Rolandt

Since version 1.0 launched nearly two years ago, Workflow has always offered the ability to share workflows with others. While somewhat simplistic, Workflow's 'Copy Link' button has allowed the proliferation of sites and communities aimed at sharing workflows with the app's users – here at MacStories, workflows are one of the key aspects of our MacStories Weekly newsletter, for instance.

With version 1.6, launching today on the App Store, the Workflow team is revising some of the features that have been in the app since the beginning, starting with the Workflow Gallery and major updates to how workflows are shared, installed, and explained to other users.

The New Workflow Gallery

The biggest change to Workflow is the new gallery, which has been completely redesigned and reorganized with a richer front page, superior workflow presentation, and user profiles.

The updated Workflow gallery.

From a visual standpoint, the difference with the old gallery is striking. The Workflow team has been moving to a fresh design style that uses gradients, drop shadows, and button-y buttons to blend the best aspects of the pre-iOS 7 UI era with modern aesthetic preferences. I love it.

Workflow's new design direction.

This design language is now shared across the gallery, the app's widget, and the main library view, but I would like to see it applied to certain elements of the workflow editor as well. The new Workflow gallery feels fresh and colorful, but its improved looks only tell one half of the story.

The Workflow team has created more curated categories of useful, hand-picked workflows to get you started. Not knowing what Workflow can do has been one of the app's greatest challenges to date: how do you explain something that can become anything? The developers' response with the new gallery is the right one. There are featured workflows with an assortment of noteworthy automations, essential workflows and workflows for iOS 10, themed collections for common activities such as music exploration or Maps, and more specific sections like Stay Healthy, News Junkies, and Learn Something New.

You can search workflows in the gallery (with suggestions provided in the search interface) and, like the App Store, there's a rotating carousel of featured workflows on the front page, which currently features workflows to be used as action extensions, Apple Music workflows, widget workflows, and more. Whether you've just downloaded Workflow or if you're a seasoned Workflow user, you'll likely find some useful workflows here.

Workflows from the gallery are previewed as rich cards that showcase their functionality and give you an idea of which actions are used. You can download and share workflows directly from the preview card, and you can also swipe to navigate between multiple workflows in a section.

I believe this is the kind of curation that should help make Workflow less intimidating and, hopefully, interesting over time if the Workflow team keeps updating the gallery alongside the app's feature set. But the Workflow team hasn't stopped at revamping and extending the gallery. With Workflow 1.6, you can now create a public profile that highlights the workflows you've submitted to the gallery.

Upon submitting a workflow, you can choose a name and enter a short and long description that will be displayed to users in the gallery. This can be done from the workflow editor via the sharing dialog, or you can hit the 'Submit your own workflow' button at the bottom of the gallery. On your profile, you can include a profile picture, a link to your website, and your Twitter username for attribution.

Sharing a workflow as you've always done and submitting one to the gallery aren't the same, however. The Workflow team is taking an Apple-like approach with workflows submitted to the gallery: submitted workflows will go through a review process to ensure they "make sense, work properly, aren't the same as ones that are already published, aren't malicious, don't encourage copyright violation, and are appropriate for all ages". According to the Workflow team, workflows that meet these criteria will be approved in the gallery; the "especially great" ones may be featured on the front page and in curated sections.

I don't think we should expect hundreds of new workflows to be featured every week – something that would defeat the very purpose of showcasing the best and most useful workflows. But, I believe investing in the Workflow community and its creativity is the right approach at this point in Workflow's life, and I'm curious to see how the gallery will evolve throughout the next few months.

Every time I write about Workflow or cover it on Canvas with Fraser Speirs, I hear from iOS users who are interested in the app but don't know if they need it, what they can do with it, and how to get started making workflows. The new Workflow gallery looks great, it already features dozens of fantastic workflows, and it's a good first step towards the bigger goal of making Workflow more approachable for everyone.

Import Questions

In addition to browsing and downloading public workflows, Workflow 1.6 brings a new option to share workflows and let others easily configure them to their needs: import questions.

Import questions let you create questions that will be asked when a workflow is imported on another device. Answers to questions are automatically filled into a workflow, essentially providing an onboarding tutorial for users who have downloaded a workflow and need to change some values or tweak actions before running it. They can be created from a workflow's setting screen and they're managed by an interface that guides you through picking actions that should be answered upon installing a workflow.

Import questions are a solution to the problem of sharing a workflow that has to be updated for someone else with slightly different action settings or variables. Perhaps you want to share a workflow that includes a private password or an address, or maybe you want to let other people decide if an action should have a certain option or not. Instead of including Comment actions or placeholder text inside the workflow to tell recipients what they need to do for a workflow to run properly, you can add import questions to actions and let the app present a special importing UI when the workflow is installed on another device.

Import questions are an elegant way to tweak the shared version of a workflow and prepare it for other users. And the best part is – import questions can be associated with any action in a workflow and they let you enter the text of a question as well as a default answer for what an action expects.

Imagine, for instance, that you want to share a workflow that contains a Text action with an address. With Workflow 1.6, you can open the Import Questions screen, choose the action that requires a question, and enter the question's text and default answer. When you share the workflow, the public version won't carry your private information, but the local version already on your device will retain the data you've entered and the workflow will keep working as normal.

On the recipient's end, upon importing a workflow they'll be asked to configure it by answering your import questions. After going through each question, they'll be able to use the workflow.

Answering an import question.

As someone who shares workflows on a weekly basis, the addition of import questions is going to fundamentally improve how I can create workflows for readers and members of Club MacStories. If I know a complex workflow could be tricky to explain in text, I can now rely on the step-by-step guided process of import questions to make sure people can properly configure a workflow beforehand. This will reduce the time I spend providing support for workflows, and, generally speaking, it'll allow everyone to share workflows publicly with fewer concerns and better tutorials than classic comment actions.

One detail I wish had been implemented differently: for complex workflows with dozens of actions, it'd be easier if import questions could be attached to individual actions from the editor, or if the dedicated question management UI had a toggle to show the local setting of an action to remember what it does. Despite this edge case, I think everyone should start using import questions for workflows they intend to share.

Better 'Choose from List' and Dictionaries

From an action standpoint, Workflow 1.6 brings much needed improvements to the 'Choose from List' action, plus changes to dictionaries (the latter introduced with the last major update).

The 'Choose from List' action can now present rich data for many types of items including contacts, locations, iTunes and App Store products, RSS entries, and dictionaries. This is something I've long wanted 'Choose from List' to support: contacts are now displayed with profile pictures, while apps have icons and details for pricing and locations provide addresses and distance directly in the list. The 'Choose from List' action was the perfect candidate for a richer presentation of items powered by the Content Graph engine, and I'm glad to see how this change is making my workflows faster and more useful.

App Store results presented in a rich list.

In my new App Store Link workflow, for example, I can search for iOS and Mac apps from Workflow like before, but now results come up alongside icons, the name of the developer, and price of each app. The list isn't just a bunch of text buttons anymore; it's also more than a cosmetic improvement as it helps me confirm results more quickly by looking at their rich entry.

One list, many possibilities.

If you deal with workflows that present list of locations, songs, or contacts, you're going to enjoy the newfound capabilities of 'Choose from List'. This is one of my new favorite actions to use as much as possible.

Dictionaries – one of the keystones of Workflow's web API support – are now easier to recall as they can be integrated with 'Choose from List', too. A dictionary can now be passed to 'Choose from List' and you'll see keys used as button titles and values as smaller subtitles; when you choose an item, only the value (without the key) will be passed as output.

Opening Spotify playlists from a dictionary.

This allows you to use pretty names for dictionary keys while retaining the ability to preview values upon choosing from the list. I've updated my Toggl workflows (detailed here) to take advantage of these dictionary improvements, and I've also created a new Spotify workflow to choose a public playlist from a dictionary presented as a list.

Workflow 1.6

Version 1.6 of Workflow rethinks some of the longstanding limitations of sharing, combining a promising gallery effort with better tools to share workflows with other people.

Almost two years into the app, it's time for the Workflow team to address other areas such as variable details, folders, and custom action presets; with today's release, they'll get there with a stronger foundation for everyone.

Workflow 1.6 is available on the App Store.

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The other day, I came across a quote that perfectly characterized my current situation, a line from the Roman philosopher Seneca:

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.

I’ve taken on a new role, as Head of Research for Spark, a strategy, research, and integrated marketing communications agency with offices in San Francisco and New York. Only a week or so ago I left Gigaom, where I had been serving as Head of Research, and after 6 years of working there.

The part of research work I’ve always enjoyed the most — and which benefits my clients the most, too, I think — is working closely with a small number of clients, and becoming deeply involved in their plans, products, and programs.

While I have had the opportunity to do that with many clients over the past years, much of the work at Gigaom involved the other side of that equation: working with a large roster of companies on a more shallow level. That’s the pattern when writing a market analysis of a product niche, like a review of the leading work chat products, for example.

This does not mean that I am no longer interested in work chat technology and its impact on work practices. On the contrary, my interest in that and the myriad other product areas I’ve researched remains unabated. If anything, I’m looking forward to working in a broader range of industries. For example, last year I was involved with a hotel multinational on the launch of a new hotel concept, and I’ve advised clients in music, media, and finance in recent years.

I have already experienced a widening of my focus at Spark, which is one of the reasons I originally suggested working here. I came into Spark’s orbit when senior managers there brought me into a few projects earlier in 2016. It quickly became clear to me that a future-leaning researcher could do a great deal for their existing clientele. Just as importantly, I started to understand that research connects with the strategy and integrated marketing communications activities to yield something greater than the sum of the parts.

I will be sharing more about this new beginning over the coming weeks and months, both here, at Medium, and the Spark blog. Let me know if you’d like to connect and talk about this in more detail.

Shaw Community TV’s Lucas Meijer has been following the events, activities, and aspirations of the Downtown Waterfront Working Group over the past year.

In this community program, Meijer interviews a member of the DWWG, Michael Alexander, to help explore the tremendous potential of the downtown waterfront — as an enhanced transportation hub, as a prime location for lively public spaces at the harbour’s edge, as well as for a mix of activities, including job, entertainment and cultural space. Meijer’s skillful use of visuals brings to life all the wonderful possibilities for what could become Canada’s most exciting waterfront development.

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Facebook page here.

This is a guest post by Darren Allen, joining us from his home turf at expressivegg.org.

The famous duck-rabbit optical illusion is a paradox, meaning that it is both one thing, and another, at the same time. The interpreting mind can never experience it this way. To the mind the image is either a duck or a rabbit, one after the other, but not both at the same time. The abstract thinking mind may know it is both, but this knowledge is itself a non-paradoxical either-or idea. The thinking mind cannot experience something that is simultaneously itself and something else; it can only comprehend one thing after another. Every time you try to directly experience the image as it fully, paradoxically, is, as both things at once, it is immediately reduced to what it partially, non-paradoxically is; to one thing or another. For a split second you think you’ve got both the full, direct, primary duck and rabbit simultaneously—perhaps because you can successfully label it a paradox—but really you are just flashing rapidly between partial, indirect, secondary mental interpretations.

Duck-Rabbit Duality

You can only experience the image as it completely actually, primarily is—as both things at once (or as neither things at once)—by not interpreting it at all. This means letting go of the interpreting mind and, like a kind of vegetable, dumbly witnessing, or just seeing; directly experiencing as your consciousness (rather than through the interpretative mind). The image then becomes impossible and pure, like the weird sound-blobs of foreign words, or like the pure strange form of an object before your mind interprets what it ‘is’, or before your emotions move towards or away from what you want or don’t want.

In the mysterious-to-mind of direct experience (or first impression) you experience two different things at once; not binary either-or, but analogue both-and. This paradox is the source of all great art. My non-interpreting paradoxical unself recognises itself in paradoxical metaphors (‘Juliet is the sun’), melodies, puns, tragi-comedy and mind-stilling masterpieces. Paradox also creates the strange meaning that science moves towards (but can never grasp) in fractal forms, perennial philosophical problems  and the fundamental wave-particles of quantum physics¹; each of which, like the true nature of the image, is a paradoxical pre-interpretative drabbit, or thing in itself.

The thing-in-itself is Immanuel Kant’s term for the inaccessible nature of reality. Kant demonstrated that time and space exist in the mind (although this does not mean they are invented by the mind) and so we can never really know what anything really is ‘in itself’. All we can know is what our minds report to us of what seems to be ‘out there’. This is now a common belief—not to mention a depressing existential reality—that we are all trapped in body-shaped capsules orbiting empty, empty rooms, unintelligible to anyone else, except through faith and only ever able to apprehend the world indirectly, through little more than meter-readings.

Despair still reigns in the scientific mind, and it reigned in Arthur Schopenhauer’s mind too—yet, soon after Kant, Schopenhauer pointed out that there is a solution to this atomised misery. There is one ‘thing in itself’ we can know, for certain; and that is our consciousness of our mind’s meter readings². I am a thing in itself, even if my own ideas about me aren’t. This—the mute, pre-thought, animal experience of just experiencing—the objective scientist (or objective religionist) can never understand; because it is not an idea, nor an objective fact, nor even an emotional state, and never can be. It precedes the objective time and space of the mind and emotions. Consciousness cannot be understood—as length, breadth and height can be understood, or dictionary definitions, or the news, or ‘what bothers me’—because conscious experience is that which the mind’s meter readings can only ever be of. Consciousness can only be experienced, and when I experience it, I experience the reality of who I am which precedes the comprehensible knowledge I have of being a self in the world.

Self Takes Charge

By self I mean the thinking-wanting-not-wanting entity which isolates timespace objects and knits them into the either subjective or objective world of things, names, memories, ideas, desires, moodies and so on that I point to when I attempt to explain the world or define myself. This world, however, is not absolutely real, nor is the self which generates and apprehends it. The selfworld is a tool which my consciousness uses and, just as with any other tool or system, when it grows beyond a certain size, or when its momentum builds beyond a certain speed and mass, it begins to demand more energy or awareness than it provides. It begins to take over the user.

Ivan Illich exhaustively detailed how this happens with tools and systems in the objective world. Excessive quanta of energy, excessive speeds, groups that are larger than certain sizes and tools that are so complex they cannot be fixed by ordinary people in ordinary communities cripple men and women and reduce them to a state of infantile dependency. But the same thing happens with the subjective tool, or mechanism, of the self. There was a moment in history (and a moment in each of our individual lives) when this tool of self took over consciousness and began to be understood as ‘me’, generating fear of not me and hostility towards anything which mind or emotions cannot grasp—such as nature, love, darkness, death, loss, paradox, the innocence of children, the difference of outsiders and the thoughtless presence of the wild, all of which became a threat. The extraordinary, paradoxical life that I once perceived in and behind all matter (which I gave fluid name to) became ordinary, non-paradoxical supernatural ‘gods’ (with fixed and superstitiously venerated names), which ‘I’ had to appease through gifts and sacrifices; and all the threats ‘I’ now found itself surrounded with had to be manipulated, controlled or vanquished.

All the problems of civilisation—violence towards women and children, massively over-expanded population centres, private property, endemic aggression toward out-groups and towards the working mass of one’s own group, preposterous architectural vanity projects, exploitation and over-use of the wild, addiction to narcotics, superstition and the species of confused misery we know as ‘the human condition’—began at the same time, in the same place and for the same reason. Around 12,000 years ago, in the Middle East / West Asia, the tool of self grew beyond a critical limit, took charge of consciousness and began calling itself I, leading to the creation of stratified, warlike tribes (proto-Aryans and Semites) which began overrunning the world, overturning its primal cultures (introducing into local myths heroic abstract sky gods, or the monotheist God, which defeated and vanquished female ‘devils’³), corrupting and subjugating its people, forming class-based cults and, eventually, technologically-advanced civilisations which slowly spread over the surface of the earth.

After several thousand years of the growth of self-in-charge, or ego, direct conscious experience of paradoxical reality was so rare⁴ and attenuated that a group of unconscious abstract philosophers in ancient Greece (e.g. the nature-, art-, body-, society and children-hating Socrates, Plato and Aristotle) began to wonder what reality really was.⁵ Unable to comprehend anything but their own mentations they based their speculations on the abstract ideas of disembodied, egoic thought; such as ‘matter’, ‘truth’, ‘beauty’, and the ultimately illusory divisions which thought creates; such as ‘time and space’, ‘subject and object’, ‘nature and culture’ and other duck-rabbits. Confusion, absurdity and an intense resistance to reality ⁶ have prevailed in professional philosophic thought ever since.

Take, for example, Zeno’s arrow paradox—one of the earliest philosophical mind-benders on record—which concludes that because at any moment in time an arrow is neither moving to where it is not (because it is not there) nor moving to where it is (because it is already there) it is, therefore, not moving at all. This absurd—but rationally correct—conclusion, only occurs because the mind abstracts a thinkable idea (the arrow and it’s isolated position in time and space) from what is ultimately an unthinkable still-moving or temporal-timeless paradoxical state. The mind does not invent the position of the arrow, or its existence in time and space, but isolates that aspect of it from an ultimately paradoxical reality—in the same way that mind isolates particles from an ultimately wave-particle monism in the double-slit experiment, or isolates graspable ideas, such as ‘good’ or ‘being’ or ‘truth’ from an ultimately elusive reality (and then fusses over what those words might mean), or, most subtly and perniciously, isolates ‘me’ from an ultimately mysterious selfless experience.

None of this of course is to deny the utility—indeed the indispensable good sense—of picking ducks and rabbits out of the paradoxical thing-in-itself and knitting them together into duck-rabbit systems. Without this ability we’d hardly be human. The point is that if you are incapable of pulling away from yourself, of being conscious of your either-or mentations and emotions, you can, firstly, do nothing but treat ducks and rabbits as real—for there is no other standard by which the word ‘reality’ can be judged. And secondly, you are committed to over-extending into your mind or into yourself—for there is no way to fundamentally comprehend less-than-self or other-than-self. The inevitable result is catastrophic fraudulence.

The Fraud Builds The World

Who am I? Such a simple question; and yet I keep getting it wrong—because self is asking the question and providing the answer. The mechanism of my self is an organic apparatus (comprised of interrelated parts and animated by calorific power) which is capable of a) manifesting reality as sensations and feelings b) structuring reality into isolated spacetime things and either-or ideas and c) manipulating these things and ideas. When I ask this mechanism ‘who I am’, or ‘what is the truth’, the answer I get is an idea or an emotion, which, sooner or later, turns out to be wrong, ridiculous, contradictory or horrifying. Self tells me (and asserts to others) that I am a definable thing, and therefore isolated, mortal, trapped in a me-shaped prison and alone in enemy territory—in a word, selfish—a conclusion which, to pre-historic people, children and great artists, is as ludicrous and bizarre as ‘the arrow is not moving’ but which, nevertheless, has driven so-called ‘culture’ for millennia.⁷

Self has no way of knowing what is unselfish, and so what anything or anyone primarily is. It therefore has no way of knowing why I am here, what death is, what I should do, if there is a god, how I can create beauty, who you are, what consciousness is, what distinguishes humans from animals or how the universe began. Self can never understand what time is, how I can be more creative, less addicted, more spontaneous, less anxious or any other meaningful (which is to say ultimately unscientific) question about what self is not. If the self-machine is questioning itself about what is beyond itself, or where self comes from, no answer it finds, ultimately, is ever going to make sense; and if the self-machine is operating itself, no solution, ultimately, is ever going to work; because everything that self-in-charge says, sees, feels and does is, ultimately, motivated by an inapt, selfish [genetic–mental–emotional⁸] impulse. Ultimately, the only message a machine can give itself—that can make sense to a machine that creates its own programming, or that attempts to understand itself with itself—is ‘expand, defend and avoid death’.⁹  Forever.

And this, of course, is what self and the groups it has huddled in for illusory security and power, has been doing ever since it took over conscious awareness and began passing it through its isolating, abstracting, fearing and desiring filters to create our plausible world of struggle, contention and anxiety. Expand, defend and avoid death forever has been the modus operandi of every civilised group of people since what we call civilised history began. It led to agriculture (and to the deforestation of the entire planet and exhaustion of its soils), to the vast inhuman megacults of the Middle East and classical era, to the unquenchable power-craving mania of the world’s celebrated empires, kingdoms and democracies and to, in the modern age, the development of a global institutional system which makes men and women self-conscious, self-referential, self-absorbed, self-believing and self-assertive components in an endlessly proliferating virtual nightmare.

The individual differences and brutal antagonisms of all these various groups—their peripheral styles, marvellous achievements and enormously complex histories—tend to mask their shared motivating and modernising intelligence; the ego of their members. Ego has not only had the same ends since the dawn of history—expand (through conflict and subjugation), experience self (through addictive stimulation¹⁰) and control or annihilate unselfish reality—but it has used the same means to achieve them; a body of virtual-technical knowledge which has been passed on, appropriated, refined and developed by each succeeding (or concurrent) cult.

These techniques—used to eradicate or control unself (nature, innocence, pain, etc.) and to expand self (through unlimited access to stimulation)—are scientific. Science begins with making reality manageably virtual through the isolation of duck-rabbit ideas and objects from the originating, paradoxical context, which can then be converted into abstractions, such as slaves from communities, natural resources from forests, scientific facts from ‘noise’, and bureaucratic facts, laws and economic money-units from society. These abstractions are predictable, immune to decay and uncertainty, can be stored indefinitely, reproduced perfectly, controlled at will and, most importantly, possessed.

The conversion of the universe into an abstract body of controllable, possessable data further requires the interdependent techniques of mechanisation, social-control, coercion, emotional management, urban-planning, opinion-shaping and the threat of violence, which were all refined into their modern form at the same time as philosophy was: around the 17th century, when institutions, serving a totalitarian system, began to take over the role of reality-management from crude, overtly violent and inefficient priestly or royal authority.

The new methods of social-control focused not on disciplining the body, on hiding criminals away or on physically forcing populations to submit, but on controlling the psyche through propaganda, through bureaucratic surveillance, through the threat of deprivation and through powerful appeals to egoic fears and addictions. This was not achieved through the efforts of Machiavellian princes, but through schools, prisons, hospitals, barracks, factories and organs of mass-media which a) were unconsciously structured to select for obedience and submission b) separated individuals from society c) exposed them to perpetual bureaucratic scrutiny, d) demanded an intense degree of abstraction and rational planning e) divided institutional identity from inner consciousness (and made them mutually antagonistic) f) placed enormous constraints on speech, thought, movement and feeling g) continually stimulated ego through (positive and negative) addictive pornography h) disciplined members to a life of permanent work and never-ending institutional-slavery and i) through taboo and the degradation of words which refer to selfless reality, made it impossible to understand what was happening or directly express dissent without sounding like a nutcase.

This did not happen consciously any more than the invention of superstitious gods, agriculture, classical civilisation or capitalism happened consciously. There was no conscious conspiracy to reduce humanity to a mutually-antagonistic hive of virtual fragments; because ego is unconsciousness: consciousness is a threat.

Consciousness is the threat.

Which means, of course, that consciousness is the cure.

This is an extract from Darren Allen’s Apocalypedia, a Comic-Philosophic Handbook of Radical Self-Knowledge which explains consciousness, genius, art, ritual, science, the history of self, the nature of the world-system (and effective means to subvert it), ego (and effective means to master it) the relationship between virtual reality and schizophrenia, how sane societies work, what a sane world looks like, the thorny matters of gender, sex and human partnership and transdimensional eruptions of hilarious ecstasy in more, and less, detail.

^{1. Adherents of scientism (scientismists) violently object to any non-specialist use of the terms quantum, reality, paradox, consciousness and so on, stridently asserting the right to determine the ‘correct’ definition of these words, thereby rendering language meaningless to ordinary non-specialists who increasingly find themselves inhabiting a colourless uniquack which they are not specialised enough to be able to fully understand. For the scientismist reality is not paradoxical—because his technical non-paradoxical descriptions of reality make technical, non-paradoxical sense. He is unable to grasp that being able to rationally describe the extraordinarily strange behaviour of quantum reality (in, for example, the famous double-slit experiment, which demonstrates that the most basic elements of reality are both waves and particles) does not make reality unparadoxical, any more than being able to think about consciousness makes consciousness, ultimately, thinkable. When pressed on the reality of what Schrödinger’s equations and so on are pointing to, or what consciousness actually is, scientists unwilling to accept the limits of science, or of thought, will rapidly exit the discussion. Or get very rude.Back.}

^{2. Actually Schopenhauer called consciousness ‘will’—which he confused with emotion—and called thinking ‘consciousness’, a mistake which I believe led to his famous misogyny and pessimism, but that’s beyond the bounds of this essay.Back.}

^{3. e.g. Marduk vs Tiamat in Babylon, Indra vs Vritra in Vedic India, Jahweh vs Satan in Judaism, Zeus vs Typhon in classical Greece. These ego-honouring male-worshipping myths all superseded earlier cosmologies in which the femi-snake had been a benevolent, mysterious creatrix.
The mono-religion also erased the creative, amoral, paradoxical, boundary-crossing trickster god from original myth and replaced him with a blandly immoral devil.
Back.}

^{4. In most religious traditions there were and are strands of original non-egoic pre-superstitious apperception and genius that persisted. The non-dualist Hinduism of the Upanishads (later Advaita), the Bhagavata and early schools of Tantric Yoga, The Tao Te Ching, some mystic strands of Buddhism (esp. Zen), the teachings of Jesus (without their Paulist-Christian distortions) and [later] a few elements of Sufism all expressed timeless, original pre-egoic experience. Because of this they were usually labelled heresy and persecuted, often brutally. Or they were taken up by selves which enjoy being different.Back.}

^{5. Only a few hundred years previous to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, so-called ‘irrational’ contemplative philosophers, such as Parmenides and Empedocles, had provided the answer—through something like zen meditation—but by the time of the rationalists, this, along with the illiterate magic of Homer, was now literally inconceivable.
See Peter Kingsley, Ancient Philosophy, Mystery and Magic and Reality.Back.}

^{6. Professional philosophers never refer to reality, to what something *is*, or how it might be perceived. Their output focuses entirely on abstractions (such as why things came to be, or how they can be described) and so is intensely abstract and of very little interest to ordinary people.Back.}

^{7. Implicitly at least—ego is quite happy to use *ideas* of immortality, togetherness, mystery and whatnot.Back.}

^{8. The emotional component of ego is the one most frequently ignored; it is possible to be friendly, generous, non-intellectual—even ‘spiritual’—and yet emotionally egotistical. Similarly, it is possible to talk often of oneself, to vaunt one’s own excellence, to be fascinated in oneself and to take (temporary / flamingly flamboyant) charge of a group, while being humble and selfless.Back.}

^{9. A self-informed machine is inherently incapable of self-sacrifice (aka **altruism**) unless that sacrifice is either not fundamental (i.e. superficial, such as mere charity), or, as self-informed evolutionists and economists repeatedly stress, for the benefit of similar selves (who share the same genes), those who might reciprocate at a later date or (as a virtuoso display of mating fitness) future partners.Back.}

^{10. There is a convincing case to be made for drug-addiction being the cause or at least (in my view) the self-reinforcing concomitant payoff of agriculture. See Greg Wadley’s, Pharmacological Influences on the Neolithic Transition and How psychoactive drugs shape human culture: A multi-disciplinary perspective.Back.}

I’m all stressed out getting ready for re:Invent, Nov 28th through Dec 2nd this year, in Vegas. I’m attending, and may even be speaking if certain pieces fall into place. I’ve seen this movie before.

At Sun, it was Java One. At Google, I/O. Every big tech company has one. They define the rhythm of the year, and I’m wondering if they’re a good idea.

Big!

Most readers here have probably been to one or more, but for those who haven’t, here’s how it goes. First of all, “big” is relative. Google and Apple favor San Francisco’s Moscone West, a nice welcoming light-filled venue which maxes out at 5,500 heads. At the other end of the spectrum, I see that Salesforce claimed 120K for Dreamforce.

I can’t find a public announcement about re:Invent’s headcount, but I see that Cloudability claimed it grew from 5,700 attendees in 2012 to 18,600 last year. I can testify that the Venetian was full.

But last year I was talking to a Vegas local and said I was at a big show, around twenty thousand people, and he laughed: “That’s nuthin. You wanna big conference? That’d be World of Concrete, the cement guys.”

What happens?

There are keynotes, ten thousand and up in the big room to hear about the big releases. There are hundreds of sessions, some deep tech, some marketing fluff. There is hallway after hallway of meeting rooms, where customers and partners and integrators gather over ice-water to talk details. Finally, there’s the trade show with the big host booth at the center and then endless ankle-grinding aisles of stands full of optimistic eyes hoping you’re a prospect.

Me, I dislike keynotes (oration not conversation) and don’t get to most sessions; I like the face time, in meeting rooms and on the show floor, with customers who are actually in the trenches trying to get work done. Even the boring ones are interesting, and several times every day I’m amazed by what I learn.

You can’t repeat Bill Joy’s old lesson too many times: “Wherever you work, most of the smart people are somewhere else.” A lot of ’em are at these gatherings.

It’s efficient

The fact is that big tech companies build new stuff year round, and do Marketing and Biz-Dev and Evangelism and so on to get the word out. But it’s hard to drink from more than one river at a time. So it’s sort of sensible to have a designated week for each vendor when they own the news cycle; everyone can focus in and take away whatever piece of the big picture matters to them.

Forcing function

At every BigTechCo I’ve known, the insiders have a dream: Their stuff is in the keynote. A lot of them get happy, but then also hearts are broken. Because those companies got big by, among other things, being fussy about what they release, and learning to say “no”. Last year I got a No for something I wanted to launch at re:Invent and I was crushed.

Practically speaking, it means that dev and marketing and messaging teams put the pedal to metal for a few weeks and just Do What It Takes To Ship. At one level I’d be happier if this biz dropped the big damn shows and we stayed home already, instead of trooping to San Fran or Vegas and standing in lines. And everyone shipped products when the products were ready.

But on the other hand, shipping is about as much fun as you can have in this biz. I’m tired all the time, but we’ve got a finish line in sight and bright hopes for what we’re building, and some things that were yellow or red are now green. I’m smiling.

But don’t expect much from me the week after.

Trump’s shifting positions, outlandish policies, and tweets criticizing the media that covers him have challenged organizations like The New York Times. After predicting Hillary Clinton would win the election, the Times is having an identity crisis. Now they’ve emailed their subscribers to say “Hey, we’re doing fine.” The letters communicate the exact opposite. The Times asks subscribers … Continued

The post Flummoxed by Trump, The New York Times says “We’re fine, really.” appeared first on without bullshit.

The Agile world is awash in metrics and measures, but most provide little benefit to teams.

What if we could change our set of measurements to support safer software development, continuous improvement, happiness of our project community, and careful craftsmanship?

In short, what are some Modern Agile metrics?

Why We Crave Measurements

Knowledge work is confusing, messy, and a tad unpredictable. It is mostly thinking, learning, experimenting, and retrying.

Programming is a kind of "lossy compression." The thinking that comprises the majority of the effort isn't directly visible in the end work. Only the final, working solution chosen by the developers is present in the code.

While measuring physical work is relatively easy, most of our work is thinking. This confounds attempts to measure degrees of completion. One programmer may have entered several dozen of lines of code, but that code may be only 20% finished and have many indirect consequences (which will manifest as errors) that the authors cannot see. Another feature may be implemented in a few well-chosen lines of code, so that having a fully-formed thought really was 90% of the effort.

The ephemeral nature of the work leaves us with some real problems:

• How do we know if we are "on track?"
• Are we "doing a good job?"
• Are we looking at cost and time overruns?
• Is this a good time to intervene, or should we wait?
• Is this "special variation" or "normal variation?"
• Are we keeping our promises to stakeholders?

Naturally enough, we turn to the collection and analysis of metrics to help us understand our processes and our progress.

A Quick Warning

We could write thousands of blogs and stories on the improper and harmful use of metrics. Let's not do that here.

If we Make Safety A Prerequisite then we need to begin with safely handling metrics.

Measuring can, in itself, be hazardous.

The use of metrics is guided by three very important laws:

• When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure (Goodhart's Law)
• Measures tend to be corrupted/gamed when used for target-setting (Campbell's Law).
• Monitoring a metric may subtly influence people to maximize that measure (The Observer Effect).

A metric is just an indicator. Just as a high temperature reading on your dash indicates a problem with your engine or cooling system, a metric only lets you know that something might be wrong — forcing that number to change doesn't necessarily fix anything.

You can have too many metrics.

Some people succumb to planning stress when seeing the vast number of metrics which might be meaningful, and they spend an awful lot of time on gathering and analyzing metrics. The human costs of collecting so much data are so high that they skew the results, and may damage the organization's culture.

Relax. Your choice of metrics is not a once-for-all event.

• You should not begin with all the metrics you might need. Start with one or two.
• Drop a metric when it outlives its usefulness.
• Don't accumulate a huge set of metrics, lest you frustrate your teams.
• Consider giving each metric an expiration date on which to evaluate whether you will continue to use it.

Can the measurements we choose help to make people awesome?

At any level of the organization, metrics are best used to help people understand and improve their own work. They are less useful at judging whether other people are doing their jobs, especially when we are measuring people two levels or more above or below us in the organization (AKA: The Law Of The Second Floor).

Measurements can, when used properly, help teams to choose and enact small changes which accumulate in significant improvements over time.

Measuring output quantity tends to prevent improvement. We can feel good about writing dozens of lines of code and hundreds of tests and increasing test coverage by 20%, and forget that our work has not yet improved anyone's life. We can obsess over squeezing out a few percentage points more code, and neglect quality and user value in doing so.

With the warnings out of the way, let's progress to some measurements .

Slack Time:

Without slack time, a team will keep avoiding or working around the same old problems. They will not have a productive breakthrough.

Teams need to spend time focused on improving their process, tools, knowledge, and interactions.

Providing slack time supports our Modern Agile values of Make People Awesome and Learn and Experiment Rapidly.

According to Tom DeMarco:

“It’s possible to make an organization more efficient without making it better. That’s what happens when you drive out slack.”

Does the team invest time toward improving their work system?

There are at least two reasonable ways to collect information about a team's use of slack time:

• Anonymously survey how much time was spent this week on learning and fixing skill/process problems?
• Enumerate changes the team has decided to enact and the results of those changes.

For teams using an online tracking tool, it may be possible to create a separate horizontal swim lane for improvements and track them as normal tasks.

Support and permission are crucial in order for teams to to feel free to make changes, in line with our Modern Agile value of Make Safety A Prerequisite.

Without the safety of management expecting and enabling slack time, developers and testers will often feel guilty for time not spent directly on producing product.

Management must provide an "umbrella of permission" for their team.

Speed:

Speed measurements can be misused, which is why people are wary of velocity and story points.

Paradoxically, setting targets on development speed often results in slower delivery times due to harmful local optimizations.

Still, there are operations which can benefit from the use of a stopwatch. Measures of machine time, queueing, or waiting can be particularly useful.

• How long does it take a new idea to go from a green light to positive user feedback?
• How long does it take a build to complete?
• How long does it take to recover from an unexpected delay or production "event?"
• How long does it take to run the tests?
• How long does it take (on average) to get an answer from a subject matter expert?
• How much time does the team spend waiting on vendors?
• How long are features finished and approved, waiting for a release?
• How long does a branch live before being merged to the main code line?

Rather than measure everything (see above warning), it might be best to measure green-light-to-completion, and then also measure the wait times that seem to cause the team the most stress.

You will find that most testing and most CI tools will happily report their elapsed time for you, either by default or with a simple tweak to the settings.

Timing human interactions may require either a physical or online ticket system. It is not hard to collect those timings, but it requires additional effort. Teams without slack time tend to be too busy to measure their work.

Measuring elapsed time gives us a baseline on which to Experiment And Learn Rapidly.

Condition of Most-Edited Files

We need to know if the way we manage our code is effective. When we add new features and capabilities, do we improve the design, or do we pollute the design?

You probably don't need to examine any file whose last change was more than 6 months ago. Odds are that code isn't currently accruing new changes, and neither is it the site of a lot of bug fixes. The most important code is the code we visit most.

It is easy with most version control systems to find the most-edited files of the past few months. You can approximate this by counting commits or merges to the main line, or by summing lines-of-code changes.

You may choose to do a spot-check, and have developers compare the code from 6 months ago to the same files in their current shape. They can usually let you know if the code is more polluted or less polluted now. Is it pleasant to change? Does it make sense?

Such a qualitative review is useful. You may convert it to a numeric qualitative measure if you have each reviewer individually give a numeric rating, and average average those ratings. When you see the trend go from 3.7 to 4.2 you will know that either the code is getting better, or the reviews are becoming less strict.

Alternatively, you can run one of the many code quality tools to determine objectively if the code measures up better or worse now. One useful metric is the so-called Change Risks Anti-Patterns (C.R.A.P.) metric, which gives a ratio of complexity of the code to its test coverage. Untested, complex code has a high C.R.A.P. rating, whereas well-tested or simple code will have a very low C.R.A.P. rating.

The trend is the crucial thing.

Having a C.R.A.P. number of N is not all that informative. It is more important to know whether we are trending upward or downward — are we becoming better craftspeople, or are we trading away the quality of our code for expediency (which will eventually cause us to have to work much more slowly).

Keeping the code clean provides safety and makes our developers more awesome by enabling continuous delivery. Poorly managed code makes delivery hazardous and painful.

Note that there is a flaw in measuring only the most-recently changed files. Sometimes there is a file that needs to be improved, but it is such a horrible mess that the entire programming staff avoids touching it for fear of breaking it. Any "officially avoided" code is a great candidate for focused microtesting and refactoring work.

Escaped Defects

Escaped Defects are defects which have made it through the process without being noticed, and have been uncovered in the field. Defects found within our walls are less interesting because they don't inconvenience our users; they merely let us know that our internal systems could be better.

Escaped defects show us where we lack safety in our testing pipeline.

Escaped defects cost us time in customer support, in management, in reputation, and in tracking and prioritizing. This is why it's better to fix them all than to carry them for weeks or months.

The count and trend for escaped defects are both important.

Even more important is the learning that comes from root-cause analysis. Rapid ad-hoc fixing of bugs will keep the trend high, but reduce the count. Truly learning the root cause will change the way we produce software, making it safer to release code to customers.

Who is Happier?

Any internal metrics are going to tell us how we are doing the work, but the real question is how our work changes the world.

Is our work helping to Make People Awesome?

One measure is the Net Promoter Score, which answers the question "how likely are our users to recommend our product or service?" The net promoter score is more important than the number of defects or the time to release or the internal improvements made over the past few weeks.

Likewise, how does our work affect customer service and technical support? How easy is it to manage our software in operations? If we have a separate testing or certification group (for FDA or Security) then how easily can they do setup, test, and teardown?

How about our salespeople? What could we do that makes the system easier to sell, demo, or explain?

If you use chartering for your projects, you will have a roster of your project community. For all the roles identified in that community, how do they see your product? How is it trending? Is it better every release than the release before? Is it becoming ever more useful?

Whether you use the planguage to set measurable goals, or use user surveys and feedback mechanisms, you will be interested in how profitable or helpful people find the use of your software. Otherwise, why bother writing it?

Summing Up

We have discussed a few kinds of metrics that we can use to gauge the effectiveness of a team at pleasing the project community, improving their own processes, and managing their source code.

• Slack Time
• Speed of Processes
• Condition of Most-Edited Files
• Escaped Defects
• Net Promoters

By watching the trends on some of these measures, we feel confident you will be able to identify and implement meaningful changes.

Please join us in the comments with any stories supporting or dissenting, so that we may learn and improve rapidly!

Special thanks to Bill Wake for his help pulling this list of metrics together, and to the crew at Industrial Logic and the Modern Agile slack group for helping with suggestions and revisions.

The post What Should We Measure? appeared first on Industrial Logic.

Today we launched Firefox Focus, a brand new iOS browser that puts user privacy first. More than ever before, we believe that everyone on the Internet has a right to protect their privacy. By launching Firefox Focus, we are putting that belief into practice in a big way.

How big? If you download Firefox Focus and start to browse, you will notice a prominent “Erase” button in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. If you tap that button, the Firefox Focus app erases all browsing information including cookies, website history or passwords. Of course, you can erase this on any other browser but we are making it simple here – just one tap away.

Out of sight too often means out of mind. Burying the tools to clear browsing history and data behind clicks or taps means that fewer people will do it. By putting the “Erase” button front and center, we offer users a simple path to healthy online behaviors — protecting their online freedom and taking greater control of their personal data. To further enhance user privacy, Firefox Focus also by default blocks advertising, social and analytics tracking. So, on Firefox Focus, “private” browsing is actually automatic, and erasing your history is incredibly simple.

Of course, we know that for many Web activities people like the functionality that cookies or tracking data provides. Subscribers to the New York Times probably dislike typing a password every time they want to read articles on the site. Most people prefer that their browser autocompletes their commonly used URLs.

That said, sometimes people don’t want to be tracked. We use the internet to research personal topics about our health – cancer or Alzheimer’s, for example. We use the Web to make purchases that are legal but can be sensitive — “hotel reservations in Cancun” or ”engagement rings”. We browse controversial topics that we may not want anyone else to know we are reading about.

This accessibility of information is one of the most powerful aspects of the Web. It is all the more powerful when anonymity is protected.

We at Mozilla believe that protecting one’s privacy should be as simple as a single tap. Firefox Focus is an experiment to see what happens when we make this radically simple. As part of our mission to maintain the health of the Internet, we will continue to try out new ways to promote user privacy. We hope you download Firefox Focus, hit that “Erase” button and see how it works for you.

Atlas Recall is a (mostly) photographic memory for your computing life

I can’t help feeling as though the Atlas Recall people owe me a royalty.

Long ago—maybe 15 years ago—I wrote on my blog about a fantasy program I wished I had. It would quietly take a screenshot every time my screen changed. That way, I’d have a paper trail of everything I’d ever seen on the screen: every email, every web article, every chat session, every Word or PDF document, every photo. And I’d always be able to call it up again when my memory failed. “Oh man, where did I read that?” would be a thing of the past.

To my astonishment, one of my readers wrote it. It was an app that basically created a QuickTime movie file, where each frame was a snapshot of something you looked at. You could arrow-key your way through it and recall everything you’d seen or read.

It was shareware, it was sort of unfinished, and you couldn’t actually search your little visual paper trail for a certain word. It was cool, but it never went anywhere.

All I had to do was be a little patient. Now, 15 years later, what that app should have been really exists—and it’s free. It’s called Atlas Recall.

It’s in a beta-test stage for the Mac (AAPL) only; a Windows (MSFT) version is coming soon. There’s also an iPhone app, although it’s not what you’d expect; more on that in a moment.

Meet Atlas Recall

Once you install Atlas Recall, it sits in the background, quietly indexing (keeping track of) everything you read or see. Every web page, every email, every chat session.

Then, the next time you have a “Where did I see that?” moment, you can search for words you remember. You can tap into Atlas Recall in any of three places: the Mac’s usual Spotlight search feature, the regular Google (GOOG, GOOGL) search (thanks to a plug-in extension for your web browser), or in the Recall program itself.

The Recall program gives you the most control, because you can limit your search to a certain kind of document (like chat, email, or web) and a certain time span. Here’s me, pointing to the “email . messages” button to isolate those:

The other advantage of using the app: Once the search is done, you get big floating thumbnails of the results, the better to visually remember. The results that appear when you do a search in your browser aren’t quite as visual:

In the month I’ve been using Recall, my bacon has been saved no fewer than five times. Five times I would have lost time hunting, trying to re-create searches, hunting through my browser’s History list, and so on.

(To be clear: There’s a big difference between Recall and the History list that your browser automatically maintains. The History list stores only the names and addresses of the websites you’ve visited; Recall captures what was written on those pages. Big difference.)

In the aftermath of the election, for example, I read dozens of articles on the web. Later, I wanted to show my wife one I’d read about the reaction when Ronald Reagan was elected—but where? I’d probably been on 30 sites over three days! Boom: Atlas found it, front and center (you can see that in my video above).

The next day, I wanted to find a discussion I’d had with my wife about some hilarious answer that Siri had provided. I couldn’t remember the wording, and I couldn’t remember if our exchange had been by email, Messages, or Facebook Messenger. I did a search for “Siri,” and boom: Atlas found it in Messages.

Meet Recall’s Limitations

“What types of content does Recall remember?

Anything you see on your screen, Recall remembers.”

That’s what the website says, but it’s not even remotely true.

Recall is rather spectacular when it comes to finding web pages you’ve seen, email you’ve read, PDF documents you’ve opened, and people you’ve opened in Contacts. It can call them up again instantaneously, and when you click Open, you’re returned to the actual web page (in your browser) or email (in your mail program).

Unfortunately, Recall isn’t as impressive at other kinds of documents. It does a great job of finding words you’ve had in chats—but when you click Open, it opens up a screenshot of the relevant screenful of chat, rather than opening the chat program and scrolling to the right place. It does the same thing if you search for an Evernote page, or for an email that no longer exists.

It’s even worse at things like Microsoft Office documents, which it can find only by their titles. It can’t seek inside of them, which is very odd—the Mac’s built-in Spotlight command can do that!

Recall can’t find text in the Mac’s Notes app, Calendar, or Stickies. It can’t find text in Tweetbot, my Twitter (TWTR) program. It’s blind to what’s in page-layout files like Adobe (ADBE) InDesign.

The App

There’s a matching iPhone app. It’s not an iPhone version of the Mac app, though—it doesn’t add a photographic memory to your phone. Instead, it’s a viewer into your Mac’s photographic memory. From the phone, you can search “everything” you’ve seen on your Mac. Since you can open them right on the phone, it’s still occasionally useful.

Also worth noting: You can install Recall on more than one Mac. At that point, a search on one computer finds all your memorized screens from all of them.

Security

It’s super-important to get this: Recall stores its index of your computer on Atlas’s servers. The company hopes to reassure privacy worriers by noting that:

• The data is encrypted on both ends
• If anything pops up in a search that you want Recall to forget, one click on a Trash button gets rid of it
• You can pause Recall’s memorizing process for 15, 30, or 60 minutes—handy if you want to look at, you know, a certain website
• You can block any folder on your computer or particular web addresses

Still, this business about storing the images of your deepest, most personal information on somebody else’s servers will be a deal-killer for lots of people.

Should you recall?

Honestly, even if all Atlas Recall could do was instantly find text in any web page, email, chat, or PDF you’ve ever seen, it would be worth installing. It’s free for now, and this basic version will always be free. (The company plans to offer a premium, paid version with additional features, like the ability to search for documents that were created before you installed Atlas Recall.)

It’s truly wonderful—if, that is, you can get past the security heebie-jeebies.

That said, there’s no technical reason the program shouldn’t one day be capable of memorizing what you see in more kinds of text-based apps. Here’s hoping the company will get around to it soon.

I doubt anyone would mind if the company addressed the program’s remaining bugs, too. The app keeps asking me to install its plug-in into my Chrome and Safari browsers—over and over and over again. (That plug-in allows you to search for all your stuff from within the browser.)

Only then will I start demanding royalties for my brilliant, brilliant idea.

David Pogue, tech columnist for Yahoo Finance, welcomes non-toxic comments in the Comments below. On the Web, he’s davidpogue.com. On Twitter, he’s @pogue. On email, he’s poguester@yahoo.com. Here’s how to get his columns by email.

Apple posted a video on YouTube promoting the new Touch Bar MacBook Pros. The video cuts frenetically between a long line of Edison bulbs exploding down a darkened street and into the countryside, and scenes of human inventions from the discovery of fire to a robot walking down a street. The spot concludes with ‘Ideas push the world forward,’ echoing the line ‘They push the human race forward’ from Apple’s famous 1997 ‘Crazy Ones’ ad.

The ad then cuts to the line ‘Introducing a tool for all the ideas to come.’ A MacBook Pro comes into view with an Edison bulb on the screen. A hand scrubs back and forth across a slider on the Touch Bar making the video of the exploding bulb fast forward and rewind. The video does a nice job demonstrating the marquee feature of the new MacBook Pros, but an even better job, through its use of pacing, music, and editing, of giving a sense of the speed at which technology advances in what feels like an oblique response to critics of the changes made to Apple’s laptop line.

→ Source: youtube.com

Some bits from a splendid article about the Chicago Cubs.

“All combined knowledge of baseball probably represents three per cent of the game—ninety-seven per cent is unknown,” Epstein told me this spring. “So we’re constantly asking each other questions, testing hypotheses, challenging other people’s opinions—asking if there’s a better way to do things, a better way to capture data, gather data, work with data, testing out old scouting axioms to see if they can be proven by the numbers or disproven by the numbers.”

---

“I asked two quantitative people, working separately, to study the entire league and to figure out if there was a statistical way to characterize the success of other ball clubs,”

---

“Everybody wants to win, but, if all you think about is winning and losing, you get tight,” he told me. “But process is fearless. Just focus on what you have to do. Play the game properly, and the rest will take care of itself.” To underscore that point with his players, Maddon, in spring training, handed out T-shirts bearing such aphorisms as “Do Simple Better” and “Try Not to Suck.”

"Being opposed to technology is profoundly at odds with the book business because what is the book but technology, technology that has been smoothed and sanded by repeated contact with human society into the most comfortable technology we have, as taken for granted as our clothes, product of the looms. … We cannot know how much magnificent culture went unpublished by the white men in tweed jackets who ran publishing for the past century but just because they did publish some great books doesn’t mean they didn’t ignore a great many more."

Something seemed to cough Michal's RSS into life and this popped into my reader. It's wonderful. It's a little ways down his page, the original source seems to have gone.

Jason Rodriguez, A List Apart, Nov 20, 2016

Could we be about to see technological innovations in email? According to this article, email vendors are beginning to awaken to the possibility. "The email industry itself is in a state of reinvention," writes Jason Rodriguez. "The web is leaking into the inbox." We're looking at responsive layouts,  animation and interactivity, semantic elements, and tooling and frameworks. Significantly, Microsoft (which has never supported HTML email properly) is taking more of an interest.

If you’ve seen reports about how the Trump transition is incompetent, vindictive, and corrupt you may have been tempted to take heart that a Trump administration would be bad at actually getting things done.

I was tempted too. But remember — these people got Trump elected. They are effective.

You might think Trump’s too lazy to do the reading and pay attention during briefings. He’s bad at those things. But he’s not lazy — he works harder than you or I do.

I wouldn’t place even the smallest shred of hope in their not getting things done. They will get things done. And you will not like those things.

* * *

Bankers are celebrating Trump’s victory. Of course they are. This administration is not for the white working class — it’s for the top of the 1%.

Trump goes out to an expensive steak restaurant and tells everyone there how he’s going to lower their taxes.

* * *

You might think that at least he’s got an infrastructure plan, so there’s that. Maybe it takes a Republican President and Congress to get infrastructure spending passed.

But hold on: it’s not what you think. It’s the privatization of infrastructure. It’s tax breaks in the hopes that it would make our roads and bridges and airports better.

If it were anything else — if it included actual, needed infrastructure spending — the Republican Congress would kill it, and they’d be able to point to that and claim that they’re independent, that they’re not just blind Trump supporters.

The one good thing you think is on the table is not actually on the table. Don’t be fooled.

* * *

You might be tempted to think there are two Republican parties: the party for the bankers and the party for the white working class. There are not two parties: there is just one, and it is not the party for any working class.

* * *

You remember laughing when Tea Party protestors would hold up signs like “Government Hands Off Medicare!”

Of course it’s silly, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt since you can’t fit that many words on a sign. The sentiment is clear: the government should not fuck up Medicare.

But it’s going to. Paul Ryan and friends are going to privatize it, which is another way of saying that it is essentially going away.

So: not only will millions lose their health insurance when ObamaCare is repealed, but future senior citizens will not have the guarantees of health care that current and previous generations received.

Which includes me, and probably you, and a whole bunch of people in that white working class.

This is going to happen. Not down the road some time — next year. 2017.

* * *

Stop thinking that there’s anything that can’t possibly happen.

You might think that there’d be too high a political price to pay for ending Medicare — but then you thought that a guy who brags about sexual assault couldn’t be elected President.

There is no regression to normality. Cooler heads won’t prevail.

Trump’s victory was an empire-strikes-back moment for all the places and voters that feel left behind in an increasingly diverse, post-industrial, and urbanized America.

Walter Lippmann, the 1920s preeminent newspaper columnist, recognized that at their core these disparate disputes represented “the older American village civilization making its last stand against what to it looks like an alien invasion,” as he wrote in The Atlantic in 1927. Lippmann had no doubt about which side would ultimately prevail: “The evil” that rural America believed it was resisting, he wrote, “is simply the new urban civilization with its irresistible economic and scientific and mass power.” Before long, the polyglot “urban civilization” established unquestioned dominance over the nation’s direction in culture, the economy, and ultimately politics, when it emerged as the cornerstone of Franklin Roosevelt’s lasting New Deal coalition. …

. Bill Clinton was the last Democratic nominee to demonstrate wide appeal across that divide: In both 1992 and 1996, he carried nearly half of America’s 3,100 counties. But since then, Democrats have retreated into the nation’s urban centers. …Reeling from Clinton’s defeat, many Democrats have declared economic populism the key to restoring competitiveness beyond the party’s urban strongholds. But, as Bonier notes, the Democrats may have permanently reduced their ceiling of support in non-urban areas by unifying behind liberal positions on almost all social issues. …

.

The converse is that several big city mayors are already promising to fight Trump’s plan to accelerate deportations of undocumented immigrants, while other collisions with urban attitudes loom over his pledges to loosen gun laws and tighten surveillance of Muslim communities. The chasm between town and country that this election exposed will only widen as the already tumultuous Trump presidency unfolds.

. Full essay here.

 

Recent reports have cast doubt on Apple's automobile ambitions. With Apple shifting its focus to auto software and autonomous driving, many have interpreted the move as Apple giving up on building its own car. I look at the situation very differently. Apple remains interested in transportation, and the case for an Apple Car continues to build.  

Apple's Initial Car Strategy

Apple management began to think about the feasibility of designing and selling its own car in early 2014, and early musings likely stretched as far back as late 2013. This was right around the time that management was becoming confident in Apple Watch becoming a commercial success. It is conceivable that Apple had begun to contemplate new product categories after Apple Watch.

As seen in the photos below, what had seemed like Tim Cook innocently checking out BMW's new i8 electric car outside of Apple HQ in June 2014 took on a whole new meaning eight months later when the Financial Times was the first publication to break the story of Apple thinking about selling its own electric car. 

Source: Twitter

I suspect Apple's initial car strategy was to design and build a premium-priced car that would be bought or leased by consumers. An Apple Car would stand out from peers due to the compelling experience produced by combining Apple hardware, software, and services. 

The plan included Apple's Industrial Design (ID) group coming up with prototypes. Product designers and hardware engineers would then work with ID to turn a prototype into a product capable of being mass produced. In terms of manufacturing, Apple would rely on the same playbook used with most of Apple's other products. Instead of building the car themselves, Apple would have a third-party contract manufacturer assemble the car. Apple management reportedly visited Magna Steyr, BMW, and Daimler to see the feasibility of using contract manufacturing in the auto industry. Apple would then be in a good position to sell an Apple Car through its Retail store network around the world. 

In mid-2015, Apple went on a real estate shopping spree, quickly buying or leasing enough land to build another Apple Campus 2 near San Jose International Airport. I suspect the land purchases were related to Project Titan. Apple also bought various heavy manufacturing facilities around Sunnyvale and Santa Clara, a very obvious sign of its growing automobile ambitions. (More information on each Project Titan building is available here). Project Titan seemed to be firing on all cylinders. The team was given approval to expand to 1,800 employees, and all indications seemed to suggest the pieces were coming together for some type of automobile product in a few years. 

Hitting the Brakes

In what turned out to be the first sign of major trouble, news broke in January 2016 that Steve Zadesky, head of Project Titan, was stepping down. Apple product managers were increasingly battling with those hired from the auto industry. In a stark contrast to iPhone development, Apple had relied on outside hires to boost its auto expertise, especially when it came to auto hardware expertise. This ended up producing a culture clash as each side had a different view on how best to achieve goals in a timely manner. To make matters worse, the goals themselves were changing. Senior Titan managers were reportedly having doubts as to how an Apple Car would be able to leapfrog existing competition from Tesla and BMW. 

As we later discovered, things had deteriorated so much with Project Titan in early 2016 that Apple convinced Bob Mansfield, former SVP of Hardware Engineering, to come out of retirement in April 2016 to take over the project. (A complete Project Titan timeline is available here.) Up to that point, one of the major clues pointing to Apple's growing interest in automobiles was the sudden rise in R&D expense. However, something changed this past summer. As shown in Exhibit 1, Apple R&D expense growth slowed dramatically beginning in July. In fact, Apple reported the slowest R&D expense growth in nine quarters. On a sequential basis, 4Q16 was the third-weakest quarter for R&D growth since 2009. 

Exhibit 1: Apple Year-Over-Year (YOY) Quarterly R&D Expense Increase

As reported in September, Apple had begun to curtail parts of Project Titan this past summer. Dozens of employees, including many focused on automobile hardware, were let go or moved to other divisions within Apple. Ultimately, Apple hit the brakes on Project Titan because the auto industry was rapidly changing and Apple had lost sight of the car "puck." 

Skating to the Puck  

In January 2007, one of Steve Jobs' final slides of his iPhone unveiling keynote included a Wayne Gretzky quote. 

"I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been."

Jobs held the quote in very high regard, saying that Apple had always tried to follow it and that it would remain Apple's goal forever. Over the years, the "puck" quote has been used so frequently that it has lost much of its meaning. Skating to where the puck is going to be does not mean having to predict the future to be right. If that were the case, the probability of success would be quite low. Instead, success is achieved by reading the market and positioning oneself as the catalyst that leads to market change. If we return to the hockey analogy, Wayne Gretzky's skill was found in his ability to read the current situation and position himself to increase the probability of impacting game play. 

Jobs included the quote in the iPhone keynote because Apple felt confident that the iPhone would not just change the smartphone industry in 2007, but would also become the catalyst for change in the coming years. The iPhone would alter the smartphone's trajectory. Apple ended up being right. The iPhone's revolutionary user interface and groundbreaking software positioned Apple well for the eventual app revolution, which only solidified iOS as the most profitable mobile platform.

A more recent example of Apple skating to where the puck will be involves Apple Watch. While many companies remain unsure of where the wearables puck will be in a few years, Apple is laying the groundwork for being a leading wearables player with Apple Watch and soon, AirPods. Apple is betting that it will be well-positioned for the inevitable trend of wearable devices handling tasks that we used to give to smartphones and tablets. 

The Apple Car Puck

When it came to skating to where the car puck is going to be, Apple made a miscalculation. Much of the change now taking place with Project Titan is a result of Apple trying to rectify that mistake. 

If we look at where the car industry was in early 2014 when Apple began to investigate the feasibility of building a car, the world was a very different place.

• Tesla had sold only 21,000 Model S cars.
• BMW had just begun to sell its i3 electric car. 
• Google had just announced it would create a self-driving car without a steering wheel or pedals. 
• Uber was valued at only $3.5 billion.

From Apple's perspective, the goal for Project Titan was to capitalize on declining battery costs and new manufacturing techniques involving new materials, including carbon fibre. Apple looked at Tesla and BMW as inspirations. The plan was to do to the car industry what Apple had done to the phone industry, namely, use software and manufacturing to rethink the car. Over time, Apple could include self-driving capabilities.

However, after only a few years, the auto industry had undergone significant changes. 

• Tesla is now producing cars at a rate of 100,000 per year but is increasingly focusing on building the low cost ($35,000) Model 3.
• Elon Musk expects to have a fully autonomous car by the end of 2017. Tesla has begun equipping all of its new cars with self-driving hardware.
• BMW's i series electric car program has lost all momentum.
• Ridesharing adoption is exploding around the world. 
• Uber is valued at $65+ billion, Didi at $35+ billion. 

Putting the pieces together, we see that the car industry has embraced ridesharing much more quickly than it appeared to be a few years ago. Meanwhile, autonomous driving is no longer looking like a pipe dream that will take 10 to 20 years to become a reality. In a world with self-driving electric cars that are part of a ridesharing fleet, relying on a traditional buy/lease model for a premium-priced electric car doesn't sound like the puck worth tracking.

The Blackberry of the Auto Industry

Electric car sales remain quite niche in the auto industry. In 2015, electric car sales represented only 0.66% of all car sales in the U.S., down from 0.74% in 2014. Optimistic sales forecasts have had to be dialed back time after time.

There has been much speculation that Tesla's Model 3 will significantly alter the auto industry, serving as the catalyst that will finally place electric car ownership in the mainstream. This would impact not only legacy automakers struggling to sell electric cars, but also Apple's car plans. I suspect Apple's original goal with Titan was to sell an electric car to consumers, helping to expand electric car adoption. However, the world is changing.

Electric car ownership may turn out to be the "Blackberry" of the auto industry, a near-term phenomenon that will end up being a head fake and not representative of the future. The combination of ridesharing and self-driving cars threatens to undermine car ownership as car utilization would be improved. (Currently, the average car is not used 96% of the time.)

Titan Reset

According to published reports, Bob Mansfield is overseeing significant changes to Apple's car strategy. Project Titan has been rearranged into three teams:

• Software
• Sensors
• Hardware

The focus has been put on autonomous driving, and auto hardware has been put on the rear burner. These changes reflect a type of reset as Apple rethinks were the car puck is headed. By placing autonomous driving as Project Titan's focal point, Apple is giving us a clue that it now thinks ridesharing is the future worth betting on. It is worth pointing out that Apple made its $1 billion investment in Didi soon after Bob Mansfield had announced major changes to Project Titan with a focus on autonomous driving. The timing between these events surely doesn't seem coincidental.  

Instead of owning cars, consumers will share cars. It is just too difficult to make a case for owning a self-driving electric car in the future. Even Tesla is showing early signs of embracing a different kind of business model in which Model 3 cars could be used to form a ridesharing network. If Apple is unable to come up with autonomous driving, the company's successes in auto hardware or manufacturing would be wasted. 

While Apple has reportedly scaled back its auto hardware ambitions, much of this reduction does not preclude a future revamp if Apple's autonomous driving research proves successful. However, Apple may approach auto hardware differently next time in an effort to improve odds of ultimate success. We know that Apple held talks with McLaren concerning some type of strategic investment. (My complete thoughts and observations on McLaren are available here.) These talks reportedly occurred after Mansfield had refocused Titan, which included de-emphasizing auto hardware. This tells me that the odds of Apple partnering or acquiring an established team of auto hardware experts have increased. 

The Big Picture

All of the evidence still points to Apple being extremely interested in transportation. The company apparently has retained all of the buildings and land associated with Project Titan, including the massive amount of open land near San Jose International Airport. Apple is now doubling down on auto software and autonomous driving talent, which includes rebuilding the QNX team in Canada. Recent Apple M&A related to augmented reality has been tied to the company's autonomous driving efforts. Apple has a seat on Didi's board. In addition, Apple ID has the freedom to continue working on car ideas.

As to where Apple thinks the car puck is headed, a self-driving smart room on wheels is the leading contender. In the beginning, these self-driving cars may be limited to specific routes or geographies with the expectation of being rolled out to additional locations over time. Apple would need to embrace new business models and partners. Apple can leapfrog the competition by keeping focus on the user experience attached to the product.

Ford 021C concept car from Marc Newson, a key member of the Apple ID group.

In a world where we share cars, there will be a significant desire for the ability to change the inside of a car for the current occupants. With control over various services including mobile payments, communication, mapping, and entertainment content, Apple will be one of the companies better positioned to come up with a premium experience in the auto industry. And of course, we can't forget Apple ID's contribution to such a product as design contains the most power to alter the car industry. Apple is still thinking about where the car puck is headed. 

Receive my analysis and perspective on Apple throughout the week via exclusive daily updates (2-3 stories a day, 10-12 stories a week). To sign up, visit the membership page.

Quattrociocchi has published a series of papers (awaiting peer-review) that analyze the rigidity of “echo chambers.” His findings suggest that people, not social networks, have been their driving force. We commonly sort ourselves into rigidly like-minded groups—and stay there.

(Via Quartz)

#

Greetings, SUMO Nation!

How have you been? Many changes around and we haven’t been slacking either – we are getting closer to the soft launch of the new community platform (happening next week), so be there when it happens :-) More details below…

Welcome, new contributors!

• DanielNL
• … autumn is getting to you all, hm? There is probably more of you, but you haven’t made yourselves known, so all the spotlights are on Daniel this week ;-)

If you just joined us, don’t hesitate – come over and say “hi” in the forums!

SUMO Community meetings

• LATEST ONE: 16th of November – you can read the notes here and see the video at AirMozilla.
  
• NEXT ONE: happening on the 23rd of November!
• If you want to add a discussion topic to the upcoming meeting agenda:
  • Start a thread in the Community Forums, so that everyone in the community can see what will be discussed and voice their opinion here before Wednesday (this will make it easier to have an efficient meeting).
  • Please do so as soon as you can before the meeting, so that people have time to read, think, and reply (and also add it to the agenda).
  • If you can, please attend the meeting in person (or via IRC), so we can follow up on your discussion topic during the meeting with your feedback.

Community

• If you want to help us brainstorm how to promote “Internet Awareness” among our visitors, please join us here.
• A guest blog post from a member of the SUMO Nation is coming your way… Patience, my friends!
• By the way… Do you know Rust?
• Reminder: We are going to retire the main SUMO mailing list, since it has been not used extensively for quite a while. So, you should remove sumo(AT)lists.mozilla.org from your contact lists.

Platform

• Check the notes from the last meeting in this document. (and don’t forget about our meeting recordings).
• The main point of today’s meeting was checking in and going through the list of outstanding issues. Please check the document linked above to make sure you’re up to date with the latest events.
• We are still aiming for a migration next week!
• You can preview the current migration test site here.
  • All your staging login data should work, but if you can’t access the site, contact Madalina. Take a good look at the new (refreshed) home page and anything else that looks new to you.
  • Drop your feedback into the same feedback document as usual.
• Reminder: The post-migration feature list can be found here (courtesy of Roland – ta!)
  • We are still looking for user stories to focus on immediately after the migration (also known as “Phase 1”)

Social

Support Forum

Knowledge Base & L10n

• Over 360 revisions have been submitted over the last 7 days – thank you, editors of SUMO!
• If you’re curious about the upcoming KB & l10n process changes for the new platform, you have a taste of it here.
• Thank you for making the version 50 articles “speak your language” :-) Users all around the world appreciate your efforts!

Firefox (release week for 50.0!)

• for Android
  
  • The forum thread for version 50 is here!

• for Desktop
  • The forum thread for version 50 is here (thanks to Philipp).

• for iOS
  • Firefox Focus is lauching today, so if you’ve got questions, check the FAQ doc about that. You can also read more about it on the other blog ;-)
    

Finally, something for your long autumn evenings… The playlist of (almost all) your great recommendations from the music sharing thread! Enjoy and keep rocking the helpful web!

I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts lately during my commutes, and the latest is Andy Ihnatko’s Almanac. The first episode is rather more unique than usual (seeing as it’s nearly a blow-by-blow of his reaction to the elections), but there was something else there that struck a nerve.

Like him, I’ve always (well, for the past couple of decades, at least) thought of myself as a Mac person (more on the UNIX side of things, but you get my point). And like him, I felt that my identity was shaped (or at least resonated) by the machines I used and the conscious choice I made to use them instead of lessermainstream defaults, and by the stuff I created using them.

And, obviously, the changes in what we used to call “computing” and this evolving reality in which literally everyone on the planet above poverty level carries on them some form of computing device is a profound rift between what we expected computing to become and what it actually is these days – which segues nicely into the current debacle regarding the MacBook Pro, the future of desktop Macs and, eventually, a larger rift between a professional workstation (for whatever job) and pocketable hardware.

As it turns out, our identity becomes inextricably enmeshed in those things, both large and fuzzy in scope (like platforms and future directions) and small and nitpicky (like scripting and keyboard feel).

I’ve been pondering the issue of identity (both private and public) for a little over a year now – joining Microsoft was an easy decision to make, but one that challenged my identity in multiple ways.

I’ve come to terms with the contradiction of working there and still being a UNIX guy first and foremost, but there’s a fork in the road up ahead where I’m going to have to choose (again) between technology and business, and it’s time to sit back, enjoy the scenery for a few weeks and figure out how my goals, wants and needs (and, most importantly, my identity) fit into the grand scheme of things.

One thing’s for sure, though. I’m going to cross that line using a Mac, and there better be new models on the other side.

David Wiley, iterating toward openness, Nov 20, 2016

David Wiley comments on the role of commercial actors in the open space in light of yesterday’ s revelation  that Microsoft has joined the Linux Foundation. He writes, "The open source software side of the open house has absolutely no issue with commercial entities using or contributing to open source software." That's not exactly true, but the dissenting voices have long since been drowned out. Anyhow, it's not the same in the content world, but the fear of educators, he writes, is unjustified. "There’ s no excuse for judging an organization based on whether it was incorporated as a for-profit or non-profit entity." Maybe, but that's not how commercial use is defined. It's when you slap a pricetag on a learning resource and prevent them from accessing it otherwise that people begin to question the practice. And remember, in most countries, education, unlike software development, is a public good. Which is why we resist the commercialization of learning resources.

Philippe le Hegaret, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Nov 20, 2016

As reported by the W3C: "A couple weeks ago the W3C Web Platform Working Group published HTML  5.1 as a Standard. It was merely days after the second anniversary of the advent of the 5th major version of the core language of the World Wide Web (you may read the press release we put out when HTML  5 became a W3C recommendation)." Best line of the day is from Ben Werdmuller: "According to software precedent, the next version should be HTML 7."

Rebecca Rego Barry, JSTOR Daily, Nov 20, 2016

I don't think anyone has seriously suggested that all books will be replaced by audio. It's far more plausible to suggests that all paper versions of books will be transferred to a digital format. Audio as a medium has its limitations. But it is a terrific medium to help occupy the mind while doing other things, like cooking, driving or trying to sleep. Hence the continuing popularity of radio and the recent rediscovery of podcasts. This article looks at the history of audio books - aka 'talking books' - from its origin in the 1930s. Audio books have always had their criticisms, as though they were some form of cheating. But there's also a sense in which audio is more. “ Listening to authors read their own memoirs introduces an intimacy that  cannot be achieved without the audio,” writes Amy Harmon.

The Stream is a weird place. Your Facebook feed, for example, is a series of posts by various people that in some ways resembles a forum, but in other ways it’s not at all like a forum.  When you post something to Facebook, there’s not an explicit prompt you are responding to, which seems non-problematic when you are posting a cool new video you like, but a bit weirder when you are posting random articles.

A recent Jay Rosen tweet thread got me thinking about this a bit more deeply. Rosen suggests that the reason that fake news spiked before the election was demand-driven: many Republican voters were feeling uneasy about voting for Trump, and articles where Hillary was knocking off FBI agents and funding ISIS helped them feel better about that:

This is interesting, because the place where I became obsessed with the fake news phenomenon was in the primary, when a lot of Sanders supporters I respected and admired for their intelligence suddenly were posting bizarre vote-rigging stories.

As one example, the Inquistr story Election Fraud Study Points To Rigged Democratic Primary Against Bernie Sanders [Video] was repeatedly in my feed, with angry references to how this proved they had been right all along — Bernie was actually winning. The primary had been stolen!

The “study” the page linked was referred to as a “Stanford Study”,  a claim which took 60 seconds to debunk. It was the work of a current Stanford student of psychology. No background in politics or polling. No Stanford appointment. And the study itself was just a paper, written and shared via Google Drive — it hadn’t been peer-reviewed or even designed above and beyond what one might do for a blog post.  When you dug into the paper, there was nothing there — the computation of some effect sizes between states with paper trails and those without, and language which indicated that the author might not in fact have understood how exit polls work, or have been aware of the shift in demographic support for Clinton between 2008 and 2016. (In fact, in this respect there was an error that would disqualify it from ever being taken seriously).

I didn’t expect most of my friends would get the math, but even so, without the call to authority, and considering the major barriers to rigging an election, one would assume people wouldn’t re-share it. But reshare it they did. And quite a lot.

And this is where I think Rosen’s point is interesting. If you think about the Stream, with it’s lack of explicit prompts, how does one know what to share? One thought is that as you go through your stream you are doing something like shopping — you’re explicitly in the market for something. And very often that something is a rebuttal to an implied argument that is giving you some cognitive dissonance.

For the Trump supporters, the dissonance was that Trump was unqualified and racist and Hillary was just (in their minds) corrupt. But was she corrupt enough? And if not, how could they vote for him? Changing Clinton to a murdering ISIS follower allowed them to follow their gut, which really wanted to vote for Trump. It gave their gut the evidence it needed to rule the day.

For the more militant Sanders conspiracists, the dissonance was between the results they felt Sanders should have and the ones that he got. People’s gut had told them Sanders would be broadly popular, but the reality was that he was not quite popular enough. On the verge of having to accept that, Facebook threw out a lifeline for the gut: the election was rigged. Stanford scientists had proved it.

If you go through a few of the public (e.g. share to all) posts on this, which you can do with this search, you’ll find something really interesting — so many of the comments people write when sharing the piece are of the type “I knew it! I knew it!”. It’s the sort of reaction someone has when they are struggling to maintain belief in the face of cognitive dissonance and suddenly stumble on a lifeline.

(Note, the post above is a public post (e.g. meant to be shared to the world). You can’t see, and shouldn’t share private/friends posts with that search. And even though the post is public I’m blacking out the person’s name out of consideration)

This isn’t to say that all this is innocent in the least. The “Stanford Study” that wasn’t actually a study or from Stanford was shared at least a 100,000 times via different sites shared on Facebook, including by HNN (share count of their version: 82,000), which changed the headline to the more zippy “Odds Hillary Won Without Widespread Fraud: 1 in 77 Billion Says Berkeley, Stanford Studies”. (Spoiler alert: the Berkeley study wasn’t from Berkeley either). And it got a big assist from state-sponsored entities like the Russian-owned RT News in this episode of Redacted Tonight, which was viewed approximately 125,000 times on YouTube:

(That’s YouTube views, BTW, which are serious stuff — you have to sit down and watch a significant percentage of it before the view will register).

The RT segment ups the ante, really highlighting the Stanford name, to much laughs. It’s a study out of a little community college called Stanford, the host jokes (again, it’s not). It’s getting to the point it’s really embarrassing, the host says, how people won’t admit it was rigged. How much evidence do you need?

There’s a similar story in the past couple days with a Breitbart story being shared that passed around a ludicrous map with a misleading headline about Trump winning the popular vote (in the heartland).

Now any person with half a brain can see how ridiculous this map is — if they stop to look at it. And any person that can stop to parse a sentence can see the gymnastics required here to claim this victory.

The people reposting this are not stupid. But crucially, they don’t stop to think about it. They see and they click, I think, because they know the moment they see this that this is a rebuttal they have been in the market for. They don’t need to evaluate it, because this is precisely what they have been looking for.

This is a bit rambling, but what I mean to say is I think Rosen is onto something here about the nature of the supply-side.  I’m starting to think of feed skimming as a sort of shopping experience, where you know the ten sorts of things that you are looking for this week. Some paper towels, a new sponge to replace the ratty old one, and a rebuttal to your snobby cousin who posted that article that made you feel for twenty seconds that you might be wrong about something. Just what I was looking for!

As I’ve said before, this doesn’t mean that the news only confirmed what you thought already. In fact, quite the opposite: this process, over time, can pull you and your friends deeper and deeper into alternate realities, based on well-known cognitive mechanisms.  But thinking of this process as not so much one of discovery as rebuttal shopping — often brought on by cognitive dissonance — is useful at the moment, and I thank Jay Rosen for that.

Despite being one of the few tech companies to take a stand on privacy this year in the wake of the San Bernadino shooter controversy, a new report indicates that iCloud, Apple cloud storage service, actually records and uploads user call history.

Russian digital forensics firm Elcomsoft has discovered that Apple’s mobile devices automatically send a user’s call history to the company’s servers when iCloud is enabled, according to a report stemming from The Intercept. This data is uploaded even when users have not given iCloud permission to do so — all that is necessary is for iCloud syncing to be turned on.

These logs contain a list of all calls made and received from any iOS device linked to that iCloud account, including phone numbers, dates, times, duration, and skipped phone calls. This information can then be used by law enforcement, especially in cases when authorities are unable to obtain this data from carriers.

Interestingly, FaceTime, which can be used to make both audio and video calls on all iOS devices, syncs with iCloud automatically as well. This feature has been part of Apple’s operating system since at iOS 8.2 and now also includes macOS, according to Elcomsoft.

The security firm says it’s releasing an update to its Phone Breaker software tool that allows users to extract call histories from iCloud accounts. Law enforcement agencies, corporate security departments and even consumers have been known to use this software.

According to 9to5 Mac, Apple has responded to the controversy with the following statement:

“We offer call history syncing as a convenience to our customers so that they can return calls from any of their devices. Apple is deeply committed to safeguarding our customers’ data. That’s why we give our customers the ability to keep their data private. Device data is encrypted with a user’s passcode, and access to iCloud data including backups requires the user’s Apple ID and password. Apple recommends all customers select strong passwords and use two-factor authentication.”

In the past, The Intercept has also reported similar activity related to iMessage logs.

Despite the iOS ecosystems popularity, almost every developer takes issue with Apple’s hefty 30 percent revenue cut.

Earlier this year the company improved the split by only taking 15 percent of revenue, but only when a user has signed up to a subscription service for a year. Now, Bloomberg is reporting that Apple could soon move to an 85/16 split for all video subscription apps removing the one year time subscription completely.

If this shift goes through, this will likely make both partners and customers happy because in some cases companies tack on an additional dollar to offset Apple’s share of the subscription fee.

Bell’s CraveTV recently announced rolled out the ability for users to subscribe directly to its service through the Apple TV.

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With individual privacy becoming more of a pressing concern each passing day, Mozilla has released a new privacy-focused browser called Firefox Focus.

What’s here at launch is fairly minimal: there’s no option to open multiple tabs — presumably, that’s where the “Focus” part of the app comes into play — but the app features several built-in blockers for ads, content trackers and social trackers. Thankfully, there’s also the option to open the current web page in Safari or Chrome. In addition, the browser can also block web fonts, and there’s even an option to erase one’s browsing history right from the navigation bar.

In an interview with Engadget, a Mozilla spokesperson said the company will “consider building a similar product” for Android depending on the success of Focus on iOS.

Download Firefox Focus from the iTunes App Store.