Rolandt

Thanks everyone for the great feedback on the all-new Things – this has been a fantastic launch! It’s extremely busy here in Stuttgart, but we wanted to quickly send out an update on the latest news.

App Store Response

We’re delighted to see that Things is receiving solid 5 star reviews in the App Store – the response has been fantastic! The Mac app also reached #1 in Top Paid, and even unseated Final Cut & Logic in many countries to claim #1 in Top Grossing. Thank you for purchasing Things and supporting its development!

Inbox 10,000

We’ve received over 10,000 inquiries with comments, questions, feature requests, etc. and we’re working around the clock to get back to you all. Currently, our support team (and our coders!) are answering emails that came in 5 days ago, so please hang in there :)

Price & Discount

Since there are still so many support questions in our queue, we’ve decided to extend our 20% launch discount until June 1st. This gives us more time to respond to questions, and gives you more time to evaluate the apps. If you plan to upgrade from Things 2, this is the best time to do it.

Also, please note that you don’t need to do anything to get the discount – the price you see in the App Store already has the discount applied. See this page for more info.

Importing From Other Apps

• Wunderlist: If you’re coming from Wunderlist, you can easily import your to-dos.
• OmniFocus: You can migrate from OmniFocus via our AppleScript importer. There was a bug in the script that is now fixed.

Repeating To-Dos in Projects

Things allows you to create repeating to-dos, but there has always been one limitation: it wasn’t possible to have them inside of projects. Many people have written in asking for this, so we’re going to add this option. We’re working on it now and it will be released in an update soon.

Thanks again for all your feedback everyone!

sillygwailo shared this story from kottke.org.

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Last week (approx. May 7-14), I stopped using social media for an entire week. I logged out of all the sites and deleted the apps from my phone. I didn’t so much as peek at Instagram, which is, with Twitter and old-school Flickr, probably my favorite online service of all time. I used Twitter as minimally as I could, for work only.¹ I didn’t check in anywhere on Swarm. No Facebook. As much as I could, I didn’t use my phone. I left it at home when I went to the grocery store. I didn’t play any games on it. I left it across the room when I went to bed and when I worked.

Many people have given up social media and written about it — the digital equivalent of the “Why I’m Leaving New York” essay — but since I didn’t write about leaving New York, I’m going to do this instead.

I used to be very good about using my phone and social media appropriately. More than a decade of working on kottke.org taught me how to not be online when I wasn’t working (for the most part). I tried super hard not to use my phone at all around my kids and if I was out with friends, my phone stayed in my pocket.²

Almost a year ago, after 13+ years in the city, I moved from lower Manhattan³ to rural Vermont. It’s beautiful here. I live in a house in the country surrounded by horse pasture and there’s great skiing in the winter. The nearest town is only five minutes away by car; it has a two-screen movie theater, a handful of restaurants (none of which are typically open after 10pm), two grocery stores, but nowhere to get a proper donut, sushi, or bowl of ramen. (The nearest ramen is an hour’s drive away.) While I was writing this post yesterday afternoon, the power in my house went out and didn’t come back on for three hours, forcing a delay in publication. It’s been difficult to meet people. Folks here are nice, but they mostly remind me of the people in the small town I grew up in (aka why I moved to the city in the first place). I work from home at a desk in my bedroom and some days, the only beings I’ll talk to are Siri, my landlord’s horses, and some days, my kids and their mom.

Social media, mostly through my phone, has been an important way for me to stay connected with friends and goings on in the wider world. But lately I’d noticed an obsessiveness, an addiction really, that I didn’t like once I became fully aware of it. When I wasn’t working, I was on my phone, refreshing Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook repeatedly in an endless series, like a little old lady at Caesar’s Palace working several slot machines at the same time. And I couldn’t stop it — my phone was in my hand even when I was trying to concentrate on my kids, watching a movie, or reading a book. So, I quit for a week to see what would happen. It’s not a super-long time period, but here’s what I noticed:

- Once I’d set my mind to it, it was pretty easy to go cold turkey. Perhaps my Twitter usage and keeping up with the news for kottke.org acted as a nicotine patch, but I don’t think so. Instagram was the toughest to stay away from, but I didn’t crack once.

- As the week went on, it was more and more evident that it wasn’t so much social media as the phone that was the problem. Even now, a few days after the conclusion of my experiment, I’m leaving my phone at home when I go out or across the room when I’m doing something. I’m going to try hard to keep this up.

- Buuuut, when you have kids, there is no such thing as giving up your phone. There’s always the potential call from their school or their mom or their doctor or another parent regarding a playdate or or or. I spend enough time online at my computer for work that I could mostly do without my phone, but with kids, that’s not really an option.

- Not a single person noticed that I had stopped using social media. (Not enough to tell me anyway.) Perhaps if it had been two weeks? For me, this reinforced that social media is actually not a good way to “stay connected with friends”. Social media aggregates interactions between loved ones so that you get industrialized communication rather than personal connection. No one really notices if a particular person goes missing because they’re just one interchangeable node in a network.

- My no-social week, for a variety of reasons, was probably the shittiest week I’d had in more than a year. Total emotional mess. Being off social media didn’t make it any better, but I doubt it made it worse. Overall, it was probably a good thing I wasn’t subjecting my friends and followers to self-subtweets and emo Instagram Stories…I was already scoring enough own goals without social media’s help.

- So, what did I do instead? I wish I could say that I had loads of extra free time that I used to learn Spanish, clean my house, catch up with old friends, cook delicious meals, and finish a couple work projects. Perhaps if shittiest week ever hadn’t been happening, I would have done some of that. Still, I did end up going to bed early every night, read a couple books, and had more time for work and dealing with kid drama.

After the week was up, I greedily checked in on Instagram and Facebook to see what I had missed. Nothing much, of course. Since then, I’ve been checking them a bit less. When I am on, I’ve been faving and commenting more in an attempt to be a little more active in connecting. I unfollowed some accounts I realized I didn’t care that much about and followed others I’ve been curious to check out. Swarm I check a lot less, about once a day — there was a lot of FOMO going on when I saw friends checked in at cool places in NYC or on vacations in Europe. And I’m only checking in when I go someplace novel, just to keep a log of where I’ve been…that’s always fun to look back on.

Mostly, I’ve resolved to use my phone less. Being on my phone was my fidget spinner…this thing that I would do when there was nothing else to do or that I would use to delay going to bed or delay getting out of bed in the morning. Going forward, I’m going to be more mindful about its use. If nothing else, my hands and thumbs might start feeling better.

1. Yeah, I did not stop using Twitter. Ideally I would have, but Twitter is a huge source of information for this here website and I couldn’t afford to give it up without ditching work for a week, which I did not want to do because I wanted to maintain my normal schedule. But I didn’t look at Twitter on my phone, didn’t reply to or fave any tweets, muted some non-news/link accounts I follow, and limited my usage to “business hours”.↩

1. Still one of my favorite tweets is from Scott Simpson: “My new standard of cool: when I’m hanging out with you, I never see your phone ever ever ever.”↩

1. Haha, you’re getting a mini leaving NYC essay anyway. Suckers!↩

Tags: Facebook   Instagram   Jason Kottke   NYC   Swarm   Twitter   WWW

sillygwailo shared this story from kottke.org.

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In The Ultimate Guide To Being An Introvert, James Altucher describes a scenario that is recognizable to anyone who is an introvert:

A few months ago I was at a dinner where everyone was “networking”.

I was totally frozen. I was speaking inside my head but I couldn’t open my mouth.

People were talking and laughing and getting to know each other.

Inside of me, I wanted desperately to talk, to think of things to say, to bond with the people. But suddenly I felt tired and dumb and like I had nothing to say.

And then I was afraid everyone thought I was stupid and boring. Then I thought they didn’t like me. So that made me want to talk even less.

I didn’t speak for the rest of the dinner. I went home but I couldn’t sleep. I kept whispering “sh*t” out loud even though I was trying not to. I just wanted to go to sleep and disappear.

My mind wouldn’t let me. For hours: “s**t”.

This has happened to me literally hundreds of times…at dinners, at conferences, at parties. That desperation to talk, to connect to other human beings, is so powerful but is matched by an even greater uncontrollable desire to sink right into the floor and out of the room. Over the past few years, I’ve gotten more comfortable talking to others in these situations…with mixed results. I don’t know if it’s introversion or some other weird thing, but my brain is so engaged in listening to other people and paying attention to social cues that I don’t really have time to figure out what I’m going to say. So I end up just saying whatever I’m thinking…aka, my inner dialogue.¹

I don’t know about you, but my inner dialogue is fucking weird and sometimes not fit for sharing with others. This doesn’t happen all the time, and I do have a filter that keeps most of the truly dumb stuff unsaid, but not all of it. At best, I’ve noticed this TMI tendency can come off as charmingly intimate and at worst, needy or unbalanced. As I get to know someone or am in a more familiar situation, this direct pipeline from my brain to my mouth shuts down, but while it exists, it can make it difficult for me to get to know people.

Hell, I don’t even know why I’m telling you all of this. I guess I’ve decided that, with apologies to not-Mark Twain, it’s better to speak and be thought a fool in the interests of getting to know others and hope that the people on the receiving end are understanding enough to recognize my earnest desire for connection among the sometimes hamfisted conversation.

1. As I was telling a friend the other day, in this very tiny way, I sympathize with Donald Trump. There’s clearly very little filter between what he thinks and what he says. But, unlike him, I don’t do it all the time, I’m aware of it, I try hard to filter it when I can, and have chosen a line of work that allows me the luxury of taking time to shape my thoughts into something a little less stream-of-consciousness…present post and footnote excluded.↩

Tags: introversion   James Altucher

sillygwailo shared this story from Blog - Susan J. Fowler.

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All of the really great people of the past and of the present always have some singular destiny. Somehow they know exactly what they love, they find it when they're young, and they spend their entire lives doing that one thing. Their destiny, their singular passion becomes their entire life, and they love every minute of it. It's their calling, it's what they were born to do, and it's beautiful. 

My husband, for example, is one of these people, driven by one thing: building a quantum computer. It's been his passion, his goal, his singular destiny his entire adult life. Every waking moment is spent building quantum computers, and he loves every minute of it. Watching him work is one of my favorite things in the world. 

My life is so different. I have no singular destiny, no one true passion, no goal. I flutter from one thing to the next. I want to be a physicist and a mathematician and a novelist and write a sitcom and write a symphony and design buildings and be a mother. I want to run a magazine and understand the lives of ants and be a philosopher and be a computer scientist and write an epic poem and understand every ancient language. I don't just want one thing. I want it all. 

This is why I read so much. I want to know it all. I want to hear every story. I want to feel everything that can be felt. I want to live a thousand lives. I read and I read and I read, and I love every word and every hurt and every dream and every failure. 

There's a piece of paper taped to the wall above my desk, titled "What I Want in Life." One day, not too long ago, I sat down and made a list of the things I wanted my life to be, leaving out any occupations or fields or specific goals. It reads: 

What I want in life

1. To figure out how to find meaning in life and give meaning to life
2. To understand how to do what is right
3. To always do what is right
4. To have a husband and family and friends to love for all my life
5. To write stories and create worlds
6. To spend a lot of time outdoors enjoying the beauty of the world
7. To be a light in the world
8. To always leave things better than I found them
9. To understand the universe
10. To understand my place in the universe

Sometimes I look at this list. Then I look at people who have singular destinies, and I'm in awe and I'm jealous. It hurts a little.  I want a singular passion. I want to be driven by only one goal, not ten thousand goals. Because having ten thousand goals is paralyzing sometimes, and you can never truly dedicate yourself to something the way that that something deserves. Because having ten thousand goals means you always feel like you're searching for the one. 

People tell me I can't do all the things I want to do, and they are of course wrong, because I can and I do and I will. But I still can't ever reach my greatest, deepest, most secret goal, the goal I left off that list: to have a singular passion. Maybe that's ok. Maybe my life will always be about running toward that unattainable goal, trying and loving everything I find along the way. And maybe at the end, when I have to give an account of my life, I'll say that I never was anything, but I was everything. 

Orthography is the set of conventions for writing in language. Microsyntax is a term I dreamed up years ago for the conventions on social media like Twitter like hashtags, retweets, and the like.

My ‘career’ as a whatever-it-is-I-am (’public intellectual’ has a nicer ring than ‘obsessive scribbler’) keeps me in constant contact with social media tools, and I want to speak in favor of some suggested patterns that I am using, that others might adopt.

Vertical bar (’|’) to indicate authorship or attribution

I have shifted to a single character mechanism to replace attribution and authorship. So for example, when I attribute a blockquote in a post as a quote by a given author, I make it look like this:

Bigger Cities Make Do With Less | Luis Bettencourt, Geoffrey West

This new, more quantitative science of cities is becoming possible because of the increasing availability of information — official statistics as well as novel measures of human and social activity — on cities and metropolitan areas worldwide.

I use the same convention in Twitter, where the reduction in characters is an additional benefit. And this can be an international standard, independent of language.

Dropping the conjunction in comma separated lists

As you may be aware, there has been ongoing contention about the placement of a final comma in lists prior to the coordinating conjunction (usually ’or’, or ‘and’), called the serial comma (see Serial comma in Wikipedia). I think like a programmer or logician, so my solution most recently has been to avoid the arguments about whether or use the serial comma or not, and instead, drop the conjunction.

So, instead of worrying about the ambiguity in phrases like this:

To my parents, Mother Teresa and the Pope:

and resolving it with a serial comma

To my parents, Mother Teresa, and the Pope:

I instead use just the serial comma:

To my parents, Mother Teresa, the Pope:

In this case the series has an implied logical ‘and’ connecting the elements of the series. After all the commas are a shorthand for the longer but syntactically correct

To my parents and Mother Teresa and the Pope

which is unambiguous. The commas are like diacritical marks that represent ‘and’s.

In the case of a series ending in an or, I suggest separating with semicolons. Consider the case of the Maine Labor Dispute in 2017 (again, see Serial comma in Wikipedia), where the meaning of a rule about overtime pay hinged on a series ending in ‘or’ but lacking a serial comma –

The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution

– of certain goods were ineligible for overtime pay. The question was whether the list referred to distribution of the goods, or only packing of the goods for distribution.

The uses of semicolons as marks representing ‘or’s would be unequivocal:

The canning; processing; preserving; freezing; drying; marketing; storing; packing for shipment; distribution

versus

The distribution or canning; processing; preserving; freezing; drying; marketing; storing; packing for shipment

or

The canning; processing; preserving; freezing; drying; marketing; storing; packing for shipment or distribution

The last two are synonymous: distribution is one thing in contract to the ‘or’ list starting with ‘canning’ and ending with ‘packing for shipment’.

This use of semicolons to indicate a pause between clauses is quite similar in purpose, so it shouldn’t confuse greatly. 

The greatest difficulty will be to get people to elide the final ‘and’ or ‘or’ in lists conceptually. 

Turning numbers around

My last recommendation is quite simple: we should adopt (or revert to) a different natural number system where the units would precede the ‘decade’ or ‘tens’, and so on. This form is in use in many languages, like German and Czech. But we should reverse the order of the numbers in left-to-right languages so that we can simply read the number from left to right.

So, an example: 

1,234,567

This is read as one million two hundred and thirty four thousand, five hundred and sixty seven. But think about the processing. I have to process the number completely from right to left before I can say the first ‘one million’, because I don’t know the magnitude by just looking at the ‘1,’ at the beginning.

(Note, we have the vestiges of this in English for the numbers thirteen through nineteen which are unit + ten in form, and the twenty through ninety decade numbers, which are short hand for ‘two ten’ and so on.)

So consider this case:

123,456,789

Which we read today as ‘one hundred twenty three million, four hundred and fifty six thousand, seven hundred eighty nine’. It’s a numeral with millions, thousands, and hundreds groups divided by commas. 

If we reverse, we’d get this:

987,654,321

and we adopted the ‘four and twenty blackbirds’ scheme for reading the number, I would read it as ‘nine and eighty and seven hundred, six and fifty and four hundred thousand, three and twenty and one hundred million’. 

I am not betting on that coming into use anytime soon.

“I am in Toronto for the seventh annual gathering to commemorate (not celebrate) the 25 May 2010 court proceedings (not a trial “in open court”) in which “independent” (though not necessarily impartial) special prosecutor Rick Peck announced and explained (not necessarily credibly) his decision to withdraw criminal charges against former Attorney General of Ontario Michael Bryant in the 31 August 2009 death of my son Darcy Allan Sheppard.
Wayne Scott and I will set up a memorial ghost bike in front of Old City Hall at 6:30 p.m. on 25 May (Thursday).

Please join us, if you can, as an expression of continuing support and solidarity.

The forecast is for rain, so we may have to adjourn to a local watering hole for respite. I have to return to Thornhill at a reasonable hour, so we can leave early, after paying our respects.

With gratitude and best wishes,
Allan Sheppard”

Wayne Scott setting up the DAS 7 sign in front of Old City Hall to remind all about the injustice carried out seven years ago.

The ghost bike with sign.

A few fine folk remembering Darcy Allan Shepard. I was very honoured to meet his dad tonight.

A few words.

Then a haunting lamentation was sung.

A small gathering to continue to bear witness.

Thanks to Wayne Scott and Allan Sheppard for keeping up the good fight.

Link to the original blog post about the reaction to the sentencing in Darcy’s killing. Note also that the banner for this blog is from a picture taken during the memorial ride for Darcy Allan Sheppard.

How can a cyclist, new to commuting by bike and not all that experienced in riding, estimate how long a commute will take?

I have been riding for 4 days to and from work. 156km over over 4 days. I'd like to know what I should be averaging time wise. I am 203 lbs / 92kg, and somewhat fit. The ride is 13 miles/ 21km there and back with an elevation of 81 meters and I'm using a good standard bike.

Are there any general guidelines to use to get an estimate? What factors will affect this? (Fitness, traffic, etc.) How can I identify ways to get faster? (Routing, accounting for other delays, etc.)

Before we published our strategy guide, we solicited feedback from 20 or so people. It made the final result infinitely better than what it otherwise would have been.

We also did this for our community platform comparison tool and another upcoming guide.

I’m constantly amazed at the generosity and willingness of people to sacrifice their time to help out on these projects.

For all the talk of too little time, people still fundamentally want to help. You just need to find interesting projects they can help with.

What upcoming content, marketing promotions, products, or ideas can you get feedback from your community on?

A fascinating day of discussion about Hong Kong football and its place in the city’s culture took place at the Education University of Hong Kong this week. Organised by Dr Lawrence Ho Ka-ki of the social sciences department and football culture researcher and aficionado of the local game Tobias Zuser, it brought together FA officials, academics, fans, current and former players and coaches and others to discuss topics such as national identity, youth development, fan culture, gender, the...

We’ve got some great news to share today: the Raspberry Pi Foundation is joining forces with the CoderDojo Foundation, in a merger that will give many more young people all over the world new opportunities to learn how to be creative with technology.

CoderDojo is a global network of coding clubs for kids from seven to 17. The first CoderDojo took place in July 2011 when James Whelton and Bill Liao decided to share their passion for computing by setting up a club at the National Software Centre in Cork. The idea was simple: provide a safe and social place for young people to acquire programming skills, learning from each other and supported by mentors.

Since then, James and Bill have helped turn that idea into a movement that reaches across the whole world, with over 1,250 CoderDojos in 69 countries, regularly attended by over 35,000 young Ninjas.

Raspberry Pi and CoderDojo have each accomplished amazing things over the last six years. Now, we see an opportunity to do even more by joining forces. Bringing together Raspberry Pi, Code Club, and CoderDojo will create the largest global effort to get young people involved in computing and digital making. We have set ourselves an ambitious goal: to quadruple the number of CoderDojos worldwide, to 5,000, by the end of 2020.

The enormous impact that CoderDojo has had so far is down to the CoderDojo Foundation team, and to the community of volunteers, businesses, and foundations who have contributed expertise, time, venues, and financial resources. We want to deepen those relationships and grow that community as we bring CoderDojo to more young people in future.

The CoderDojo Foundation will continue as an independent charity, based in Ireland. Nothing about CoderDojo’s brand or ethos is changing as a result of this merger. CoderDojos will continue to be platform-neutral, using whatever kit they need to help young people learn.

In technical terms, the Raspberry Pi Foundation is becoming a corporate member of the CoderDojo Foundation (which is a bit like being a shareholder, but without any financial interest). I will also join the board of the CoderDojo Foundation as a director. The merger is subject to approval by Irish regulators.

How will this work in practice? The two organisations will work together to advance our shared goals, using our respective assets and capabilities to get many more adults and young people involved in the CoderDojo movement. The Raspberry Pi Foundation will also provide practical, financial, and back-office support to the CoderDojo Foundation.

Last June, I attended the CoderDojo Coolest Projects event in Dublin, and was blown away by the amazing projects made by CoderDojo Ninjas from all over the world. From eight-year-olds who had written their first programs in Scratch to the teenagers who built a Raspberry Pi-powered hovercraft, it was clear that CoderDojo is already making a huge difference.

I am thrilled that we’re going to be working closely with the brilliant CoderDojo team, and I can’t wait to visit Coolest Projects again next month to meet all of the Ninjas and mentors who make CoderDojo possible.

If you want to find out more about CoderDojo and how you can get involved in helping the movement grow, go here.

The post Raspberry Pi and CoderDojo join forces appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

A New Approach to Testing Autonomous Cars is 99.9% Faster and Cheaper:

A four-step accelerated approach to evaluate autonomous vehicles

[Huei] Peng and [Ding] Zhao outlined their approach in a white paper published by a U-M-led public-private partnership called Mcity. Developed using more than 25 million miles of real-world driving data collected over two years from about 3,000 vehicles and volunteers, their testing system could potentially reduce the time needed to evaluate how driverless cars handle dangerous situations by 300 to 100,000 times, reducing testing time and costs by 99.9 percent.

Peng and Zhao estimate what’s needed for consumer confidence of driverless vehicles:

To create consumer acceptance of automated vehicles, tests will need to prove at a level of 80 percent confidence that the robotic vehicle is 90 percent safer than human drivers on the road. The distance test vehicles would need to be driven in simulated or real-world settings to get to that high confidence level would be 11 billion miles. 

That would seem to be a real barrier.

Their approach? ‘Accelerated longitudinal evaluation’, 

The key is to break down difficult real-world driving situations into components that can be tested or simulated repeatedly. Two scenarios have been tested: car-following and merging/cutin. In both cases, the tested automated vehicle is the car behind. It responds to the lead vehicle maneuver, which simulates the behavior of a human-controlled vehicle. 

Conclusions?

U-M’s accelerated evaluation procedure […] can cut the time required to evaluate crash, injury, or other conflict events by 300 to 100,000 times. If an automated vehicle drives for 1,000 miles under this method that exposes it to a condensed set of the most serious and challenging driving situations, it would yield the equivalent of 300,000 to 100 million miles of real-world driving.

This accelerated testing approach can eliminate up to 99.9 percent of the cost and time in compiling enough data to achieve a level of 80 percent confidence that any such tested robotic vehicle is 90 percent safer than cars piloted by human drivers now on the road. This new evaluation process would dramatically reduce the amount of time and cost involved in validating the reliability of automated vehicles.

To achieve that level of confidence, evaluators will need many more miles of real-world driving with an automated vehicle. That means the current amount of data about the realworld driving situations to which Level 4 robotic vehicles will need to accurately respond isn’t nearly enough.

In addition, researchers also will need to identify more critical driving scenarios to analyze all the potential failures of automated vehicles, including challenges to sensors from snow and fog; blinking signal lights or gestures from other drivers; illegal movements, such as vehicles running red lights or jaywalking pedestrians; movements by heavily loaded vehicles that behave and respond differently; and various road conditions.

Finally, U-M researchers also aim to expand evaluations to three more critical driving situations beyond car-following and lane changes, to include left turns, street crossing and cars coming in the opposite direction. They also want to include scenarios for single vehicle crashes and accidents involving pedestrians and cyclists.

Once that data and expanded evaluation capability is developed, U-M researchers will refine their discoveries in accelerated evaluation, so that this innovative methodology can be employed across a wide variety of vehicles and technology to show consumers that automated vehicles are safe and trustworthy.

These guys should be funded to get the additional data, obviously.

Denmark is appointing an ambassador to big tech | Matthew Hughes:

Maybe this is just a realistic approach to dealing with the tech behemoths:

Speaking with the Washington Post, Danish Foreign Minister Anders Samuelsen said, “just as we engage in a diplomatic dialogue with countries, we also need to establish and prioritize comprehensive relations with tech actors, such as Google, Facebook, Apple and so on. The idea is, we see a lot of companies and new technologies that will in many ways involve and be part of everyday life of citizens in Denmark.”

“If we want to be part of what is going on, and we want to have our say in this story, then we need to have, I think, a tech ambassador.”

Denmark is currently looking for the best candidate for the job. It’s also finalizing the details of how it’ll work, although Samuelsen said that the candidate will work with Denmark’s international network of embassies and consulates.

Notes From An Emergency |  Maciej Cegłowski:

Maciej Cegłowski must be a conservative, because I find myself agreeing with his prognosis but not his prescription, and the prescription is hard to discern except between the lines.

Bots will soon be able to borrow our identities | Hossein Rahnama:

Hossein Rahnama envisions bots that emulate public figures:

Imagine you’re a tech executive trying to get a clear sense of how President Donald Trump’s views on net neutrality might affect your business. Soon you’ll be able to question Trump’s swappable identity on the matter directly. Or you could activate, say, Elon Musk’s or Jack Dorsey’s persona and get their opinion.

The process is simple: Activate the persona (or personality “lens”) within Siri or Slackbot, and ask your question. Semantics-driven algorithms will then search gigabytes of data, patterns, statements, and transcribed video statements, and the digital interface will show the answer to your question, including its level of confidence. Based on your interaction with the answer, the algorithm will adjust the confidence level for future interactions.

Back to our net neutrality example: By tapping into expert opinions on the matter, you have a better sense of what alterations to regulations may occur, which can help you ensure your company’s tech remains viable when those changes go into effect.

Yes, and I’d like to charge for the advice of my simulated persona, please.

“I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams. It is very queer. But my dreams make conclusions for me. They decide things finally. I dream a decision. Sleep seems to hammer out for me the logical conclusions of my vague days, and offer me them as dreams.”

- D H Lawrence

Kik announced the launch of Kin, its own cryptocurrency that the company says will serve as a foundation for a decentralized ecosystem of digital services.

Kin will be created as an ERC20 token on the Ethereum blockchain, and will be integrated into Kik as the primary transaction currency.

Kik founder and CEO Ted Livingston has been vocal about his dedication to combining payments and chatbots, calling payments “the missing piece” to making bots successful in an op-ed April 2017. Seemingly to boost this vision, the company also announced the launch of the Kin Foundation, which it “envisions” as a non-profit governance body for the Kin ecosystem.

The Kin Foundation’s mandate will be to grow an open ecosystem of digital services that consumers can find value in, while giving developers an open platform to develop and monetize those services.

“Kik believes that Kin can bring together a broad group of participants to create an open ecosystem of digital services that prioritizes consumer experience and choice,” said Livingston. “As a leader in the chat space, we want to bring a fair and sustainable model for digital services to the market and fuel an alternative ecosystem for communications, information, and commerce.”

Kin will be adopted as the transaction currency inside of the Kik app, which has “millions” of monthly active users. The company will also develop the Kin Rewards Engine, which will work to promote the use of Kin as a common currency by creating an incentive; through the engine, Kin will be introduced into circulation as a daily reward, which will be distributed among stakeholders by an algorithm that reflects each community’s contribution to the overall ecosystem. The company plans to make the engine a fully decentralized system based on smart contract technology.

“We believe cryptocurrency is the next important business model innovation in tech,” said Fred Wilson, partner at Union Square Ventures and Kik board member. “Kik will be the first mainstream application to integrate a cryptocurrency. This could be a watershed moment for the blockchain sector.”

This story was originally published on BetaKit. 

The post Kik launches Kin to drive mainstream adoption of cryptocurrency appeared first on MobileSyrup.

It’s not a news anymore. @jackerhack has written about this in detail. To which after a denial, the man behind the accounts has apologized. I have not met Sharad nor done any business with him. I have attended a product nation conclave couple of years back.

Thank you @jackerhack for alerting me and everyone else. Bravo. Though I noticed a recent rise in trolling. I didn’t pay much attention until every Aadhaar tweet of mine started getting aggressive responses. Many times similar ones from different accounts. There was a pattern. I did a basic check on the usernames and joining dates. It was clear that it was a group effort. But I didn’t know who it was. I kept looking for details as they started harassing other Aadhaar critics. Thank you @jackerhack for alerting me and everyone else. Bravo.

Though Sharad apologized, we still don’t know everyone behind it. It was clearly a group effort. Also I am quite disappointed by the Twitterati who jumped into shower him with adjectives like “brave”, “bravo” etc. They did so without inquiring/talking to the harassment victims ¹. Most of them didn’t even face the harassment nor did they condemn when it was going on. So to jump in to call him brave is dubious.

Twenty third evening I did a tweetstorms to express what I think about this whole thing. I am reproducing them here.

1. I have been online long enough to understand how trolls work. It hasn’t changed much since flame-war days
2. Hence all the lists and communities we created had just one rule “Be Nice”. Its easy to enforce on email lists, irc or on slack.
3. One can present any kind of PoV but needs to be Nice to everyone else or will be kicked out.
4. This is where Twitter is different from lists or irc. Its left to the participant to be civil or not.
5. It also offers anonymity to people, specially the one who can’t afford to speak otherwise.
6. But using anonymity for speaking up and using it to abuse are not the same. Specially by a person who is in power & in no danger.
7. In this case ( #Aadhaar #iSpirit ) intention was to clearly abuse, hurt and mislead a very important discussion.
8. Its so happened that at the receiving end there were people who had seen enough flamewars & capable of defending online harassment
9. Imagine if abuse receivers were non technical, forget about outing a troll they would have stopped talking
10. Which is what usually trolls want. They want you shut you. We have seen this again and again.
11. For examples see the series #LetsTalkAboutTrolls
12. This #Aadhaar #iSprit trolls are not very different from the trolls mentioned in #LetsTalkAboutTrolls
13. Just that they got caught red hand, has a reputation to maintain in real life and hence the apology.
14. It would be stupid to think abuse would have stopped if they weren’t caught & won’t transform into other forms like legal, IT, funding
15. This is just the beginning because #Aadhaar conversation is not over yet.
16. Calling an apology “brave” or “bravo” without enquiring about what kind of effect it had on community doesn’t instill confidence , imho.
17. I expect #iSprit #Aadhaar community to act beyond calling it “brave”, work on rebuilding trust, which at this point frankly is -ve.
18. Community building is hard. The most important raw materials are trust and providing safe area to express unpopular opinions
19. So next few days IT/startup/tech community will watch how the whole #iSprit org/#Aadhaar community works to regain the trust
20. Good night. EOF.

Again my issue is not that he used an anonymous account. Anyone and everyone is free to use anonymous account. But the issue here is using an anonymous account to harass critics.

I wish this trolling incident had not happened. Many more had just started talking openly on Aadhaar. This incident has a chilling effect on them.

Update 31/May/2017: I am very disappointed by iSpirt. You can read the public statement made by Sharad ² on behalf of iSPIRT created IGCC team to investigate this issue.

This clip of Obi-Wan saying “Hello there” 67 million times amused me too much.

I think there’s a lesson in averages or small multiples hidden somewhere in there.

Tags: multiples, Star Wars

Most read reviews this week: The Best Wi-Fi Router (for Most People), The Best Gear for Travel, and The Best Wireless Outdoor Security Camera. [See all 10 most popular reviews this week.]

clavierm:

micdotcom:

Jimmy Kimmel “apologizes” to critics for saying kids should have health care

Yes… Call the scum what they are…

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One quibble: newts aren’t lizards, they’re amphibians. But the point still works.

What Self-Driving Cars See:

Lidar is one of the key technologies in driverless ytransport, nearly as critical as the AI involved:

The biggest hurdle to widespread lidar adoption is an economic one, and that is where the battle is being waged.

When Google initially started its autonomous vehicle research eight years ago, the lidar sensors it used cost roughly $75,000. Those sensors were made by Velodyne Lidar, an industry leader. Velodyne declined to say what the current pricing is for such systems, but Waymo’s chief executive, John Krafcik, said in a recent presentation that his company had reduced the cost of its lidar system by 90 percent.

But even at $7,500, such systems are seen as too expensive to meet automakers’ demands.

“Car companies want it to cost $100 and perform 10 times better, be smaller — and very reliable,” said Omer Keilaf, chief executive of Innoviz Technologies, a lidar developer based in Israel. “So there’s a big vacuum in the industry right now.”

The race to fill that void is largely focused on producing solid-state lidar systems, which would shrink the size of the sensors, eliminate moving parts involved in the optical mechanisms and enable the kind of mass manufacturing that could bring costs down, said Hongbo Zhang, a research associate at Virginia Tech who is working on a lidar design. Established automotive suppliers, such as Velodyne and Valeo; technology companies like Waymo and Uber; and relative newcomers like Innoviz, LeddarTech and Quanergy all have their sights set on making less expensive sensors.

Solid-state lidars tend to have a reduced field of view, about 120 degrees compared with the 360-degree view offered by rooftop models. “So to create a cocoon around the car, you need to integrate four to six solid-state lidar sensors,” said Marc A. Morin, a spokesman for LeddarTech.

But most of the researchers working on these designs still believe they can produce them for much lower prices, and Hyundai has demonstrated in its Ioniq autonomous test cars how such sensors could be made less conspicuous and concealed in the bumpers and roof pillars of vehicles.

Luminar Technologies, a lidar company that recently came out of stealth mode, is focusing on improving the performance of sensors by extending the effective range of lidar past 200 meters. (Top-of-the-line sensors now have a range of 120 meters.) Austin Russell, Luminar’s chief executive, said the company accomplished the longer range by using a more sensitive receiver, as well as a more powerful light output that remains safe enough to avoid damaging people’s vision.

Some Lessons I Learned from the Dotcom Bubble for the Coming Crypto Bubble | Albert Wenger:

Albert Wenger thinks ICO’s are looking bubblicious.

The gig economy workforce will double in four years

More manufacturing jobs came back to the U.S. than left last year | April Glaser

mkalus shared this story from Michael Geist.

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Last week’s CRTC decision on group licensing for the major Canadian broadcasters has the creative community in a panic, claiming that it could “mean the devastation of Canadian domestic [television] production.” The decision, which set a uniform spending requirement of 5 percent on programs of national interest (PNI, which includes dramas, documentaries, some children’s programming, and some award shows), means a reduction in spending requirements for some broadcasters. The Writers Guild of Canada fears that the decision could lead to a reduction in spending on PNI of $200 million over five years.

Groups have heaped criticism on CRTC Chair Jean-Pierre Blais, whose term ends next month. The WGC labels him a “Harper appointee”, while Kate Taylor says “he doesn’t leave much of a legacy for himself” and that “his piecemeal approach offers no consistent strategy to address the challenges facing Canadian television production in the Netflix age.”

Blais may have his faults, but claiming that he has not had a strategic vision for the digital age is not one of them. He recognized that the advent of the digital networks, an abundance of consumer choice, and the effective removal of longstanding analog protections for Canadian creators would gradually reduce the relevance of the regulator and leave it with two choices. The first – favoured by the creator groups – was to temporarily prolong the protections by extending Cancon regulations to Internet services and increasing regulatory costs on broadcasters. The second was to jump on the digital bandwagon, gradually removing the safeguards and creating a regulatory environment premised on competition at all levels – creators, broadcasters, and broadcast distributors. Anyone following the CRTC broadcast and telecom decisions in recent years knows that he chose the latter.

The result is a digital regulatory framework designed to enable Canadian creators to compete on a level playing in Canada (net neutrality), encourage the creation of programming that finds international audiences and partnerships (TalkTV), grant consumers greater television choice (skinny basic and pick-and-pay) and more competitive Internet services (wholesale fibre access), ensure universal Internet access (TalkBroadband), maintain deregulation of Internet-based services (new media exemption), facilitate new Canadian Internet entrants (hybrid services), and press broadcasters to reduce their reliance on U.S. programming (simsub). The policies may not universally succeed (and the simsub decision did not go as far as he may have wanted), but there is no doubting the strategy. In fact, despite the expectation that some have for Canadian Heritage Minister Melanie Joly to chart a new path, most of her public comments on digital Cancon are headed in the same direction.

Is 5 percent for PNI too low? At least four things can be said to defend the decision and place the impact into proper perspective. First, the argument that broadcasters needed a lower PNI number to compete with Internet-based services such as Netflix has merit. There are good reasons for not creating a mandatory contributions requirement for Internet video services, but the cost gap between regulated and unregulated services is relevant to the setting of mandated contributions for regulated broadcast services. Further, the decision lends credence to those who regularly whispered that the lobbying campaign for a Netflix tax was never about the money that could be generated from the streaming giant (a five percent tax on Netflix Canadian revenues generates a tiny amount of money given that Canadian TV production is a $2.6 billion industry) but rather about maintaining the contributions for the regulated services. When the licences come up for renewal in five years, the calls for the elimination of any contribution in the face of unregulated competition will be far louder.

Second, the suggestion that the Canadian television industry is – as Kate Taylor’s column states – “left to fend for themselves” ignores the massive public support for Canadian content creation. Given the amount invested annually by Canadian taxpayers, it is simply not credible to claim that Canadian television has been abandoned. The CMPA’s Profile 2016 tells the story with well over a billion dollars contributed from public sources including the public broadcaster, federal and provincial tax credits, and the Canadian Media Fund.

Third, while the industry is clearly not left to fend for itself, the CRTC decision is part of a shift that encourages and rewards success, not just creation. The claim that reduced mandatory PNI will devastate the industry is premised on the notion that Canadian broadcasters will only invest in domestic programming if required to do so. Licensing cheaper foreign programming is understandably attractive, yet the long-term success of broadcasters increasingly depends on controlling original content that can be delivered through multiple channels and markets (particularly if simsub disappears). In other words, the market encourages investment in original programming and the CRTC has sought to establish conditions that promote such investment.

Fourth,  critics of the decision are quick to point to higher profile Canadian fictional programming that is said to be at risk, but the CMPA data confirms that private broadcasters are relatively minor players when it comes to the financing of Canadian drama. The report states:

With fiction productions, the largest share of financing came from provincial and federal tax credits; the fiction genre also attracted the most foreign financing among all genres. Children’s and youth productions also derived the largest share of their financing from tax credits, followed by broadcaster licence fees. Distributors also accounted for an important part of the financing picture for the fiction, and children’s and youth genres. In the VAPA and lifestyle and human interest genres, most financing came from broadcaster licence fees.

The CMPA chart below confirms that conclusion with private broadcasters contributing only 9 percent of the financing for fictional programs, less than federal and provincial tax credits, Canadian distributors, foreign financing, and the CMF.  Private broadcasters allocate much of their money toward variety and performing arts as well as “lifestyle and human interest” programming, which including magazine style shows.

 

 

In other words, financing and the success or failure of Canadian programming such as dramas do not depend upon private broadcaster spending. In fact, the WGC release effectively confirms this since their worst case scenario – $40 million in reduced broadcaster PNI spending per year – represents just a two percent reduction in total financing for the fiction, children’s and documentary genres in Canada at a time when foreign funding from services such as Netflix is on the rise. Hardly the stuff of devastation.

The post Canadian TV in the Netflix Age: In Defence of the CRTC Television Licensing Decision appeared first on Michael Geist.

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What’s the collective noun for this: Over 50 students from Charles Tupper school, assembling at Second Beach for a bike tour around Stanley Park.  I don’t know if it’s an end-of-the-school-year tradition, but this is the second of three groups that have made the trek so far in the last week.

Paul, their leader, says they bring their own bikes or rent them on Denman, and then circumnavigate the park, stopping at key points to learn about the park.

And then hopefully continue on for the rest of their lives.

jennifer keesmaat @jen_keesmaat
Children belong in our cities. Will we plan for them to thrive? #GrowingUpVertical pic.twitter.com/V49valam7r