that the metal inside a Beats Solo is only there to add weight.
When I read that sentence, I didn’t think “those swindlers! They tricked me into not buying uglier, less comfortable headphones from Bose or whoever”
I thought instead, of course they added weight. Beats makes a product you wear on your head. The weight of the object, in particular the weight of the ear cups pressing against your head, is one of its most essential qualities, perhaps even more important than its sound quality. If headphones aren’t comfortable—if they’re too tight or loose, so heavy they cause neck strain or so light you worry they’ll fall off—you’re not gonna wear them. It makes total sense to me that Beats would add weight to a mostly plastic headphone so that they can precisely control the weight, and in turn the user experience.
I don’t wear Beats Solos; I opted instead for the heavier Beats Studios. Even though they are bigger and cover more of my ears, the weight feels perfect. They feel substantial without feeling too heavy, or adding too much weight to my bag.
The article goes on to say Beats has found ways to manufacture these weights cheaply and at massive scale. Good for them. There’s an old joke/parable about an engineer who’s called in to fix a problem. It turns out that he only needs to tighten a bolt, which he does. Then he presents his client with an invoice for a ridiculous sum of money. For the sake of this post, let’s say it was $199. The client is outraged and demands an itemized bill. The engineer crosses out the old one and writes two lines: “Tightening bolt $1; Knowing which bolt to tighten: $198.”
…do Beats by Dre headphones really enhance the bass? I couldn’t tell from the product teardown but the generic drivers make it seem unlikely.
I’m not an audio engineer, or any kind of hardware expert, and so am not qualified to analyze either Beats’ products or this other person’s analysis of their product. Maybe it’s a placebo effect. Maybe they order drivers from a commodity-parts vendor, but tuned or tailored specifically to Beats without looking obviously like a Beats-custom part.
All I can say is that I’ve tried a lot of headphones, and Beats do sound different. They don’t sound tremendously different, and in recent years they’ve dialed back the differences to appeal to a more mainstream audience. It could be more noticeable when comparing Beats to similarly priced models from Bose or Sennheiser, whose drivers and other hardware are not “generic”.
I estimate that the COGS without labor or shipping is $16.89 - yet Beats is able to successfully retail these headphones for $199+. This is the power of brand; Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine have leveraged their personal backgrounds and a sleek design to launch a remarkable brand that’s become fundamental to music pop culture.
The first part of this (and the table that precedes it) is pure speculation, in a tabular, schematic format that looks an awfully lot like indisputable fact. A COGS estimate is based on numerous assumptions, like the assumption that Beats’s audio drivers are generic and therefore generically priced. That’s not to say they definitely aren’t generic, or that custom audio hardware would necessarily be more expensive. At Beats’s scale—or, for that matter, Apple’s—you’d be amazed how cheap the per-unit cost of something can be. My point is that this number is the product of assumptions, which were reached by simply taking a pair of consumer headphones apart and making some educated guesses about how they were made, and how much they cost to make. Educated guesses are better than nothing, but they aren’t facts. This graf appears to answer the initial framing question—are Beats headphones worth their “sky-high” price—with a resounding no. Like I said, Betteridge would be pleased.
The second half of this graf goes beyond speculation, into the realm of bullshit. It’s familiar bullshit, but bullshit nonetheless. Let’s repeat the lines in question:
This is the power of brand; Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine have leveraged their personal backgrounds and a sleek design to launch a remarkable brand that’s become fundamental to music pop culture.
At times, I get so fucking tired of hearing about or discussing the “power of brand.” In my experience, the basic power of a brand is to force itself into a conversation, but its ability to influence people’s behavior ultimately comes down to the experiences associated with the brand.
It’s hard to deny that Dre and Iovine’s “personal backgrounds” were essential to starting their business. It’s also hard to deny that Beats have a “street cred” that many other brands lack. In the beginning, these two things were probably close to the same: Beats were from Dre and Jimmy Iovine, and people bought them for the association with artists they love.
Today, however, Beats’ defining quality is that they are everywhere. You don’t buy them because Dre endorsed them, you buy them because half your friends own them, and implicitly endorse them. They look good, they feel good, they’re what your friends use, and at $199, they’re a slightly luxurious purchase, but one that many, many budgets could bear. Beats’s brand isn’t artist cred or endorsements—it’s ubiquity.
At the same time, it’s quality. Not absurd, audiophile quality that most people will never experience, but the tactile feel of a pair of headphones that sound good and feel good, that come in a nice case and have a satisfying rubberized clicker. Beats are ubiquitous, but they’re more Chipotle than McDonalds. No one would say Chipotle makes the best burrito, and they certainly don’t make the cheapest. But they make a satisfying burrito that you can get in many, many places.
Finally, “sleek design” here feels like the old reductive nonsense about design being how a thing looks. Beats’s design is sleek and pleasing, which is essential for something they hope you’ll wear all the time. Good design isn’t a sweetener or a trick. For wearable devices, even basic ones like headphones, it’s the whole game.
Ben Thompson makes a really good point in today’s Stratechery Daily Update (paywall’d) about Tim Cook’s privacy stance, and his comments about Google’s business model that I previously and half-jokingly described as “throwing shade”.
Thompson writes:
First, it’s simply not true to say that Google or Facebook are selling off your data: what they are doing is promising advertisers they will display their ads to a particular type of customer as defined by the advertiser using Google or Facebook’s provided parameters. This may sound like semantics but the difference is significant: Google and Facebook do know a lot about individuals, but advertisers don’t know anything — that’s why Google and Facebook can charge a premium!
Second, Google and Facebook are highly motivated to protect user information. In fact, should Google or Facebook decide to sell your data, the value of each company would fall through the floor! Their competitive advantage in advertising is that they have data on customers that no one else has. In other words, if you consider incentives, Google and Facebook have more motivation to protect their users' data from 3rd-parties than Apple does: money has a funny way of trumping morals (not that I question Apple’s! Rather, I’m just pointing out how wrong Cook’s implication is)
This is 100% right—Google and Facebook don’t sell your data, or in fact do anything that compromises your privacy for the sake of advertising. As Thompson points out, social media companies’ business isn’t selling you so much as selling access to you, in ways that are actually fairly transparent. The social networks I use most—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr—all run ads, all their ads are clearly denoted as ads, and all are (ostensibly) targeted.
Like most of you, I also see a ton of ads that can’t possibly be based on my interests, like the Kate Upton Game of War crap that just won’t go away no matter how often I click “not interested”. I can only suppose that the people marketing that game are going for quantity, bidding a lot for every possible slice of Twitter & Facebook’s 18-35 male user base. But see, that’s my point: even when advertisers could use social networks’ data to target me in a very personal way, they often don’t.
Cook wasn’t so much railing against what social media companies do with our data, but whether it’s right for them to make money from it at all. It’s not a question of private vs. public data, but which business is more moral: advertising, or selling hardware.
Elliot begins thus:
Yesterday afternoon, I realised that I wasn’t wearing my Apple Watch. In fact, it occurred to me that I hadn’t been wearing it for the entire day. It was back in my bedroom, still attached to its charger and very much not on my wrist.
This is not an isolated event. This sudden realisation late in the day has happened now a good six or seven times in the month that I’ve owned the Watch. And the prompt for this realisation? I had lifted my wrist to see what time it was.
And he concludes:
I can’t recommend the Apple Watch, because it’s almost useless. Take away my Macs, my iPhone, or even my iPod, and I’d be stuck. Powerless. Lost! But take away my Watch and… I probably won’t even notice. Unless, of course, I need to tell the time.
I’m still excited to get a Watch (though haven’t ordered one yet, because we’re buying a house, and want to make sure we won’t need that $700 for other things), but I may have really low expectations for it. It’s a really beautiful watch that does some other stuff, and I think that may be enough for me.
Having said that, the offline experience is crucial. I know the Watch has a “Power Reserve” mode in which it is only a watch, and in fact only a specific kind of watch. Reserve mode limits you to a single watch face, no complications, no apps, and certainly no wireless communication with your phone. I’m glad that mode exists, but also have to hope there’s some graceful degradation between Reserve mode, and the full experience enabled by being in wireless range of an iPhone, and that the degraded, offline Watch experience is good and satisfying.
We believe the customer should be in control of their own information. You might like these so-called free services, but we don’t think they’re worth having your email, your search history **and now even your family photos** data mined and sold off for god knows what advertising purpose. And we think some day, customers will see this for what it is.
Tim Cook throws some serious shade about Google Photos.
This is an interesting comparison. Google makes most of its money from targeted advertising, but they’re not an advertising company, or even necessarily a search or services company. Google is an artificial intelligence company. All their marquee products are about taking scraps of digital information and teaching machines how to distill them into meaning, even into decisions. Advertising is just one way Google is applying this knowledge, but not the only way. Interestingly, Google’s most impressive new products—Inbox, Now on Tap, Photos—don’t carry any advertising at all, at least not yet.
Today’s Google and Apple are trying to do the same thing: make computing more personal. Apple is doing it by putting a device on our wrists, Google is doing it by teaching computers to know us better.
Microsoft continues buying up productivity-minded startups (see also Accompli, Sunrise). This news comes hot on the heels of Wunderlist shipping their first API integrations; interestingly, fellow acquiree Sunrise was one of their first integration partners.
Makes one wonder who else Microsoft might buy.
Google Photos has learned video editing. Take that, Skynet.
Most impressive thing about Google's recent iOS apps is how gracefully they work within the OS's limitations. Google Photos and Google Calendar both sit on top of the system photo library and calendar store, respectively, and while the apps don’t have the same level of access as they would on (say) Android, they’re complete, satisfying experiences anyway. Neither app feels like a dumbed-down version.
Some Google Photos search queries that are basically black magic
“Bugaboo” finds photos of our baby’s stroller, a Bugaboo Cameleon3, even in photos where the stroller’s form isn’t obvious or clear:
“Barbecue” doesn’t find pictures of brisket sandwiches, and can’t tell a fire pit from a grill, but still, it can recognize flames and grill and make a surprisingly reasonable inference as to content:
Having seen these other queries, “wine” seems like fish in a barrel, though it does return one interesting false positive: