I just read and enjoyed this:
Machine learning (ML) is the science of helping computers discover patterns and relationships in data instead of being manually programmed. It’s a powerful tool for creating personalized and dynamic experiences, and it’s already driving everything from Netflix recommendations to autonomous cars.
Read “Human-Centered Machine Learning”
I just read and enjoyed this:
Technology isn’t an industry, it’s a method of transforming the culture and economics of existing systems and institutions. That can be a little bit hard to understand if we only judge tech as a set of consumer products that we purchase.
I just read and enjoyed this:
The standard way to talk about autonomous cars, shown in this diagram, is to talk about levels. […] This seems pretty straightforward, until you start thinking about how you might actually deploy this – and about the fact that some places are easier to drive in than others.
[If each iOS device] would be unlocked using a 4-digit PIN, the time to bring them into use would be about 2 seconds. Expanding to a 6-digit PIN would probably increase that to perhaps 2.5 seconds (accounting also for failures due to input errors.)
[…]
It turns out that, based on the installed base numbers, moving to the more secure 6-digit code would add 2.8 billion hours to the total time to unlock the world’s iPhones and iPads. That’s 321,000 years of waiting added for every year of use.
Fortunately we got Touch ID to replace PIN entry and the time to unlock the iPhone/iPad has decreased to perhaps 1 second, saving 5.6 billion hours of unlock time vs. 4-digit PIN.
Reminds me of an interview with Larry Tesler in Dan Saffer’s Designing for Interaction, where he said the following:
If a million users each waste a minute a day dealing with complexity that an engineer could have eliminated in a week by making the software a little more complex, you are penalizing the user to make the engineer’s job easier.
I guess it’s no coincidence that Larry Tesler was an early Apple employee, back when Steve Jobs argued that decreasing Macintosh boot times would save lives.
I just read and enjoyed this:
Whether you’re a developer who’s working on mobile apps, or just someone enjoying the millions of apps available for your phone, today is a very special day. It’s the ten year anniversary of the original iPhone SDK.
This is the best, easily comprehensible explanation of how bitcoin and blockchain technology work that I’ve come across:
The soaring price of bitcoin—the virtual currency is now worth more than $250 billion—has gotten a lot of attention in recent weeks. But the real significance of bitcoin isn’t just its rising value. It’s the technological breakthrough that allowed the network to exist in the first place.
Read “Want to really understand how bitcoin works? Here’s a gentle primer”
On a less technical, but much funnier note, John Oliver had some solid investment advice on Last Week Tonight for those wondering if they should put their life-savings in cryptocurrencies:
A few weeks ago, there was a false state-wide missile alert broadcast in Hawaii. You’ve probably heard about it, because it was all over the news and the event even has its own Wikipedia page by now.
While the incident was certainly unpleasant for Hawaiians, and particularly for the poor man responsible for the broadcast, it is a stroke of luck for me. I’m always on the look-out for poor user interface design leading to catastrophe, and this event is about as good an example as it gets. In the days following the incident there was ample discussion of the user interface for sending out the broadcast (which turned out to be surprisingly difficult to reliably pin down) and how to prevent such mistakes in the future, e.g. from The Verge, Ars Technica, Jason Kottke and Nick Heer, all of which are worth a read.
As I said, I’m always looking for examples of poor user interface design, which is surprisingly difficult and seems to have become more difficult over time. By and large, the importance and necessity of good usability and user interface design seems to be so pervasive and commonly accepted that nowadays any application with a sizeable audience is well designed. While that’s obviously a very good thing for most people, it makes it quite difficult for me to find examples illustrating bad design and its consequences.
I just read and enjoyed this:
Everywhere we looked, conversational UIs were breaking out of messaging apps and into the products we use every day, from shoe shopping to cosmetics and everything in between. Many of these were successful, but many others were not.
Read “The cult of conversational design and why forms aren’t dead yet”
I just read and enjoyed this:
At Booking.com, they do a lot of A/B testing. At Booking.com, they’ve got a lot of dark patterns. I think there might be a connection.
I just read and enjoyed this, it’s quite funny:
The iPhone X is packed with new and novel technology. Face ID. OLED. Dual cameras in a compact package. As fascinating as that all is though, it has an unusual property that been little discussed: this phone is really, really tall. iPhone X’s screen is the tallest ever in an iPhone.
