there is no benefit to delaying a bad feeling
A quiet environment is a sign of success | Penelope Trunk Careers
As said right in the next paragraph, our instinct is to delay a terrible thing that is about to happen. But is it worth it? No. It’s better to deal with it now and get it over with, so you can have peace of mind instead of worrying about it at the back of your mind.
Interesting, short read. Go check it out.
Visual design is powerful, but the words are what people quote to one another.
And they are the only part of the design that survives across time and media types. They can be held intact in a human mind.
Erika Hall
As soon as I read this quote on Joshua’s blog, I thought about my reluctance to use Snapchat. I once had a conversation with someone who is an ardent user of the social network and after explaining a few basics of the app to me, he grew weary of my inane questions and simply said, “if you’d been with the app since the beginning, this would not feel weird to you.”
Indeed, I see it as this – visual design needs a lot of historical context to understand. If you’ve seen it evolve over time, you can understand it well. But if you are dropped into it anew, it’s all strange and confusing to you. A new user might even be scared of clicking things, if they have no idea what they’re doing.
I love playing a game called Egg, Inc. For the first few months of playing the game, I would notice these cute little drones flying around. I thought they’re just an easter egg by the developer. Unrelated, I would notice that at random times, my resources would shoot up, by random values which made no sense to me.
While reading a post on reddit one time, I discovered that you’re supposed to smack those drones out of the air. See, in the game, you’re running a chicken farm, and you believe those drones are a violation of your space, so you can shoot them down, for a reward. Sometimes, fast moving drones appear and shooting them down is difficult but awards you with an exponential value. All of this would be in the onboarding, but I can never recall there being a specific time when I was told to hit the drones. In a way, that is an easter egg – you’re supposed to discovered on your own that those cute flying objects are actually an annoyance to your character and shooting them is the right thing to do. But I felt betrayed. How many months had I wasted not knowing about this growth hack?
I can’t expect a game of all things to label everything. The elegant interface of Egg, Inc, would only be made more clunky by the addition of ugly labels. But I can expect this from Snapchat. Their job is to make it easy for me to use their interface, specially if I’m a new user.
An interface made up entirely of swipes is revolutionary, but a hindrance to people who have not understood it from the beginning. The same is true for all visual design, and it’s worth remembering for everyone who is involved in the task of designing interfaces.
n.b. Notice how quickly Erika’s ideas were attacked by someone who puts more value in visual design than textual context. I would have expected people to have differing opinions about the topic, but one opinion doesn’t invalidate another. It’s an opinion, not a fact.
My wife asked me the other day – why do you use twitter? Isn’t it full of bile and anger? This is why. Great ideas are often posted to it, and inquisitive minds go where the water of knowledge is.
I’ve been experimenting with Tiny Tiny RSS for a couple of weeks now, to figure out if I’m done with Fever RSS. Part of it is that Fever runs on a Digital Ocean VPS and I’d like to reduce the load on that server as much as possible.
I run TT-RSS on my home PC and get access to it using ZeroTier wherever I am. My app of choice for it on the move is Fiery Feeds. It’s a beautiful app with an amazing, rich feature set. But the main reason I use it is because Reeder doesn’t natively support TT-RSS.
But, I’m learning that I’m set in my ways. the TT-RSS web app feels just as dated as Fever, and there are some features in Fever that I really enjoyed, which I miss in TT-RSS. Since I’m looking at two dated, self-hosted RSS readers, why not go with the one I’ve used more?
Also, Fiery Feeds is gorgeous, but it’s not Reeder. Reeder is familiar and cozy. It’s got matured syncing and great UX. Fiery Feeds comes close, but there are some things which are just irksome, such as the way it opens up articles as a pop up. The cadence of Reeder’s panes is just beautiful to work with.
Today I learnt that Reeder 4 has been out since April 25th. At an absurd cross-device cost of $5, it’s a steal for all the features Reeder gives you.
But here’s the flip side – I only use Fever (and now TT-RSS) and while TT-RSS has a plug-in for Fever, I’m more inclined to just use Fever. Which means I have no space for using any other paid or free RSS reader service. So I’m really restricted in what I’m doing with Reeder. Further, though I’ve started using Instapaper as my read later solution, I’ve never really understood the point of using Reeder for Instapaper. It’s fine to skim through, but wouldn’t you rather use the Instapaper apps to read the content? For me, the highlighting and notes functionality of Instapaper is essential. How does one ignore that to read content on Reeder?
Lastly, there’s the demise of Mercury. Mercury has been my savior in this mess of RSS feeds. My TT-RSS installation has a Mercury plugin that cleans up and extracts content from the feeds. It really just works, and since they’ve made it open source and unavailable as an API, Reeder is bound to suffer. Reeder 4 is now experimenting with something called Bionic Reading and it’s a hit or miss. We’ll see.
So here it is –
I love Reeder 3 and Reeder 4 is ridiculously cheap for an upgrade. I have an older iPad Pro, so Reeder 3 works really well for me. But buying 4 means supporting Rizzi in the amazing work he’s doing.
Fiery Feeds is awesome and pretty and useful, but I don’t pay for the subscription, so I don’t get to use the fancy automatic folders that it creates.
RIP Mercury
I really want to get my RSS feed reader off the VPS and onto my local setup, secured and made accessible through ZeroTier.
How many people reading this have already bought Reeder 4?
How is it?
Have you used Bionic Reading?
Which RSS reader service do you use it with?
Do you read Instapaper articles on Reeder 4? How is that experience?
The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.
Rands In Repose: Hacking is Important
Dear Reader,
I’m looking for a suggestion, or a coalescence of suggestions to drive me towards a solution.
I’m looking for a read later solution that doubles as a notes repository. See, I want to not just read longform articles at peace, I want to also take notes and highlight things and (maybe?) search my notes and recall things over time.
Here’s a list of everything I’ve tried to date –
So, after I mucked around with all kinds of cross-platform services, I dipped my toe into some platform specific, or interesting solutions –
There are solutions that I’ve tried over the years and not bothered pursuing or listing here. Apps like Unmark, which do a great job of letting you know what’s on your plate to read, but don’t let you read in a clean environment, or let you make notes, don’t count here. Similarly, apps like Evernote don’t either, because they’re not a read-later solution.
I know there are hundreds of solutions I’ve not tried or talked about. Most of them are closely related to what I’ve listed above. For example, TheBrain, DevonThink, Refind, Google Keep, OneNote, etc are all nice, but don’t fit into the box I’m trying to fill here.
So, dear reader (first of all, thanks for getting to this point), tell me what should I do? Should I bite the bullet and go with the top most solution, Instapaper, which is well priced, focused specifically on reading text (which is what I primarily want), but which is run by someone else? Or should I go with some form of open source solution that might cause me headaches but at least I’ll keep all of my thoughts with me over the years? Maybe I should go with a solution like Hypothes.is, which is free, non-profit, and an interesting technology. Or maybe I should be looking at it from a different perspective, or looking at a solution I’ve never even heard or thought much of? What’s your opinion?
$10 per month all-you-can-eat from 300-plus publishers
Source: The danger of ‘I already pay for Apple News+’ | TechCrunch
Apple News+ sounds a lot more like Netflix in its early years to me. Over time, when publishers realize that “yes, this is indeed a losing proposition for us, in favor of the customer”, they’ll either launch their own similar services, or threaten to pull out of News+, or throw tantrums, which will mean a slowly increasing cost of News+ over time.
The problem here, that Netflix must respect and Apple won’t, is that news is not a single source thing for the most part. If there’s an in-depth report that people want, but only Bloomberg provides, then Apple will either need Bloomberg (just like Netflix needs Friends), or will have to provide à la carte options the way Hulu does. But for most other news, if I can’t get it from publisher A, then I’ll just read Newspaper B’s report. Apple is making it easier for customers to ignore who the source is, just like Facebook did and Google AMP does. Good for consumers, bad for brand recognition.
Yes, this will open up a new avenue for some, and will be great for customers, and will break niche storytellers (of the LongReads types) and also big newsrooms. But you can’t blame Apple on capitalizing on a broken market. They’ve had a long time to fix this. So many business models have come and gone, from Better Ads, to services that allowed people to pay a monthly fee for ad-free experiences on a set of participating sites, to stupid stuff like Adblocker Blocker. The industry has fumbled through everything but collaborating and making their own version of News+ where they wouldn’t have had to pay Apple fifty cents on the dollar.
Just like Netflix broke an already dying business, and reinvented the way we consume TV, News+ is poised to do the same. Thing is, the innovation cycle has sped up this time and you’ll be seeing News+ competitors as early as next year. First, it’ll be half-assed attempts by Samsung, Microsoft, or Google, and then publishers themselves, who will shoot themselves in the foot by giving customers limited options (one reason I’m not subscribed to online services like CBS). What’s worth seeing is if they’re able to band together and learn something from this experience.
Apple acquired the magazine industry’s self-distribution app Texture a year ago
I was looking at solutions around this some time ago (just idle browsing, mind you) and realized that Apple had bought Texture and done nothing with it. The News app is not a natural extension of what Texture did, but News+ is. Good for them.
More than anything, it seems that Apple wanted to build a product around magazines for iPad consumers, and news media was an afterthought that just happened to be in need. When Apple announced News+, I thought it was the opposite, but the Texture explanation makes sense.
That means those magazines are likely to absorb a ton of taps and engagement time before users even make it to the WSJ, which will then only score few cents per reader.
I don’t know how Netflix pays their sources, but this is how Spotify pays theirs. As a consumer of Indian music, I have to push Spotify’s constant prattle of American artists aside to get to the music I want to listen to. But thems the chops. If publishers want more engagement, they need to now build a better relationship with Apple. This means the smaller ones will absolutely suffer. They should keep out of News+
But if a YouTube channel disappears, it’s gone to us.
Source: Dat Rats
I worry about this too, sometimes, because it would seem that we’ve created and destroyed more content on the Internet than the entire Greek civilization produced for us.
But other times, I’m ambivalent to the idea. Some of the most important ideas survive and move on to the next level or the next civilization and there’s always progress.
So while yeah, it would suck if these cool/weird/fun sites disappear, and if YouTube one day loses all content from a period of time. But how much would it be a loss for civilization? The ideas would have been absorbed by the people of the time and the most important ones move on with artists and consumers in different ways.
The following is a critique of a post I recently came across in my RSS feeds-
This is augmented by the ease of concerted flagging and other public shaming campaigns, which create a guilty-until-proven innocent environment.
Source: Falling into Faith — Acko.net
This is a weird post, and it set off all kinds of alarms in my head. But I read through the author’s convoluted logic till the end. Some of it doesn’t make any sense, the rest of it makes sense, but is faulty logic. It’s clear that it’s a rambling, onerous post about somehow not protecting white privilege, but also not condemning it. It seems to want to put logic above everything else but the relationship between the example and the conclusion is tenuous.
This line above was the one that sprung out to me the most. The author seems to want to say that the constant vigilante justice meted out on social networks stifles free speech. But forgets a couple of things –
bootstrapping their own inquisition in the name of Trust and Safety
This means that the author doesn’t trust the devices created to remove negative influencers from social media, and doesn’t accept that people should be able to run their own campaigns to remove such people from there either. So what’s the recourse? What can people do to root out truly evil ideas from the public sphere? The author falls silent on that aspect. As it is, the tools that Facebook and Twitter (and WhatsApp) have created to combat misuse are woefully shortsighted and pathetic attempts at appeasement. That leaves the users to fend for themselves, so why would they not band together and attack the trolls and bad actors? Yes, they would get a few folks wrong and that’s where the author jumps in again to criticize, but not to give solutions –
Nuanceless policing bots and scripts make it trivial for innocent bystanders to get hurt.
All in all, a frustrating read to go through. Why did I? Well, for some reason, I’m subscribed to this person’s RSS feed and this was a recent article on there. Everything else by the author is purely about technology.
Also, it’s a good exercise in spotting every logical misconception that the author has made. Which ones did I miss?
A few weeks ago I heard something from a friend – climate change will mean more boys will be born. At the time, I didn’t give it much thought because we were having a conversation and I didn’t have any facts one way or the other.
Revisiting the idea, I realized that I’ve recently read a conflicting notion. I read a comic book by Aminder Dhaliwal called Woman World that talks about a world where men have disappeared and women have to form society again. It’s a Utopia –
No, I’m not claiming that a comic book is scientifically accurate, but it does seem to be telling more truth than Fox News. I searched for the idea online and tried to find its source. Here’s what a search for it looks like –
You’ll notice that most articles don’t give you a clear answer to the question and want you to read the article to come to a conclusion. Some of them, like IFLScience clearly state that a higher proportion of girls will be born due to Climate Change.
But then there’s Fox8.com – “Warmer temperatures bring sons”
Total lie. Well, not really. But mostly a lie, because the people living in Cleveland, which is where Fox8 belongs, do NOT live in preindustrial Finland.
There’s a research paper out of Japan, linked here, which all of these articles quote. If you open the link and read no more than the “Conclusion” line, it’ll be quite clear to you that the evidence says that less boys will be born over time because the male fetus is more susceptible to external factors. (I’ll come back to external factors)
Since this narrative doesn’t suit Fox 8 Cleveland they warped the headline to what they want to state. The article includes research by one Samuli Helle, from the University of Finland, that states that in the case of the Sami people of Finland, warmer temperatures will mean more male children for that community.
The way it’s worded in the article, it says –
Clearly, the person writing the article or their editor decided that single line should be the headline. I wanted to call out said person who wrote the Fox News article, but if you look for the author, it’s attributed to CNNWire.
What?
I opened a few more of the articles on the search page and they all attribute ‘CNN’ as the author of the article.
I searched for the keywords and CNN and found out that one Susan Scutti, who writes on medical topics for CNN, wrote the article here, and it was syndicated to all these other outlets, including Fox. Fox8, however, had the bad sense to change the headline to what suits them, because in this age of information overload, their readers will only read the headline and move on, sadly misinformed on the topic. From what I understand about wires, news organizations receiving the wire can’t change the text significantly, but can change the headline to suit their needs.
But, that doesn’t let CNN off the hook either. I don’t know what the interaction between Susan Scutti and Samuli Helle was (the article mentions emails), but the article words it to say that warmer temperatures will bring more male children everywhere.
The truth couldn’t be farther from that statement. The Japanese research, and Helle’s own research seems to state that in colder regions like Finland, warming up will bring more male children, but in the majority of the world, where ‘external factors’ such as forest fires, floods, and droughts are going to be the norm, more girls will be born. Helle even admits in the article itself that the effects of climate change on reproduction will not be uniform worldwide. Yet that’s exactly how the article seems to portray it.
I reached out to Susan Scutti and Samuli Helle a few days ago to get clarification on the topic. While I didn’t hear back from Scutti, Helle responded back. I’m going to put his response in full below, instead of the hit job that Susan has done on Helle’s work and responses.
Yes that study considered only Sami people who lived some two hundred years ago in northern Finland. We aimed not to generalize that result to other populations, at least not to modern humans. I am not quite sure how strong is the evidence for such an association in modern or western populations, since haven’t been following that literature too closely for years now. We did however publish another article in 2009 showing that in whole Finland during 1865-2003, high temperature was associated with proportionally more male births. Please see:
https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1365-2656.2009.01598.x
Samuli Helle via email
So, there’s research that during a large period of time, higher male births did happen in Finland during ‘warm years’. However, by the author’s own admission, this does not apply to other modern or western populations. Further, even if you accept the results of the 2009 paper, do the same apply to the US, where the weather profile varies wildly from Finland? I don’t think so.
Media outlets can often be seen doing one of two things – terrible oversimplification, and muddying the waters. Clearly, Fox oversimplified the results explained in the article, all while others who syndicated the article left it untouched for the nuance the headline provides. On the other hand, it seems that CNN found this piece of evidence from the Japanese study and decided that they can’t write a one-sided article, so they went out and found conflicting information, however misguided, and published it alongside.
Had Susan Scutti referenced the 2009 paper, it still would have made some sense, as the results actually do seem to be in favor of the argument. However, referencing the Sami people study clearly shows a misguided attempt at ‘balancing’ the reporting.
I don’t know whether it was the author of the article, or her editor, who decided that the reporting needed to have two sides, but this sort of silly mistake is what erodes trust in the fourth estate. Anyone skimming these articles will be swayed to think one way or another, but anyone who takes a breath and reads the content will see the aimless wandering that media outlets call the news nowadays. This is how cynics are created.
In the end, take the whole thing with a grain of salt – in some countries, more boys will be born, while in most, it seems, more girls will be born. Wait for the research to talk about your country, your demographic, and your time. Everything else is noise.
Back in 2012, I wrote a post called Conversations as a future of blogging. Well, I say I wrote, but actually I must have had a conversation on this up-and-coming platform called branch.com with a few people I invited to it from twitter. Using their tools, I embedded the conversation to my blog on the link above. I thought the embed would last forever, because a) where is branch going to go, and b) WordPress usually gracefully downgrades embeds, right?
Nope. branch.com died three years after launch. They gave us a period of time to request backups of our conversations. I remember doing that, but I never received one in my email. Perhaps they expected me to come back to their site to download the files? I asked all the other people involved in the conversation and none of them cared to request a backup of the copy. This goes back to my posts here about the futility of exporting your data from online services, even though in this case, a full backup was exactly what I needed to recover my blog post.
I was further wrong in that WordPress does no such thing with embeds. In the case of officially supported embeds, I’ve seen the system do this once before and I thought that was standard behavior, but in the case of link embeds, there’s no clear way for it to be possible.
Recently, I introduced a random post finder to my blog. With it, I’ve been discovering a lot of great and terrible posts I’ve written over time. It’s my way of getting closer to my blog.
But it has also left me reeling from all the broken links and embeds that I trusted to work forever. The branch.com embed, images and links I’ve linked to, PDF files I thought would never go away. Heck, even Facebook CDN stuff has disappeared and that company doesn’t let go of any data!
Recently, Automattic introduced inline GIFs from giphy through Jetpack. The model they’re following is pretty neat – they shipped the Gutenberg editor within WordPress 5, and have been extending it using Jetpack with blocks that allow various kinds of content, including GIFs. It shows the scope that Gutenberg has in the future.
Coming back to embeds, Giphy, the company Automattic is leaning on, came into existence in 2013, and I suspect will be out the door before its 10 year mark. Such is the way of life on the Internet. All of these are fads and fads can raise millions, but they eventually all die. Automattic will simply pull out the block from Jetpack and replace it with something else, but we users will be left with broken links and missing context on our blogs.
When the block was introduced some time ago, I played with it and added some GIFs to a blog post. It’s a lot of fun to express ourselves visually. But if branch.com is any indication, embeds come back to bite us later on.
Therefore, I’m getting off embeds. I’d rather download the GIF and upload it to my media. I’d rather take a screenshot of a webpage than to iframe it and hope it sticks around a few years from now. Jetpack already has a massive CDN operation behind them, so you’re never really serving your content directly from your site if they can help it. So there’s no need to worry about storage and bandwidth issues.
As I go through my site, rediscovering old posts, I’ll keep coming across these embeds. Whenever I have context, I’ll try to replace it with relevant information. But, as in the case of branch.com, I will just put a note that explains what happened there, some general thoughts on the topic, and move on. Once bitten by embeds, twice shy now.
