Search Results for: coffee

‘The Tyranny of the Algorithm’ ⇥ theguardian.com

Kyle Chayka, in the Guardian, describes the universalized interior design trends of what he calls post-recession “hipster coffee shops”:

Of course, there have been examples of such cultural globalisation going back as far as recorded civilisation. But the 21st-century generic cafes were remarkable in the specificity of their matching details, as well as the sense that each had emerged organically from its location. They were proud local efforts that were often described as “authentic”, an adjective that I was also guilty of overusing. When travelling, I always wanted to find somewhere “authentic” to have a drink or eat a meal.

If these places were all so similar, though, what were they authentic to, exactly? What I concluded was that they were all authentically connected to the new network of digital geography, wired together in real time by social networks. They were authentic to the internet, particularly the 2010s internet of algorithmic feeds.

This is an excerpt from Chayka’s new book “Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture”, out this week. I have put myself on the waiting list for it at the library and I am looking forward to reading it, but I am already skeptical of the argument it will make based on what is presented here.

Based on the title, you can probably predict it references Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat”, which is a questionable start. Where Friedman proposes an economic playing field he says has been levelled somewhat by globalization and technology, Chayka argues a similar effect has occurred in cultural and expressive terms primarily through algorithmically promoted, sorted, and filtered ideas. On its face, this will be a compelling investigation. I think the role played by automated systems in our understanding of current events needs ongoing serious longform exploration. There have been plenty of books about individual companies, and there have been article-length vibes-based stories, but the only deep exploration in this vein I can remember is Cathy O’Neil’s excellent “Weapons of Math Destruction” from 2016. Chayka seems to present a more recent evaluation.

Unfortunately, my first glimpse of it is this Guardian story. While the book has a more generic title, this excerpt is specifically about the apparent influence of Instagram and Australian café culture on coffee shops and restaurants. Chayka writes that it is not any specific aesthetic quality which is disputable but “the fundamental homogeneity, which became more and more entrenched” in otherwise unrelated areas. But this just sounds like it is describing trends accelerated by the web, not necessarily something impressed upon us by what photos are on someone’s social media feed. The world is full of incongruous architectural, language, branding, and fashion choices — but, then again, it has been for a long time before social media or even the internet. I am curious to read how Chayka expands upon this argument.

Later in this excerpt, there is one more thing I found notable. Chayka, regarding businesses’ use of Instagram:

The effect May observed could be called “follower inflation”. High follower numbers correlate less and less to actual engagement over time, as the platform’s priorities change or the same content tricks stop working. It’s a familiar feeling for all of us who have been on Instagram over the past decade. While it might hurt your ego to receive fewer likes on a selfie, it’s a real financial problem when that follower footprint is how a business makes money, whether it’s a cafe attracting visitors or an influencer selling sponsored content.

What is not established in this piece is whether a business being popular on Instagram necessarily correlates with being popular in real life. Photogenic business features and art exhibitions are something I have written about before, and I still think there is lots to be explored therein. I am sure photo walls and brightly-coloured decor is attractive and lures people in. What keeps them coming back and spreading the word, on the other hand, is a place worth visiting beyond the aesthetics. Some of my favourite places to visit in Calgary have terrible social media presence, but they are constantly busy because they are good.

Computers Are Magical; Computers Are Awful

I was reminded of Nikita Prokopov’s classic post today — “People Expect Technology to Suck Because It Actually Sucks” — in much the same way I think of it many days but, and especially, today. These are all things which happened today from when I woke up:

  • I grabbed my phone off my nightstand and launched the CBC News app. A scrolling gesture in the Top Stories feed was misinterpreted as a tap on an ad, which launched Safari. This is a constant problem in many apps but, particularly, in CBC News.

  • Next, I opened the New York Times app. I tapped on a story, then returned to the Today view, which immediately refreshed and showed some different stories.

  • I marked a story within the Times app to read it later. I assumed I would find this in the For You section of the app, but I was wrong. You actually need to be in the Today view and then you must tap the person icon in the upper-right. I am noting this because I will forget it again and refer back to this post.

  • Messaging a friend, I once again noticed that the autocorrect suggestion bubble is sometimes partially obscured by the keyboard. I have predictive text turned off so this is the old-style iOS autocorrect bubble.

  • Partway through my text to my friend, the predictive text bar appears with no particular trigger — for example, I did not type anything like “my address is” — then disappears, then reappears with a button to send money via Apple Pay, which is not supported in Canada.

I brewed some coffee and started my day on my Mac:

  • There was intermittent lag in Bluetooth keyboard entry in MacOS. Running killall Dock seemed to fix it temporarily; connecting my keyboard via a wire and toggling its Bluetooth mode, then disconnecting the wire seems to have corrected it.

  • I was listening to a song in Music, then I paused it to watch a video on YouTube in Safari, then I closed the Safari tab and tapped the play/pause key on my keyboard, which did nothing because it was — according to the audio playback menubar item — still controlling that closed YouTube tab.

  • When performing ripple deletes in a simple Adobe Audition project, there is lag or delay which increases a little bit with each ripple delete. After ten minutes or so of work, it is necessary to restart Audition. I lost an hour today to tracking down and trying to diagnose this problem. It turns out many people have experienced this problem on MacOS and Windows for years, and there does not appear to be a fix.

    Interestingly, Audition does not consume a lot of resources. It uses less than a single CPU core even while doing complex editing, and its RAM consumption is similarly modest. It is just a really, really slow application.

  • OneDrive and fileproviderd put a combined 300% pressure on my CPU while syncing Audition’s temporary files. I do not necessarily need those temporary files to sync, so I pause OneDrive. Then a colleague asks me to share a link to a file and I find that OneDrive cannot generate links while syncing is paused. Resuming syncing causes high CPU consumption for several minutes.

  • I filed a bug report against this with Microsoft. (The relevant Apple one is FB13320112.) The text box was unresponsive, but in a new way compared to the keyboard entry problems I was having earlier.

  • Attempted to launch Audition from Spotlight by typing “aud” which momentarily flashed Audition before changing to Audio MIDI Setup as I hit return.

  • Noticed my free disk space had dropped by over 20 GB in the span of an hour for no clear reason. A brief investigation did not reveal anything immediately, but I got sidetracked by…

  • …a 34 GB folder of cached Apple Music files sitting in a ~/Library/ folder labelled “com.apple.iTunes”. It appears to have been untouched since iTunes became Music but, for some reason, MacOS has not cleared it out.

  • I switched to my laptop to write a post through MarsEdit this evening. There was apparently a configuration change somewhere — probably at my web host — which causes it to return a “403 Forbidden” error when attempting to publish through MarsEdit. I have, as of writing, spent three hours trying to fix this. I finally gave up and asked my web host for help; they fixed it because their support is great.

  • I tried to AirDrop a website from Safari on my iPhone to my wife’s iPhone. It got stuck on “Waiting…”, so I cancelled the AirDrop. Then I navigated away from the page and the AirDrop occurred a beat later.

  • I dismissed a Time Machine notice that my MacBook Pro has not been backed up in about two months. The hard drive attached to my “server” seems to have a problematic connection or board or something else, and it is something I need to fix.

None of the problems above are life-changing, but this list is representative of the kinds of hiccups I experience more-or-less daily. It could be a different mix of things with less or more impact than those above, but these problems often require I spend time trying to diagnose and fix them. Sometimes I can; sometimes, as with the Adobe Audition problem, the tools just suck and I have no recourse.

I know there are real people working on these products, many of whom really do want to make them the very best. I am encouraged by stories like Mark Gurman’s report today in which it seems that Apple has spent a couple of weeks switching from feature development to bug fixing mode for its next major releases. I am grateful for how incredible most of this stuff often is, and I understand things occasionally need fixing. But not like this. The ways in which these things break rob me of confidence in everything I use. I cannot see a good reason I would want to introduce more computers into my life, like with “smart” home devices.

It is amazing what I do every day with the computer on my desk, the one on my lap, and the one in my pocket. But I wish they did everything more reliably, predictably, and consistently. I am prepared to fix things sometimes. I do not understand why I am tending to these things daily like they are made in a shed instead of by some of the world’s most valuable corporations. We, the users, deserve better than this.

A Brief Look at the Specialty Coffee Market Today ⇥ youtube.com

The main thing which struck me when watching this short video about the current specialty coffee market is how the price paid to producers in Kenya, for example, has declined in recent years. It was upsetting to learn that as the consumer price for specialty coffee has gone up pretty dramatically, at least around here. Instead of 340-gram bags, some specialty roasters are switching to 300-gram and even 250-gram bags at the same or higher price points. I can accept the cost increase, but I do so with the assumption producers are receiving a better rate. I welcome greater transparency.

On ‘Good’ Coffee ⇥ meltedcheeseonwhitefish.substack.com

Jason Diamond, the Melt:

That was always my problem with the rise of the coffee snob. And, again, I’m not saying you, the person with all your gadgets at home to make your perfect French press or espresso on your machine. The real-life versions of Ari Spyros from Billions, the compliance officer obsessed with his office setup is, honestly, goals. I wish that I took that much interest in the coffee I make. But I don’t. I do buy certain beans and I researched my grinder and coffee maker, but the truth is that I live in a city with countless options to just walk outside my door and get a coffee from and the idea is that since they all charge the same price that they should all serve good coffee.

And yet, that’s never the case. This is a very arbitrary assessment, but of the six (yes, six (I do live in Brooklyn, remember) places I could count that are all within eight minutes of my home (I timed these and rounded down to eight, I swear I didn’t just pick a number at random) that serve “specialty” coffee from roasters like Sey or Counter Culture, Partners or Intelligentsia, where the average price of a small coffee is four dollars, I’d say that four of those places just aren’t worth the cost. The coffee just isn’t that good. The two-dollar cup I get at the bodega does the trick.

I have a similar number of “good” coffee places within a short walk of my house. As with Diamond’s experience, only a few of these are actually decent. There are many places which have good beans from roasters I trust, made on all the “right” equipment by people who appear to care — and it just comes out all wrong. The atmosphere is wrong, too: one of the places near me has Edison bulbs and reclaimed wood everywhere, and it feels like it came from a kit; another place is a mix of a coffee shop, coworking space, and retail for clothing and knick-knacks. You do not need to be a snob to recognize that beneath the pastiche of specialty coffee is a seeming lack of care from the top down.

Migration Assistant Magic

John Siracusa briefly mentioned something in one of his podcasts that stuck with me and I want to get it in writing for future reference. Ideally, I would like to link back to where I heard this. The problem is that I cannot remember which episode or even which podcast — though I think it was Reconcilable Differences — for full acknowledgement, and neither podcast has a searchable text transcript.

The situation here is that you are moving from an old Mac to a new one, and you have reached the point in Setup Assistant where it asks if you want to transfer data. You agree, it opens Migration Assistant on your new Mac — you open it manually on your old one — and then it runs a few tests in the background to automatically select the fastest transfer method.

In my case, this was peer-to-peer at a painfully slow three-to-six megabytes per second. To move the half-million files from my old Mac, it was looking like a twelve hour operation. But I remembered I had a first-generation Thunderbolt cable laying around and an adaptor — and the tip Siracusa relayed in that podcast episode: Migration Assistant will automatically switch to the fastest method available, even partway through a migration.

So I plugged it in to both Macs and, I kid you not, all my stuff was moved over to the new Mac in the time it took me to boil water and brew a coffee. Remember, this was with a first-generation Thunderbolt connection. Imagine how much faster this could be if you upgrade your Mac more often than I do.

Thanks, John.

Update: The segment where Siracusa discusses this begins around the 32 minute mark in Accidental Tech Podcast episode 485. Thanks to David Anson for pointing me in the right direction.

Rogers Says Services Mostly Restored ⇥ cbc.ca

Pete Evans, CBC News:

Rogers services are back online for most customers after a daylong outage at the telecom giant that left millions of Canadians without internet and cellular service, while also disrupting government services and payment systems.

[…]

Tony Staffieri, chief executive and president of Rogers, said in an open letter that the company apologizes for the service interruption. He gave no explanation for the outage or how many customers were affected.

If Cloudflare’s data is any indication, the answer to the second mystery is pretty much every customer. The amount of Rogers traffic stayed at zero for an entire day. It is awful for everyone affected, but do not worry — Rogers will automatically apply a credit to customers’ accounts. And that is really what this post is about.

Lisa Belmonte, Narcity:

During another big Rogers outage that happened back in April 2021, wireless calls, SMS and data services were down across Canada for almost an entire day because of an issue with a software update.

After it was resolved and service was restored, Rogers issued credits to customers who were impacted by the outage.

A credit equivalent to the wireless service fee from that day was automatically applied to the customer’s bill the next month.

If someone pays Rogers $100 per month for cellular service and another $100 per month for internet — not uncommon rates in this ferociously expensive country — it likely means getting one day’s credit for each, for a total of about $6. That is a slap in the face.

There is a disconnect between how much these services cost to end users and how much they enable. Many people depend on a single company for their connectivity services, as bundle pricing disincentivize us from shopping around. In return, we expect ongoing service, divided into manageable monthly payments. When that fails, it is worth more than a free cup of coffee and an apology.

In fairness to Rogers, it can see itself providing extraordinary value at $3 per day per connection. But we expect far more than that, and it would be obscene for a service provider to begin charging based on how much it enables. Internet access is arguably a human right but its availability, price, and quality is left up to private companies which hate competing. So what would be so wrong with nationalizing internet or cellular service?

Tim Hortons App Found to Have Illegally Collected Location Data ⇥ theglobeandmail.com

Susan Krashinsky Robertson and Colin Freeze, the Globe and Mail:

Canada’s largest fast-food chain violated privacy laws by tracking people who used its app, gathering their location data hundreds of times a day — even when the app was not in use.

That is the result of a joint investigation by Canadian privacy officials into Tim Hortons’ surveillance of customers through an app installed on millions of mobile phones in this country. But while the coffee-and-doughnuts chain owned by Toronto-based Restaurant Brands International Inc. will have to make changes to its privacy practices, it faces no fines or financial penalties for the breach.

This is the most Canadian story imaginable. Tim Hortons, our crappy coffee franchise that has somehow usurped any semblance of national identity, collected the location information of millions of the country’s most committed customers every few minutes, and its penalty is to say sorry. Embarrassing.

Today’s Claim That Tesla Is on the Verge of Producing a Humanoid Robot, as Viewed From the Year 2032 ⇥ cnbc.com

Sam Shead, writing for CNBC in April 2022:

Tesla may start production of a humanoid robot known as Optimus as early as next year, CEO Elon Musk said Thursday.

[…]

“We have a shot of being in production for version one of Optimus hopefully next year,” Musk said Thursday at the opening of Tesla’s new vehicle assembly plant in Austin, Texas, where he appeared on stage — in a cowboy hat and sunglasses — to Dr. Dre’s “Still D.R.E.”

Musk was, at best, spitballing with little more than a hope and a prayer. But this statement was similar to many of his previous claims which hid truth behind sensationalism. This tactic worked as a public relations strategy, creating years of breathless press coverage for Musk’s scarcely developed ideas and musings, but it repeatedly landed him in hot water with regulators.

Tesla has yet to reveal a working prototype of the robot, however, and it’s unclear how sophisticated Optimus is at this stage.

Tesla later pushed prototyping this robot years into the future as it sorted out a backlog of other promised products, including a pickup truck, a semi truck, and a sports car. Current prototypes cannot carry a mug of coffee without spilling it and tear clothing to shreds while attempting to fold it, and some have even played anti-union audio recordings on loop without any apparent way of shutting it off.

Musk has once again said a version of this robot will be delivered to customers next year, but researchers and other experts are skeptical anything like the version first shown in 2021 is around the corner.

When Musk first announced Tesla’s robot, he said it will be based on the same chips and sensors that the company’s cars use for self-driving features. […]

At the same media event, Musk also said a work-in-progress “beta” version of what the company then branded “Full Self Driving” would expand to all customers the same year. At the time, it was marketed as a level two system. This was a regression from years of assurance that level five autonomy would be delivered soon, something which has not yet been achieved. Empty promises like these coupled with the expensive Full Self Driving option pack led to numerous lawsuits and, ultimately, shareholders’ loss of confidence in Musk’s ability to deliver.

When reached for comment, Musk, now living on a dairy farm in Wisconsin, said he was starting a new company to turn cattle’s markings into mobile solar panels.

There Is a Way to Restore Wider Alerts in MacOS Big Sur and Monterey ⇥ twitter.com

I have my gripes with the current generation of the MacOS visual design language that used to be called Aqua. There are several things I hope to see changed, and many of those things are more evolutionary updates. But if I were in Alan Dye’s shoes, I know the first thing I would change on my first day: I would have alert panels reverted to their previous and far superior presentation.

Happily, that is possible today, thanks to a tip from Léo Natan (via Michael Tsai):

Do you prefer the old style macOS alerts? There is a way to get them globally for AppKit in Big Sur and Monterey:

defaults write -g NSAlertMetricsGatheringEnabled -bool false

I applied this immediately, restarted an app I was using, triggered an alert — and everything is suddenly better. The clouds parted, sun rays danced in my office, my coffee tasted just a little bit sweeter. There is still work to do on things like buttons, which remain a barely-differentiated grey blob resting on the grey background of the dialog, but it is an undeniable upgrade.

Watch this get ripped out of the next major version.

Also, what is up with the name of this preference key? What does it mean that I am disabling alert metrics gathering?

Update: Ben Sargent has a strong theory:

If I had to guess: NSAlert (the dialog) Metrics (size of the dialog) GatheringEnabled (gather the content into a hideous vertical silo)

Makes sense to me.

Wordle’s Vibe Shift ⇥ embedded.substack.com

Kate Lindsay:

Suddenly, the vibe shifted. The homegrown, humble game of Wordle receiving the backing of a corporate owner was like watching your favorite indie band get big and do a Doritos commercial. Rather than the story being “Wordle creator unexpectedly gets a ton of money for making something nice” we all saw it the same way: Wordle had sold out, and now we hate it.

For what it is worth, I did not feel like Joshua Wardle “sold out” by selling Wordle. Some people have a coffee and a cigarette every morning; since December, my daily routine has started with a coffee and this one puzzle.

But I love the association between Wordle and that vibe shift article that has been going around Twitter. It does not necessarily surprise me how some people have latched onto the virtually non-existent changes made by the New York Times as evidence the game does not feel the same as it did. But I think we should be honest: the only thing the Times made worse is jamming it full of tracking scripts.

Meta Launders Its Reputation Through Small Businesses

Jeran Wittenstein, Bloomberg:

Meta Platforms Inc. has tumbled out of the world’s 10 largest companies by market value, hammered by its worst monthly stock decline ever.

Once the world’s sixth largest company with a valuation in excess of $1 trillion, the Facebook parent closed on Thursday with a value of $565 billion, placing it in 11th place behind Tencent Holdings Ltd., according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Please accept my condolences.

Huge changes in market value like Meta is currently experiencing can partly be attributed to the massive market capitalization reflected in today’s top ten. The Economic Research Council published a chart in 2019 showing the ten most valuable publicly traded companies for twenty years prior and, as recently as 2014, only one was worth more than a trillion dollars. That is not the world we live in any more. Even normal day-to-day fluctuations reflect billions of dollars that ostensibly reflect investors’ confidence.

But there is also an undeniable loss of confidence in Meta’s ability to maintain the success of its core product — targeted advertising — in the face of increasing regulatory scrutiny, and changes made by operating system vendors. Meta’s virtual reality efforts, with which it is hoping to become an operating system owner itself, are still far away, and I do not think the company has yet demonstrated a compelling case for its existence.

For now, it has ads to sell across its platforms, and that is getting harder as public pressure mounts against its business practices. Unfortunately, as Meta’s empire is increasingly scrutinized, small businesses that depend on it are feeling the squeeze.

Suzanne Vranica, Patience Haggin, and Salvador Rodriguez, Wall Street Journal:

Martha Krueger, who runs a gift-basket business called Giften Market, used to spend her entire advertising budget on Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook and Instagram. She picked up a new customer for every $14 she spent.

When Apple Inc. introduced a privacy feature for mobile devices last year that restricts user tracking, she said, her costs to acquire such customers rose 10-fold. In October, she shifted her whole ad budget to search ads on Alphabet Inc.’s Google.

I empathize with the owners and marketers who work with businesses like these, which have depended on precisely targeting advertising to lower their marketing costs and get more customers. However, I think we have lost sight of how Meta was able to be so successful in the first place: it tracked users’ behaviour without their explicit consent or knowledge. What I find so frustrating about this is how Meta defends its practices by invoking the trust these businesses have placed in it:

Meta said in a written statement that it has more than 10 million advertisers. “Apple’s harmful policy is making it harder and more expensive for businesses of all sizes to reach their customers,” it said. “We believe Facebook and Instagram remain the best platforms for businesses to grow and connect with people, and we’ll always keep working to improve performance and measurement.”

Meta constructed a fundamentally unethical business model that allowed it to offer cheap ads, and it is laundering that scummy behaviour through the much better reputation of coffee shops, and florists, and travel agents, and other small business owners. Entrepreneurs should not be blamed for taking advantage of the marketing opportunities available to them.

This is a complex problem with a simple root: in a more just world, where the privacy of individuals is truly respected, Meta would never have offered these kinds of ads in the first place. But the company recognized that it was on legally firm ground to follow users’ activity across the web and through third-party apps, and it built its entire business around milking that strategy for everything it could give. It gave small business owners the ability to buy better advertising at lower rates, but has cost all of us our privacy online with little in the way of notice, consent, or control.

So that is how we got into this mess, and lawmakers in many regions around the world are trying various ways of getting us out of it. But Apple, having a business model more conducive to privacy and being an operating system vendor, realized it could also do something about tracking without due consent. It asks a simple question when apps want to track a user: do you want to permit this? Most people answer in the negative.

This naturally leads to the question of what business it is of Apple’s to have a say in other companies’ practices. It has a long history of doing so and a familiar future ahead. That is a discussion way too long for a single post, especially one I am publishing on a Friday evening. But there is one argument I think can be addressed in short order: all Apple did to push Meta’s buttons is that it now requires explicit consent for tracking. If Meta’s business model cannot handle a simple question of permissions, that is a pretty crappy business model. It should have been better prepared for a day when lawmakers started asking questions. But it was not. Meta’s best move has been to use the plight of small businesses, lured by its short-term promises, to excuse its unethical practices. Shame.

James Hoffmann’s New Series Is About the Bialetti Moka Express ⇥ youtube.com

James Hoffmann’s coffee videos have been a truly excellent way for me to pass the time this year. Weirdly, they have sometimes paralleled what has been going on in my life. Last month, just after I got back from a vacation where I used Nespresso machines for the first time, Hoffmann tried every pod for that machine.

Now, shortly after I was given a Bialetti Moka, Hoffmann has decided to do a thoughtful episodic look at the brewer and its history. This first episode has me looking forward to my next cup of Moka-brewed coffee as I worry about Bialetti’s future.

See Also: Earlier this year, I linked to Hoffmann’s series about the AeroPress.

Boston Startup Develops Worst Imaginable Way to Get a Cup of Coffee ⇥ defector.com

Albert Burneko, Defector:

In other words, just to get to the point at which your freezer has a Cometeer-brand flash-frozen puck of concentrated brewed coffee in it, some number of coffee beans must be subjected to the absolute most sophisticated, technologized, circuitous, wasteful process for making coffee in the entire history of life of earth. More experience and equipment are required to create a cup of Cometeer coffee than any other halfway plausible cup of coffee, literally ever. (You can tell the MIT, Apple, and Tesla scientists and Princeton-educated coffee-masters did a good job of brewing your coffee with proprietary machinery in Gloucester, Mass., flash-freezing it in liquid nitrogen, packing it in dry ice, and shipping it to your home for you to store in your freezer, because it tastes like you spent five minutes making it yourself using techniques that predate the advent of antibiotics.)

This process makes Keurig — also rightly criticized by Burneko — look like an environmental dream. What is wrong with the myriad methods of brewing coffee today that requires a ground-up reinvention? Sometimes, it is worth trying new things; other times, you end up pitching the virtues of a cryogenic brick of coffee.

Gorge

While many news organizations were satisfied with covering today’s launch of App Tracking Transparency in iOS 14.5 as a feature that, at most, illustrates a key difference between Apple and Facebook, for example, Mike Isaac and Jack Nicas of the New York Times decided to write a parallel article about the apparently fractured relationship between the companies’ CEOs. And it is a doozy.

I do not like these kinds of articles at the best of times. Regardless of how closely executives are tied to the companies they are involved with, I do not think there is much value in seeing them as inextricably linked. I do not think we can extrapolate personal animosity from competitiveness, and I think the CEO-as-celebrity narrative is a worrisome premise.

So this is the kind of article that I am going to approach with trepidation. Sure enough, it is chock full of anecdotes that do not simply portray Apple and Facebook as two companies that have some competitive overlap and very different approaches to privacy, but an “all-out war” between two bitter enemies in Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg. I did not learn much but, as I re-read the article, a single paragraph stuck out:

Those contrasts have widened with their deeply divergent visions for the digital future. Mr. Cook wants people to pay a premium — often to Apple — for a safer, more private version of the internet. It is a strategy that keeps Apple firmly in control. But Mr. Zuckerberg champions an “open” internet where services like Facebook are effectively free. In that scenario, advertisers foot the bill.

This reads like a Facebook PR person has spun it already, since it is the distillation of the company’s false compromise between privacy and revenue. It also misrepresents how lock-in and opt-in work on the internet.

If you want to talk about control over the internet, you really have to start with Facebook, Google — and, to a lesser extent, Amazon. All three companies insidiously lock people into their data-mining platforms without presenting a real means of consent or opting out. In addition to being de facto infrastructure, these companies never really stop tracking you. They can stop showing you ads based on the personalized data they have collected, but they may continue to slurp up behavioural information anyhow. And that’s only the three biggest companies in this space; there are thousands of other ad tech businesses and data brokers gorging themselves on data you never meaningfully consented to sharing.

Apple’s apparent control over the internet is comparatively meagre. If you rid yourself of all Apple hardware and software, you quit using its services, and you delete your iCloud account, you have zero affiliation with Apple. As far as it knows, you no longer exist. This is undoubtably a tedious, time-consuming, and expensive thing to do — but you can entirely opt out of Apple’s ecosystem. I know many people who have.

It is hard to see how Apple’s greater emphasis on privacy enables it to have more control over the internet in the long run. You would have to be a deeply cynical person who believes Apple would oppose a strict national privacy law — something Cook has repeatedly called for — because it creates a market for Apple’s more privacy-friendly products, and you would have to ignore the overwhelming majority of people who demand greater privacy online for that to be true. Of course Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, would rather you buy your technology products from Apple, but this company policy is not mere veneer. It is a longstanding commitment — though it is imperfect and has its limits — as is the company’s stance towards an open internet.1

But an open internet does not mean one in which all advertising is individually targeted using data farmed through independent apps and websites that serve as proxies for the surveillance practices of Facebook and Google. In the history of advertising, the privacy-hostile premise that these companies are selling is fairly recent. Shooting for pinpoint relevancy is a waste of time and privacy when relevant enough ads can be targeted to someone browsing a list of coffee cake recipes, an article about wedding locations, or a local news story. Mediocre ad targeting was good enough to buy an entire Batmobile.

Forget the apparent “war” between Cook and Zuckerberg personally, or even between the companies they chair. Both Apple and Facebook believe that many users, when presented with the option of whether to allow third parties to track their activity, will say no. But the new thing is not the tracking, it is the request for explicit permission — and Facebook appears to think that it will struggle to convince people it should be allowed to strip-mine their behaviour. We ought to be asking whether this was ever ethical. It seems most people would disagree.

Ads can keep funding the internet; Apple is not eradicating advertising from its platform. It is only requiring that users give consent to how much they would like to be surveilled. It speaks volumes about Facebook that it believes those are necessarily the same thing.

  1. A non-exhaustive list of privacy commitments: device encryption; masking Bluetooth and MAC addresses; Safari’s tracking prevention mechanisms, including ITP and share button tracking; local categorization of images in Photos; privacy labels in the App Store; non-specific location data in apps; and background location notifications. Many of these features are not recent. For example, since the mid-2000s, Safari defaulted to allowing only first-party cookies and cookies from websites you visited. ↥︎

James Hoffman’s AeroPress Technique ⇥ youtube.com

Tony Konecny, formerly of Tonx and now at Yes Plz, in a lengthy and entertaining thread about coffee brewing techniques [sic]:

And I of course love the Chemex. The heavier filters are very forgiving of grind size/quality. It’s hard to fuck up.

It’s an elegant brewer when you’re serving multiple people and one of the few pieces of coffee gear that looks good left on the countertop.

and an Aeropress looks like a something you keep hidden in the nightstand.

I brew a cup or two of Chemex when I am feeling fancy and want something to clean afterwards, but I make most of my coffee with an AeroPress despite its looks. It is a resoundingly utilitarian brewer with seemingly a many variables and, depending on how fussy you want to be, a challenge to use consistently. But it has many passionate fans for two good reasons: it is very simple, and it requires very little effort to make good coffee.

James Hoffman made three videos about the AeroPress that are worth checking out:

If you’re short on time, you can just watch the last video, but I highly recommend all three. The intro on the first one is a lovely piece of filmmaking, and Hoffman’s dedication to trying different techniques in the second is admirable.

These three videos got me to try a different technique than my go-to recipe. For years, I have used a cheap kitchen scale and the AeroPress Timer app — which is, simultaneously, the best-designed and least-beautiful app I use regularly — to brew 18 grams of coffee with 200 millilitres of water in about a minute and a half, which is the Blue Bottle recipe. It is a little anal retentive, but it sure produces more reliable results than my previous technique of guesswork.

But Hoffman’s recipe uses just 11 grams of coffee and takes two and a half minutes, with a finer grind than I typically use. It is a noticeably different cup and I cannot work out if I like it more or less, but it is worth exploring. If you have an AeroPress, I think Hoffman’s video series is an entertaining and informative way to spend about an hour, and I think the AeroPress Timer app is also worth giving a shot.

Spotify Continues to Remove Episodes of Joe Rogan’s Podcast ⇥ digitalmusicnews.com

Paul Resnikoff, Digital Media News:

Just last week, Digital Music News first reported that 40 different Joe Rogan Experience podcast episodes were found missing from Spotify, now the exclusive platform for the show. Now, that number has quickly grown to 42, with potentially more shows quietly getting removed from the catalog.

Among the newly-missing is an episode (#411) with Bulletproof Coffee founder Dave Asprey, a frequent guest on The Joe Rogan Experience. Strangely, Spotify has deleted three total episodes with Asprey for reasons that aren’t entirely clear.

You may remember Asprey from his many years of bullshit.

It is worth reading this article alongside something like Ben Thompson’s piece about sovereign writers, and considering the balance of editorial control and independence against guaranteed income.

I am not a fan of Rogan’s podcast; I think it sounds like if you grafted a mouth onto a lifted Dodge Ram covered in Punisher decals. I also think that it is probably a good thing for the world that Spotify can exercise some control over a popular but obsequious host. But I have to wonder how comfortable Rogan is with sharing his fame with Spotify while letting it meddle with his show. Spotify surely benefits from the exclusivity of his show and being associated with one of the world’s most popular podcasts; Rogan benefits because he is a hundred million dollars richer, which is a galling amount of money for Joe Rogan’s HGH and PCP power hour. Spotify apparently has little editorial control, but it now has control and responsibility over distributing an exclusive show that it paid, again, a hundred million dollars for. Rogan’s name may be on the show, but it is Spotify’s reputation that is on the line.

Bloomberg: Apple Is Working on a New TV Product With HomePod and Videoconferencing Capabilities ⇥ bloomberg.com

Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

The company is working on a product that would combine an Apple TV set-top box with a HomePod speaker and include a camera for video conferencing through a connected TV and other smart-home functions, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing internal matters.

Gurman says that this product is “still in the early stages” which, if you want to be a bit cynical, gives this report enough wiggle room to never pan out.

But it is intriguing, isn’t it? I know that it is something I would have loved to own this past year. Over Christmastime, I used AirPlay to place a FaceTime window onto the television and set my MacBook Air on the coffee table so that we could spend time with family in a more immersive way. It was a pretty nice, albeit janky, setup.

The obvious question about something like this is where a camera would be mounted, given that some people probably do not put their Apple TV out in the open or adjacent to their television screen. The other question is whether we can expect a new remote, something that for years I have been hearing is in the works, yet somehow never arrives. The Apple TV appears to be on the development cycle usually reserved for new kinds of water.

After Union Push, Medium Follows the Trend ⇥ vice.com

Medium CEO Ev Williams, in a companywide email:

Though Medium has been an open platform since day one, we’ve had an editorial team almost as long. The original thesis was that we wanted to establish that Medium was both open and high quality. We wanted to set the bar high. We were successful in doing that, and, since then, the editorial part of our company has gone through many iterations as we’ve strived to find the right way to integrate it. In 2014–16, we published great original content but we didn’t have the right business model to support it.

[…]

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I strongly believe that the editorial talent we have assembled here is a strategic asset that is in line with our business and strategy. For the foreseeable future, we will focus that talent on supporting independent voices on our platform. This means identifying writers — both already on Medium and not — and offering them deals, support, editing, and feedback to help them tell great stories and find their audience.

So instead of house publications like OneZero, GEN, and the just-launched Momentum, Medium is following Substack’s strategy of hiring individual writers. This is because, as Williams writes, “the role of publications — in the world, not just on Medium — has decreased in the modern era”, which is a sentiment I worry deeply about. I love following the work of individual writers, but there are also plenty of publications that I read because I trust them and their editorial standards.

As I was writing this, I was reminded of something Steve Jobs said eleven years ago:

I don’t want to see us descend into a nation of bloggers … I think we need editorial oversight now more than ever.

With a somewhat liberal definition of “bloggers”, this remains true. There is plenty of great reporting done every day by people who are not star journalists.

Medium’s latest pivot is yet another example of the company’s inability to focus on anything, at all, ever. About seven years ago, Medium had a handful of in-house publications like Steven Levy’s Backchannel and the Nib. Those brought in regular readers, so the next step was monetization.

Davey Alba, writing for Buzzfeed News in 2017:

Then Medium shifted to branded content partnerships. And then decided it wanted to host boutique online publications. In late 2015 and early 2016, it brought more than a dozen small, separate publishing operations onto the platform, while Medium’s in-house publications either quietly wound down or moved away from the platform. A year later, the platform pivoted again, firing a third of its employees — 50 workers in nonengineering roles — and shutting down its New York and DC offices. The publishing partners — beloved sites like The Awl, The Ringer, Pacific Standard, and ThinkProgress — left Medium in a mass exodus.

Now, a few months later, Williams has a new model, one that he maintains is the right one for today’s state of affairs in online publishing. The current membership model includes a small team of editors — jobs that had existed at the company until January 2017 when it unceremoniously eliminated them. The only difference now seems to be that the company’s new-again editorial staff will be much smaller — and this time, editors won’t be attached to particular editorial brand names, but rather work for Medium as a whole. It appears, in other words, that Williams has pivoted so many times he’s ended up right back where he started.

That was then; this is now, with Medium pivoting to Substack because it cannot commit to sticking with anything or maintaining job security. And that latter thing seems to be related to this latest corporate shift.

Edward Ongweso Jr, Vice:

The move comes less than one month after all Medium employees — including the editorial unit — attempted to unionize and lost by one vote. Employees at the company say that journalists who work at Medium’s nine publications were not the initial driving force behind the union, but were some of the most vocal supporters of it. The news media industry (including VICE) is highly unionized; the tech industry is not.

Four current Medium employees told Motherboard that in the leadup to the vote, Medium and Williams himself discouraged the company from unionizing. Medium hired the unionbusting firm Kauff McGuire & Margolis in the leadup to the February union vote. Williams also held “coffee chats” with small groups of workers, where four current employees told Motherboard that Williams said that it would be difficult to raise money from venture capitalists if the union won the vote.

Medium keeps trying to eat its tail, and venture capital firms keep sinking tens of millions of dollars into its flailing efforts. Five years from now, Medium could have pivoted two or three more times, or it could be entirely wiped from the web. It’s anybody’s guess.

Unproven Biometrics Are Increasingly Being Used at Border Crossings and by Law Enforcement ⇥ thewalrus.ca

Hilary Beaumont, the Walrus:

In recent years, and whether we realize it or not, biometric technologies such as face and iris recognition have crept into every facet of our lives. These technologies link people who would otherwise have public anonymity to detailed profiles of information about them, kept by everything from security companies to financial institutions. They are used to screen CCTV camera footage, for keyless entry in apartment buildings, and even in contactless banking. And now, increasingly, algorithms designed to recognize us are being used in border control. Canada has been researching and piloting facial recognition at our borders for a few years, but — at least based on publicly available information — we haven’t yet implemented it on as large a scale as the US has. Examining how these technologies are being used and how quickly they are proliferating at the southern US border is perhaps our best way of getting a glimpse of what may be in our own future—especially given that any American adoption of technology shapes not only Canada–US travel but, as the world learned after 9/11, international travel protocols.

[…]

Canada has tested a “deception-detection system,” similar to iBorderCtrl, called the Automated Virtual Agent for Truth Assessment in Real Time, or AVATAR. Canada Border Services Agency employees tested AVATAR in March 2016. Eighty-two volunteers from government agencies and academic partners took part in the experiment, with half of them playing “imposters” and “smugglers,” which the study labelled “liars,” and the other half playing innocent travellers, referred to as “non-liars.” The system’s sensors recorded more than a million biometric and nonbiometric measurements for each person and spat out an assessment of guilt or innocence. The test showed that AVATAR was “better than a random guess” and better than humans at detecting “liars.” However, the study concluded, “results of this experiment may not represent real world results.” The report recommended “further testing in a variety of border control applications.” (A CBSA spokesperson told me the agency has not tested AVATAR beyond the 2018 report and is not currently considering using it on actual travellers.)

These technologies are deeply concerning from a privacy perspective. The risks of their misuse are so great that their implementation should be prohibited — at least until a legal framework is in place, but I think forever. There is no reason we should test them on a “trial” basis; no new problems exist that biometrics systems are solving by being used sooner.

But I am curious about our relationship with their biases and accuracy. The fundamental concerns about depending on machine learning boil down to whether suspicions about its reliability are grounded in reality, and whether we are less prone to examining its results in depth. I have always been skeptical of machines replacing humans in jobs that require high levels of judgement. But I began questioning that very general assumption last summer after reading a convincing argument from Aaron Gordon at Vice that speed cameras are actually fine:

Speed and red light cameras are a proven, functional technology that make roads safer by slowing drivers down. They’re widely used in other countries and can also enforce parking restrictions like not blocking bus or bike lanes. They’re incredibly effective enforcers of the law. They never need coffee breaks, don’t let their friends or coworkers off easy, and certainly don’t discriminate based on the color of the driver’s skin. Because these automated systems are looking at vehicles, not people’s faces, they avoid the implicit bias quandaries that, say, facial recognition systems have, although, as Dave Cooke from the Union of Concerned Scientists tweeted, “the equitability of traffic cameras is dependent upon who is determining where to place them.”

Loath as I am to admit it, Gordon and the researchers in his article have got a point. There are few instances where something is as unambiguous as a vehicle speeding or running a red light. If the equipment is accurately calibrated and there is ample amber light time, the biggest frustration for drivers is that they can no longer speed with abandon or race through changing lights — which are things they should not have been doing in any circumstance. I am not arguing that we should put speed cameras every hundred metres on every road, nor that punitive measures are the only or even best behavioural correction, merely that these cameras can actually reduce bias. Please do not send hate mail.

Facial recognition, iris recognition, gait recognition — these biometrics methods are clearly more complex than identifying whether a car was speeding. But I have to wonder if there is an assumption by some that there is a linear and logical progression from one to the other, and there simply is not. Biometrics are more like forensics, and courtrooms still accept junk science. It appears that all that is being done with machine learning is to disguise the assumptions involved in matching one part of a person’s body or behaviour to their entire self.

It comes back to Maciej Cegłowski’s aphorism that “machine learning is money laundering for bias”:

When we talk about the moral economy of tech, we must confront the fact that we have created a powerful tool of social control. Those who run the surveillance apparatus understand its capabilities in a way the average citizen does not. My greatest fear is seeing the full might of the surveillance apparatus unleashed against a despised minority, in a democratic country.

What we’ve done as technologists is leave a loaded gun lying around, in the hopes that no one will ever pick it up and use it.

Well we’re using it now, and we have done little to assure there are no bystanders in the path of the bullet.

Facebook’s Attempt to Vilify Apple ⇥ theguardian.com

Kurt Wagner and Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

Facebook Inc. lashed out at Apple Inc. in a series of full-page newspaper ads, claiming the iPhone maker’s coming mobile software changes around data gathering and targeted advertising are bad for small businesses.

The ads, which ran Wednesday in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, carried the headline “We’re standing up to Apple for small businesses everywhere.” They home in on upcoming changes to Apple’s iOS 14 operating system that will curb the ability of companies like Facebook to gather data about users and ply them with targeted advertising.

Alex Hern, the Guardian:

The point of contention is a feature coming to iPhones in the new year that will require developers to ask for permission before they can track what users do across apps. Apple says the feature, which was originally slated for launch in October before being delayed in order to allow advertisers time to cope, is necessary to protect user privacy; it comes alongside a number of similar changes in new versions of iOS, such as a requirement that app developers provide a “nutritional label” for their software to explain what they do with user data.

Facebook objects – but seems keen to stress it is not doing so because it is defending its bottom line. According to its pitch, the real victims are “your neighbourhood coffee brewery, your friend who owns their own retail business, your cousin who started an event planning service and the game developers who build the apps you use for free”.

Dan Levy — but not that Dan Levy — of Facebook:

This affects not just app developers, but also small businesses that rely on personalized ads to grow. Here’s why. Small businesses have small budgets. For these small budgets to work, they have to be targeted at the customers that matter to small businesses. It doesn’t do a local wedding planner any good to reach people who aren’t planning a wedding. Likewise, it doesn’t do a small ecommerce outfit selling customized dog leashes any good to reach cat owners. Put simply, by dramatically limiting the effectiveness of personalized advertising, Apple’s policy will make it much harder for small businesses to reach their target audience, which will limit their growth and their ability to compete with big companies.

Levy deftly conflates “advertising” and “personalized advertising”, as if there are no ways to target people planning a wedding without surveilling their web browsing behaviour. Facebook’s campaign casually ignores decades of advertising targeted based on the current webpage or video instead of who those people are because it would impact Facebook’s primary business. Most people who are reading an article about great wedding venues are probably planning a wedding, but you don’t need quite as much of the ad tech stack to make that work.

The way to describe this feature coming to iOS devices next year is that all apps that wish to track users must ask permission. But Reed Albergotti of the Washington Post filed a credulous report:

Facebook took aim at Apple on Wednesday, criticizing the iPhone maker’s new policies limiting personalized ads on Apple products.

Facebook said changes Apple has made to how easily advertisers can track iPhone users will disproportionately harm small businesses that rely on personalized advertisements to reach customers and find new ones. Facebook said its internal research has found that small businesses earned 60 percent less in sales when they were not able to use the kind of targeted advertising that Apple aims to limit.

Dan Levy, Facebook’s vice president for ads and business products, blasted Apple, questioning the company’s motives for a move he said benefits Apple’s bottom line. “We believe Apple is behaving anti-competitively by using their control of the App Store to benefit their bottom line at the expense of app developers and small businesses,” he said during a call Wednesday. Facebook launched a new website and took out full-page ads in newspapers to try to drum up support.

At best, Albergotti’s report treats everything about this issue as an open debate where both parties’ claims are equally accurate. While I understand the inclination to avoid taking sides, it is possible to check their claims against the available evidence. I have quoted above the first three paragraphs of the story, only after which there is a comment from Apple clarifying that, no, this new policy does not inherently limit tracking or advertising:

“We believe that this is a simple matter of standing up for our users,” said Apple spokesman Fred Sainz in a statement. He said the new changes in iOS 14 don’t actually prohibit Facebook from continuing to offer the same tracking. Rather, “It simply requires they give users a choice,” he said. Apple has denied that it is making the changes for business reasons. Instead, Apple says, the changes, which require customers to specifically opt into personalized ad tracking, are meant to enhance its customers’ privacy, which the company has called a fundamental human right.

It would be more honest for Albergotti to describe this change for what it is: instead of requiring users to opt out of targeting later, it now requires users give explicit consent for each app to track them using the system identifier. There are parts of this that may be worth treating as an open discussion — the trade-offs for small businesses described by Facebook may be real to some extent, and this change may improve user privacy as Apple claims — but the mechanism itself is not a debate. These new policies are not, as Facebook and Albergotti say, explicitly about “limiting personalized ads”, only requiring that users meaningfully consent to them instead of burying that affirmation in a lengthy privacy policy.