Search Results for: coffee

Every Morning, John Foley Wakes Up and Drinks Water From His Own Hands ⇥ defector.com

Let me give you a glimpse of my weekend: I like to get up just a little late, make myself a great cup of coffee, and sit down with the New York Times’ “Sunday Routine” column because it is hysterical. It is full of semi-famous wealthy New Yorkers sharing what they describe as a typical Sunday for them, and usually involves some fantasy combination of waking up at the crack of dawn, exercising for hours, eating a handful of nuts for breakfast, browsing boutiques, picking up some stuff at a farmer’s market, and cooking a big dinner with the family — and so scarcely resembles my own understanding of what a weekend ought to be that I find it hard to believe a single word.

Anyway, Paige Darrah interviewed John Foley, CEO of Peleton, for the series and this caught everyone’s eye for obvious reasons:

Twenty years ago a colleague told me the key to your day is to hydrate at much as you can, so the first thing I do is drink 40 sips of water from my hand at the upstairs bathroom sink. It’s efficient. I drink until I feel like I’m going to throw up water. Every day.

Dan McQuade, Defector:

The Times article opens with an anecdote that Foley doesn’t like to wear branded Peloton gear for fear of looking, in his words, “like a tool.” I fear Foley has been pranked by his colleague and writer Paige Darrah, who have now made him explain in a fancy New York newspaper that he drinks water with his paw, like a cat, until he hurls. My cat doesn’t even drink water from the faucet, preferring instead to meow at me until I give her a pint glass.

The Times piece also mentions that Foley is touchy when it comes to being mocked. I don’t imagine this is going to help with that at all.

Understanding ProRAW ⇥ blog.halide.cam

Ben Sandofsky of Lux:

As we dug deeper into ProRAW, we realized it wasn’t just about making RAW more powerful. It’s about making RAW approachable. ProRAW could very well change how everyone shoots and edits photos, beginners and experts alike.

To understand what makes it so special, the first half of this post explains how a digital camera develops a photo. Then we go on to explain the strengths and weaknesses of traditional RAWs. Finally, we dive into what’s unique about ProRAW, how it changes the game, and its few remaining drawbacks.

Grab a coffee, because this is a long read.

As expected, this is much better than my attempt. You can read both, though. Are you really doing something better right now?

New Apple Maps, Including Look Around and Guides, Are Now Available in Canada ⇥ justinobeirne.com

Earlier today, Apple announced that the full new Maps experience was rolling out to Canadian users. That’s right — not just users in Toronto and Vancouver, but across the entire country.

I have been keeping my eye on Justin O’Beirne’s catalogue of changes all evening. The cartography is undeniably better: it is more precise, just as clear, and has subtler distinctions in cities and parks. The 3D models of buildings look very good, and Look Around is terrific; I am glad that Google no longer has a monopoly on street-level imagery. It is nowhere near as comprehensive as Google’s efforts, but there is imagery for a wider range of places than I imagined.

There are also Guides: collections of locations and landmarks from resources like AllTrails, Complex, the Los Angeles Times, and Time Out. Sadly, there are currently none for Calgary, but there are already two for Banff. I hope Sprudge puts together a coffee guide for our little city; we have some terrific shops and roasters here that deserve more attention.

My first impressions of its data are more mixed and, because I cannot load old Maps at the same time, it is tough to make comparisons. I will say that I panned around a few blocks near me and found a few businesses that had pins far away from where they should have been, one business that changed its name last year and had not been updated, and a listing for a bar that closed its doors thirteen years ago, all within a couple of minutes. This is all in a city of over a million people. That’s not to say that I have never found errors with Google Maps, but I find them more rarely and, in a similarly quick glance of the same area, did not notice anything wrong.

Upon unveiling its new Maps effort in a story with TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino, Apple said that two of its goals were to improve “ground truth” and to be able to make changes faster. I hope that is the case. I don’t know how to assess the accuracy of place data beyond the most obvious flaws, and I don’t know how to evaluate that over time. I just need to be able to trust my maps provider. I have found Apple’s existing Maps client to provide good driving directions and generally accurate addresses for businesses; however, I have found business hours in particular to be inaccurate, even before this year’s restrictions.

There are so many reasons to use Apple’s Maps app. It is nicer to look at with better cartography. It is integrated throughout the system and doesn’t have ads. Its implementation of street-level imagery blows Google’s out of the water, and you don’t have to fight with user-submitted panoramas. Apple’s challenges remain with places and businesses which, unfortunately for them, form the backbone of many users’ digital mapping needs. I hope this initiative is what helps get them closer to Google’s high benchmark.

Following Tradition, Ajit Pai Will Leave the FCC on January 20 ⇥ vox.com

Sara Morrison, Recode:

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chair Ajit Pai has announced that he will leave the agency on January 20, when Joe Biden is sworn in as president. This gives Biden at least one commissioner slot to fill on his first day in office and, should that choice be confirmed, a Democrat majority to fulfill his vision of what the FCC should be and do for the next four years.

You know what pairs well with novelty-sized coffee mugs? Tiny violins.

Karl Bode, Techdirt:

Pai’s tenure wasn’t entirely devoid of value. The agency boss did oversee massive and noncontroversial wireless spectrum auction efforts that will deliver troves of valuable spectrum to market, and spearheaded the creation of the nation’s first suicide prevention hotline (988).

But by and large Pai’s tenure was comprised of a parade of industry-cozy policies, bad data, hubris, and in many instances, outright lies.

I have no doubt Pai will be able to find a cushy job beginning January 21 in the industry he was supposed to regulate. After all, that’s the very job he had before he joined the FCC.

Understanding 5G ⇥ tidbits.com

Glenn Fleishman, TidBits:

However, 5G won’t be transformative for most people or purposes. Its advantages primarily accrue to cellular carriers, even more so than 3G or 4G, which offered significant boosts in throughput and allowed higher rates over broader areas. 5G will let carriers charge more for service in some cases, handle more customers simultaneously, break into new markets that require higher throughput or low latency, and equip more kinds of devices with ubiquitous high-speed cellular data connections.

For users, it will gradually feel like we have broadband no matter where we might be, which is not terribly exciting except when you want to stream a 4K movie in the backseat of a car on a highway or download a 5 GB file in a minute in a coffee shop. The level of excitement should be more akin to finding out your city has (silently) dug up the streets while you were sleeping, replaced 10-inch water mains with 20-inch ones, and then cleaned it all up without you knowing. 5G is better network plumbing that your “Internet utility” had to install to deal with the amount of data and new data connections it wants to move around a city.

This is the best primer I’ve read about 5G. Fleishman manages to bring all of its different narrative strands into a coherent and easy-to-read article.

New iPhone Day 2020

This year’s iPhone announcements were special for me because it is the first time since 2017 that I know I will be buying a new phone. My partner’s 6S has some sort of circuit fault that discharges batteries extremely quickly, so she will be getting my iPhone X — and I will be getting, well, something announced today. But it is not easy because, more than ever, it feels like there is some compromise at every level. That is not a criticism, only an observation based on my priorities.

But we will get to that.

The Event Itself

I do not wish to make light of this harrowing pandemic, but the more I see Apple’s new presentation format, the more I like it. The nostalgic soul in me pines for the Stevenote era because he was one of the best public speakers in modern corporate history. Yet, one of the drawbacks of a golden era Steve Jobs keynote — from, say, 2005 through 2008 or so — is that it maximized Jobs’ presence at the expense of the thousands of people involved in creating a product or service. Sure, you would occasionally hear from Phil Schiller, Jony Ive, Scott Forstall, and others, but there was a gravity around Jobs that made it hard for others to get as much attention.

The Tim Cook era Apple has distributed presentations amongst greater numbers of executives, managers, and marketing types, but I do not think it has ever been as effective as it is in the videos they have been forced to create as a result of this pandemic. We get to hear from even more people who were involved in creating these products — and likely more than a live theatrical production could handle. There are logistical reasons for not handing off the presenter role every few minutes in a live setting, and there are also many people who simply are not comfortable in a live broadcast setting with an audience.

As many observers have pointed out, it is also a far more diverse group of presenters. Apple really does pick presenters who are intimately familiar with a technology because they worked on it. I am enjoying hearing more from these voices in addition to the usual suspects on the executive team.

Today’s presentation did have its lulls. The iPhone 12 lineup supports 5G — more on that in a minute — so not only did Apple explain at multiple points how revolutionary 5G is supposed to be, an executive from Verizon appeared to help explain how revolutionary 5G is supposed to be with the help of Verizon. There was also a demo of a new iPhone version of “League of Legends”, so we really hit the Apple keynote jackpot today.

I wonder what Verizon did to deserve such prominent placement during today’s keynote. It has been a very long time since Apple has donated several minutes of valuable iPhone-adjacent air space to a carrier, or a technical partner of any kind. But, like the September keynote, this stream clocked in at a few minutes over one hour long, so it isn’t like those moments pushed live audiences to some kind of bladder breaking point.

5G

As I have written for years now, the way 5G is being sold to the public is wildly disproportionate to the actual day-to-day impact it will have on most of us most of the time. At the moment, 5G is largely a useful buzzword for when you want billions of dollars in tax breaks, a shortcut for newspapers to seem more technologically advanced, and a way to eat up phone batteries at speeds slower than LTE.

But that surely does not have to be the case. One reason speeds are so slow right now is because faster 5G waves require users to be in closer proximity to cell towers and, so far, the infrastructure coverage is weaker than for LTE in the United States. But what if a company starts shipping a whole bunch of the most popular smartphone model in that country? That may spur a wave of adoption that effectively requires cell carriers to build out infrastructure more quickly. Outside of the U.S. and with many different 5G frequencies used worldwide, the situation surely differs. I am interested to know what it is like in Calgary, for example. When Apple gets behind a technology, though, it tends to push the industry as a whole.

5G radios also require more power, but Apple is being clever there as well. The iPhone 12 models are usually using LTE but will ramp up to 5G when it is necessary. That seems like an adept way to balance speed and battery life.

But, oh boy, did Apple sell 5G hard during today’s presentation, to points where I think they overstepped.

For example, before either iPhone was unveiled, Tim Cook spoke generally about 5G. One of the things that caught my ear was his claim that it “helps protect your privacy and security” because it is so fast that you are less likely to connect to insecure public Wi-Fi hotspots. There is some truth to that statement, but it sounds an awful lot like spin. Public Wi-Fi, at least where I am, is often slower than LTE, so it isn’t a compromise of privacy for speed. A Wi-Fi hotspot is appealing because carriers in many countries have monthly data allowances on their plans, so connecting to Wi-Fi avoids expensive overage charges.1

Then, during the introduction of the iPhone 12 Pro, Greg Joswiak said that doctors will be able to download scans faster, and implied that 5G could make the difference between life and death. This is probably true in some circumstances, but it is a wild claim to drop during an iPhone keynote. There are many cases where having faster network speeds is simply a nicer and better experience for most customers, and I found the dive into a possible life-saving realm of 5G to be more distracting than convincing.

The iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro Lineups

The thing that is hard about this year’s iPhone lineup is that they are hard to choose between for both the ways that they overlap and the ways that they differ.

The best news this year, from a basic hardware standpoint, is that Apple has resurrected the iPhone 5-like flat sided form factor and mixed it with the glass sandwich of the iPhone 4 and recent iPhone models. That hardware design language has always been my favourite for its in-hand stability and precision, and I am glad to see it brought back and modernized. It is basically the same design across the lineup, with the iPhone 12 getting an aluminum chassis and the Pro models sporting stainless steel.

The processor is also the pitched as being the same on all models — though benchmarking experts will tell us the extent to which they are equivalent. They all have the same Ceramic Shield cover glass, which, Apple says improves the likelihood it will survive a drop by four times, they all have OLED displays, they all have MagSafe — another blast from the past — and they all support 5G. These phones are, in many ways, the same.

As I wrote above, I am upgrading from an iPhone X, so there is a lot that will be new to me and I am not a great resource for year-over-year comparisons. But I do know what I like and use on this phone. I prefer a smaller form factor, so the iPhone 12 Mini caught my attention in a big way. But, though I am excited by the prospects of a wide angle lens, I use the telephoto lens on my current iPhone to know that I do not want to be without it. The telephoto is only available on the Pro models, so I will naturally be guided to them.

But there’s a big catch here, which is that the cameras in the iPhone 12 Pro Max are no longer consistent with those in the smaller Pro model. Across the lineup, most of the camera changes this year seem to be in software rather than lenses or sensors. The situation is not so simple with the Pro Max, as Sebastiaan de With explains:

In addition to a better lens, the 12 Pro Max has the room to pack a new, 47% larger sensor. That means bigger pixels, and bigger pixels that capture more light simply means better photos. More detail in the day, more light at night. That combines with the lens to result in almost twice as much light captured: Apple claims an 87% improvement in light capture from the 11 Pro. That’s huge.

But that’s not its only trick: the 12 Pro Max’s Wide system also gets a new sensor-shift OIS system. OIS, or Optical Image Stabilization, lets your iPhone move the camera around a bit to compensate for your decidedly unsteady human trembly hands. That results in smoother video captures and sharp shots at night, when the iPhone has to take in light over a longer amount of time.

These appear to be big improvements to the camera and they are, frustratingly, only on the biggest iPhone model. That makes complete sense from an engineering perspective and I do not think Apple should restrict the camera of the bigger model because it no longer has parity with its smaller sibling.

But, damn, that makes this a pretty difficult choice. If I want the best camera on an iPhone this year, I have to live with a size I find harder to use day-to-day; if I want to get the size that works best for me, I have to sacrifice a camera mode I use most. But, as choices go, I could just stick with the middle-ground option.2 That seems like a sensible compromise all around, but I do hope that sensor-based stabilization system comes to smaller iPhones by the time I am ready to buy another.

  1. American carriers are not immune to this. Verizon, a company that received a generous amount of prime keynote time, has several “unlimited” plans for you to choose from. One immediately wonders why a range of choices is needed for plans that are “unlimited”, and it is because there are several limitations on those plans. I, too, wish for words to have agreed-upon definitions. ↥︎

  2. When I was in college, I used to work at a coffee shop that offered only small and large sizes. Most of the time, when someone ordered coffee and I had to ask which size they wanted, they would answer “medium”. I guess, in a good, better, best situation, people generally choose “better”. ↥︎

Hey, Nah

Yesterday, Basecamp began sending invitation codes to people who had previously registered interest in Hey, its much-anticipated new email-like product. Hey has a bunch of quirky new features that, unsurprisingly, cannot entirely be shoehorned into existing email protocols so, while it uses SMTP, it does not support IMAP or POP. Users must use the proprietary Hey suite of apps to access their @hey.com inbox, and cannot use other email addresses within Hey’s apps.

The company says that its apps are all “full-featured native apps” but its desktop apps are Electron-based. That’s not entirely relevant to this post, but it is my policy to shame websites masquerading as native apps.

Anyway, while Apple was busy touting the results of a study it funded that estimated the total economic footprint of the App Store at over half a trillion dollars in 2019, the company was also rejecting a bug fix update to the already-approved Hey app for iOS.

David Pierce, Protocol:

Hey does cost $99 a year, but users can’t sign up or pay within the iOS app. It’s an app for using an existing outside service, just like Basecamp’s eponymous platform — and Netflix and Slack and countless other apps. “So we were like, OK, maybe we just got the Monday morning reviewer,” Basecamp co-founder and CTO David Heinemeier Hansson said. Lots of developers over the years have found that their app-review luck sometimes depended on who happened to be looking, and whether they’d had coffee yet. So Basecamp fixed more bugs, submitted a new version — 1.0.2 — and hoped for the best.

The app sat in the queue for review, then in the “under review” status for far longer than usual. Then Waugh got a phone call. The Apple reviewer said he was calling because the new app hadn’t resolved the issue with rule 3.1.1. The issue had been escalated internally, and Apple had determined it was a valid rejection — the only way to move forward would be to implement Apple’s payments system. And not only that: Waugh was told that Apple would like a commitment and a timeline for implementing the payment system, or Apple might be forced to remove Hey from the App Store entirely.

When Waugh and Basecamp pointed out that there were many other apps — even email apps like Spark or Edison — that allowed users to log in to their existing accounts without signing up through Apple, the reviewer told them they wouldn’t discuss other apps. And that was that.

It’s hard not to quote Pierce’s piece at length because it is so comprehensive. Pierce says that Apple admitted that it shouldn’t have approved the app in the first place; Apple also said that Hey doesn’t qualify as a “reader” client app nor is it a business-focused software-as-a-service app, so it apparently must implement Apple’s own in-app purchases API. This is news.

David Heinemeier Hansson of Basecamp:

We did everything we were supposed to with the iOS app. Try downloading it (while you can?). You can’t sign up, because Apple says no. We don’t mention subscriptions. You can’t upgrade. You can’t access billing. We did all of it! Wasn’t enough.

This extraordinary rejection comes on the very same day that the European Commission announced that it was opening two antitrust investigations into Apple’s business practices. One concerns Apple Pay, and the other is about the App Store; obviously, the latter will be my focus. The Commission:

The Commission will investigate in particular two restrictions imposed by Apple in its agreements with companies that wish to distribute apps to users of Apple devices:

(i) The mandatory use of Apple’s own proprietary in-app purchase system “IAP” for the distribution of paid digital content. Apple charges app developers a 30% commission on all subscription fees through IAP.

(ii) Restrictions on the ability of developers to inform users of alternative purchasing possibilities outside of apps. While Apple allows users to consume content such as music, e-books and audiobooks purchased elsewhere (e.g. on the website of the app developer) also in the app, its rules prevent developers from informing users about such purchasing possibilities, which are usually cheaper.

Apple’s response, via Manton Reece:

It’s disappointing the European Commission is advancing baseless complaints from a handful of companies who simply want a free ride, and don’t want to play by the same rules as everyone else… We don’t think that’s right — we want to maintain a level playing field where anyone with determination and a great idea can succeed.

This is the worst, most insulting statement from Apple that I’ve ever seen. Everything in it is backwards.

There remains a fair argument that Apple can take some cut of sales made through the App Store and its own in-app purchase APIs, though I think 30% is too high. Apple maintains the store, offers marketing benefits, and pays for hosting, distribution, and credit card fees. But, as subscriptions have become the preferred way to charge for apps — a shift encouraged by Apple — the App Store commission increasingly seems like a form of rent-seeking.

Add to that Apple’s prohibition on references of any kind to digital purchases being available outside of iOS apps — a prohibition that extends to website materials linked from within an app — and things begin to look ridiculous. Amazon finds itself in a situation where it can sell paperbacks through its app and offer samples of Kindle books, but cannot sell Kindle versions without giving 30% of the sale to Apple, nor can it explain why or where the book can be bought. Spotify faces a similar quandary with its subscriptions, and its complaint to the E.U. is cited as a triggering factor in the Commission’s investigation. I’ve written about that complaint, which I think has problems.

Regardless of what you think about Apple’s rules and restrictions, none of the above prohibitions apply to Hey’s rejection. The Basecamp team explicitly designed around Apple’s rules and ensured that there were no references to subscriptions or billing from within the app. It’s possible that this is a mistake but, as it has already gone through the dispute process, it appears to be entirely deliberate. A reversal would only be responding to the negative press coverage this has generated.

Apple’s response to the E.U. antitrust investigation says that all apps in its store are subject to the same rules, but that is plainly not true, either. The way Apple is splitting hairs in Hey’s service offering and refusing to compare it to other apps is grossly unfair. The reason I included a detailed description of how Hey works at the outset of this post is because this appears to be the main difference between it and any other email app. But that is an undocumented, unclear, and almost wilfully pedantic interpretation.

Meanwhile, bigger tech companies like Netflix, before it stopped offering in-app purchases, negotiated sweetheart deals with Apple to take a 15% cut on every subscription instead of 30% for the first year and 15% for subsequent years. Then there are the “premium subscription video entertainment” providers who, in exchange for implementing many tvOS features, have been allowed to use their own in-app purchasing mechanism instead of Apple’s APIs, allowing them to keep the entire subscription cost.

WWDC begins in six days. Apple is using the lead-up to strongarm a well-known developer following its policies and issue dishonest statements and press releases about competition in the App Store on the same day that the E.U. announced an antitrust investigation into these practices. Audacious.

Employee Surveillance Applications Are an Intrusive Waste of Time ⇥ nytimes.com

Adam Satariano, New York Times:

With millions of us working from home in the coronavirus pandemic, companies are hunting for ways to ensure that we are doing what we are supposed to. Demand has surged for software that can monitor employees, with programs tracking the words we type, snapping pictures with our computer cameras and giving our managers rankings of who is spending too much time on Facebook and not enough on Excel.

The technology raises thorny privacy questions about where employers draw the line between maintaining productivity from a homebound work force and creepy surveillance. To try to answer them, I turned the spylike software on myself.

Via Christina Warren:

[…] Moreover, all it does is underscore that you don’t trust your employees and encourages employees to use workarounds to avoid surveillance.

But what really gets me is that in the modern work era, employees are frequently encouraged to bring their own devices to work. Meaning, I’m paying for my own equipment. And that comes with a tacit expectation we work more off hours. Imagine paying to be spied on!

Finding loopholes is ultimately what Satariano did:

By the end, I found myself trying to cheat the Hubstaff system altogether. As I write this at 11:38 a.m. on April 24, I am about to get some coffee and spend time with my cooped-up kids. But I plan to leave a Google Doc open on my computer that Hubstaff can screenshot to make it look like I was doing work.

Aside from how creepy, intrusive, and ineffective surveillance technologies like these are, I cannot imagine that anyone will actually sift through employees’ work sessions to verify that the report is accurate. All the data collection in the world cannot replace trust, but it can destroy it.

James Lipton Dies Aged 93 ⇥ hollywoodreporter.com

I was not the best student in college; I semi-frequently pulled all-nighters to finish projects and papers that I should have started much, much sooner. At around 3:00 in the morning, and with several cups of coffee in my system, I’d start to feel like I was vibrating from the inside, so I would take a break and fire up an episode of Inside the Actor’s Studio. There is something superhuman about James Lipton’s calming voice as he interviewed someone in a way I have never heard elsewhere. I think everyone who watched that series had their own answers to his infamous survey — I know I did.

The Era of Widely-Peddled Fake Products ⇥ thewirecutter.com

Ganda Suthivarakom, the Wirecutter:

The rise of counterfeit goods and other phony products sold on the Internet has been swift — and it has largely gone unnoticed by many shoppers. But make no mistake: The problem is extensive. Most people don’t realize this, but the majority of listings on Amazon aren’t actually for items sold by Amazon — they’re run by third-party sellers. And even though many, many third-party sellers are upstanding merchants, an awful lot of them are peddling fakes.

A major Wall Street Journal investigation recently revealed that Amazon has listed “thousands of banned, unsafe, or mislabeled products,” from dangerous children’s products to electronics with fake certifications. The Verge reported that even Amazon’s listings for its own line of goods are “getting hijacked by impostor sellers.” CNBC found that Amazon has shipped expired foods — including baby formula — to customers, pointing to an inability to monitor something as basic as an expiration date. Because of the proliferation of counterfeits and what Birkenstock describes as Amazon’s unwillingness to help it fight them, Birkenstock won’t sell on Amazon anymore. Nike announced that it is also pulling out of Amazon. “Many consumers are … unaware of the significant probabilities they face of being defrauded by counterfeiters when they shop on e-commerce platforms,” reads a January 2020 Department of Homeland Security report (PDF) recommending measures that would force e-retailers to take counterfeits even more seriously. “These probabilities are unacceptably high and appear to be rising.”

Counterfeits, overwhelming choice, Prime Day, poor-quality recommendations, deceptive advertising, and its myriad private labels combine to make Amazon feel increasingly like a low grade flea market mixed with a liquidation store.

Here’s a true and dumb story about your silly writer: last Wednesday, as I was trying to put my MacBook Air on the coffee table, I missed and instead allowed gravity to place it directly onto my foot. My laptop is fine. One of my toes, however, is broken. I got it checked out on Thursday just to be safe — universal health care is a very good thing — and was told that I could keep buddy taping it; it’s not a serious break. They recommended I pick up a cohesive bandage, which they said could best be found on Amazon. So I tried finding it, and spent a solid hour poking around the Amazon storefront. It’s not that there’s a shortage of choice; it’s quite the opposite problem. I just wanted to find a small quantity of the narrowest bandage available. I ended up frustrated and buying a six-pack with multiple sizes made by a company I’ve never heard of. It was, oddly enough, the best choice, but not even close to the correct one.

Rage Against the Machine Learning

A recent cold snap seems to have increased my propensity to experience bugs. I’m usually a walking commuter to my day job, but I’ve happily accepted a lift from my partner all week long as temperatures dropped below the ‑30° C mark every morning. As I got into the car this morning, I noticed a strange notification on my lock screen:

Siri Suggestion on lock screen to take day-long commute to work

This appears to be a Siri suggestion — a nudge by the system to show a hopefully-useful shortcut to a common task. As Apple puts it:

As Siri learns your routines, you get suggestions for just what you need, at just the right time. For example, if you frequently order coffee mid morning, Siri may suggest your order near the time you normally place it.

Since I go to work at a similar time every day, it tells me how long my commute will take and gives me the option to get directions. Nice, right?

Except something is plainly not right: it’s going to take me over a day to get to work? Here’s the route it thinks I should take:

Apple Maps directions across the continent

I found this hilarious — obviously — but also fascinating. How did it get this so wrong?

My assumption was that my phone knew that I commuted to work daily, so it figured out the address of my office. And then, somehow, it got confused between the location it knows and the transcribed address it has stored, and then associated that with an address in or near Rochester, New York. But that doesn’t seem right.

Then, I thought that perhaps the details in my contact card were wrong. My work address is stored in there, and Siri mines that card for information. But there’s a full address in that card including country and postal code, so I’m not sure it could get it so wrong.

I think the third option is most likely: I have my work hours as a calendar appointment every day, and the address only includes the unit and street name, not my city, country, or postal code. I guess Apple Maps’ search engine must have searched globally for that address and ended up in upstate New York.

But why? Why would it think that an appointment in my calendar is likely to be anywhere other than near where I live, particularly when it’s recurring? Why doesn’t Apple Maps’ search engine or Siri — I don’t know which is responsible in this circumstance — prioritize nearby locations? Why doesn’t it prioritize frequent locations?

If you look closely, you’ll also notice another discrepancy: the notification says that it’s going to give me directions to “12th St”, but the directions in Maps are to “12 Ave SE”. Why would this discrepancy exist?

It’s not just the bug — or, more likely, the cascading series of bugs — that fascinates me, nor the fact that it’s so wrong. It’s this era of mystery box machine learning, where sometimes its results look like magic and, at other times, the results are incomprehensible. Every time some lengthy IF-ELSE chain helpfully suggests me driving directions for going across the continent or thinks I only ever message myself, my confidence is immediately erased in my phone’s ability to do basic tasks. How can I trust it when it makes such blatant mistakes, especially when there’s no way to tell it that it’s wrong?

End the Razor-and-Blades Business Model ⇥ theverge.com

Kim Lyons, the Verge:

Obviously, we won’t see an end to such gadgets because too many products rely on what economists refer to as the “two-part tariff,” where you buy the product (razor, floss dispenser, coffee maker) and then pay a per-unit fee for the items (blades, floss, coffee pods) that make the product usable. Every subscription razor blade company has this figured out: it’s why the razor itself is usually relatively inexpensive, but the specialized blades are pricey.

However, the gadgets that are flooding the marketplace (and Kickstarter) now are a generation removed from razor blades, which actually do take some precision to manufacture. The gadgets I’m ranting about are ones that try to convince you to spend more for a relatively inexpensive, readily available product: floss dispensers with proprietary floss (it’s just string, people); garbage cans with specialty garbage bags; even a manicure machine that paints each fingernail individually using — wait for it — pods of its proprietary nail polish.

The razor-and-blades model simply refuses to die. The Juicero thing happened in 2017, the same year Albert Burneko wrote my favourite thing that has ever been written about Keurigs. HP began offering a subscription model for their printers, which allowed them to claim ownership over the cartridges used and add DRM to prevent third-party refills. This business model is wasteful, expensive, and should be abolished — not expanded.

Shopping Is Complicated by Overwhelming Choice, Bad Search Options, and Well-Meaning Professional Reviews ⇥ vice.com

Casey Johnston, Vice:

For a long time, our problem was there were not enough things to choose from. Then with big box stores, followed by the internet, there were too many things to choose from. Now there are still too many things to choose from, but also a seemingly infinite number of ways to choose, or seemingly infinite steps to figuring out how to choose. The longer I spend trying to choose, the higher the premium becomes on choosing correctly, which means I go on not choosing something I need pretty badly, coping with the lack of it or an awful hacked-together solution (in the case of gloves, it’s “trying to pull my sleeves over my hands but they are too short for this”) for way, way too long, and sometimes forever.

The degree to which you feel this problem definitely depends on your income, or at least, being in the privileged position of not having to make do with the only thing you can afford. But for people with even a limited ability to make an investment purchase, if it’s worth it, there’s even more pressure to get it right. Knowing you wasted a big chunk of money on a cheaper, worse thing that falls apart when you could have spent a little more money on a thing that is good and lasts feels like failure. You’ve then wasted your money, wasted your time, you’ve contributed to global warming, and now you have to start the entire thing over again and hope you don’t somehow end up making the exact same mistake.

We’ve known since at least the 1970s that too much choice feels far from freeing; it is anxiety-inducing and causes us to feel paralyzed.1 In a bid to narrow down our options, we’ll probably turn to professional reviews — particularly from sites like the Wirecutter, where Johnston was a senior editor.

Matt Hartman, the Outline:

This obsessive tendency is as obviously silly as it is widespread. Culture journalist Eliza Brooke pointed out that “Google searches for ‘best” have been steadily rising for years.’” Product recommendation sites have been springing up across the internet, including scientific reviews and influencer reviews and trend reviews and aggregated reviews and bad SEO-driven reviews and even worse copies of all of the above. “Googling ‘best air fryer’ is not a path to enlightenment, but into a spiral of comparison between publications,” Alyssa Bereznak said of the impact at the Ringer.

The worst part, though, is that I don’t actually care about pants or pillows or travel mugs. I just want to be a man with warm coffee, a covered crotch, and no neck pain. Mediocre products would suffice. But I can’t help but enter the product review trap for every little item because I live in the United States in 2019 and so I am constantly taught that I must make the best purchases because buying good things is also a moral good.

I get why people want the “best” of something, but I think that’s the wrong term for review sites to be using. I assume it’s for Google ranking reasons that they do.

Review websites are fantastic starting points for product categories that you know virtually nothing about, and for larger purchases that are supposed to last a long time. As an example, I’ve been trying to find a decent portable vacuum for cleaning detritus out of the car, and a few review roundups saved me from buying a model that wasn’t going to be powerful enough, even though it was from a well-known brand.

But the “best” product for you may vary from what reviewers recommend. You’ll know this if you know a particular product category well, or if you have fairly specific requirements. For example, when the Wirecutter tested food storage containers, they suggested Pyrex’s tempered glass containers. What Pyrex markets as an “eighteen piece set” — which is actually nine containers of various sizes and nine matching lids — costs about $30 in the United States. Their plastic pick was similar, except made by Snapware and about $10 less expensive for the same-sized set. I get the allure of both of these. But neither option fulfills three criteria that I consider essential: they must be perfectly stackable with and without a fitted lid, so they sit securely in my fridge or pantry when in use, but are compact when not in use; they must be cheap enough to leave behind, so they don’t feel precious; and they must all fit the same lid, so I don’t have to go hunting for a specific one in an oft-disorganized cupboard. And, for those reasons, I own fifty-count sleeves of half- and whole-litre heavy-weight plastic deli containers, and fifty lids that fit both sizes. I bought them from a restaurant supply store where I get a lot of my kitchen gear; this “hundred and fifty piece set”, as the marketing department might put it, cost me $15. Oh, and they’re microwaveable and machine-washable.

I think review websites could do a better job of making their criteria more apparent. I also think Amazon should make their website easier to use, especially for categories with thousands of options. Nobody needs that much choice. But we can do a better job of understanding the role of professional reviewers. They provide recommendations, but if you know better or have specific requirements, you shouldn’t take their “best” choice too literally.

  1. I think I’ve mentioned before how much I loathe shopping for toothpaste. Of all the goods in the world, why can I select from so many variations of that? ↥︎

Ticketmaster Is Fighting a Losing Battle Against Scalpers by Making Purchases More Difficult for Fans ⇥ vice.com

Jason Koebler, Vice:

For four years during college, I bought and scalped tickets on the side. I didn’t use bots and I wasn’t good at it. I ultimately lost a lot of money. But I did learn quite a lot about the ticket scalping industry. And I learned enough to know that the “anti-scalper” strategies Ticketmaster has deployed in recent years benefits scalpers, not fans.

It is the full-time job of thousands of people in the U.S. and around the world to buy tickets during hectic Ticketmaster onsales and sell them at jacked-up prices. When Ticketmaster tweaks how sales work, scalpers have lots of time and incentive to learn how to optimize for its new systems and to circumvent its anti-scalper tech. By making onsales more complicated, Ticketmaster is hurting average fans who buy tickets using the site only a couple times a year and helping the people who buy tickets every single day, in dozens of different onsales.

I was reminded of this article today as I attempted to buy a couple of tickets to a low-demand show that definitely isn’t seeing mass orders by scalpers. Point of clarity: scumbags they may be, ticket scalpers do not actually collect human scalps.

I started on my phone, because I was in the kitchen making coffee. I have the Ticketmaster app, but it had logged me out at some point. So I had to go through all of its prompts to pick bands and artists to get emailed about — no, thank you — to switch on push notifications, and all the rest of it. I signed in using my complicated saved password, which had apparently expired, so I had to go through their whole password reset process. Expiring passwords are bullshit.

Anyway, I tapped the button to get tickets and I got an all-white screen with a flashing loading bar for maybe ten seconds, and then an error: “unable to identify your browser”. I do not know what this means. The error page says I need to have JavaScript and cookies enabled — which I do — and that I can’t use a proxy or VPN — which I am not.

I switched over to my Mac and tried in Safari, Chrome — the browser for people who don’t give a shit about their privacy — and I even brushed the dust off my copy of Firefox. I got the same error in all of them. I tried again on my phone using LTE, and had the same problem. Their website is apparently so secure that I simply cannot use it to buy tickets; last year, however, a Canadian investigation found that Ticketmaster was complicit in scalping. Live Nation Entertainment — the parent company of both Ticketmaster and Live Nation, which were somehow permitted to merge in 2010 — has exclusive contracts with some of the biggest venues in North America, too, so they’re impossible to avoid.

So I guess I’ll try buying tickets in person, at a booth, the way my ancestors once did.

An Airbnb Scam Demonstrates the Site’s Toothless Policies ⇥ vice.com

Allie Conti, Vice:

I was thankful I’d gotten the last-minute agreement in writing, but I also started to wonder what had actually happened in Chicago. Unable to shake the sense that this was more than a run-of-the-mill bad host, I started to look for red flags I must have missed. It didn’t take long to find a few. For one, the phone number that the Airbnb host had called me with was a Google number that couldn’t be traced. Through a reverse image search, I also realized that the profile picture Becky and Andrew had used on Airbnb was a stock photo from a website that hosts surfing-themed desktop wallpapers. And when I started going through other people’s reviews of Becky and Andrew’s properties, I noticed some other renters had reported experiences that strangely mirrored my own. A woman said she was forced to switch up her itinerary three minutes before check-in due to alleged plumbing issues. A man said that he was promised a refund because his rental was “falling apart,” though it never materialized.

Even some of the positive reviews of Becky and Andrew’s Chicago rentals seemed odd, especially those left by other pairs of hosts. Kelsey and Jean, for example, said Becky and Andrew were “awesome and communicative guests.” But they themselves were based in Chicago, where it seemed they had at least two properties of their own. Why would they need to rent from someone else there? Even stranger, Kelsey and Jean’s photo also had been cribbed from a travel site, and the language they used to describe their home (“Westloop 6 Bed Getaway – Walk the City”) seemed similar to that of Becky and Andrew’s (“6 Bed Downtown / Wicker Park / Walk the City”). It wasn’t long before I found what looked an awful lot like the apartment I’d originally booked with Becky and Andrew—the one on North Wood Street—listed by Kelsey and Jean as well. There was no mistaking it: The couch, coffee table, dining room set, and wall art were all the same.

I started to wonder whether “Becky and Andrew” and “Kelsey and Jean” existed at all.

This is a brilliant investigation, well told.

It’s almost as though operating businesses free of regulation under the guise of “disruption” leads to predictable consequences that scale-obsessed platform owners struggle to solve.

Microsoft Announces New Surface Products, Including Dual-Screened Devices for End of Next Year ⇥ wired.com

Panos Panay of Microsoft:

Today in New York we announced our broadest Surface lineup ever – with five new products coming this holiday and two new dual-screen devices, Surface Neo and Surface Duo, coming in Holiday 2020.

As far as I can tell, the updates Microsoft announced today have been well-received by those who know their products well. The Surface line has, generally, seemed very successful — I see them all the time when I’m in coffee shops or at the library.

But there were still traces of the old Microsoft during today’s announcements which became most obvious when they introduced the Surface Neo and Surface Duo — two products that, while intriguing, won’t be available until the end of next year. Why show them now?

Lauren Goode of Wired got to interview Panay and Satya Nadella at Microsoft’s headquarters last week. There isn’t a rationale in her report of why these products are being shown over a year before anyone can buy them; the closest she gets is explaining that Panay can’t talk about where the camera is going to be because it might give competitors ideas. The piece starts with this strange request:

No matter what you do, do not call the new Surface phone a phone. You can call it a Surface, a mobile product, a dual-screen device, a new kind of 2-in-1, a pathway to the all-important cloud. But Panos Panay, Microsoft’s chief product officer, doesn’t want you to call it a phone.

Never mind that the thing slips in and out of the pocket of Panay’s salt-and-pepper tweed blazer exactly the way a smartphone would. Or that one of the earliest scenes in the marketing video for the thing, with its slow, fetishized swirls of the gadget, shows a woman picking it up to her ear and saying “Hello?” the way you would with, well, you know. Or that Panay himself admits he makes what are universally known as a “phone calls” from it.

A few companies have weird stylistic conventions, but people are gonna call this phone-sized, phone-shaped product that has general phone functionality a “phone”.

That phone, by the way, runs Android, and it speaks to the company’s radical transformation since the Steve Ballmer era that this is how Satya Nadella responded when Goode asked if the company would ever make another Windows-based phone:

Later on I ask Nadella the same question, and he zooms out even further. “The operating system is no longer the most important layer for us,” he says. “What is most important for us is the app model and the experience. How people are going to write apps for Duo and Neo will have a lot more to do with each other than just writing a Windows app or an Android app, because it’s going to be about the Microsoft graph.”

Could you imagine a previous Microsoft CEO saying that they do not consider the operating system nearly as important as the app ecosystem?

Regardless of how bizarre it is that these devices were introduced a year out, I’m fascinated by the Surface Neo. I’ve always liked the Microsoft Courier, especially some of its weirder UI ideas that leaned heavily on maximizing its book-like form. I’m not sure how any of this stuff will translate into real life — the marketing video doesn’t give a good impression and neither do the hands-on videos I’ve seen — but it’s interesting, and I dig that.

The Apple Watch Turns Four: Some Thoughts

Four years ago today, the Apple Watch went on sale. Like many of Apple’s biggest hits, it wasn’t immediately well-understood. I think that was partly because of the distraction of the solid gold Edition model, and also partly because of the way the company pitched it. Like the iPhone’s infamous iPod, phone, and internet communicator setup, the Apple Watch was three things: a precise and customizable timepiece, an intimate communications device, and a health and fitness companion. It debuted in two sizes, classified by case material into three collections, all with a bunch of different band options, and with feature-rich software and third-party app availability. In hindsight, I think the rollout of the Apple Watch was unnecessarily complicated for a first-generation product.

But several generations of Apple Watch models and WatchOS versions later, that almost doesn’t matter. The watch has been, it is safe to say, a resounding success for the company. Apple has never broken out sales figures for it, but it’s likely one of the best-selling device families they’ve ever done. From a convoluted and much-mocked start, it has grown to become an invaluable accessory for millions. One more reason it was so often misunderstood: it’s truly the kind of product that you need to use to understand it.

I bought my first shortly after Apple started shipping them in 2015; I liked my Apple Watch so much that I replaced it with a Series 1 model the same day I shattered my Sport’s display in December 2016. But despite the allure of recent models’ GPS capabilities and far nicer industrial design, I have not had the itch to upgrade.

The Apple Watch is, for me, a highly polarizing product within my own head. That is: the things I like about it I really like about it; the things that I do not are deeply frustrating. I think its small size and more limited nature concentrate and amplify its high points as much as its flaws.

I adore the activity and fitness tracking, for example. In an office job, it’s far too easy to remain seated for hours at a time, standing up only to refill a coffee cup or water bottle, or to use the restroom. Similarly, it’s not uncommon for many people to spend a majority of their day barely moving their limbs: you get in the car, you stand in an elevator, you sit at your desk, and then you get back in the elevator and get in your car to go home — and this is likely even more sedentary for those who work from home. I don’t necessarily have the most extreme version of this as I have a walking commute, but reminders to get some physical activity are welcomed, particularly on the weekend and in the winter. Because of the Apple Watch, I walk through Calgary’s excellent indoor walkway system during the winter instead of taking the train to and from work.

I also like some of the smart watch face features. It feels completely natural for me to glance at my watch to check the weather or to see what appointments or reminders I have that day. Having Siri on my wrist is also a revelation. These features combine to help create the kind of passive technology future many of us have dreamed of. If only I could tilt my wrist and see when the next bus or train is due to arrive — that would nearly complete a feeling of immersion.

And then there are some of the finer things that are made possible because the watch is persistently authenticated throughout the day. Paying with my wrist doesn’t always feel natural, but virtually every transit pass I’ve bought since Apple Pay became available in Canada was purchased from my Apple Watch. I also think the ability to automatically unlock my iMac is sublime.

But then there are the things that I feel more negative about, and which have not meaningfully changed over the past four years — the worst of which is the third-party app ecosystem on the device. Even though I have a Series 1 Apple Watch, this has little to do with speed and everything to do with functionality. It feels like third-party developers either cannot figure out what they want to do with their WatchOS apps, or they’re not able to do what they want because of API limitations.

While the fit and finish of the hardware is nice and getting nicer — and the rectangular shape is apt for the many list-based functions of the device — it’s still a little strange to see so many people wearing the exact same watch every day. Band customization only gets you so far, no matter how good the bands are — and they are very good, indeed — and how fantastic the band changing system is; it’s still the same easily-identifiable watch everyone else is wearing. And it’s a little frustrating that it has to be a watch; in the morning, it’s a choice between wearing a traditional watch or wearing my Apple Watch. Rather than augmenting what I already wear, it replaces something.

I’m also not wholly convinced that pushing notifications to my wrist is somehow beneficial for either my phone use or my attentiveness. The notifications that go to my watch are limited to messages, custom Slack notifications,1 phone calls, and activity stuff, but I still have to use my iPhone to act upon virtually all of these. Also, looking at my phone during a meeting or while talking with a friend is considered rude, and I’m not sure looking at my watch is much better. I like that I can look at my watch and make a judgement right away whether it’s something that needs my attention now, or if it’s something I can deal with later; but, because notifications are generally irritating, I’ve already limited them to things that I generally act upon immediately. In general, I still think that devices need to do a better job of managing notifications.

Finally, there’s something about wearing an Apple Watch with my AirPods in my ears while looking at an iPhone that makes me feel, well, a little bit dorky. I don’t want to make a big deal out of this; I’m sure it’s just elevated levels of self-consciousness that are more indicative of who I am than of the device. This is almost certainly a me problem. But, still.

The Apple Watch has been on my mind lately for a couple of reasons, but one main one: my Series 1 is rapidly giving up the ghost. The first release of WatchOS 5.2 made its battery drain by early afternoon every day. And, even though recent beta seeds have restored its all-day battery life, I haven’t stopped thinking about what I would replace it with. Apple still offers the Series 3 which would give me plenty of new features at an affordable price, yet it’s in the same chunky case as the watch I have now. Spending over $500 in Canada would get me the Series 4 with its far nicer industrial design, and I’m just not sure it’s worth the cost for how I use it.

So, I dug out my old Boccia that I haven’t worn much since I got my first Apple Watch. It doesn’t have the same fit and finish as my Apple Watch; its band is not as easily swapped. It does not display the weather. It does not tell me when I should get some exercise. But it feels nice. It’s coincidental that the battery I needed for it arrived yesterday, but I’ve been wearing it all day, and I really like it. And this is not an expensive watch; if I were to spend $500 on a new watch, that would buy a pretty nice timepiece. It’s not Tudor or Omega money, but it would get me a decent Seiko or Citizen. Or I can leave it in the bank and add to it for a watch that’s far more like a piece of jewellery than it is a wrist computer. Even the nicest stainless steel Apple Watch is still identifiable primarily as a device.

Like I said, it’s a complete coincidence that all of this discovery happened around the fourth anniversary of the Apple Watch’s launch; but, this fortuitous timing gives me the opportunity to assess how it has built upon the first-generation product’s three pillars:

  • A precise and customizable timepiece: All computer clocks are precise; nobody expected the Apple Watch to struggle to keep time. This seemed like a silly and hyperbolic factor against which the Apple Watch should be judged. As far as customizability is concerned, case colours and different bands only get you so far; its hardware still screams “Apple Watch”.2 However, WatchOS updates have made it far more personalized with features like the Siri watch face and better third-party app integration.

  • An intimate communications device: I now know a lot of people with an Apple Watch, but I don’t know anyone who uses Digital Touch, shares their heartbeat, or even responds to texts with their watch. These features have not changed much over time, and the device’s size dictates its often awkward interaction mechanisms. Perhaps you frequently take calls on your watch or respond to texts with your voice, and that’s fine; it’s just not something I’ve seen a lot of people doing, even while they’re working out.

  • A health and fitness companion: This is, by far, the area where I think the Apple Watch has succeeded the most, and Apple has demonstrated this year after year by adding health features. The Workout app has come a long way since its launch, with new categories of workouts, workout detection, and a far simpler design. Newer generations of Apple Watch have added fall notification and an ECG, which I still think is wildly impressive. This is where I see myself continuing to use my Apple Watch in a more limited capacity, as it’s what I’ve been using it primarily for every day since I got it: taking my Apple Watch off broke my 379 day streak of closing all my rings. I’m a little bummed about that.

The Apple Watch seems to be excelling in one of its three pillars, doing fine in another, and totally missing the mark on the third. Apple is clearly learning what people use their Apple Watch for and adjusting accordingly, investing most heavily in its fitness and health features.

I have also learned something over the last four years that I’ve used an Apple Watch: I learned that my hesitance to upgrade is not from a lack of new features — there are plenty of those — but almost the opposite. I don’t know that I want more of anything happening on my wrist; I guess I just want less.

  1. I have a Slack workspace all for myself with some custom news alerts and push notifications set up. It’s kind of like a roll-your-own notification service for stuff that I care about. It’s quite silly, granted, but it works for me. ↥︎

  2. The Apple Watch’s hardware is notable for introducing three interaction mechanisms: Force Touch, the Taptic Engine, and the Digital Crown.

    Force Touch has been applied across Apple’s product line: it’s used for trackpads on the Mac, and its general principles were brought to the iPhone with 3D Touch. But its role on the Apple Watch has been scaled back since the first release of WatchOS, and 3D Touch is a mixed bag. Maybe the best current implementation of Force Touch is with the nearly solid-state trackpads in Apple’s current notebook lineup and in the second-generation Magic Trackpad, but I don’t use any of the Force Touch stuff in MacOS.

    The Digital Crown continues to baffle me. It’s a smart way to use the language of a knob that’s present on pretty much all watches. But so much of the interaction in WatchOS remains screen-dependent, which means that I often see people touching their Apple Watch screens instead of using the Digital Crown.

    The Taptic Engine has been a resounding success, as far as I’m concerned. It is among the finest physical interaction methods I’ve used on any device, particularly in its iPhone implementation. The vibration motors in most phones suck; some phones still ship with shitty buzzy vibrator mechanisms in 2019. The Taptic Engine in the Apple Watch is equally great; its strong pulses on the wrist feel sophisticated, not obtrusive. ↥︎

Twitter’s Algorithmic Timeline Sometimes Surfaces Radical Tweets, Boosting Their Reach ⇥ edition.cnn.com

Oliver Darcy, CNN:

Over the last several months, Twitter has begun inserting what it believes to be relevant and popular tweets into the feeds of people who do not subscribe to the accounts that posted them. In other words, Twitter has started showing users tweets from accounts that are followed by those they follow. This practice is different from the promoted content paid for by advertisers, as Twitter is putting these posts into the feeds of users without being paid and without consent from users.

[…]

In effect, the practice means Twitter may at times end up amplifying inflammatory political rhetoric, misinformation, conspiracy theories, and flat out lies to its users. This comes at a time when other platforms, like YouTube, are facing intense criticism for using algorithms to suggest content to users. It’s been documented, for instance, that YouTube’s algorithm has exposed users to fringe content and helped radicalize them online. YouTube has pledged to address the problem.

[…]

There is some irony to the amplification of these right-wing voices. Trump and other prominent Republicans have long accused Twitter of “shadow banning” users with conservative viewpoints, an accusation Twitter has strongly denied. In reality, not only is Twitter not “shadow banning” these right-wing personalities for their political viewpoints, the platform’s algorithm is actually amplifying some of their tweets to audiences who do not even follow their accounts.

Algorithmic recommendations from all major platforms — Instagram and YouTube, especially — are failing users by encouraging them to take their interests to the farthest maximum: a you like coffee; have you tried cocaine? kind of effect. Are these features necessary? I imagine recommendations increase the amount of time spent on these platforms which, in turn, increases their ad revenue and improves the figures they report every quarter. Evidence is growing, though, that recommendations are also detrimental to the health of the platform and its users.

I hate to sound like a Luddite, but was there something wrong with a purely reverse-chronological feed?

You May Have Forgotten Foursquare, But It Didn’t Forget You ⇥ wired.com

Paris Martineau, Wired:

Ask someone about Foursquare and they’ll probably think of the once-hyped social media company, known for gamifying mobile check-ins and giving recommendations. But the Foursquare of today is a location-data giant. During an interview with NBC in November, the company’s CEO, Jeff Glueck, said that only Facebook and Google rival Foursquare in terms of location-data precision.

You might think you don’t use Foursquare, but chances are you do. Foursquare’s technology powers the geofilters in Snapchat, tagged tweets on Twitter; it’s in Uber, Apple Maps, Airbnb, WeChat, and Samsung phones, to name a few. (Condé Nast Traveler, owned by the same parent company as WIRED, relies on Foursquare data.)

In 2014, Foursquare launched Pilgrim, a piece of code that passively tracks where your phone goes using Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS, and GSM to identify the coffee shop or park or Thai restaurant you’re visiting, then feeds that data to its partner apps to send you, say, an offer for a 10 percent off coupon if you leave a review for the restaurant. Today, Pilgrim and the company’s Places API are an integral part of tens of thousands of apps, sites, and interfaces. As Foursquare’s website says, “If it tells you where, it’s probably built on Foursquare.”

I’m sure many apps and services from the earliest days of the App Store are dead now, but I wonder what happened to the ones that aren’t. In either case, I wonder what happened to stored user data — particularly private and personally-identifiable details. Was all of it securely wiped from servers, in the case of a company shuttering? What kind of highly-private data is still lingering on servers and development machines worldwide that has simply been forgotten about by users who have moved on to other apps and services?

Kevin Alexander Found the Best Burger Place in America, Which Killed It ⇥ thrillist.com

Kevin Alexander, in Thrillist:

In my office, I have a coffee mug from Stanich’s in Portland, Oregon. Under the restaurant name, it says “Great hamburgers since 1949.” The mug was given to me by Steve Stanich on the day I told him that, after eating 330 burgers during a 30-city search, I was naming Stanich’s cheeseburger the best burger in America. That same day, we filmed a short video to announce my pick. On camera, Stanich cried as he talked about how proud his parents would be. After the shoot, he handed me the mug, visibly moved. “My parents are thanking you from the grave,” he said, shaking my hand vigorously. When I left, I felt light and happy. I’d done a good thing.

Five months later, in a story in The Oregonian, restaurant critic Michael Russell detailed how Stanich’s had been forced to shut down. In the article, Steve Stanich called my burger award a curse, “the worst thing that’s ever happened to us.” He told a story about the country music singer Tim McGraw showing up one day, and not being able to serve him because there was a five hour wait for a burger. On January 2, 2018, Stanich shut down the restaurant for what he called a “two week deep cleaning.” Ten months later, Stanich’s is still closed. Now when I look at the Stanich’s mug in my office, I no longer feel light and happy. I feel like I’ve done a bad thing.

There seems to be no satisfactory or clean answer to the question of what do reviewers leave behind?; the reach of a reviewer with a global audience means that, much like geotagging Instagram photos, it has the ability to share something fantastic to such an extent that it ruins everything that made it good.

Update: It turns out that this story could have a far darker conclusion.