Email really is an amazing, miraculous technology. But at the end of the day, it’s in the hands of humans who are always going to screw it up.
Source: Why Is Email Still So Terrible? →
Links
How will these smaller groups of happier people be monetized? This is a tough question for the billionaires. Happy people, the kind who eat sandwiches together, are boring. They don’t buy much.
I had no idea a Mercedes-Benz makes a special sound before a crash which helps “make the noise from the crash impact not nearly as harmful” to our ears. Now I Know.
That’s a smart feature. And here I was getting pleased having a few buttons aligned to the centre through CSS.
If you’re a developer or a tester, and you want to abbreviate the word “accessibility” in a bug report, then as my New York friends keep saying to me, “knock yourself out”. But when we’re talking about accessibility in a public environment like Mastodon, where we can connect with people who know little about it, using A11Y as a hashtag creates a clique that has the potential to lessen the reach of the subject matter.
[L]earning to write is about more than learning to write. For one thing, it’s about learning to turn a loose assemblage of thoughts into a clear line of reasoning—a skill that is useful for everyone, not just those who enjoy writing or need to do a lot of it for work.
Instead of playing whac-a-mole with passwords, why not eliminate that avenue of attack outright? That’s our mission.
Source: Goodbye, passwords | 1Password →
Over the years, critics and audiences alike have re-examined the film and found, like the ship itself, it is a bit of a wreck.
Source: Titanic at 25: like the ship itself, James Cameron’s film is a bit of a wreck →
It keeps mistaking skiers, and some other fitness enthusiasts, for car-wreck victims.
Source - My Watch Thinks I’m Dead - New York Times →
Finally, if you were subscriber to Twitterrific for iOS, we would ask you to please consider not requesting a refund from Apple. The loss of ongoing, recurring revenue from Twitterrific is already going to hurt our business significantly, and any refunds will come directly out of our pockets – not Twitter’s and not Apple’s. To put it simply, thousands of refunds would be devastating to a small company like ours.
Source - Twitterrific: End of an Era • The Breakroom →
I had missed to post this, but this passage was painful to read.
In general, what characterizes this phase of the tech giants' development is a shift from unlocking user creativity and customer value to doubling down on surveillance, usually augmented by AI.
Source: Two ways to think about decline →
[W]hy do layoffs at all if they don’t actually work? “People do all kinds of stupid things all the time,” Pfeffer says. “I don’t know why you’d expect managers to be any different.”
Source - Why so many tech companies are laying people off right now - The Verge →
Cracks, like scars, tell a story. They are not only beautiful to look at, they are also lessons in survival and perseverance
Source - Scars are beautiful →
Customer satisfaction, though important, is not as much of a priority as customer demand — and getting your customer to crave a food item because they never quite feel satisfied after their last taste effectively establishes long-term and lucrative demand.
Source - Why are we addicted to junk food? →
Twitter’s staff spent years trying to protect the social media site against impulsive billionaires who wanted to use the reach of its platform for their own ends, and then one made himself the CEO.
They may seem the cornerstone of democracy, but in reality they do little to promote it. There’s a far better way to empower ordinary citizens: democracy by lottery.
Source - The Case for Abolishing Elections - Boston Review →
Covering everything from the company’s claim of transparency to its own security practices and more, Palant believes LastPass has downplayed the risks and is guilty of “gross negligence.”
Source: LastPass' breach update was full of lies →
The country’s vast population and high birth rate make it an attractive market for end-products as well as a manufacturing base, while Vietnam’s workforce offers lower labor costs than in China
Social media showed that everyone has the potential to reach a massive audience at low cost and high gain—and that potential gave many people the impression that they deserve such an audience.
Source - The Age of Social Media Is Ending →
We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge.
The clock continues to log its rigid seconds, minutes and hours, utterly unaware of the global crisis that is taking place. It is stable, correct, neutral and absolute. But what makes us wrong and the clock right?
Source - The Tyranny Of Time - NOEMA →
Google announced it’s going to start rolling out end-to-end encrypted group RCS chats to the Google Messages beta over the next few weeks.
Source: Google Messages is getting end-to-end encrypted RCS group chats →
A pretty important step for non-Apple ecosystem.
At a cultural level, we didn’t stop smoking just because the habit was unpleasant or uncool or even because it might kill us. We did so slowly and over time, by forcing social life to suffocate the practice. That process must now begin in earnest for social media.
Part of the power of a network is its distributed nature. That’s a plus when it comes to tech and innovation. It’s a minus when it comes to the speed of central agreement as well as the potential for abuse.
Source: Some thoughts on Mastodon →
“Even if you ideologically agree with him, unless you love being a replaceable cog who has to dance on command, this is not a workplace to be in."
A comment that says so much about the anxiety among Twitter employees.
Source: Elon Musk’s Disastrous Weekend on Twitter - The Atlantic →
In the past 30 years, the British economy chose finance over industry, Britain’s government chose austerity over investment, and British voters chose a closed and poorer economy over an open and richer one.
Source: How the U.K. Became One of the Poorest Countries in Western Europe - The Atlantic →