jwz: Zoom is bad and you should feel bad
March 27, 2020
jwz: Zoom is bad and you should feel bad
— Read on www.jwz.org/blog/2020/03/zoom-is-bad-and-you-should-feel-bad/
It’s pretty bad.
The More You Know!
The Prodigal Techbro | The Conversationalist
March 25, 2020
The Prodigal Techbro | The Conversationalist:
Ex-Google lobbyist Ross Lajeunesse left the company in 2019 over its censored search engine for China and also because of homophobic, sexist and racist work practices. He’s now running for a Democratic senate nomination, and recently wrote a classic of the ‘scales have fallen from my eyes’ genre, called “I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left.” Its lede is “The company’s motto used to be “Don’t be evil.” Things have changed.”
Really? Has Google really changed? Lajeunesse joined in 2008, years into Google’s multi-billion dollar tax avoidance, sexist labor practices and privacy hostility and continued to work there through the years of antitrust fines, misuse of personal health data, wage fixing, and financially pressuring think tanks. Google didn’t change. It just started treating some of its insiders like it already treated outsiders. That only looks like radical change if you’ve never thought too hard about what you are doing and to whom.
Daring Fireball: ‘Who Would Have Thought an iPad Cursor Could Be So Much Fun?’
— Read on daringfireball.net/linked/2020/03/24/mod-ipad-pointer
See also:
https://sixcolors.com/post/2020/03/in-praise-of-the-ipados-134-cursor/
Further evidence of what I had posted earlier… The new iPad OS pointer is Apple redefining the utility of one of the fundamental interfaces of our time, giving it context and intelligence nobody would expect on the desktop.
Daring Fireball: Convergence on the Laptop Form Factor
March 24, 2020
Daring Fireball: Convergence on the Laptop Form Factor:
I think Heer gets this right. It’s not about iPad moving closer to Surface conceptually; it’s about moving closer to the laptop ideal. For certain tasks nothing beats the laptop form factor, and quite possibly never will. All computing platforms that are used for such tasks inevitably take on that form. What’s new this decade is the detachable 2-in-1 form — one device that serves as both a laptop with keyboard and trackpad and as a handheld tablet. Microsoft got there from one direction, Apple from another.
I think it’s more than just a direction, but a destination. The iPad was released as an ideal, and for certain things it was perfect on Day One… But for other things, it wasn’t as well suited by itself, and so each release is steering the ship, adding things to make it a little better for edge cases while trying not to lose the spirit…
For Microsoft, the PC was their original ideal, and they’re trying to make it as broad a platform as they can, while truly satisfying nobody.
The fact that today’s iPad OS update is happening on the 19th anniversary of the original GA release of Mac OS X suggests to me that this might be a moon-shot release of sorts.
Daring Fireball: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What’s Coming
— Read on daringfireball.net/linked/2020/03/20/levy-brilliant
Daring Fireball: New Android Malware Can Steal Google Authenticator 2FA Codes
— Read on daringfireball.net/linked/2020/02/27/android-malware-google-authenticator
Michael Pollan On Caffeine Addiction’s Upside — And Ugly History : Shots – Health News : NPR
February 11, 2020
When Pollan decided to write about caffeine, he gave it up — cold turkey. “I just couldn’t focus,” he says. “I was irritable. I lost confidence.” Caffeine reshapes the brain in surprising ways.
— Read on www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/02/10/803394030/michael-pollan-explains-caffeine-cravings-and-why-you-dont-have-to-quit
