By now, the privacy threats posed by Amazon Alexa and Google Home are common knowledge. Workers for both companies routinely listen to audio of users—recordings of which can be kept forever—and the sounds the devices capture can be used in criminal trials.

Now, there’s a new concern: malicious apps developed by third parties and hosted by Amazon or Google. The threat isn’t just theoretical. Whitehat hackers at Germany’s Security Research Labs developed eight apps—four Alexa “skills” and four Google Home “actions”—that all passed Amazon or Google security-vetting processes. The skills or actions posed as simple apps for checking horoscopes, with the exception of one, which masqueraded as a random-number generator. Behind the scenes, these “smart spies,” as the researchers call them, surreptitiously eavesdropped on users and phished for their passwords.

These horror stories of privacy violations on smart speakers are unending. There are just a few options here.

1. Don’t have anything, that has a mic or camera and is connected to the internet, around you.
2. If that’s too much for you, don’t have any smart speakers in your home. Use your smartphone to connect to a good old Bluetooth speaker.
3. If you do want a smart speaker around, learn you to use it cautiously. Switch it off when not needed. Use the mute option. Do not, do not install any third-party skill on the device. Let only Google and Amazon track you. At the very least, they can be held accountable.

John Gruber wonders what’s holding Instagram back from launching a Instagram for iPad. Especially when they adjusted their app for Galaxy Fold.

Instagram is willing to update their Android app to adjust to the extraordinarily niche Galaxy Fold, but still hasn’t updated their iOS app to adjust to the extraordinarily popular and much-used iPad?

I feel there are a couple points here that might help understand this.

1. Instagram still believes it is a creative photo sharing application first. This is what the first line on their homepage reads - “a simple, fun & creative way to capture, edit & share photos, videos & messages”. They possibly want more creators on their platforms than passive consumers of the stream of photos. For them then, iPad is not a good device for taking pictures.
2. According to them, Galaxy Fold is still a smartphone first with a first rate camera system. So, it deserves providing the first rate experience of using Instagram.

Of course, how true this assumption is, is debatable.

It was exactly a year ago that I had posted an update on my then-recently undertaken no-news experiment. It primarily involved -

• consuming news only through the morning newspaper
• no news related apps on my phone
• no notifications from social apps (including messages, WhatsApp)

I am pleasantly surprised that the things begun then have more or less stayed the same. I still consume my news primarily from the morning newspaper. I still avoid visiting the news website. I still have the notifications from social apps disabled. For that matter, I have become more aggressive in disabling notification access to any app.

The only deviation has been that I have installed a few news apps on my phone. I always had that urge to open some editorial on the browser when my mind was momentarily free. This minor change has quenched that.

Of course, I am still extremely picky about which apps get installed. I have installed only a couple of news curating apps (also known for doing their job well). And The New York Times app.

Digital Detox - No YouTube

I have also recently undertaken a digital detox experiment. I want to check which additional service I can get off my routine. It should be something that I carelessly spend a lot of time on.

I had recently been consuming a lot of stupid content on YouTube. I used to open the app every time I had some free time at hand. Or for that matter even when I was busy doing something else. It garnered a subconscious tap. Such absent-minded behaviour is never healthy.

So I have planned to be off YouTube for at least a month to reset the terms of my relationship with this service. It has been 15 days now and I already feel better. I no longer have that urge to tap into YouTube any more. I have observed am following my routine a lot better.

However, YouTube has become too important a destination for all kinds of videos. That includes videos relevant to my work too. So it is difficult to completely get rid of the access to the service.

Of course, then, I plan to allow access to the app in a controlled manner. This time, however, I will set the terms again consciously. I am also planning to clear the YouTube view history before I do that. I believe this will help me reset the recommendations. I am, however, yet to decide the exact terms under which the service will be allowed back.

During this month of digital detox, I also plan to indulge myself with some analogue activities that I had never done before. I have started doodling more. Sure, am not good at it. But I hit the web for inspiration and try to simply emulate.

I am also spending dedicated time with my daughter without any digital devices around. It can be as less as 15 minutes. Involving simple talks. Or some silly games. But it has to be focused time.

It is too early to see the effects of all this. One thing is for sure, though. I feel a tad less burdened on the inside.

Tik Tok is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on US social networks convincing US consumers, in particular kids, to download and use the app. This is fucking brilliant, by the way.

I have managed to stay away from this “social phenomenon” - but am always impressed with the creativity on display in the app. Everytime that happens, I cautiously move away - I do not want another mindless entertainment fighting for my attention.

And am not even thinking about the political backdrop and its effects - which this essay from John Battelle nicely summaries.

Nice reminder from Dave Winer (who else) on what blogs are not.

You imagine that your blog is lonely and angry that you’re not visiting, but that’s purely a figment of your imagination. The blog doesn’t exist in any corporeal sense. It has no thoughts or feelings. I doesn’t give a shit if you live or die, because it doesn’t have an ego, it doesn’t care about anything.

Yep. There’s no reason to not have a blog. Get some space for yourself on the web - select any platform that lets you do so for free. Write anything. Or just share links and pictures.

Don’t look at numbers. Don’t promote. Don’t yearn for likes or replies. It is a chore that will hamper your interest. Get rid of such mindless distractions. Forget your blog exists if you want. It won’t feel bad. But next time you have a thought, just put it on there. No one will mind.

Derek Sivers recently wrote about how he does not prefer using automation for things that he would better do himself. Or he enjoys doing manually. According to Derek, the decision of whether one wants automation or not comes down to is this.

how much of an expert you are at controlling this thing yourself, how much you still enjoy doing it, if you want the kind of assistance it provides

I believe there is one more aspect that drives this decision for me - how convenient will the automation make my life after all? And what is the the cost associated with automating that?

The price one pays might be in terms of the personal data he or she needs to relinquish. This is relevant primarily when the automation workflows are built and served ready-made by the companies. For example, as part of various functions of the smart assistants.

It can also be in terms of the actual time one has to put in to build the overall automation workflow. This comes into picture when you are linking multiple applications and services to get a use-case handled. For example, while using Shortcuts or IFTT, Zapier and likes.

In both the cases, whether I want the automation or not is a trade-off between the efficiency I gain due to the automation and the price I have to pay for that.

On a recent busy Friday morning, I hopped into my cab on my way to the office. I was about to isolate myself by plugging my ears with an audiobook. Right about that time, I heard a voice in Hindi, a local Indian language, giving directions to my Uber driver. It made me pause and ponder on how ubiquitous the technical solutions have become. A large section of society has learnt to start carrying these powerful devices along. And this change alone has made some complex businesses more accessible.

Many, especially Apple, mock Android for being “a cesspool of cheap, sluggish devices”. But it is Android that has put this change on the fast track. I spent my hour-long ride by being a lot more attentive than isolated. I decided to look around to the individuals, running small and medium businesses, using digital solutions. Almost everyone was flaunting some form of an Android device.

Uber drivers for managing their rides and the routes. Small shop owners for accepting digital payments. Delivery-only restaurants for accepting orders. Food delivery agents running around on bikes to find the next order to be delivered. Part-time “service experts” on the look-out for their next housekeeping jobs. And many more individual or small group ventures.

There is no doubt that the always-connected¹ and accessible Android devices have enabled all these use cases. The two combined have also managed to pull millions of more people into the digital age. Sure, iOS might be the more secure, more private platform that’s better for everyone. But it is not for everyone because it is not affordable to everyone.

We need to credit Google for fostering a platform that attracts more and more OEMs. This makes the platform a lot more usable for the majority section of the world. And they continue to lessen the needs of the platform, recently with the introduction of the Go edition. No doubt, it suits and assists their business model. However, it doesn’t matter. They do that so, in their own words, “even the most affordable Android smartphones are as sweet as can be”. I’ve come to believe that. Kudos!

Yes, let’s make the technology affordable for more people so that they too can benefit from the new-age advances. And while we do that, let’s also make the same affordable technology powerful. Because when we do that, we open more ways the people can earn, can learn, can connect, can be part of the world.

1. Duplex on Chrome? Sorry, not for me. Google wants Chrome to be a platform — but it already runs on another platform, my OS. And in here, I want it to stay a browser. Chrome OS can go as wild as Google wants. Not the regular browser. Another reason I stay a Firefox user.
2. Apple today released iOS 13.1.2 and iPadOS 13.1.2. And users are still reporting on some unfixed bugs, even those that Apple claims they have fixed. Has there been any iOS release that has been buggier than this? I hope introduction of iPadOS hasn’t affected the dev team, that was already thin, further. That, at this point, looks to be a strong possibility.
3. When Apple Arcade and TV+ are priced aggressively as they are, the high subscription cost of Apple News+ sticks out. Is it driven by Apple or the publishers? If we don’t see a course correction soon, I doubt it is the later.
4. Music is priced exactly the same. So may be, it is driven by who owns the primary content that Apple provide subscription for?
5. A couple of Surface devices that Microsoft plans to release in their upcoming event have leaked. More than the Surface laptops (which unfortunately look may too similar to MacBook Pros - so much for differentiating), I am always excited about the 2-in-1 devices from Microsoft. I find the hinge designs in there to be really well done, with some crazy low angles!

I am not a gamer. I cannot play a single-person shooter. I was ok with this particular style of gaming when it was on desktop, with a keyboard and a mouse. On mobile, I am terrible. I just can’t make sense of the direction or speed. And completely pathetic in multiplayer situations.

Same applies to the racing games. It was ok till it was simple lane following games, like Road Fighter. But then they become a lot more real.

Actually, the quest to be more real with the gameplay and the graphics killed this form of media for me. It made the controls a lot more convoluted to be fun any more. Arcade-type games had some breezy liveliness to them. But gradually, gaming became a lot more serious, a lot more pro for my casual taste. These pros ruined the arcade in a way.

Of course, that doesn’t mean there do not exist casual games. There do. However, most of them are ruined by the freemium model. And I am not the first one complaining about this.

But what that meant was even the casual gamer in me had recently died — pushed way back for the fear of the effort it would take to find that one good, clean casual game. Like Monument Valley or Alto’s Adventure.

So I was pretty excited with the announcement of Apple Arcade. I am especially pleased with Apple’s aggressive pricing and push in the non-US markets and the initial reviews of the games. These sound like the games that match my taste.

I hope these stay the way they are currently. I hope the pros do not ruin the Arcade again.

I wonder what the purists think of the recent computational photography trend.

Google started it with its all-in-cloud touch up of the photos. And then they moved it on-device in the camera app. Every photo one took was stitched together from multiple shots with different settings. And eventually each OEM made their cameras smarter, “AI-driven”.

Latest iPhone 11 stitches a single photo from 4 under exposed frames taken before the shutter button is clicked, one normal picture and 1 over exposed frame. They call this process semantic rendering. What follows is some heavy processing. Here’s snippet from the The Verge’s review of iPhone 11 Pro review.

Smart HDR looks for things in the photos it understands: the sky, faces, hair, facial hair, things like that. Then it uses the additional detail from the underexposed and overexposed frames to selectively process those areas of the image: hair gets sharpened, the sky gets de-noised but not sharpened, faces get relighted to make them look more even, and facial hair gets sharpened up. Smart HDR is also now less aggressive with highlights and shadows. Highlights on faces aren’t corrected as aggressively as before because those highlights make photos look more natural, but other highlights and shadows are corrected to regain detail.

What you get as a result is an extremely clear picture with each object in the photo appropriately visible.

But with so much processing of each image, should this even be called photography any more? Here’s Wikipedia introducing the term.

Photography is the art, application and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film.

What we do with our smartphones is neither an art nor is it creating a single image.

All parts of the photos are independently captured (and even pre-captured) with the best suited settings, processed post-capture, with even some live sections including audio recorded. This is not “creating an image” any more.

Someone might say it all started when the digital photography became mainstream - when the physical limitations of the analog methods did not constrain the person with a camera in his hand. However, what we capture is no longer a single image anymore. A more apt term for these might be “visual memories”. Common people are interested in doing just that, they don’t care if they are called photographers.

Let Photography stay an art.

We worry about face recognition just as we worried about databases - we worry what happens if they contain bad data and we worry what bad people might do with them.

A great post by Benedict Evans where he compares our fears around usage of facial recognition technology, and in extension the AI and data hoarding, to the fears we had when data gathering and analysis capabilities of databases was being introduced. Some comparisons are indeed apt. And some fears, of course misguided and misplaced.

Gathering data inherently isn’t bad — it is the fact that it enables bad people to use it in bad manner that everyone knowledgeable worries about. So, the call for regulating the usage of the data isn’t unjustified. However, the exaggerated and far-fetched fall-outs of data misuses, and the recent own goals by the big corps, like Facebook, Google and others, are just making regulators around the world shoot for the easiest target out there — their ability to collect data.

The challenge here, I think, is to work out the right level of abstraction. When Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme imploded, we didn’t say that Excel needed tighter regulation or that his landlord should have spotted what he was doing - the right layer to intervene was within financial services. Equally, we regulate financial services, but mortgages, credit cards, the stock market and retail banks’ capital requirements are all handled very separately. A law that tries to regulate using your face to unlock your phone, or turn yourself into a kitten, and also a system for spotting loyalty-card holders in a supermarket, and to determine where the police can use cameras and how they can store data, is unlikely to be very effective.

Recently, my reading habits have been pleasantly satisfying. If not something that I can be proud of, or anything that’s comparable to the voracious readers I know of, at least I am glad they are far improved. It is only the start of September and I have already met my Goodreads challenge- 4 books ahead of schedule. I understand it was a small target this time - book a month - but I was worried I would not meet even that. I am happy that I did it so comfortably.

It is the use of Audible that has led me to at least stay on track for the “book a month” target. Every credit I got in the month was excitedly utilized. I say “excitedly” because I used to be keen to get a new credit and identify a new book at the start of every month. Of course, it meant I had to change the habits of my “reading” - rather listening. No podcasts. No music in car. It had to be a book.

I thought I would always have one. This month proved that would not be the case always. I was through with the audiobook — the brilliant second in the Discworld series from Terry Pratchett — in the first week itself. Audible is wonderful!

This allowed me time to kindle my reading habit next. So, well, my old Kindle had to get recharged and be ready to serve. And serve it did. It was great to complete reading one book and get in the middle of another — right after finishing the audible book. There are times when I can’t listen — or may be I can avoid listening. Especially when I have a limited time at hand. For example while standing in a short queue. Kindle app on my phone has taken that mind space. It is better than letting the stream of some social network, mainly Twitter or YouTube, pollute my mind with some useless posts.

So August was brilliant from reading perspective for me - 2.5 books read. I want to continue doing so in the remaining year too.

There is one book that I just can’t get back to, the latest in the Cormoron Strike from J.K.Rowling. This one has stayed there in the list of my “currently reading” books for more than a year now. I am ~30% in. And I am no way inclined to pick it up again. It is not that I do not enjoy the Strike series. I do. I have throughly enjoyed the first three books. But there is something about the latest one, or the time when I am reading it and the state of my mind, that makes me uninterested in story it narrates. Or the way it narrates it.

I may have to drop it for now, move it to couldn’t complete. May I will attempt to read it again with a fresh perspective. And at a new phase.

I have met two types of customer service representatives. There is a section that is trained to listen to what the customer has to be say and serve her rightly. It may, at times, involve sailing through the tirade that the angry, unsatisfied customer unleashes on them. They wait for the right moment to pacify them with a solution that does actually solve the problem that she has.

Then there is another section that neither calms a customer down nor solve her problem. They just passively ignore the blabber and just move on to what they had to do right from the beginning — lead her to another queue.

Both these sections pacify the customer by making her tired.

But there is another section, though in minority, that I come across with a pleasant surprise. They do not listen to your tirade - they even engage, if necessary. They make you realize that your anger is unjustified at the moment, at the place and is against a person that does not deserve to be shouted at. They pacify you by not making you tired, but by tersely moving on to the actual problem that should be addressed. It demands a degree of confidence in one’s knowledge and experience and belief in understanding the customer need better to belong in this group.

Which section fits the standard schooling of customer care, is more effective in addressing the customer needs is undoubtedly debatable. I believe majority of the people may prefer the patience and calmness of the first group. But at times, it is the concise interaction of the final group that is beneficial for all parties involved.

It’s been around a month since I started maintaining a bullet journal (BuJo, as it is called with love). It has been an enlightening month - I have learned so much about my habits and the way my mind works.

Of course, this wasn’t my first attempt at maintaining a journal or of planning myself, my life through an organizer. There have been many failed new year resolutions that have led to me buying, keeping and planning my days and months in the traditional journals - ones with days, months written on every page. With every day that I had failed to make an entry in, I had lost my interest in writing or planning another today. I just wasn’t organized enough each day, everyday to keep myself, well, organized.

However, I love, love updating my personal bullet journal daily. I believe the analog method of doing so is one big reason behind the change. Thoughts flow freely through the pen on to the paper — a lot more so than they do digitally. There is something about the legibility (illegibility, to be fair) of the handwritten words that lowers some mental hurdles. I always wondered, and even subconsciously ridiculed, the fascination a section of my social circle had with the pen and paper - the pen addicts. But I do fathom the allure now.

The fact that I could be more organized with BuJo by being less organized at times was neat. The process of “maintaining” a journal feels a lot less formal and this casualness has done wonders for my journaling/organizing attempts. The whole concept of rapid logging - capturing thoughts as bulleted lists - worked brilliantly for me. It was ok to miss bullets for a day. It was ok to not have any tasks, but only notes for a day. It was ok to not complete tasks on the day, or even in the week that it was written — just migrate it to a new page. It’s perfect for my moody, erratic, unorganized mind.

A month of habit tracking has also been delightful. This is what I was tracking when I started this habit of tracking habits - morning walk/run, publish 100 words every day, measure weight, three meals a day and regular sleep routine.

And boy, have I learned stuff about what makes me carry through any habits. Some habits are easy, some are way too difficult.

• Habits that I thought would be a cakewalk to follow, turned out to be a walk in a desert. Those I thought would need more push from my side came just naturally.
• I had thought 100 words to be published daily would be the most difficult task for me to stick to. Three meals/morning walks would be difficult, but not so much. Nah ah. It is apparently easier for me to do things I enjoy doing (bruh, of course) - so I wrote daily more often than I jogged or controlled eating. However, I thoroughly enjoyed attempting to stick to all the three daily, so I plan to continue to track them.
• Measuring one’s weight daily does nothing but act as a deterrent when you are trying to lose your weight. It is easier to do, but useless. Anything that I shouldn’t be doing daily doesn’t need to be on the tracker.
• Maintaining regular sleep routine was something I did almost daily. But this tracking was also the most ineffective of the lot. I think I know the reason - I just wasn’t specific enough with my target. “Regular” and “routine” are subjective. So any sleep more than 7 hours was fine — didn’t matter if it was pleasant or how I felt when I woke up. I do want to sign myself up for a good sleep routine. So this particular item would need some changes.

With all the learnings, I decided to continue with my habit tracker, with some tweaking. This is what I would track as my daily habits for the next month.

• Rise by 6 AM
• Morning Walk/Run
• Morning Pages
• Publish 100 Words
• 3 Meals/day
• Sleep by 11 PM

Since I started maintaining a bullet journal, I have also started carrying along a small diary that I mainly use for the morning pages. It helps me declutter my mind to a limit. Do I see benefits? I believe it is too early to say. But it is something I do want to carry on.

It has been a wonderful month of reorganizing the way I lead my life with journals. Is it worth all the effort I have to go through? Only time will tell. But it for sure has made some aspects of my life more fun.

Too much has been happening for the last few weeks. I do not like this much happening.

For one, it completely ruins all the plans one has — one just doesn’t get a chance to think of anything. All he can do is to run amok trying to catch up. Plan? Bruhh! What plan? Run!

Second, the routine that you so diligently, so delicately have been following for some time now? Yeah, forget about that. Screw that. That’s going to go for a toss too. I haven’t been able to stick to a single routine. None. Nada.

And sure, I could have foreseen and planned for this spike in activity, right? Nope, not at all.

You can’t plan for events that haven’t been scheduled yet.

You can’t plan for the back to back birthdays you haven’t been invited to yet.

You can’t plan for friends and relatives remembering and visiting you after ages.

And you can’t plan for the sudden feeling of illness, of exhaustion this whole running around leaves you with.

Could I have avoided any of that? Did I not welcome any of what happened? No, of course not. But what I ended up doing is sit alone at my desk, physically and mentally sick and tired, trying to calm things down. To Breathe.

Because there’s no way to plan against the unplanned, against irregularity.

SpaceX is teaming up with the maker of a space tugboat, which would nudge satellites around, clean up space junk, and do other orbital housekeeping.

Our recent innovations in Space visits always fascinate me. There are so many players trying to solve each unique problem with the space trips. I find the concept of “rideshare” in space really intriguing.

That question is still open, in part because space tugs still have to prove themselves and live up to their promise of reusability. “The current state of the space tug is, you pay for the entire Uber car, you drive it to one spot, and then you throw it away,” says Roberts.

It’s of great importance to make sure we are not junking up the space. And I find it satisfying (to a limit) that there are attempts to clean this junk too.

The various tugs on the drawing boards and in the engineering labs of Earth could—in addition to acting as puddle-jumpers—also cut down on space junk, by tugging satellites out of orbit, and keep useful satellites up longer, by boosting them to higher orbits.

I am stunned at how often someone calls somebody else “normal”, with a hope that it would belittle him or her. Why is being “normal” not ok? Normal of anything is absolutely fine.

Sure, your goals and aims from your life can be extremely high. But normalcy is not something to be mocked.

There are so many people around the world who would consider being normal a privilege. Earning normal wages. Owning a normal house. Looking, sounding or behaving like a normal person. Leading a normal life.

Yes, these are all privileges that the normal people enjoy. So next time someone says I am normal, am going to spread a nice, wide smile across my face and say “thank you”!

What is silence? Is it the lack of any sound or is it the lack of any discernible sound? What do you need to attain calmness?

Today, I sat alone, reading for around an hour - time that I was the most focused in a very long time. I felt I was alone, I physically wasn’t. I realised this only once I was out of my trance.

I was surrounded by a persistent hustle-bustle of the regularities of a working day. People chattering over a cup of coffee. Muffled, at the same time distinctly recognisable, voices of the labourers working outside the window. Rambles of the passing trains every now and then.

There was a lot of sound, a lot of noise around me. But there was silence within - I have come to realise it works way better to calm one down than the silence outside.

Patience is a virtue that is rapidly getting extinct within us. Everything digital has trained us to expect everything instant. You want to read, watch, listen to, learn, earn? There’s an app for that.

We were ruined, further, by the advances in efficient service distribution at scale. You need things delivered - there’s a service for that. Groceries? Yeah, those are covered. Food? Cab? Stationery? Yep, we got those covered too.

Services would reach you earlier after a week or more, if at all they could reach you. It became days. One day was a stretch goal that was soon met for many. And next was hours. For many services, it is minutes now. 30 minutes or free.

We have all been ruined by this promise of “instant”. A detour of 15 minutes before the food is delivered is worthy of a lengthy rant at the service provider now. A delay of a day before one’s headphone is delivered is intolerable.

Days of patiently waiting for things we need, we want have long been lost. We are ruined by our lack of patience.

Martin Weigert has an interesting take on this - this is what he wrote while sharing this essay as part if his weekly newsletter at Meshed Soceity.

(…) there are at least 2 types of patience: Waiting for the pay offs of one’s work (whether on oneself or external projects), and waiting for things one needs. I consider the first type a virtue. The latter type however, seems to be mostly a mental hack to make a virtue out of necessity. Have to wait for 4 hours to get your 5 minutes at the doctor? Be patient! Have to wait one week to get the thing you bought online? Be patient! Have to wait one day until your bank transfer has been processed? Be patient! In these cases, there is nothing inherently virtuous or positive in waiting.

I do not disagree with any part of this. And I was indeed focused on the second type that he talked about because that’s primary what he face more often and so is what that tests us the most. It is important that we do not lose our sanity if things do go wrong while we wait for things and have to wait longer.

It is very tiring to make decisions. There appears to exist a popular perception that decision, once made, leads to some irreversible change to the currently “working state”. What, then, one has to decide is whether the change was good or bad, and so whether the decision made was right or wrong.

This judgement that follows after every decision invariably forces one to question whether it was worth the enforced change. The fear of making the wrong decision is the reason, more often than not, behind the lack inclination to change.

You can be deciding what gift to buy for someone or who to choose to be your life partner. It does not matter whether the decision to be made is critical or trivial. Our subconscious is always at work, judging our every decision.

However, it is up to you to not let this fear of judgement drive how you lead your life. It is easier to overcome the wrong decisions you make than to lead a life being too indecisive.

My sister recently bought a new iPhone - her first, switching over from Android - and was happily setting it up with all the apps she had been using. And many more new ones. I did observe one bothersome behavior while she was using her device. She was happily tapping around whenever iOS threw a permission prompt at her, without paying any attention to what the prompt said. “Sure, have all the access you need.”

And I do not think she is in minority here. I observe this behavior very often and every single time, I am left completely befuddled. Why would you not read what permission the app is asking for and why would you not question why it needs that?

For me, no app gets any permission the first time it asks for it. Everything is disabled by default. Especially the access to my location, microphone or camera. None. You need to convince me to the core at the right moment that you deserve this privilege. I prefer veering towards extreme stringency of access to my device.

As more and more connected, data-hungry devices surround us, it is becoming important to instill awareness amongst the populace of the fallouts minor negligence while using these devices can lead to. Not provoke moral panic, but train to be cognizant towards one’s privacy and security. If we ourselves don’t put price on our data, we have no right to expect the organizations to lend respect to something that is a primary and sole fuel to their profits.

There is no point ignoring sleep - you can’t steal hours from what the sleep deserves. You can be happy for a day because you got some extra hours in your day to work on things you enjoy. Or to “relax” by watching some mindless videos that YouTube’s recommendation engines serve you. Or to read those articles you have been adding to your Instapaper queue. Or to binge watch and complete that one season of the show you enjoy on Netflix.

Sure, you can do all this on a late night by stealing some hours from sleep. But it vehemently gets back at you. If not on the very next day, you have to pay back in the week that follows. For days in a row. It is better to let sleep carry on with its routine.

A brilliant essay at New Yorker on A.I. and intellectual debt, output of an often employed “approach to discovery — answers first, explanations later”. I was aware of, but never thought in detail on what would be the implications of letting independent, isolated machine learning models interact freely. This example is indeed eyeopening.

In 2011, a biologist named Michael Eisen found out, from one of his students, that the least-expensive copy of an otherwise unremarkable used book—“The Making of a Fly: The Genetics of Animal Design”—was available on Amazon for $1.7 million, plus $3.99 shipping. The second-cheapest copy cost $2.1 million. The respective sellers were well established, with thousands of positive reviews between them. When Eisen visited the book’s Amazon page several days in a row, he discovered that the prices were increasing continually, in a regular pattern. Seller A’s price was consistently 99.83 per cent that of Seller B; Seller B’s price was reset, every day, to 127.059 per cent of Seller A’s. Eisen surmised that Seller A had a copy of the book, and was seeking to undercut the next-cheapest price. Seller B, meanwhile, didn’t have a copy, and so priced the book higher; if someone purchased it, B could order it, on that customer’s behalf, from A.

Each seller’s presumed strategy was rational. It was the interaction of their algorithms that produced irrational results. The interaction of thousands of machine-learning systems in the wild promises to be much more unpredictable.

Yep, indeed. May be such interactions need more control? May be we have one more thing about AI to worry about?

Much of the timely criticism of artificial intelligence has rightly focussed on the ways in which it can go wrong: it can create or replicate bias; it can make mistakes; it can be put to evil ends. We should also worry, though, about what will happen when A.I. gets it right.

Written languages based on alphabets are one of the great human accomplishments. (…) when I write the word “human” you can fill in what you imagine a human to look like. The word itself carries some fundamental attributes of being a human but the rest is intentionally underspecified. This allows us to use a single word that applies independent of gender, nationality, race, clothing, etc. That is the power of language based on alphabets, because the letters themselves carry no meaning. Even the meaning of a word can evolve over time. For example, the word “couple” at one point might have meant a male-female couple but is now used to describe any two people who are paired.

A thoughtful essay, but I completely disagree. There is an innate assumption here that everyone can read and write English alphabet. It is, in reality, not the case. There are tons of alphabets across nations and regions. In India itself, there are 11 alphabets. My mom can fluently read and write Devanagari, but that is not the case with English alphabets.

Emoji cross the confines of regions - primarily because it is visual. Is it perfect? Of course, not — we have managed to mess up the standards in implementation across platforms.

However, at least, I can send my mom a “smile” emoji without spelling it out in Devanagari. It was the first thing that lent her confidence to start using smartphones, way before Devanagari support was even introduced.