DANGER POINT

Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos meet the Segway prototype

Sat, 11 May 2013 21:34:52 -0400

Steve Jobs: I think it sucks!

Tim Adams: Why?

Steve Jobs: It just does.

Tim Adams: In what sense? Give me a clue.

Steve Jobs: Its shape is not innovative, it's not elegant, it doesn't feel anthropomorphic. You have this incredibly innovative machine but it looks very traditional. There are design firms out there that could come up with things we've never thought of, things that would make you shit in your pants.

Tim Adams: Well, let's keep going, because we don't have much time today to-

John Doerr: We do have time. We want to get Steve's and Jeff's ideas.

Tim Adams: The problem at this point is lead time in our schedule –

Steve Jobs: Screw the lead times. You don't have a great product yet! I know burn rates are important, but you'll only get one shot at this, and if you blow it, it's over.

Social Roulette

Sat, 11 May 2013 21:07:56 -0400

Social Roulette:

Social Roulette has a 1/6 chance of deleting your account, 5/6 chance that it just posts ‘you played’ to your timeline.

And this comes out the week after I post my big ol’ essay on ephemerality in app design. Hrmph.

"‘The best designers are passionate about design, yet dispassionate about their own designs.’ The..."

Wed, 08 May 2013 09:24:04 -0400

“‘The best designers are passionate about design, yet dispassionate about their own designs.’ The managers tell us they look for folks who get very excited and curious about creating great designs, but can easily walk away from their own ideas and work when it makes sense to do so. […] Design is a team sport and the managers say the individuals who can do this are better team members.”

- Jared Spool on Passionate About Design; Dispassionate About Your Design (via pascallaliberte)

There’s a Snapchat video I sent myself a month ago in...

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 22:47:00 -0400

There’s a Snapchat video I sent myself a month ago in Mexico. I’m saving it for a rainy day. The video itself is inappropriate for pretty much every other medium - and it’s not pornographic or gory. It’s just that drunken revelry had by some young travelers doesn’t really fit on a Facebook page that anybody’s mom might check at 2pm on a Sunday afternoon.

In that innocuous self-destructing message, there’s something that’s too important to forget, but too intimate for a text message or a wall post or a tweet.

Snapchat separates the act of capturing an event and the sharing of it. No one ever wants to record their weird facial expressions for posterty’s sake, but man do I wanna share them. Hence, Snapchat. Facebook, by contrast, saves everything that passes through its doors.

And there’s something gained by embracing ephemerality – the giving of an expiry date. It’s the reason that I think Snapchat is the only app that has ever come close to being art. From their blog:

Snapchat isn’t about capturing the traditional Kodak moment. It’s about communicating with the full range of human emotion — not just what appears to be pretty or perfect.

That is goddamn liberating. It’s funny how much of human life can only exist in the ephemeral space between being seen and forgotten. Nothing persists, and that is where we find some freedom.

You might remember glimmers of the Snapchat feeling when trying to remember what images are on a roll of undeveloped film. Or the voice of someone who called you.

But it’s not a tool of nostalgia. It’s playing with the same tricks that make our imaginations go wild – half-remembered images, forgotten context – and it works because that’s actually what a lot of our everyday lived experience is like. Nothing is ever as unambiguous as having 21 likes and four hundred followers. Instead, the events in our lives take on the shape and color and weight that our brains somewhat arbitrarily encourage them to. We are always experiencing something as humans, never anything but, and that’s how life can feel a certain way that Facebook just can’t capture.

Literally. It cannot capture it. It may attempt to make all your data persist forever, but it cannot capture how information feels.

There are some smart apps that hack the persistence of the web, or openly flout it. Another is Duck Duck Go:

We believe in better search and not tracking.

This sounds deeply unconventional. Aren’t we supposed to accept that tracking leads to better search? That more information about our searches and our social networks will produce better results for us?

No. I don’t think anyone who’s seen Google’s vision of a social web could honestly say any different (though after using Duck Duck Go for a couple weeks, it looks like they have a ways to go). Regardless, we have bought into Google’s vision of the web. It feels constantly icky – like a close relative’s inappropriate comments – but we deal with it.

I guess the merit of these new apps - ephemeral apps, as I’ll call them - is that they isolate a feeling that got lost somewhere around the point that persistent storage of all the data, anywhere, became financially and technically feasible.

For all the talk about our brains making us feel a certain way, maybe the appeal of these new apps is far simpler than neuroscience. What’s admirable is that they embrace entropy. Which is a pretty important part of the human condition. It’s the terrifying part, granted, but also where all the fun bits occur.

We end. Our stories end. Our memories will fade from this world in ways that no filter can reproduce, that no Instagram can imagine.

It occurs to me that there’s this trend in the tech startup world, where people think that technology means doing things that are supposed to suck in data and venture capital and IPO money forever until all our brains sit in Google Jars.

I don’t expect things have to be that way. I actually don’t think people want things to be that way, either. When people say that these are early days of the web, and early days of ‘the mobile revolution’ (whatever that means), they mean that they don’t know what technology is supposed to do. The only way we answer that is by trying new things that don’t forget the oldest things.

It’s pretty obvious, though, isn’t it? Technology is supposed to do what we care about. What we, human beings, give a shit about. And no app or invention or piece of art has a monopoly on understanding the human condition.

So, every so often we look at a new way of communicating and we realize that it has something important that we forgot about for a while. Something human. Something difficult to pinpoint for even the most astute observers.

And that’s Snapchat. That’s possibly also Duck Duck Go. It’s most certainly not Facebook, nor Google. It probably isn’t the web browser in its current form.

These are the most recent words in the longest running conversation ever: the discourse over how we should interact with one another. It’s almost a political question, and it admits of no absolute answer. It just needs humans to take up the latest suggestion and see if it really is better, in some ways, than what came before.

We’re just beginning to look at technology in this light, and I’m unspeakably excited to be a part of this grand project. It comes from a place of unbelievable privilege: now that we can take it for granted that our world is so completely connected, we can take the opportunity to wonder if it should really be so.

And the answer is, I think, that we’re damn close. But as always, the devil is in the details, and certain popular devils of the internet have found a way to tempt humans into some fairly empty pleasures.

People know when they’re being had, though. And those are the people who, after having grown tired of fakery, will end up seeing what the web should really look like.

The Strongest Careers Are Non-Linear

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 10:38:53 -0400

The Strongest Careers Are Non-Linear:

Kids should be working in internships in high school. Because the best path to a good job is a bunch of great internships. But great internships don’t go to people who need money. They are mostly for young people. Yes, this is probably illegal and classist and bad for a fluid society. But we will not debate that here. Instead we will debate why kids need to go to college if the internships are what make them employable? Kids should do internships in high school and by their college years, they are capable of real jobs where they are doing work that people value, with cash.

The three most wrong things about this post:

The young woman selling stock in herself was a hoax.
We’re supposed to accept that high school is useless for everyone based on these three sources, none of which even pretend to tackle that question in all its complexity.
What the fuck are you supposed to do at an internship in high school? What knowledge or world experience could you possibly have to offer a company? And why in the name of christ should you be giving your labour for free (because that appears to be the meaning of ‘internship’) to anyone rather than focusing on building yourself into someone who might understand how to meaningfully contribute to society?

Infuriating stuff from the woman who calls herself the Brazen Careerist.

liveactionfloyd: I wasn’t going to post this to my blog, but...

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 16:07:35 -0400

liveactionfloyd:

I wasn’t going to post this to my blog, but after repeated requests for the audio file I reconsidered my decision. Silence isn’t the answer. Rest in peace, Rehteah.

Might not feel like spring, but my cactus sure thinks it is.

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 10:38:30 -0400

Might not feel like spring, but my cactus sure thinks it is.

bisforpiano: My favorite thing is when I forget that I’ve added...

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 20:46:05 -0400

bisforpiano:

My favorite thing is when I forget that I’ve added an extension to my browser so instead of saying “the cloud” it says “my butt”.

My least favorite thing is when I get an e-mail from my dad saying “I’ve added it to my butt.”

Video

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 12:48:39 -0400

Beach tracks.

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 11:20:31 -0400

Beach tracks.

Salbute-making 101. (at los dos)

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 14:10:48 -0400

Salbute-making 101. (at los dos)

Get yo dance on, Merida. (at Plaza Grande)

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 23:11:07 -0400

Get yo dance on, Merida. (at Plaza Grande)

Yucutan, here I come.

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 12:18:11 -0400

Yucutan, here I come.

If you're worried about Google dropping support for something you use...

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:49:08 -0400

Don’t worry. Things end. They always have, they always will. Make sure that you can take your data when it does end, and you’ll be set.

It’s a good thing that they’re not supporting things that don’t make them money. Seriously. All good companies do. Maybe Google will become a better company with better products if it does follow that path. Maybe it’ll even stop trying to pretend it’s more morally righteous, more open, more knowledgeable of the future. Maybe it’ll just ship good, useable, important things. That would be great.

kateordie: It started as a tweet, and it became an...

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 12:21:39 -0400

kateordie:

It started as a tweet, and it became an infographic.

Hey guys! Kate Leth’s subcultures are definitely cooler and more valid than yours.

As a male feminist, I’m not a fan of MRAs. As a dedicated TV watcher, I didn’t really care about My Little Pony, but I gave it a shot. And as someone who cares a lot about the clothes I wear, I’ve learned that I don’t look good in fedoras.

But I’ve met people who fit those three categories. I didn’t agree with and certainly didn’t get along with them. That’s OK. What I definitely didn’t do is trash them on the internet. And that, folks, is a lesson we all have to learn: don’t be a dick to people who can instead be understood.

Photo

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 10:50:47 -0400

"We need an ethics of quantification, Morozov cries, and I cry with him. When is it good? When is it..."

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 19:12:00 -0400

“We need an ethics of quantification, Morozov cries, and I cry with him. When is it good? When is it bad? How can it be used to further our ends, as opposed to being celebrated as its own end?”

- From this review of To Save Everything, Click Here, a new book by Evgeny Morozov. In my undergrad I did a lot of work in the philosophy of science, and I came away from it with a deep appreciation for Kuhn. When research paradigms change, the new one isn’t chosen by anything much resembling rationality; theory choice seems to always be underdetermined by existing evidence. And that means that pretty much everything is value-laden, which is OK, because what isn’t value-laden isn’t interesting for humans. For instance, stats are hard because you need to know how to effectively but also responsibly use models and techniques.

What grounds the discussion of quantification (and I have a hunch that quantification’s problems, as described by Morozov, are the problems of all symbolic systems, and certainly also problems that narratives face) is the fact that these models work and matter only insofar as they aim at truth. And sure, you can be a dick about it like Morozov, but that’s no fun, and you’re going to miss out on a whole lot of important, truth-speaking stuff if you take a Luddite’s view towards all the tools of science. Sure, you might avoid seeing the wrong bits that make you feel uncomfortable. But why not actually contribute? Why not actually be a part of the refining of quantification? Why not see where it can go, and bring in your knowledge also about what is moral?

What seeeeeems to be important is that we aim at truth, so let’s not silo ourselves too much. There’s a reason why the subtitle of this blog is “at the tech frontier of the liberal arts.” It’s because I’ve found there’s too much benefit in being a scientist about the real human shit I care about to ever go back to thinking that theory has all the answers.

"Simplicity is not about making something without ornament, but rather about making something very..."

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 14:59:00 -0400

“Simplicity is not about making something without ornament, but rather about making something very complex, then slicing elements away, until you reveal the very essence.
After all the slicing away, you may realize, now that you can clearly see the idea, that it’s actually not very good.”

- From The Story of My App in the New Yorker, telling the tale of how a Christopher Niemann built the Petting Zoo app. It turns out that you very much can treat apps as an artful medium, and that, as usual, the hardest part of making good art is to trim out the bad parts.

House show! @themountainsandthetrees

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 20:10:34 -0400

House show! @themountainsandthetrees

How many popes are alive?

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 19:32:04 -0400

How many popes are alive?