On one of the recent episodes of “Reconcilable Differences”, John Siracusa and Merlin Mann had an interesting conversation on who would make them feel starstruck. Especially they wondered -
Who do you wish you could meet and why? What would you say to Steve Jobs in an elevator or Bill Murray on a plane?
And of course, that sent my mind on a drive. Who would I want to meet? I think one big factor deciding that would be for whom meeting me will not be a burden. It clearly rules out all the musicians, tired of all the ad-hoc post-show crooning requests. It rules out most of the sports celebrities, already tired, looking out for relaxation. Film celebrities, a complete no.
I think people I would be most comfortable meeting would be the ones not too big of celebrities, but well respected in what they do — ones whom I admire for what they are and how they conduct themselves.
Podcasters, writers are of course high on that list. Anyway, here goes a short list, those I just want to convey I respect them.
John Siracusa — I think the meet may make him awkward, but I admire him for his clarity of thought and his expertise to put that in words.
Leo Laporte — One of the most fun, but equally knowledgable voices I listen to. I admire him for how effortlessly he hosts any topic of discussion. Experience does matter.
And those I wish I just had even a selfie with - Roger Federer, Sachin Tendulkar, Steve Jobs, Terry Pratchett.
I don’t think this is a complete list. Rather I believe it would be difficult to put such an extensive list out. Anyway, the least I would do if I ever run into any of the folks I respect is to not make them feel awkward.
We, as an industry, need to find ways to simplify the process of building software, without ignoring the legitimate complexities of businesses. We need to admit that not every application out there needs the same level of interface sophistication and operational scalability as Gmail. There is a whole world of apps out there that need well thought-out interfaces, complicated logic, solid architectures, smooth workflows, etc…. but don’t need microservices or AI or chatbots or NoSQL or Redux or Kafka or Containers or whatever the tool dujour is.
A lot of developers right now seem to be so obsessed with the technical wizardry of it all that they can’t step back and ask themselves if any of this is really needed.
I can’t agree more with the whole premise of this article. The quest for adopting new, trending technology is making the overall design of the software we are building extremely complex. I can’t recount the number of times we are made to select the technology first to solve the problem at hand. It should never be so.
Software will always be simple and reliable if it is built to the address the problem it aims at with whatever technology - platforms/frameworks/solutions - that suit best. More often than not, simpler solutions are the most efficient ones to build and maintain software with.
Chris Lattner kind of sums it perfectly.
So true. Too many apparently "simple" techs merely shift the complexity to other places (higher level tools, frameworks, pkg managers, wrappers, syntax extensions, etc). Well designed systems are simple to learn and use end-to-end, while permitting experts to build amazing things https://t.co/sIlJYALYaO
Dark patterns, dark algorithms, dark user experiences, what is that? You might ask. I will define them as the following for this piece:
Dark pattern - anything designed for malintention
Dark algorithm - an algorithm that is designed as a dark pattern
Dark UX - a user flow on the internet that is designed as a dark pattern
All of these patterns are designed intentionally, or if not, are the act of serious neglect. It was also super hard to aggregate these as recurring issues because there is no central place to discuss these issues and their prevelance, since sickness is taboo.
Ok cool, so how do these manifest in health insurance, you might ask?
Another reminder that businesses and their owners are inclined, or even at times duty-bound, to maximise the earnings for the stakeholders. Every day, the boundaries on what should be perceived as morally corrupt just get pushed farther.
It’s a troubling trend then that we are training the machines to do the same for us — imparting intelligence to maximise benefits for organisations who build these AI systems. A fascinating thread this that captures the fallouts of such training purely geared towards such optimisations.
Almost 10 years ago I had a prototype where I played around with using a simple genetic algorithm to breed enemies that would be good against whatever play style you chose. The fitness function in it was just how long they could stay alive against you
if you optimize games for money you get mobile lootbox garbage. if you optimize videos for watch time you get vlogs that are 95% filler. if you optimize social media posts for view counts you get clickbait, lies, and freebooting
AI is really good at finding local minimums and maximums. Like "oh, promoting 45 minute videos gets more watch time than 5 minute videos". Its terrible at recognizing that promoting that kind of garbage will eventually cause people to leave for better platforms
A mystery thriller — what do I expect from a book that categorises itself as that? A deep, dark mystery to start with. Woven into a tight, intriguing plot. A protagonist as bemused as the reader about the main plot, but a lot smarter to overcome the clues and riddles en route. If it’s a Robert Langdon mystery, I am trained now to expect a bit less of the later. Of course, with abundance of information on art - the artists, the structures, the paintings - delivered as riddles relevant to the overarching plot.
Unfortunately, Origin fails on all counts for me. The mystery it intends to solve is too thin — the plot is stretched too long. It isn’t even a good Langdon story. All our polymath symbologist is made to do throughout is sit through the tiresome travelogues and some bootless scientific blabber. All in hope of an earth-shattering reveal — unfortunately even that fails to be one.
Langdon is flown to Bilbao, Spain by his old student Edmond Kirsch to witness his presentation with potentially far-reaching effects on the religions all around the world. And of course, humanity too. He has already unnerved a set of prominent religious figures by a special and exclusive preview of his discovery. “Where do we come from? Where are we going?” The enigmatic billionaire futurist has the world’s eyes with a promise to answer these longstanding questions. But a brain-washed assassin throws the world into disarray by eliminating Kirsch. Only hope rests, then, on Professor Langdon and the bold & gorgeous sidekick, Ambra Vidal, to uncover their friend Edmond’s discovery.
There are a lot of subplots involving, of course the brainwashing of the assassin and his quest to stop the protagonist duo on run, the family feud in monarchy and the struggle of the Guardia Real on whom and what to trust. And then their is Edmond’s most prized invention, his own personal Jarvis - the AI assistant Winston.
In short, there is a lot going on here. But it is presented in a bloated form where nothing captures reader’s attention or gets his pulse rising. All plot twists are easy to see miles ahead. The chapter-end cliffhangers just tend to delay some trivial or glaring surprises. Same applies to the now-renowned Brown template of holding back from reader a specific information that character owns. I admit it might be a style of keeping readers intrigued. But when the substance is not meaty, one just feels cheated. And finally the ending is anticlimactic — feeble, obvious and noncommittal.
What about the knowledge sharing sessions of Langdon, you may ask? Yes, there are a lot. And I have been forthcoming in my dislike for the irrelevance of them. This is what I had said in my review of Inferno. “Many a times, the novel reads as Brown’s travelogue of places during his research, just there to increase the page count.” That hasn’t been fixed in here too. Rather it has gone worse. In Inferno, at list the flabby travelogue were towards solving a clue. Here the sessions are just feckless, as Langdon wanders on, contemplating.
With Origin, Brown intended to take on a strong idea — about creation and destiny. About God’s existence. A deft rigidness while editing could well have turned this into terse, riveting story. Alas, it wasn’t to be.
If we should make UI elements we want users to click on large, and ideally place them at corners or edges for maximum clickability — what should we do with UI elements we don’t want users to click on? Like, say, the “delete all my work” button?
Of course, totally unrelated1 to a recent event triggered by a bad UI design, Jeff Atwood captures why it is so important to handle interfaces you want users just not to use lightly.
It, absolutely, is not in response to the event — just check the day when Jeff published it. Is it unrelated? Well, heck no.↩
The time in between sparked a brief panic in a state where fears of an attack by North Korea have heightened in recent months. Residents and tourists reported seeking shelter, frantically gathering supplies, and calling and texting loved ones to say their goodbyes.
The alerts quickly turned a serene Saturday morning into “mass hysteria” on the roads.
“My boyfriend was like, ‘Who do we sue for this?’ We don’t just need an apology, we need an explanation. Someone could have had a heart attack,” McLaughlin, 29, said. “It took something that’s kind of incomprehensible and very quickly made it very personal. All of a sudden going through your mind is, ‘Is this the end of my life?’ I called my mom, I called my dad, I called my brother and basically said my goodbyes.”
Honolulu resident Noah Tom was picking up breakfast for a meeting when he heard of the alerts. Thinking he might only have 15 to 20 minutes before a missile strike, Tom considered how his family was split up across three locations: He had just dropped off his oldest daughter at the airport, while his two younger children were at home. His wife was already at work.
“I literally sent out ‘I love you’ texts to as many family members as I could. It was all kind of surreal at that point,” Tom, 48, told The Washington Post. He made the difficult decision of turning the car toward home, where his two youngest children were. “I figured it was the largest grouping of my family.”
Irrespective of how pathetic and juvenile the cause for the trigger of this alarm was, it shows what the fallouts of such a tragic event, wish and hope it never really happens, will be. Looking at the positive side, if we can, it also has triggered an opportunity for all, the relevant agencies, those governing and those governed, to gauge how ready we are for such a calamity. And how it deeply can affect us.
Appearing strong on Twitter is one thing. But staying strong when faced with an imminent, life altering event is a whole different ball-game.
Well, the user interface that’s one of the causes for this whole mess is even horrible than what I had imagined. It’s so amusing to find that the system that is supposed to alarm the population about a calamity is such a horrible hodgepodge of strangles text. This is no better than having nothing, which we in India have.
I know the having-nothing-like-India argument is bit of a stretch, but man this interface is horrid.
Looking at these graphs feels a lot like looking at a graph of dependencies in a codebase. If you add a node for each class, and draw and edge between the classes that communicate, you’ll end up with a graph like the ones above. My talk of “components” and “modules” was influenced by thinking about these graphs in terms of software. The last example touches on an important point - you can manage a growing codebase without growing in complexity if you manage the way modules connect to each other. A codebase composed of small interconnected modules that communicate with each other in a well-defined way will have a lower complexity than one where the modules communicate with each other haphazardly.
This is an example of how it’s better to manage interaction along a point than along an edge. By that I mean modules that present a single point of interaction will be able to maintain their own internal dynamics without polluting the complexity of the codebase. If programmers don’t think about how they connect the modules in their codebase, and they end up connecting modules along multiple points of interaction, the complexity of the codebase will grow.
This is such a fascinating read. I have recently come across the four color theorem many times in different variants. It is a fascinating mathematical statement on graphs, specifically maps. But I could never imagine how it could also be applied to represent software complexity, or rather how one can build and manage the growing codebase of a software without adding to the complexity.
“May I enter Detective?”, Mr Rao peeks through the open door of the kitchen. “I heard you had something you wanted to talk to me about.”
“Of course, Mr Rao. Come in. And please call me Naik. ‘Detective’ burdens the conversation for no necessary reason. I just want to have some chat. And at the same, if I can get the work I am here for, done quickly, better for all of us. Right?”
“Sure. By the way, ‘Mr’ is no less burdensome,” quips Mr Rao, half-heartedly.
“So what do you know about the situation we are in Rao?” Naik’s quick, curt response takes Rao by surprise. He realises that irrespective of the words used, the conversation to follow is going to be somber. His brow is getting damp, and he knows that isn’t a good sign.
“Nothing much to be frank. I came late from work yesterday, was completely tired you see. So I went straight to my room and went to sleep. I was woken up only in the morning by your friend, asking me to join you here. So in a sense, I know lesser than you do.” Rao blurts out everything he had come prepared with.
“That was lickety-split, huh, Rao.” Rao sees Naik lean closer and look deeper at him. He could sense Naik believes he knows more than what he was revealing. “Anything else you want to mention? We can also go through, you know, the regular drill. I can ask some questions to remind you of stuff you may know.”
Rao sighs. “I gave you what matters Naik. Others’ just stuff. Details.”
Naik is again quick to respond, “It is the stuff, the details I love Rao. You see otherwise this detective job is boring. What fun is it to listen only to the sad, murky bites from people’s lives?” He pats Rao’s lap a couple of times, then slumps back into the beanbag. “I love this job because I get to know people - their habits, their thoughts, their behaviours. I happen to solve some crazy cases over last few years just through such chats. Nothing much.”
Rao knows that wasn’t really the case — Naik was in the news a lot recently because he was a sagacious detective. He realises his attempt to skim through yesterday’s happenings was futile. He also knows the regular drill with Naik would be a lot more dreadful.
“As you wish Naik. I have been living in this house for last 4 years. You must already know ..”
Rao sees Naik signalling something to his friend. Realising Rao has stopped, Naik grins and mouths a nimble ‘sorry’ and leans back again.
Rao continues, “You must already know that we are 4 people sharing the house. Actually, 3 now, given, you know..” He peeps at the chalk outline around where Joy’s body lay. ”I met Joy just a couple of weeks back when he joined us in this house. Adi and he knew each other from the beginning. I am not sure how though. I haven’t got much chance to talk to them about their acquaintance. Adi and I have known each other for last two years. He is a good guy, so was Joy, I guess. Unfortunate, he had to fall this way.”
Naik’s scratching his soul patch, deep in some thoughts. “How do you think Joy died?”
Rao shrugs and then responds, “Well, it was an unfortunate accident, wasn’t it? An electric shock while using that Microwave? And that is why I was stumped in the morning when I heard you are on the case. Why, do you think there is some foul play here?”
“Sir,” Naik straightens up, “I rarely do think when I am on a case. As I told you earlier, I just come to chatter. I have just happened to have solved few cases over such chats. Anyway, do you know a lot about Microwaves?”
Rao is taken aback by the direct question. “Why? Me? No. I mean I am not an electrical engineer.”
“It’s alright, of course,” Naik grins. “I just felt you looked a lot confident on the reason behind Joy’s death. So I thought you must know something about Microwaves that I don’t. Why do you feel that that harmless device is the reason we are sitting here Rao?”
Rao continues to stare at Naik, his heart pounding now. I have no idea what’s cooking inside this devil’s mind. The perspiration is now clearly visible on his forehead. “Mr Naik, I have no idea what you are hinting at. On my way here, Adi had mentioned that Joy’s died of electric shock. I see him lying here on the floor, his legs towards the Microwave, with it still displaying the time since it had been on. Other than Joy’s fallen body, nothing else looks out of sort for this room. There are no signs of any combat that might have played out here last night. So I connect the dots and feel his death has to be natural — he got the electric shock while using the Microwave and ..”
“.. and he then turned around to fall face first?” Naik isn’t looking at Rao anymore — he is busy noting down something in his diary. After a momentary pause, he apologises, “Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to break your train of thoughts. But you were doing my job so well, that I felt I should help you too.”
The tone of snark in Naik’s voice isn’t lost on Rao and he is done fooling around though. “See. I have no clue what’s going on here. I have no idea why you are even here. I came home late yesterday, slept right away. I haven’t been to the kitchen since then — came here only in the morning today when you called me. I do not know Joy well, neither did I have an issue with him. He appeared to be a calm sedate guy, it’s unfortunate that he passed away. Even more unfortunate is the fact that now that you are on the case, we all would be held up in this house till you are done and I have to chat with you.”
“Aha, that’s how you summarise,” Naik is already jotting something in his notebook. “Thank you so much, Rao. You can leave now.” He goes through the content of page titled“Mr Roy (x)”.
Does not know Joy. Adi knows Joy well. Rao knows Adi well.
Easily swayed by bites of information and runs with it.
Lies about not being to the kitchen yesterday after office — has his tiffin at the wash basin.
As Rao is about to leave the kitchen, Naik stops him. “Just a food for thought Rao. Why do you think Joy died while using the Microwave and not, say, after using it?”
Rao, wiping his brow, shrugs, “I don’t know. Maybe because people do not instantly die after using a microwave. They usually eat?”
Naik slumps back, satisfied, in his beanbag, “There you go. Thank you, Mr Rao. You can go back to the living room.” He makes another note.
The Apple Event of September 2017 was in many ways just another iPhone launch day. It was marked by the typical, yearly frenzy in the media and the tech community. But in few other ways, it also lent the day a uniqueness of its own. Of course, it was the first one from the Apple Park at the Steve Jobs Theatre.
Dan Frommer from Recode has perfectly captured the launch of this stunning architecture in this great photo essay, also summarizing this well run event. I remember all the pictures that had started pouring into my Twitter timeline were full of excitement and amazement. And of course, so was Tim Cook.
It's a big day at Apple! We are honored and thrilled to host our first keynote at the Steve Jobs Theater this morning. pic.twitter.com/gyiqPJB46y
I, personally, am always excited for every Apple event — their story behind and commitment to the design of their products always mesmerises me. They are proud of every product they make and that shows from their excitement while exhibiting each one of them. The unveiling event of any product is never about just showing what the product is or about a spec roundup to opine on how their’s is better than the competition. It is, rather, a well-choreographed and well-rehearsed stage show. And for them, it matters that they tell their side of the story — be it the detailing that went in while designing it, the breakthrough they achieved in a thing that people might perceive as almost irrelevant or their reasons and justifications behind the known compromises1.
So in that sense, this event at the Apple Park was indeed unique. Apple revealed this newest product, one that got unveiled the first - Steve Jobs Theatre, without they arranging any show, narrating any backstory for it. Apple just opened the doors and handed it to the curious media straight for hands-on. Steve was heard saying2 at the beginning of the event “One of the ways that I believe people express their appreciation to the rest of humanity is to make something wonderful and put it out there”. Apple did just that with the Steve Jobs Theatre.
John Gruber, as always, has the apt perspective on the significance of this latest product from Apple.
Five, ten years from now, the Apple Watch Series 3, the iPhone 8, and even the iPhone X are just going to be old products sitting around in drawers. But the public debut of Apple Park, the grand opening of the Steve Jobs Theater, and the company’s first public tribute to its founder — that’s what I’ll remember most about yesterday
Apple gets often dinged for attempting to justify and advocate the compromises they had to introduce in the products. For looking at these compromises as an opportunity to sell other costlier products. Sometimes they succeed, at times they don’t. But at least they try when there is just no need given the sales that they eventually achieve.↩
It was overwhelming to hear Steve’s voice and his crisp words. I feel no awkwardness in revealing that I had a throat choked with emotion just by the fifth words into his message. Very few people have had that effect on me.↩
A sudden and repeated knock on the door reverberated through the room. It shook Rama, bringing her back from a sombre which had her unmoved for quite some time now. Unmoved, since a rock shattered her windows and her spirit. A rock with a paper wrapped around it.
She had no clue for how long she had been staring at that piece of paper. The words it read were pretty conspicuous in imparting the intentions of the one who wrote them. And they had had her shaken to her core.
Who knows about Sam? And about Ali? And how? Rama wondered.
No one should know about them. No one knows where they came from. No one will ever know where they went. Isn’t that what you always believed? A voice in Rama’s head chided her.
She read the words again.
I know about Sam. I know about Ali. I know what you did to them. I know what you intend to do to Rachit. I will not let you. Beware.
None of the three lines should be written by anyone, but herself. And she was pretty confident she had not written them. Or had she?
Another knock pierced the silence of Rama’s lab. Darkness was creeping through the shattered window into the lab now.
Who can come to the lab? Who even knows you have a lab? The voice questioned Rama again. And you would not be stumped now had you not let Sam and Ali ever leave the lab. Or had them put away forever.
“They had to if Rachit, the cherished felicity of my existence, was to come to my life. They were not perfect. Rachit is,” shouted Rama.
The knocks grew louder, and faster now — each thump pounding vigorously at her mind. And, just as they began, they ceased suddenly. The lab went silent again. And a lot darker. So did her mind.
