Today, Apple revealed an update to the 27-inch 5K Retina iMac with faster processors, updated graphics, more storage, and new display features. Although the new 27-inch iMac’s design is identical to the existing model, this is still a significant update compared to the iMac it replaces.
“Now more than ever, our customers are relying on the Mac. And many of them need the most powerful and capable iMac we’ve ever made,” said Tom Boger, Apple’s senior director of Mac and iPad Product Marketing. “With blazing performance, double the memory, SSDs across the line with quadruple the storage, an even more stunning Retina 5K display, a better camera, higher fidelity speakers, and studio-quality mics, the 27-inch iMac is loaded with new features at the same price. It’s the ultimate desktop, to work, create, and communicate.”
Last updated in March 2019, the new iMac features 6 and 8-core 10th generation Intel CPUs that can reach speeds of up to 5.0GHz with Turbo Boost. Storage is all SSD now with transfer speeds up to 3.4GB/s when launching apps and large files. There’s also an 8TB SSD option for the first time, which is four times the storage available in the previous model. Until today, the standard configurations of the 27-inch iMac came with Fusion drives.
The new iMac has been upgraded to AMD Radeon Pro Series 5000 graphics. The display of the iMac is the same resolution as before, but now, it comes with a new nano-texture option first seen in the Pro Display XDR, which provides a low-reflection, matte finish, and it supports Apple’s True Tone technology. The new all-in-one desktop also includes a T2 chip for boot and data security, a 1080p FaceTime HD camera, and improved speakers and microphones.
Apple’s other iMacs received smaller updates today too. SSDs are now standard in the 21.5-inch model, although a Fusion Drive is still an option. Also, a 10-core Intel Xeon processor is now standard in the iMac Pro.
Today’s updates are in line with Apple’s statements during WWDC that the company had additional updates to Macs based on Intel CPUs in the pipeline. Although Macs with ARM processors are on the way later this year, Apple has not revealed which models will be converted to ARM first. Consequently, if you need a new desktop Mac, it’s still worth considering the Intel-based models, especially the new 27-inch iMac, which is substantially improved over its last iteration.
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Are you looking for a communications role with a purpose-driven organization? Are you interested in exploring ways that sustainable transportation can make communities more livable?
Better Environmentally Sound Transportation is a non-profit charity with a vision of healthy, vibrant communities through sustainable transportation. We aim to activate better transportation options though initiatives, collaboration and leadership. For more about BEST, please visit our website at best.bc.ca
BEST is looking for a Communications Manager to articulate the impact and results of our programs, plan engagement opportunities, and craft stories about sustainable ways of moving around the Metro Vancouver region. The successful candidate will work collaboratively with the General Manager to develop content that engages audiences and positions BEST as a leader in sustainable transportation.
To apply for the Communications Manager role, please send a resume and a cover letter telling us about your career goals to hr@best.bc.ca. Applications will be accepted until the position is filled.
Here’s why the Spinning Chandelier as an accessible work of public art will be one of the most loved in the city – rather like “A-mazing Laughter” at English Bay.
Sure, “most loved” does not mean “best,” depending on your criteria, but those who dismiss it because of how it signifies class, or is an obscene expenditure when we have so many other priorities, or is just a marketing device, etc, will only annoy themselves when seeing how people engage with it.
Like this:
Nominations open for any more engaging works in the city.
Journalist Douglas Todd is well known for carefully examining both sides of issues in his writings in the Vancouver Sun. On the weekend Mr. Todd wrote a very topical opinion editorial asking why there was not a continuous path along the Fraser River in the Southlands area accessible to public path users.
Indeed the Greenways Plan that was adopted by City of Vancouver Council 25 years ago envisioned a pathway all along the Fraser River that would be available to residents. When the Coast Mountain Bus Company controversially took acres of industrial land on the Fraser River at 9150 Bentley Street to use for bus parking it was landscape architect Art Cowie and retired biologist Terry Slack that pushed for a walkway open to the public along this part of the Fraser River. It was always intended that as redevelopment occurred along the river’s edge that the city would negotiate a right of way open to citizens.
The City has been successful in that negotiation and public pathways have been provided with two of the three golf courses along the Fraser River west of the Oak Street Bridge. Both McCleery Public Golf Course and Point Grey Golf Course have provided a public easement along the Fraser River. With the redevelopment of Deering Island a public pathway was also installed along the water, and a public park created on Deering Island.
(And a quick aside-the City in an in camera meeting was offered Deering Island decades ago for one million dollars for park land. At that time the City determined that they had an abundance of park land on the west side, and the land instead was sold to Park Georgia Realty who developed 38 single family lots, with architect Michael Geller.)
There was one section of the Fraser River Trail greenway south of the Point Grey Golf Course that was inaccessible due to a large stream embankment. The Simpson Family in Southlands who had lost a son in an accident in the armed forces chose to honour his memory and paid for the public bridge which is accessible to walkers, rollers, cyclists and horse back riders.
This meant that the greenways trail proceeded west through the ancient territory of the Musqueam First Nation, and that trail joins up to Pacific Spirit Park at Southwest Marine Drive. You can see the exact route for wayfinding here.
The Marine Drive Golf Club in this century tried to keep areas of the private club for male members only and as shown in court records intimidated female members who wanted to use that space as well. After women members won a court decision to have access to all parts of the Marine Drive Golf Club, the men in the club went to the British Columbia Court of Appeal to have that decision on equity overturned. The men won.
As Gary Mason in the Globe and Mail wrote in 2007:
“the B.C. Court of Appeal, no less, had ruled unanimously that the men could play their cards and tell their off-colour jokes without having to share their tables with members of the opposite sex. The lounge’s no-women-allowed policy was not, in the court’s view, a violation of the B.C. Human Rights Code.”
Given the rancour of the male members to sharing spaces with women members, you can also well imagine what the Marine Drive Golf Club’s response was over a decade ago when City staff politely requested the consideration of allowing a public right of way at the club’s riverfront.
The City has several closed street rights of way through the golf course that could be used as bargaining chips to get the Marine Drive Golf Club to do the right thing. But changing public attitudes and moral suasion have a stronger impact, and ten years later, Larry Emrick, Jennifer Maynard and Whitney Santos posed for a photo for Douglas Todd’s article. Each of these individuals have advocated for decades encouraging Vancouverites to use the Fraser River Trail.
It is now time for that trail to extend past the Marine Drive Golf Course and to be accessible for all residents of Vancouver. You can see the exact location of the Marine Drive Golf Course’s “missing greenway link” on the dotted Fraser River Trail below.
Silo’d TikToks. “This scenario would create siloed versions of TikTok, but it would ensure that the right data is stored on U.S. servers and never commingles with Chinese-hosted data.”
One TikTok, segregated data. Huh? In this scenario ByteDance still makes the app, but Microsoft owns and operates the data? Given how important the data is to the recommendation algorithm, I don’t see how this would work. (And Williams doesn’t either.)
TikTok as platform. “ByteDance and Microsoft [would] collaborate on a new TikTok platform enabled by a more open API.”
All three of those approaches are insane. Then again, all of this is insane.
Here’s how I think this will go down: Microsoft backs out, because the Trump administration is the crazy person in this threeway, and Satya Nadella is Tom Wambsgans in the season 2 finale of Succession. Come September, Trump makes a lot of noise, Barr tries to do something hand-wavey to shut down TikTok, and when it turns out he can’t, Trump turns on Apple and Google as the app store chokepoints…and because their CEOs are convenient targets. When they don’t do his bidding, he shouts election interference…
Oh god, please make it stop. Please.
microtok scenario was originally published in stating the obvious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Apple spendiert den 27" iMacs noch die Intel-Prozessoren der 10. Generation. Die kleinen iMacs bleiben vorerst bei der 7. und 8. Generation. Zwei längst überfällige Updates ist eine 1080p-Kamera und SSDs als Standardoption.
Ein neues Gehäuse werden die iMac wohl erst mit dem Schwenk auf Apple-eigene Prozessoren bekommen.
Lately I have been playing around with some vintage bikes. Here are two that I have finished and are now for sale. The Diamondback I am currently riding, but is is still in great shape. Follow the links to Craigslist to get the details and more photos.
The German Netflix series Dark, which I’ve now watched through, and loved all three seasons of, returns to a parable several times:
A human lives three lives. The first ends with the loss of naiveté, the second with the loss of innocence, and the third with the loss of life itself. It is inevitable that we will go through all three stages.
I have now spent more of my life on Prince Edward Island than off, a milestone I reached mid-March when the clock ticked over 27 years. Because Catherine and I moved here only 18 months after meeting, “life on Prince Edward Island” overlaps to a great degree with “life with Catherine”: PEI is the stage upon which our lives together played out.
So my life now neatly divides into three (I’m choosing to be optimistic about having another 27 years in me):
It doesn’t take much to shoehorn this into the Dark construction, as moving to PEI did coincide with a certain loss of naiveté, and the death of my father and of Catherine involved a rather dramatic loss of innocence.
June and July were therapeutic months for me: I did a round of one-on-one therapy with my psychologist, and, in parallel, attended an 8 week men’s grief group (which I dubbed “grief club” to my fellow bereaved).
The life lesson from both, boiled down to their essence, is “feel all the feelings.” Easier said than done, especially when you try to do it all by yourself, which is how I’d been attacking the problem from January to June. Indeed, when the instigator of grief club phoned me one Friday in late spring to invite me to join, my first reaction was “thanks, but I’m okay.”
On Monday I changed my mind, phoned back, and signed up. I booked my first appointment with my psychologist on the same day.
Truth be told, the most important part of both experiences happened that day: the simple act of saying, to myself, “no, I don’t got this” was the most important step of all.
Catherine died 200 days ago; I’ve spent much of that time dwelling on the years we spent together, on her illness and death, and trying to figure out the practicalities of how to live now, as a single father and a single man.
I’ve also spent a lot of that time running away from feeling (I uttered the phrase “I’m not sure if it’s okay to feel this” more than once during therapy), and trying desperately to attach some sort of blueprint to what happens next.
That lack of a blueprint is daunting: I’m so, so used to having a blueprint, most recently the sad and inevitable blueprint of Catherine’s illness and death, that not having one left me grasping every which way for one. It was my brother Mike who pulled me out of its whirligig, telling me, when I proclaimed frustration at not knowing what the coming months and years would hold, that it’s okay to not know, that, for that matter, it’s not possible to know. That was good to be reminded of.
So “now until death” lays out before me. The purple era. Twenty-seven years of?
I vacillate between seeing it as a free and open road and a frightening forest path, but I’m spending more time in the former these days. There is a power in the loss of naiveté and innocence, something I didn’t anticipate: I have been to the top of the mountain; it is dreadful and sad and terrifying, but it’s also beautiful and full of promise to look out from that vantage point, and empowering to have made that climb and survive.
A friend of mine, consoling me after the death of my father, said that he had never felt so intensely alive after the death of his; I know exactly what he was talking about.
Kissa by Kissa: How to Walk Japan (Book One) is a book about walking 1,000+km of the countryside of Japan along the ancient Nakasendō highway, the culture of toast (toast!), and mid-twentieth century Japanese cafés called kissaten.
Not sure what I should congratulate Craig Mod more on: His new book or the fact that he built a Kickstarter like engine in Shopify and open sourced it.
The 4 steps our product team applies to find valuable insights that support us to make the right decisions.
Firefox Lite is a lightweight browser made for emerging market users with storage/ data constraints on their mobile devices. Last week, Firefox Lite reached to 1.6M monthly active users, which was the highest number that it has had so far. 🙌
To keep improving Firefox Lite to provide a better user experience for our users, we did some A/B testing on the top sites, which is one of the most used features in Firefox Lite. We looked into the telemetry data, listed assumptions, ran A/B tests…which was taxing on the entire team, including PM, UX, devs, QA, and data analysts, but unfortunately, the test failed.
“Why did the test fail?” we asked ourselves during our sprint retrospective.
It ended up that our A/B test was too complex for a small team. 6 groups with different top site variants were rolled out at the same time, which answered the 3 assumptions we listed. We were too ambitious to find all the answers that could influence the UX design, without thinking about how we could narrow down the questions by making our own decisions based on the learnings from the previous user research. Eventually, the test scope was too aggressive that it didn’t allow any human errors to happen when team members passed on work from one to another.
We need to level up and transform how we do research: to have a lean approach which is leveraging different methodologies from qualitative user research and quantitative data analysis on the same group of users, at the same time. And most importantly, ask the right questions to make the right design decisions.
The Firefox Lite team
Our product team consists of dedicated team members and shared resources. The product team is small but flexible on supporting each other due to the research resource shared. Product managers can dig into telemetry data, and designers can run user tests.
Our research resource is shared with other product teams in Mozilla Taipei
Just like most fast-paced software companies, things are changing fast. Sometimes we swap priorities based on the environmental changes or the new goals that the organization sets. Therefore, moving fast to adopt changes and efficiently find answers to the research questions is key. Mixing qualitative and quantitative methods in user research can help us reduce the time and effort.
Our recent research projects for Firefox Lite are mostly initiated with the insights from the telemetry data, then dig deeper by qualitative user research and following-up on “why”. We’re lucky to have a user researcher and data scientists all talented, collaborating closely as a team while running research projects. Both qualitative and quantitative mindsets are complementary to the research they conducted.
If you put user needs in mind and orient yourself by asking “why” questions to the user scenarios, you will be able to translate the quantitative data with qualitative insights.
- Lany, senior data scientist in Firefox Lite team
How to Lean UR?
The spirit of the Lean UR is to move fast and respect the shared research resources. The following is the best practices that we developed from our lesson learned:
Step 1: Frame research objectives and questions that match the project goals.
🧑💻 Who is involved: PM and UX
Product managers are usually the people who initiate a project and set goals for it based on the initial findings from the telemetry data. To make sure the research objectives are matching the project goals, we found it more efficient if the PM and UX draft research objectives and questions before inviting researchers to kick-start it.
Step 2: Prioritize the research questions.
🧑💻 Who is involved: PM and UX
As I mentioned the failed test in the beginning, we designed an A/B test with a large scope which was too big and complicated for a small team. I would suggest to ask the team some questions when making decisions on running a research project or not:
Is it really something that you need to know before making the right design decisions? Any previous research that can provide some pieces of knowledge which can guide you to make good decisions?
Is the usage rate of the feature high enough to impact the entire product significantly if you find the best solution by doing user tests or A/B tests? Let’s say the feature only has 4% of the usage rate. How can it help with the overall retention rate if you enhance it to 100%?
Here’s another story: In the project “Home Customization”, we were considering running an A/B test on the feature button (which is next to the search bar on Firefox Lite Home) to see if the Smart Shopping Search or Private Mode is the best bet for app retention.
After looking at the usage data and the previous user testing results, we decided to make the decision without spending time and effort on running a test. We’re confident to have the Private Mode next to the search bar as it makes more sense to the UI layout and the usage of the Private Mode is much higher than Smart Shopping Search.
The decision was taken immediately, and our research resource was saved for the next big project, wonderful! 🙌
Step 3: Sit together with user researchers and data scientists to identify the right methods to answer research questions.
🧑💻 Who is involved: PM, UX, UR, and Data scientists
After prioritizing the research questions, now it’s clear for our user researcher and data scientists to move forward on the important ones to find the best combination of research methods. The following tips are to make the test lean and effective on research resources:
Quantitative research
Tip #1: Make a small number of A/B test groups and iterate multiple times.
Tip #2: Collect the data only when it’s essential to the research questions. Explore ways to collect data that is not sacrificing users’ privacy.
Consciously collecting telemetry data can not only protect your users’ privacy but also reduce the effort of developers from setting unnecessary telemetry. Moreover, it helps you build trust with users and reduce operational risk in your organization.
If you don’t need a piece of data, don’t collect it. If you need a piece of data, keep it for only as long as necessary and anonymize the data before you store it.
Tip #1: Evaluate the research scope and invite designers to support small and medium design validation.
Not all research has to be conducted rigorously to find valuable insights. We categorize user research with 3 levels in terms of scope:
Types of user research in small, medium, large scopes
[Small scope] Internal design validation This is the test that can be conducted by designers. Sometimes a quick-and-dirty user testing in the office reveals the majority of the insights for an iteration. Examples like icon testing for a new feature, usability testing for the new menu panel can be frequently conducted in any stage of the design process.
[Medium scope] External design validation If the project includes some big changes on a high-visibility feature or some user flows that are not commonly used in the industry, we’ll consider running a remote user test or survey to validate the design with global participants. Unmoderated usability tests on Usertesting.com saves time on conducting user tests with numbers of participants. However, it has a lower tolerance for the comprehension of the test script. Some pilot tests for checking the wording and task flow are essential to the success of the test. We found it easier to make the test scripts unbiased and direct when we have more than one person working on it. Therefore, sometimes we’ll have designers making a draft script and then get reviewed and shipped by our user researcher.
[Large scope] Fundamental user research Firefox Lite has some large-scope fundamental user research that helps us understand our users more. Research projects like Persona, Push factors, and Pull factors require the expertise of our user researcher and highly rely on the collaboration with our data scientists. That’s why we have designers supporting the design validations so that our researchers can contribute more time and effort on building fundamental knowledge for Firefox Lite.
Tip #2: User testing with no more than 5 participants.
3~5 is the magic number for recruiting participants because you’ll find more and more overlapping insights if you test with more participants in the same category. The article that Jakob Nielsen wrote 20 years ago is still a good reference for today’s user researchers. Highly recommended.
Step 4: Review results simultaneously to generate comprehensive insights.
🧑💻 Who is involved: UR, and Data scientists
It’s natural to have comprehensive insights from both ends because our user researcher and data scientists have worked as a team since the beginning of the planning stage. Take Project Persona as an example: deep-diving into telemetry data can help us categorize users into several groups of personas, and user interviews can reveal the “why” under their behavioral patterns.
Interested in the Project Persona? Click here to read more stories.
Research insights are one of the tools that help us get greater confidence in making product decisions.
There are always insights from tests, but you may not need all pieces of evidence to avoid making wrong product decisions. Our lean UR approach can lower the time and effort of running unnecessary tests, focus more on important features, and test & iterate them more.
We’re continuously exploring and polishing our lean UR process. Feel free to share your thoughts with me on how your organization runs research projects :)
The picture of Firefox Lite team celebrating for a new achievement on our user base.
Special thanks to our user researcher, Ivonne Chen, and Data scientist, Lany Liu for generously sharing their work experiences and thoughts on research that were summarized in this post.
I often describe myself as a cultural determinist, more as a way to differentiate myself from people with other dominant worldviews, though I am not a strict adherent. It’s more that in many situations when people ascribe causal power to something other than culture, I’m immediately suspicious.
The 2010’s were a fascinating time to follow the consumer tech industry in China. Though I left Hulu in 2011, I still kept in touch with a lot of the team from our satellite Hulu Beijing office, many of whom scattered out to various Chinese tech companies throughout the past decade. On my last visit to the Hulu Beijing office in 2011, I was skeptical any of the new tech companies out of China would ever crack the U.S. market.
It wasn’t just that the U.S. had strong incumbents, or that the Chinese tech companies were still in their infancy. My default hypothesis was that what I call the veil of cultural ignorance was too impenetrable a barrier. That companies from non-WEIRD countries (Joseph Henrich shorthand for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) would struggle to ship into WEIRD cultures. I was even skeptical of the reverse, of U.S. companies competing in China or India. The further the cultural distance between two countries, the more challenging it would be for companies in one to compete in the other. The path towards overcoming that seemed to lie in hiring a local leadership team, or sending someone over from the U.S. who understood the culture of that country inside-out.
For the most part, that has held true. China has struggled, for the most part, to make real inroads in the U.S. WeChat tried to make inroads in the U.S. but only really managed to capture Chinese-Americans who used the app to communicate with friends, family, and business colleagues in China.
In the other direction, the U.S. hasn’t made a huge dent in China. Obviously, the Great Firewall played a huge role in keeping a lot of U.S. companies out of the Chinese market, but in the few cases where a U.S. company got a crack at the Chinese market, like Uber China, the results were mixed.
For this reason, I’ve been fascinated with TikTok. Here in 2020, TikTok is, for many, including myself, the most entertaining short video app going. The U.S. government is considering banning the app as a national security risk, and while that’s the topic du jour for just about everyone right now, I’m much more interested in tracing how it got a foothold in markets outside of China, especially the U.S. with its powerful incumbents.
They say you learn the most from failure, and in the same way I learn the most about my mental models from the exceptions. How did an app designed by two guys in Shanghai managed to run circles around U.S. video apps from YouTube to Facebook to Instagram to Snapchat, becoming the most fertile source for meme origination, mutation, and dissemination in a culture so different from the one in which it was built?
The answer, I believe, has significant implications for the future of cross-border tech competition, as well as for understanding how product developers achieve product-market-fit. The rise of TikTok updated my thinking. It turns out that in some categories, a machine learning algorithm significantly responsive and accurate can pierce the veil of cultural ignorance. Today, sometimes culture can be abstracted.
TikTok's story begins in 2014, in Shanghai. Alex Zhu and Luyu “Louis” Yang had launched an educational short-form video app that hadn’t gotten any traction. They decided to pivot to lip-synch music videos, launching Musical.ly in the U.S. and China. Ironically, the app got more traction across the Pacific Ocean, so they killed their efforts in their home country of China and focused their efforts on their American market.
The early user base consisted mostly of American teenage girls. Finally, an app offered users the chance to lip synch to the official version of popular songs and have those videos distributed to an audience for social feedback.
That the app got any traction at all was progress. However, it presented Alex, Louis, and their team with a problem. American teen girls were not exactly an audience Alex and Louis really understood.To be fair, most American parents would argue they don't understand their teenage daughters either.
During this era where China and the U.S. tech scenes have overlapped, the Chinese market has been largely impenetrable to the U.S. tech companies because of the Great Firewall, both the software instance and the outright bans from the CCP. But in the reverse direction, America has been almost as impenetrable to Chinese companies because of what might be thought of as America’s cultural firewall. Outside of DJI in dronesI'd argue one reason DJI had success in America was that drone control interfaces borrow heavily from standard flight control interfaces and are not culturally specific. Thus DJI could lean on its hardware prowess which was formidable., I can’t think of any Chinese app making real inroads in the U.S. prior to Musical.ly. To build on its early traction, Musical.ly would have to overcome this cultural barrier.
It’s been said that if you ask your customers what they want, they’ll ask for a faster horse (attributed to Henry Ford, though that may not be true). Frankly, that’s always been half horses***, and not just because horses are involved. First of all, what if your customers are horse jockeys?
Secondly, while you can’t listen to your customers exclusively, paying attention to them is a dependable way to build a solid SaaS business, and even in the consumer space it provides useful signal. As I’ve written about before, customers may tell you they want a faster horse, and what you should hear is not that you should be injecting your horses with steroids but that your customers find their current mode of transportation, the aforementioned horse, to be too slow a means of getting around.
Alex and Louis listened to Musical.ly’s early adopters. The app made feedback channels easy to find, and the American teenage girls using the app every day were more than willing to speak up about what they wanted to ease their video creation. They sent a ton of product requests, helping to inform a product roadmap for the Musical.ly team. That, combined with some clever growth hacks, like allowing watermarked videos to easily be downloaded and distributed via other networks like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, helped them achieve hockey-stick inflection among their target market.
Still, Musical.ly ran into its invisible asymptote eventually. There are only so many teenage girls in the U.S. When they saturated that market, usage and growth flatlined. It was then that a suitor they had rebuffed previously, the Chinese technology company Bytedance, suddenly looked more attractive, like Professor Bhaer to Jo March at the end of Little Women. In a bit of dramatic irony, Bytedance had cloned Musical.ly in China with an app called Douyin, one that had taken off in China, and now Bytedance was buying the app that inspired it, Musical.ly, an app conceived and built in China but that had failed in China and instead gotten traction in the U.S.
After the purchase, Bytedance rebranded Musical.ly as TikTok. Still, if that’s all they had done, it’s not clear why the app would’ve broken out of its stalled growth to the stunning extent it has under its new owner. After all, Bytedance paid just $1B for an app that’s rumored to sell now, if the U.S. government approves the transaction, for anywhere from $30 to $70B.
Bytedance did two things in particular to jumpstart TikTok’s growth.
First, it opened up its wallet and started spending on user acquisition in the U.S. the way wealthy Chinese used to spend on American real estate (no, I’m not still bitter at all the Chinese all-cash offers that trounced me repeatedly when condo-hunting six years ago). TikTok was rumored to have been spending a staggering eight or nine figures a month on advertising.
The ubiquity of TikTok ads lent the theory credence. I saw TikTok ads everywhere, on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and in mobile gamesTikTok ads are bizarre. The video ads I see for the app in mobile games convey nothing about what the app is or does. One ad I've seen dozens of times has an old lady doing lunges in her living room, another has a kid blow drying his hair, and as he does, his hair changes colors. I feel like the ads could do a better job of selling the app, but what do I know?. If Bytedance could have purchased ads on the back of my eyelids at sub $20 CPMs I don’t doubt they would have done so.
It didn’t look like a wise investment at first. Rumors abounded that the 30-day retention of all those new users poured into the top of its funnel was sub 10%. They seemed to be lighting ad dollars on fire.
Ultimately, the ROI on that spend would turn the corner, but only because of the second element of their assault on the US market, the most important piece of technology Bytedance introduced to TikTok: the updated For You Page feed algorithm.
Bytedance has an absurd proportion of their software engineers focused on their algorithms, more than half at last check. It is known as the algorithm company, first for its breakout algorithmic “news” app Toutiao, then for its Musical.ly clone Douyin, and now for TikTok.
Prior to TikTok, I would’ve said YouTube had the strongest exploit algorithm in video,The exploit versus explore conundrum is sort of a classic of algorithmic design, usually mentioned in relation to the multi-armed bandit problem. For the purposes of this discussion, think of it simply as the problem of choosing which videos to show you. An exploit algorithm will give you more of what you like, while an explore algorithm tries to broaden your exposure to more than just what you’ve shown you like. YouTube is often described as an exploit algorithm because it tends to really push more of what you like, and then before you know it, you’re looking at some alt-right video that’s trying to redpill you. but in comparison to TikTok, YouTube’s algorithm feels primitive (the top creators on YouTube have long ago figured out how to game YouTube’s algorithm’s heavy dependence on click-through rates and watch time, one reason so many YouTube videos are lengthening over time, much to my dismay).
Before Bytedance bought Musical.ly and rebranded it TikTok, its Musical.ly clone called Douyin was already a sensation in the Chinese market thanks in large part to its effective algorithm. A few years ago, on a visit to Beijing, I caught up with a bunch of former colleagues from Hulu Beijing, and all of them showed me their Douyin feeds. They described the app as frighteningly addictive and the algorithm as eerily perceptive. More than one of them said they had to delete the app off their phone for months at a time because they were losing an hour or two every night just lying in bed watching videos.
That same trip, I had coffee with an ex-Hulu developer who now was now a senior exec in the Bytedance engineering organization. Of course, he was tight-lipped about how their algorithm worked, but the scale of their infrastructure dedicated to their algorithms was clear. On my way in and out of this office, just one of several Bytedance spaces all across the city, I gawked at hundreds of workers sitting side by side in row after row in the open floorplan. It resembled what I’d seen at tech giants like Facebook in the U.S., but even denser.The mood was giddy. I could tell he was doing well. He took me and my friends to a Luckin Coffee in their office basement and told us to order drinks off an app on his phone. I reached in my pocket for some RMB to pay for the drinks and he put his hand on my arm to stop me. “Don’t worry, I can afford this,” he said, laughing. He didn’t mean it in a boasting manner, he seemed almost sheepish about how well they were doing. Afterwards, as we waited outside the office in their parking lot, he walked past and asked me if I needed a ride. No, I said, I’d be taking the subway. A Tesla Model X pulled up, the valet hopped out, and he jumped in and drove off.
It’s rumored that Bytedance examines more features of videos than other companies. If you like a video featuring video game captures, that is noted. If you like videos featuring puppies, that is noted. Every Douyin feed I examined was distinctive. My friends all noted that after spending only a short amount of time in the app, it had locked onto their palate.
That, more than anything else, was the critical upgrade Bytedance applied to Musical.ly to turn it into TikTok. Friends at Bytedance claimed, with some pride, that after they plugged Musical.ly, now TikTok, into Bytedance’s back-end algorithm, they doubled the time spent in the app. I was skeptical until I asked some friends who had some data on the before and after. The step change in the graph was anything but subtle.
At the time Musical.ly got renamed TikTok, it was still dominated by teen girls doing lip synch videos. Many U.S. teens at the time described TikTok as “cringey,” usually a kiss of death for networks looking to expand among youths, fickle as they are about what’s cool. Scrolling the app at the time felt like eavesdropping on the theater kids clique from high school. Entertaining, but hardly a mainstream entertainment staple.
That’s where the one-two combination of Bytedance’s enormous marketing spend and the power of TikTok’s algorithm came to the rescue. To help a network break out from its early adopter group, you need both to bring lots of new people/subcultures into the app—that’s where the massive marketing spend helps—but also ways to help these disparate groups to 1) find each other quickly and 2) branch off into their own spaces.
More than any other feed algorithm I can recall, Bytedance’s short video algorithm fulfilled these two requirements. It is a rapid, hyper-efficient matchmaker. Merely by watching some videos, and without having to follow or friend anyone, you can quickly train TikTok on what you like. In the two sided entertainment network that is TikTok, the algorithm acts as a rapid, efficient market maker, connecting videos with the audiences they’re destined to delight. The algorithm allows this to happen without an explicit follower graph.
Just as importantly, by personalizing everyone’s FYP feeds, TikTok helped to keep these distinct subcultures, with their different tastes, separated. One person’s cringe is another person’s pleasure, but figuring out which is which is no small feat.
TikTok’s algorithm is the Sorting Hat from the Harry Potter universe. Just as that magical hat sorts students at Hogwarts into the Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Slytherin houses, TikTok’s algorithm sorts its users into dozens and dozens of subculturesThe Sorting Hat is perhaps the most curious plot device from the Harry Potter universe. Is it a metaphor for genetic determinism? Did Draco have any hope of not being a Slytherin? By sorting Draco into that house, did it shape his destiny? Is the hat a metaphor for the U.S. college admissions system, with all its known biases? Is Harry Potter, sorted into Gryffindor, a legacy admit?. Not two FYP feeds are alike.
For all the naive and idealistic dreams of the so-called “marketplace of ideas,” the first generation of large social networks has proven mostly unprepared and ill-equipped to deal with the resulting culture wars. Until they have some real substantial ideas and incentives to take on the costly task of mediating between strangers who disagree with each other, they’re better off sorting those people apart. The only types of people who enjoy being thrown into a gladiatorial online arena together with those they disagree with seem to be trolls, who benefit asymmetrically from the resultant violence.
Consider Twitter's content moderation problems. How much of that results from throwing liberals and conservatives together in a timeline together? Twitter employees speak often about wanting to improve public discourse, but they’d be much better off (and society, too) keeping the Slytherins and Gryffindors apart until they have some real substantive ideas to solve the problem of low trust conversation.The same can be said of NextDoor and their problem of racist reporting of minorities just walking down the sidewalk. They’d be better off just removing that feature. At some point, NextDoor needs to face the fact that they aren’t going to solve racism. Tweak that feature all you want, put up all the hoops for users to jump through to file such a report, but adverse selection ensures that those most motivated to jump through them are the racist ones.
After some time, new subcultures did indeed emerge on TikTok. No longer was it just teenage girls lip-synching. There are so many subcultures on TikTok I can barely track them because I only ever see a portion of them in my personalized FYP. This broadened TikTok’s appeal and total addressable market. Douyin had followed that path in China, so Bytedance at least had some precedent for committing to such an expensive bet, but I wasn’t certain if it would work in the U.S., a much more competitive media and entertainment market.
Within a larger social network, even subcultures need some minimum viable scale, and though Bytedance paid dearly to fill the top of the funnel, its algorithm eventually helped assemble many subcultures surpassing that minimum viable scale. More notably, it did so with amazing speed.
Think of how most other social networks have scaled. The usual path is organic. Users are encouraged to follow and friend each other to assemble their own graph one connection at a time. The challenge with that is that it’s almost always a really slow build, and you have to provide some reason for people to hang around and build that graph, often encapsulated by the aphorism “come for the tool, stay for the network.” Today, it’s not as easy to build the “tool” part when so much of that landscape has already been mined and when scaled networks have learned to copy any tool achieving any level of traction.In the West, Facebook is the master of the fast follow. They struggle to launch new social graphs of their own invention, but if they spot any competing social network achieve any level of traction, they will lock down and ship a clone with blinding speed. Good artists borrow, great artists steal, the best artists steal the most quickly? Facebook as a competitor reminds me of that class of zombies in movies that stagger around drunk most of the time, but the moment they spot a target, they sprint at it like a pack of cheetahs. The type you see in 28 Days Later and I Am Legend. Terrifying.
Some people still think that a new social network will be built around a new content format, but it’s almost impossible to think of a format that couldn’t be copied in two to three months by a compact Facebook team put in lockdown with catered dinners. Yes, a new content format might create a new proof of work, as I wrote about in Status as a Service, but just as critical is building the right structures to distribute such content to the right audience to close the social feedback loop.
What’s the last new social network to achieve scale in recent years? You probably can’t think of any, and that’s because there really aren’t any. Even Facebook hasn’t been able to launch any really new successful social products, and a lot of that is because they also seem fixated on building these things around some content format gimmick.
Recall the three purposes which I used to distinguish among networks in Status as a Service: social capital (status), entertainment, and utility. In another post soon I promise to explain why I classify networks along these three axes, but for now, just know that while almost all networks serve some mix of the three, most lean heavily towards one of those three purposes.
A network like Venmo or Uber, for example, is mostly about utility: I need to pay someone money, or I need to travel from here to there. A network like YouTube is more about entertainment. Amuse me. And some networks, what most people refer to when they use the generic term “social network,” are more focused on social capital. Soho House, for example.
TikTok is less a pure social network, the type focused on social capital, than an entertainment network. I don’t socialize with people on TikTok, I barely know any of them. It consists of a network of people connected to each other, but they are connected for a distinct reason, for creators to reach viewers with their short videos.Bytedance hasn't been successful in building out a social network to compete with WeChat, though it's not for lack of trying. I think they have a variety of options for doing so, but as with many companies that didn't begin as social first, it's not in their DNA. Facebook is underrated for its ability to build functional social plumbing at scale, that is a rare design skill. Companies as diverse as Amazon and Netflix have tried building social features and then later abandoned them. I suspect they tried when they didn't have enough users to create breakaway social scale, but it's difficult to imagine them pulling that off without more social DNA. But having a social-first DNA also means that Facebook isn't great at building non-social offerings. Their video or watch tab remains a bizarre and unfocused mess.
One can debate the semantics of what constitutes a social network forever, but what matters here is realizing that another way to describe an entertainment network is as an interest network. TikTok takes content from one group of people and match it to other people who would enjoy that content. It is trying to figure out what hundreds of millions of viewers around the world are interested in. When you frame TikTok's algorithm that way, its enormous unrealized potential snaps into focus.
The idea of using a social graph to build out an interest-based network has always been a sort of approximation, a hack. You follow some people in an app, and it serves you some subset of the content from those people under the assumption that you’ll find much of what they post of interest to you. It worked in college for Facebook because a bunch of hormonal college students are really interested in each other. It worked in Twitter, eventually, though it took a while. Twitter's unidirectional follow graph allowed people to pick and choose who to follow with more flexibility than Facebook's initial bi-directional friend model, but Twitter didn't provide enough feedback mechanisms early on to help train its users on what to tweet. The early days were filled with a lot of status updates of the variety people cite when criticizing social media: "nobody cares what you ate for lunch."I talk about Twitter's slow path to product market fit in Status as a Service
But what if there was a way to build an interest graph for you without you having to follow anyone? What if you could skip the long and painstaking intermediate step of assembling a social graph and just jump directly to the interest graph? And what if that could be done really quickly and cheaply at scale, across millions of users? And what if the algorithm that pulled this off could also adjust to your evolving tastes in near real-time, without you having to actively tune it?
The problem with approximating an interest graph with a social graph is that social graphs have negative network effects that kick in at scale. Take a social network like Twitter: the one-way follow graph structure is well-suited to interest graph construction, but the problem is that you’re rarely interested in everything from any single person you follow. You may enjoy Gruber’s thoughts on Apple but not his Yankees tweets. Or my tweets on tech but not on film. And so on. You can try to use Twitter Lists, or mute or block certain people or topics, but it’s all a big hassle that few have the energy or will to tackle.
Think of what happened to Facebook when it’s users went from having their classmates as friends to hundreds and often thousands of people as friends, including coworkers, parents, and that random person you met at the open bar at a wedding reception and felt obligated to accept a friend request from even though their jokes didn’t seem as funny the next morning in the cold light of sobriety. Some have termed it context collapse, but by any name, it’s an annoyance everyone understands. It manifests itself in the declining visit and posting frequency on Facebook across many cohorts.
Think of Snapchat’s struggles to differentiate between its utility— as a way to communicate among friends—and its entertainment function as a place famous people broadcast content to their fans. In a controversial redesign, Snapchat cleaved the broadcast content from influencers into the righthand Discover tab, leaving your conversations with friends in the left Chat pane. Look, the redesign seemed to say, Kylie Jenner is not your friend.
TikTok doesn’t bump into the negative network effects of using a social graph at scale because it doesn't really have one. It is more of a pure interest graph, one derived from its short video content, and the beauty is its algorithm is so efficient that its interest graph can be assembled without imposing much of a burden on the user at all. It is passive personalization, learning through consumption. Because the videos are so short, the volume of training data a user provides per unit of time is high. Because the videos are entertaining, this training process feels effortless, even enjoyable, for the user.
I like to say that “when you gaze into TikTok, TikTok gazes into you.” Think of all the countless hours product managers, designers and engineers have dedicated to growth-hacking social onboarding—goading people into adding friends and following people, urging them to grant access to their phone contact lists—all in an attempt to carry them past the dead zone to the minimum viable graph size necessary to provide them with a healthy, robust feed. (sidenote: Every social product manager has heard the story of Facebook and Twitter’s keystone metrics for minimum viable friend or follow graph size countless times.) Think of how many damn interest bubble UI’s you’ve had to sit through before you could start using some new social product: what subjects interest you? who are your favorite musicians? what types of movies do you enjoy?The last time I tried to use Twitter’s new user onboarding flow, it recommended I follow, among other accounts, that of Donald Trump. There are countless ways they could onboard people more efficiently to provide them with a great experience immediately, but that is not one of them.
TikTok came along and bypassed all of that. In a two-sided entertainment marketplace, they provide creators on one side with unmatched video creation tools coupled with potential super-scaled distribution, and viewers on the other side with an endless stream of entertainment that gets more personalized with time. In doing so, TikTok, with a product team and infrastructure mostly located in China, came out of left field and became a player in the attention marketplace on the same playing fields around the world as giants like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and Netflix. Not quite a Cinderella story...maybe a Mulan story?
TikTok didn't just break out in America. It became unbelievably popular in India and in the Middle East, more countries whose cultures and language were foreign to the Chinese Bytedance product teams. Imagine an algorithm so clever it enables its builders to treat another market and culture as a complete black box. What do people in that country like? No, even better, what does each individual person in each of those foreign countries like? You don't have to figure it out. The algorithm will handle that. The algorithm knows.
I don’t think the Chinese product teams I’ve met in recent years in China are much further ahead than the ones I met in 2011 when it comes to understanding foreign cultures like America. But what the Bytedance algorithm did was it abstracted that problem away.One of the concerns about CCP ties with Bytedance is that they might use it as a propaganda tool against the U.S. I tend to think that problem is overrated because my sense is that many in China still don't understand the nuances of American culture, just as America doesn't understand theirs (though I speak Mandarin, some of the memes on Douyin fly way over my head). However, perhaps an algorithm that abstracts culture into a series of stimuli responses makes it more dangerous?
Now imagine that level of hyper efficient interest matching applied to other opportunities and markets. Personalized TV of the future? Check. Education? I already find a lot of education videos in my TikTok feed, on everything from cooking to magic to iPhone hacks. Scale that up and Alex and Louis might finally realize their dream of a short video education app that they set out to build before Musical.ly.
Shopping? A slam dunk, Douyin and Toutiao already enable a ton of commerce in China. Job marketplace? A bit of a stretch, but not impossible. If Microsoft buys TikTok, I’d certainly give the TikTok team a crack at improving my LinkedIn feed, which, to be clear, is horrifying. What about personalized reading, from books to newsletters to blogs? Music? Podcasts? Yes, yes, yes please. Dating? The world could absolutely use an alternative to the high GINI co-efficient, high inequality dating marketplace that is Tinder.
Douyin already visualizes much of this future for us with its much broader diversity of videos and revenue models. In China, video e-commerce is light years ahead of where it is in the U.S. (for a variety of reasons, but none that aren’t surmountable; a topic, again, for another piece). Whereas TikTok can still feel, to me, like a pure entertainment time-killer, Douyin, which I track on a separate phone I keep just to run Chinese apps for research purposes, feels like much more than that. It feels like a realization of short video as a broad use case platform.
There’s a reason that many people in the U.S. today describe social media as work. And why many, like me, have come to find TikTok a much more fun app to spend time in. Apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are built on social graphs, and as such, they amplify the scale, ubiquity, and reach of our performative social burden. They struggle to separate their social functions from their entertainment and utility functions, injecting an aspect of social artifice where it never used to exist.
Facebook has struggled with its transition to utility, which would’ve offered it a path towards becoming more of a societal operating system the way WeChat is in China. To be fair, the competition for many of those functions is much stiffer in the U.S. In payments, for example, Facebook must compete with credit cards, which work fine and which most people default to in the U.S., whereas in China AliPay and WeChat Pay were competing with a cash-dominant culture. Still, in the U.S., Facebook has yet to make any real inroads in significant utility use cases like commerce.I speak so often about how much video as a medium is underrated by tech elites. In an alternate history of Facebook, they would've made a harder shift to becoming a video-only app, moving up the ladder from text to photos to videos, and maybe they would've become TikTok before TikTok. If they had, I think their time spent figures would be even higher today. For as quickly as Facebook moved to disrupt itself in the past, there's a limit to how far they're willing to go. I plan to compare the Chinese and U.S. tech ecosystems in a future post, and one of the broadest and most important takeaways is that China leapfrogged the U.S. in the shift to video, among many other things. This doesn't mean the U.S. won't then leapfrog China the next time around, but for now, the U.S. is the trailing frog in several categories.
Instagram is some strange hybrid mix of social and interest graph, and now it’s also a jumble of formats, with a Stories feed relegated to a top bar in the app while the more stagnant and less active original feed continues to run vertically as the default. Messaging is pushed to a separate pane and also served by a separate app. Longer form videos bounce you to Instagram TV, which is just an app for videos that exceed some time limit, I guess? And soon, perhaps commerce will be jammed in somehow? Meanwhile, they have a Discover tab, or whatever it is called, which seems like it could be the default tab if they wanted to take a more interest-based approach like TikTok. But they seem to have punted on making any hard decisions for so long now that the app is just a Frankenstein of feeds and formats and functions spread across a somewhat confused constellation of apps.
Twitter has never seemed to know what it is. Ask ten different Twitter employees, you’ll hear ten different answers. Perhaps that’s why the dominant product philosophy of the company seems to be a sort of constant paralysis broken up by the occasional crisis mitigation. One reason I’ve long wished Twitter had just become a open protocol and let the developer community go to town is that Twitter moves. At. A. Snail's. Pace.
The shame of it is that Twitter had a head start on an interest graph, largely through the work of its users, who gave signal on what they cared about through the graphs they assembled. That could have been a foundation to all sorts of new markets for them. They could’ve even been an interest-based social network, but instead users have mostly extracted that value themselves by pinging each other through the woefully neglected DM product.Of course, Twitter also once purchased Vine and then let it wither on the, uh vine. Of all the tech companies that could purchase TikTok, maybe Twitter is the one that least deserves it. At a minimum, they should be required to submit a book report showing they understand what it is they're buying.
A few other tech companies are worth mentioning here. YouTube is a massive video network, but honestly they may have shipped even less than Twitter over the years. That they don’t have any video creation tools of note (do they have any?!) and allowed TikTok to come in and steal the short video space is both shocking and not.
Amazon launched a short video commerce app some time ago. It came and went so quickly I didn’t even have time to try it. Though Amazon is good at many things, they just don’t have the DNA to build something like TikTok. That they have failed to realize the short video commerce vision that China led the way on is a shocking miss on their part.
Apple owns the actual camera that so many of these videos are shot on, but they've never understood social.iMessages could be a social networking colossus if Apple had the social DNA, but every day other messaging apps pull further away in functionality and design. But I guess they're finally adding threading in iMessages with the next iOS release? Haha. At least they'll continue to improve the camera hardware with every successive iPhone release.
None of this is to say TikTok is anywhere near the market value of any of these aforementioned American tech giants. If you still think of it as a novelty meme short video app, you're not far from the truth.Are there flaws with TikTok? Of course. It’s far from perfect. The algorithm can be too clingy. Sometimes I like one video from some meme and the next day TikTok serves me too many follow-up videos from the same meme. But the great thing about a hyper-responsive algorithm is that you can tune it quickly, almost like priming GPT-3 to get the results you want. Often all it takes to inject some new subculture into your TikTok feed is to find some video from it (you can easily find them on YouTube or via friends whose feeds are different from your own) and like it. Another problem for TikTok is that a lot of other use cases are being jammed into what was designed to be a portrait mode lip synch video app. Vertical video is good for the human figure, for dance and makeup videos, but not ideal for other types of communication and storytelling (I still hate when basketball and football highlight clips can’t show more of the horizontal playing field, and that goes for both IG and TikTok; in many highlights of Steph Curry hitting a long 3 you can’t see him, or the basket, only one of the two, lol). Stepping up a level, the list of opportunities Bytedance and TikTok have yet to capitalize on in the U.S. is long, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they miss many of them even if they stave off a ban from the U.S. government. Much of it would require new form factors, and it’s unclear how strong the TikTok product team would be, especially if divested out of Bytedance. Under Microsoft, a company with a fairly shaky history in the consumer market, it's unclear that their full potential would be realized.
Still, none of that product work is rocket science. Much of it seems clear in my head. More importantly, TikTok, if armed with the Bytedance algorithm as part of a divestment, has a generalized interest-matching algorithm that can allow it to tackle U.S. tech giants not head on but from an oblique angle. To see it as merely a novelty meme video app for kids is to miss what its much greater disruptive potential. That an app launched out of China could come to the U.S. and sprint into cultural relevance in this attention marketplace should be a wake-up call to complacent U.S. tech companies. Given how many of those companies rely on intuiting user interests to sell them things or to show them ads, a company like TikTok which found a shortcut to assembling such an interest graph should raise all sorts of alarm bells.
It surprises me that more U.S. tech companies aren’t taking a harder run at trying to acquire TikTok if the rumored CFIUS hammer stops short of an outright ban. I can’t think of any of them that shouldn’t be bidding for what is a once-in-a-generation forced fire sale asset. I’ve seen prices like $30B tossed around online. If that’s true, it’s an absolute bargain. I’d easily pay twice that without a second thought.
I could cycle through my long list of nits, but ultimately they are all easily solvable with the right product vision and execution. TikTok has figured out the hardest piece, the algorithm. With it, a massive team made up mostly by people who’ve never left China, and many who never will, grabbed massive marketshare in cultures and markets they’d never experienced firsthand. To a cultural determinist like myself, that feels like black magic.
On that same trip to China in 2018 when I visited Bytedance, an ex-colleague of mine from Hulu organized a visit for me to Newsdog. It was a news app for the Indian market built by a startup headquartered in Beijing. As I exited the elevator into their lobby, I was greeted by a giant mural of Jeff Bezos’ famous saying “It’s Always Day One” on the opposite wall.
A friend of a friend was the CEO there, and he sat me down in a conference room to walk me through their app. They had raised $50M from Tencent just a few months earlier that year, and they were the number one news app in India at the time.
He opened the app on his phone and handed it to me. Similar to Toutiao in China, there were different topic areas in a scrollbar across the top, with a vertical feed of stories beneath each. All of these were stories selected algorithmically, as is the style of Toutiao and so many apps in China.
I looked through the stories, all in Hindi (and yes, one feed that contained the thirst trap photos of attractive Indian girls in rather suggestive outfits standing under things like waterfalls; some parts of culture are universal). Then I looked up from the app and through the glass walls of the conference room at an office filled with about 40 Chinese engineers, mostly male, tapping away on their computers. Then I looked back down at page after page of Hindi stories in the app.
“Wait,” I asked. “Do you have people in this office or at the company who know how to read Hindi?”
He looked at me with a smile.
“No,” he said. “None of us can read any of it.”
NEXT POST: Part II of my thoughts on TikTok, on how the app design is informed by its algorithm and vice versa in a virtuous circle.
A little over a year ago we enabled Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) by default in Firefox. We did so because we recognize that tracking poses a threat to society, user safety, and the autonomy of individuals and we’re committed to protecting users against these threats by default. ETP was our first step in fulfilling that commitment, but the web provides many covert avenues trackers can use to continue their data collection.
Today’s Firefox release introduces the next step in providing a safer and more private experience for our users with Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0, where we will block a new advanced tracking technique called redirect tracking, also known as bounce tracking. ETP 2.0 clears cookies and site data from tracking sites every 24 hours, except for those you regularly interact with. We’ll be rolling ETP 2.0 out to all Firefox users over the course of the next few weeks.
What is “redirect” tracking?
When we browse the web we constantly navigate between websites; we might search for “best running shoes” on a search engine, click a result to read reviews, and finally click a link to buy a pair of shoes from an online store. In the past, each of these websites could embed resources from the same tracker, and the tracker could use its cookies to link all of these page visits to the same person. To protect your privacy ETP 1.0 blocks trackers from using cookies when they are embedded in a third party context, but still allows them to use cookies as a first party because blocking first party cookies causes websites to break. Redirect tracking takes advantage of this to circumvent third-party cookie blocking.
Redirect trackers work by forcing you to make an imperceptible and momentary stopover to their website as part of that journey. So instead of navigating directly from the review website to the retailer, you end up navigating to the redirect tracker first rather than to the retailer. This means that the tracker is loaded as a first party and therefore is allowed to store cookies. The redirect tracker associates tracking data with the identifiers they have stored in their first-party cookies and then forwards you to the retailer.
A step-by-step explanation of redirect tracking:
Let’s say you’re browsing a product review website and you click a link to purchase a pair of shoes from an online retailer. A few seconds later Firefox navigates to the retailer’s website and the product page loads. Nothing looks out of place to you, but behind the scenes you were tracked using redirect tracking. Here’s how it happened:
Step 1: On the review website you click a link that appears to take you to the retail site. The URL that was visible when you hovered over the link belonged to the retail site.
Step 2: A redirect tracker embedded in the review site intercepts your click and sends you to their website instead. The tracker also saves the intended destination—the retailer’s URL that you actually thought you were visiting when you clicked the link.
Step 3: When the redirect tracker is loaded as a first party, the tracker will be able to access its cookies. It can associate information about which website you’re coming from (and where you’re headed) with identifiers stored in those cookies. If a lot of websites redirect through this tracker, the tracker can effectively track you across the web.
Step 4: After it finishes saving its tracking data, it automatically redirects you to the original destination.
How does Firefox protect against redirect tracking?
Once every 24 hours ETP 2.0 will completely clear out any cookies and site data stored by known trackers. This prevents redirect trackers from being able to build a long-term profile of your activity.
When you first visit a redirect tracker it can store a unique identifier in its cookies. Any redirects to that tracker during the 24 hour window will be able to associate tracking data with that same identifying cookie. However, once ETP 2.0’s cookie clearing runs, the identifying cookies will be deleted from Firefox and you’ll look like a fresh user the next time you visit the tracker.
This only applies to known trackers; cookies from non-tracking sites are unaffected. Sometimes trackers do more than just track; trackers may also offer services you engage with, such as a search engine or social network. If Firefox cleared cookies for these services we’d end up logging you out of your email or social network every day. To prevent this, we provide a 45 day exception for any trackers that you’ve interacted with directly, so that you can continue to have a good experience on their websites. This means that the sites you visit and interact with regularly will continue to work as expected, while the invisible “redirect” trackers will have their storage regularly cleared. A detailed technical description of our protections is available on MDN.
ETP 2.0 is an upgrade to our suite of default-on tracking protections. Expect to see us continue to iterate on our protections to ensure you stay protected while using Firefox.
Elizabeth Picciuto 🌱@epicciuto
Widely-praised interviewers of Trump have one quality in common. It’s not necessarily persistence. They act like th… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
If you feel a debate has a reasonable chance of influencing the minds of participants, then let it continue.
If you feel a debate is introducing new, high-quality, information others might find useful to inform their opinion, then let it continue.
If you feel participants are simply repeating themselves, flinging selected statistics at each other, and drifting further apart, it’s probably time to step in and lock the discussion (with a short explanation why).
Sure, allowing provocative discussions to continue endlessly looks good on engagement metrics. But that’s an extremely short-term approach. Once people associate a community as a place where they spend a lot of time without gaining much value, they stop visiting.
I remain fascinated by techniques for zero downtime deployment - once you have it working it makes shipping changes to your software so much less stressful, which means you can iterate faster and generally be much more confident in shipping code.
Facebook have invested vast amounts of effort into getting this right, and their new paper for the ACM SIGCOMM conference goes into detail about how it all works.
That’s a first for LinkedIn for me, I just encountered a (Dutch) Q Anon profile in the comments of a post by a connection. Now blocked, as my per usual on the birdsite and elsewhere. LinkedIn now joining those ranks. Do they have a fake news / CT counterforce at LinkedIn? Their reporting options don’t include deliberatly spreading obvious falshoods and conspiracy stories at the profile level.
One of the things I find invidious about social media is the ‘norming’ that happens at scale. People are simultaneously performing for others and conforming to their status as member of a particular group.
Identity is important. It’s the way we understand the world around us and our place in it. It’s also a fluid construct that changes over time. That’s why groups have a vested interest in ensuring that either their members change to conform to a shared group identity (usually) or the shared group identity changes to reflect the times (rarely).
One way of thinking about group formation is in terms of customs and habits of that group, but also, as Michel de Montaigne’s best friend pointed out, voluntary servitude:
Nevertheless it is clear enough that the powerful influence of custom is in no respect more compelling than in this, namely, habituation to subjection.
We are all born into groups which define our reality, becoming habituated to the subjection imposed by them. Sometimes by accident, often due to some form of crisis, we find our way out of them and discover a world we didn’t previously know existed.
Let us therefore admit that all those things to which he is trained and accustomed seem natural to man and that only that is truly native to him which he receives with his primitive, untrained individuality. Thus custom becomes the first reason for voluntary servitude. Men are like handsome race horses who first bite the bit and later like it, and rearing under the saddle a while soon learn to enjoy displaying their harness and prance proudly beneath their trappings. Similarly men will grow accustomed to the idea that they have always been in subjection, that their fathers lived in the same way; they will think they are obliged to suffer this evil, and will persuade themselves by example and imitation of others, finally investing those who order them around with proprietary rights, based on the idea that it has always been that way.
I just realised that it’s a month this Friday that I started using markdown textfiles and Obsidian for notes, and that I have not used my local WordPress install at all during that time, nor Evernote much. I made 4 notes in EN in a month: 1 bookmark, 1 shopping list, 2 call logs. Compared to 47 notes the month prior to it.
Day logs and work notes are now in markdown files, internal wikipages are now my Garden of the Forking Path notes in markdown files. Those were previously in my local WP install. Bookmarks aren’t mindlessly send to Evernote at a touch of a button anymore, with the vague intention of reading later and/or having it come up in a search at some point in the future. Reading ‘later’ never really works for me (Instapaper never succeeded in really landing in my workflow). So now it’s either I read it and want to keep it for reference by adding a snapshot to Zotero, or I did not read it and trust that if it’s important it will resurface at some point again. Other elements in my use of Evernote I’ve recreated on the go in text files quite naturally: Folders for each of my areas of activity match up with what I have as Notebooks in EN.
It feels like coming full circle, as I have for the most part been note taking in simple text files since the late ’80s. I started paying for Evernote in 2010, after using the free version for a while, and used wiki in parallel to text files for note taking for a number of years before that (2004-2008 I think). Textfiles always had my preference, as they’re fast and easy to create, but it needed a way to connect them, add tags etc., and that was always the sticking point. Tools like Obsidian, Foam and others like it are mere viewers on top of those text files in my file system. Viewers that add useful things like visualising connections, and showing multiple queries on the underlying files in parallel. It adds what was missing. So after a month, I am getting more convinced that I am on a path ditching Evernote.
Time to start syncing some of my notes folders to my phone (through NextCloud), and choose a good editor for Android, so I can add/use/edit them there too.
“Ask yourself honestly: are you looking for a steady, predictable life? Is this what you want? If so, you must realize that the world cannot offer you this. Everything in the world is in the process of change. Nothing is steady. Nothing is predictable. Nothing will give you anything other than temporary security. Toughts come and go. Relationships begin and end. Bodies are born and pass away. This is all the world can offer you: impermanence, growth, change.”
— Paul Ferrini
Today, we’re releasing a major upgrade to SoundSource, our essential audio control utility. With the new version 5, SoundSource is both more powerful and more refined than ever before. Read on to learn about this major leap forward.
A Refined New Interface
The most noticeable change in SoundSource 5 is its dramatically overhauled interface. We’ve reviewed every part of the user experience, striving to make it better than ever.
Space Saving
We started by streamlining SoundSource’s main window. It now uses less width, while still providing all the controls and information you need. Further, the System and Applications sections can now be closed to reduce height. All of this is particularly useful when you keep SoundSource pinned open for fast access.
Optionally Even Slimmer
For an even skinnier look, SoundSource now offers a great new Compact view as well. Save even more screen space, while retaining access to all controls.
An Updated Menu Bar Icon
SoundSource’s menu bar icon will now always act as a volume indicator. It shows the volume level for your default output device, and will also show you when your output is muted.
Still More to See
From subtle animations and artwork enhancements throughout the app, to the new support for matching system accent colors, SoundSource 5’s new interface is a sight to behold.
Apps Handled, Automatically
With version 5, it’s no longer necessary to manage the applications SoundSource keeps in its list. Instead, SoundSource automatically adds applications to its list whenever they produce audio. That way, everything is always ready for you to make any adjustments you desire.
Of course, SoundSource also keeps this list tidy. It removes applications when they stop producing audio, while storing your settings for the future.
If you want to make sure an application is in the list even when it’s not producing audio, you can still do that as well. Just click the “Favorites” star to keep an application in the list permanently.
Menu Bar Meters
While previous versions offered a single menu bar meter for your default output device, but we’ve taken visual indicators to the next level in SoundSource 5.
With the new meters preferences, activity can be shown in the menu bar for the default output device, the default input device, and for any active applications. Of course, these indicators are all optional, so you can turn on the exact combination of meters that suits your needs.
These meters also provide a ridiculously handy mute control for anything audio related. With a fast click in the menu bar, you now can mute your microphone or silence a bothersome app.
Using the new menu bar meters, you can control your audio without even needing to open SoundSource’s main window.
Audio Effects Are Better Than Ever
One of SoundSource’s most popular features is its ability to apply audio effects to any audio. Whether you want to improve the quality of Zoom calls, add an equalizer to a movie, or just get more from small laptop speakers, SoundSource makes it possible. In version 5, we’ve super-charged audio effects.
Magic Boost 2
In SoundSource 5, we’ve optimized Magic Boost to use less CPU. The new Magic Boost 2 is the best way yet to get rich, full sound from even the tiniest speakers.
Simplified Equalizer
The built-in 10-band Lagutin equalizer sounds great, of course. With this update, we’ve simplified the default display, so you can more easily adjust audio. It’s also now possible to pin the equalizer, so you can adjust it from anywhere, without pulling SoundSource forward.
Pinnable Audio Units
Audio Unit effects in SoundSource can also now be pinned, for fast access no matter what you’re doing. Pin an effect, and it will float above everything on your Mac for instant adjustments.
Audio Unit Search
If you have a large number of Audio Unit effects installed, you’ll love the built-in search. Just type a few characters to get the exact plugin you need.
Support for Audio Unit v3
SoundSource now supports the newest Audio Unit plugins, made with the Audio Unit v3 API
With these changes, applying audio effects your Mac is better than ever.
Try SoundSource Now
SoundSource 5 has lots more to offer, from an enhanced right-click menu to advancements for VoiceOver users, and so much more. Ultimately, there are simply too many improvements to list them all here. Fortunately, you can check them out for yourself.
To explore all that SoundSource 5 has to offer, download our free, fully-featured trial for MacOS 10.13 and up. When you’re ready, you can unlock the full version by purchasing through our online store.
SoundSource’s regular price is just $39, but we’re also running a special introductory price. Through the end of August, you can purchase for just $29.
Download SoundSource 5 to experience sound control so good, it ought to be built in to MacOS.
If you previously purchased SoundSource 4, you’re eligible to upgrade to SoundSource 5 for just $19. Download the new version to try it out, then click to purchase your discounted upgrade to version 5.
As is our standard practice, we’re also providing complimentary upgrades to a generous number of recent purchasers of SoundSource. If you purchased SoundSource 4 on or after May 1st, 2020, you’re eligible for a complimentary upgrade. We’ve sent an email with the relevant details, so check your inbox to get started using SoundSource 5 today.
The South Korean phone maker says it will now offer “three generations” of updates to Galaxy devices. While ‘generations’ isn’t the best term to use here, it means Galaxy phones will get three Android updates plus three years of monthly or quarterly security updates. In the case of the Note 20 line, that means the Android 11, 12 and 13 upgrades.
Plus, Samsung says this applies retroactively to the Galaxy S10 line, which will get the Android 12 update (the phones launched on Android 9).
Currently, Samsung provides two Android OS upgrades to most of its flagships, along with two years of monthly security patches followed by quarterly security patches in the third year. Further, Samsung has also improved the speed it pushes updates to its devices, making it one of the better Android manufacturers when it comes to software.
When the Note 20 and Note 20 Ultra arrive on August 21st, they’ll sport Samsung’s One UI 2.5, which runs on Android 10. It’s a minor update over the current One UI 2.1 on the S20 line.
As for the Android 11 update, that likely won’t come until much later this year. Rumours suggest Google will launch Android 11 on September 8th, and it often takes Samsung a while to port its One UI software to the latest version. With Android 10, it took Samsung until January 2020 to port One UI, so it could take a similar length of time this year.
The argument here is that we could "seize this moment of crisis to make our universities more equitable and resilient by restoring public funding and prioritizing a deeper democratic purpose. For this to happen, faculty, staff, students, and adjacent communities must mobilize and demand a seat at the table." It's not that far-fetched, but a lot has to fall into place for it to happen. This article describes the process underway at Rutgers. " We have a vision of a different university, the classic model of which includes 'faculty governance.' But we do not believe that faculty governance means only including teachers. Rutgers has 30,000 workers who are making a life serving this institution—serving the students, maintaining our buildings, feeding us lunch, teaching us, conducting research. They should be making decisions about the university, not lawyers, accountants, and human resource bureaucrats."
Cory Doctorow comments on a recent Atlantic article on QAnon - a nebulous web of personalities and conspiracy theories revolving round the anonymous postings on 4chan of a contributor known only as Q. The thrust of the Atlantic article, says Doctorow, is that the algorithms originally for marketing and advertising are now being used to promote conspiracy theories. Maybe. Doctorow has an alternative explanation, though: "What Big Tech does VERY well, however, is find people... This isn't a persuasive miracle, it's just spying." Just so, the technology helps people on the fringe find each other. The big question is, why are so many people susceptible to conspiracy theories? Doctorow responds: "because so many of the things that have traumatized so many people ARE conspiracies." All this makes the wider point, to my mind, that people learn from everything we do, so if we want better education for our children, we need to become a better society. See also: What ARGs can teach us about QAnon via Metafilter.
I envy the people who had a nice time at school. For me it was a struggle against stupid, unfeeling power the entire time. I truly hated it. When I wasn’t in trouble, when I was actually sitting in class, I was just watching the minute hand on the clock, begging it to speed up, minute by minute. By my senior year I was the person in the school who skipped entire days the most. I stayed up late and slept way in lots of mornings.
Eventually I got suspended for smoking a cigarette without having filled out the paperwork.
Well. This is just to say that I preferred being at home, where I was reading and writing and writing computer programs. Like now.
There are young people who desperately need school for very practical reasons: food, warmth, sanctuary.
There are young people who thrive when they’re in a classroom learning from teachers and fellow students
And there are young people who don’t need school at all, who find it a toxic, frustrating, counterproductive activity.
As we’re building a system for COVID-learning, why not see if we can find a way to liberate these students from the tyranny of needing to buy what we’re selling.
陳俊傑 Carl Tan Chun Kiet@tanchunkiet
I see a lot of people listing 伊 as one of their pronouns, is this meant to be gender neutral in a Mandarin context?… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Apple has refreshed the internal hardware featured in its 27-inch iMac.
The all-in-one desktop now features Intel’s 10th Gen Comet Lake processor and a higher-resolution 1080p HD webcam instead of the rapidly ageing 720p sensor included in other Macs. Further, Apple says that the all-in-one desktop’s new T2 chip allows for tone mapping, exposure control and face detection.
All of these improved features work with any video conferencing app and not just FaceTime, according to Apple. That said, face detection can’t be used to unlock the iMac because it still doesn’t feature Face ID, and there still isn’t a fingerprint scanner like with Apple’s MacBook line. However, the company says that the Apple Watch can be used to log into the computer automatically.
While a relatively minor webcam upgrade, given the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in many people working from home, it makes sense for Apple to be increasing the resolution of the built-in webcam.
The T2 chip also adds other features to the iMac, including “Hey Siri” support and a new audio controller that improves bass and audio fidelity at lower volumes and adds ‘True Tone’ to the display. It’s worth noting that the desktop’s speaker hardware is still the same. The iMac’s microphones have been updated with a new three-mic “studio quality” setup, though.
Other hardware changes include the nano-texture matte display featured in the Pro Display XDR for an additional $625 CAD.
Regarding the processor bump, Intel’s 10th Gen i5 3.1GHz, i5 3.3GHz and 3.8GHz processors are available as options. Graphic configurations include AMD’s Radeon 5300 or 5500XT, with the 5700XT with 16GB VRAM also being available as an upgrade for an additional $625.
The new 27-inch iMac can now be configured to feature up to 128GB of DDR4 RAM instead of just 64GB. Apple is also switching to SSDs from its Fusion Drives, though if you’re looking for a sizable amount of storage, be prepared to shell out a lot of money — for example, the 2TB update adds an additional $750 to the cost. Storage also tops out at 8TB with the new 27-inch iMac.
Finally, other upgrades include 10-gigabit Ethernet and an SD card reader that supports UHS-II speeds. It’s also worth noting that Apple is updating the iMac Pro’s processor to a 10-core Intel Xeon chip.
While all of the above updates relate to the 27-inch iMac, Apple is also adding the ability to configure the 21.5-inch iMac with a 1 TB Fusion Drive. However, it’s unclear how much of the Fusion Drive is SSD and how much is an old-school HDD.
However, this isn’t the ARM-based iMac refresh many people have likely been hoping for. Both the 27-inch and 21.5-inch iMac look identical to their predecessors and include the same sizable, dated bezels that run around the screen and metal chin located at the bottom of the display.
While Apple confirmed plans to eventually switch to its own ARM processors across its entire Mac line, the tech giant also stated that it has plans to continue releasing Intel-based Macs.
Canadian Pricing for the new 27-inch iMac remains the same as before and can be found below:
$2,399: Six-core 3.1GHz Core i5 processor, 4GB AMD Radeon Pro 5300 GPU, 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD
$2,649: Six-core 3.3GHz Core i5 processor, 4GB AMD Radeon Pro 5300 GPU, 8GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD
$3,079: Eight-core 3.8GHz Core i7 processor, 8GB AMD Radeon Pro 5500 XT GPU, 8GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD
Snapchat is getting ready to roll out a feature that will allow users to add music to their snaps to take on rivals like TikTok.
Users are going to get the option to add songs to their snaps before or after recording a video. Snapchat has formed deals with several record labels including Warner Music Group and Universal Music Publishing Group.
The feature is currently being tested in Australia and New Zealand, and is going to be released more widely later this year.
“We’re constantly building on our relationships within the music industry, and making sure the entire music ecosystem (artists, labels, songwriters, publishers and streaming services) are seeing value in our partnerships,” a spokesperson for the company said in a statement.
It’s important to note that although the new feature will allow Snapchat to mimic part of TikTok’s popularity, there are still some notable features that separate the two. For instance, TikTok allows users to lip sync and remix videos on top of simply adding music to videos.
However, the ability to add music will be a nice addition to Snapchat, especially since users on all platforms seem to like incorporating music with their content. For instance, earlier this year, Instagram launched the ability to add music to Stories in Canada.
If you’re a fan of Apple’s commercials and hockey, this might be your dream advertisement.
It looks like Apple gave Canadian NHL stars Marc-André Fleury and Mark Stone a few iPhone 11 Pro smartphones and told them to shoot from creative angles as Apple’s crew filmed them.
While a relatively uninspired commercial, there’s no denying iPhone 11 Pro’s video quality is impressive.
I’d also like to point out that Fleury and Stone are using Renfrew-branded hockey tape, which is the second-best thing to come out of that rural Ontario town beside me — shoutout to Scapa Tape factory and its hockey tape division.
In 2020 a lot of the SUMO platform’s team work is focused on modernizing our support platform (Kitsune) and performing some foundational work that will allow us to grow and expand the platform. We have started this in H1 with the new Responsive and AAQ redesign. Last week we completed a new milestone: the Python/Django upgrade.
Why was this necessary
Support.mozilla.org was running on Python 2.7, meaning our core technology stack was running on a no longer supported version. We needed to upgrade to at least 3.7 and, at the same time, upgrade to the latest Django Long Term Support (LTS) version 2.2.
What have we focused on
During the last couple of weeks our work focused on upgrading the platform’s code-base from Python 2.7 to Python 3.8. We have also upgraded all the underlying libraries to their latest version compatible with Python 3.8 and replaced non compatible Python libraries with a compatible library with equivalent functionality. Furthermore we upgraded Django to the latest LTS version, augmented testing coverage and improved developer tooling.
What’s next
In H2 2020, we’re continuing the work on platform modernization, our next milestone being the full redesign of our search architecture (including the upgrade of the ElasticSearch service from and re implementation of the search functionality from scratch). With this we are also looking into expanding our Search UI and adding new features to offer a better internal search experience to our users.
Image: TourismVancouver
Images: Postmedia.ca&CityofVancouver
