Excursions avatar

Excursions

I believe when organisations say AI powers each of their offerings/products, they use the term way too leniently. Not every problem needs AI to be addressed. I guess it is more to create a perception - one of adopting cutting-edge tech. Amazon too just joined the club.

“What would make more sense to me is that Amazon converts the latter into a marketplace where PBMs, insurance administrators, distributors, and pharmacies have to compete to serve employees.” - Ben Thompson

So AWS for health then?

Adding Touch Support on Mac

Steven Sinofsky, in response to an interesting (and hopefully promising) note from Axios, again raised the long debated point.

Adding touch to OS X would bound to be disappointing. Plenty examples of this challenge. Ultimately the use case for touch on legacy desktop OS is minimal. BUT you can’t run iOS without touch and it remains a huge challenge to have a multi-modal API..

I have always been on the side of touch being useless on desktops/laptops. But proponents of this feature have disagreed, putting forth many justifications and success stories, even if anecdotal, with Windows 10 Ultrabooks. Even though I am rarely convinced, I can appreciate how touch can come handy for some activities - mainly clicks and scrolls — especially since iPad with Bluetooth keyboard nullified benefits of laptops in some situations for me.

I believe the request from the proponents to Apple is to not make a decision for the end user, not attempt to identify purpose for, or lack thereof, touch. Put it in, let users benefit if they think they can. Unfortunately, I do not think Apple ever introduces an interface to a platform without their justification for and user story behind it.

These are such great captures of the lunar eclipse from yesterday. Of course, not captured by me - wish I could identify and credit the original poster.

Lunar Eclipse ‘18

Lunar Eclipse ‘18

Who would make me feel starstruck?

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.

  • Published writers to whom I just want to convey how unique and different perspective they have to the world around - Fredrik Backman, Christopher Moore, Khaled Hosseini

  • Some creative writers I follow on Medium - Lizella Prescott, Nicole Willson

  • 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.

@manton How does crossposting from micro.blog to twitter handle the syndication? Will the webmentions be pulled back to the post on website? I realised Bridgy didn’t send a webmention for the activity on twitter.

I think I might have finally cracked the Micropub endpoint riddle - an attempt to post via micro.blog.

“Software will always be simple and reliable if it is built to address the problem it aims at with whatever technology - platforms/frameworks/solutions - that suit best.” — wrote a response to a great post at Simple Thread on software complexity.

I wish I did not have to use any of the Google apps on iOS. But I just can’t find a way to drop Gmail. I guess email has to die for that to happen — anyway it’s just a spam galore.

Stop Making Software Complex

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.

Enabled the h-entry microformat markup to posts/journal entries. POSSE handled via IFTTT recipes on feeds. Still need to set up a micropub endpoint — this looks tricky. Daniel Goldsmith’s detailed post hopefully helps.

I have enabled an extremely basic processing and display of two types of posts - likes and replies. However, am still not sure the possible activity types as responses from webmention.io in documentation. Any idea @aaronpk?

On my journey towards embracing IndieWeb, achieved - identify via microformats2, IndieAuth enabled, webmention addressed - receive and send mentions and of course, micro.blog syndication. Couple of open items - significance of h-entry for posts, way to process and display incoming webmentions.

Experimentation continues with IndieWeb projects — over to Webmentions. It is a really wonderful concept which enables responses to a post to be written on one’s own website. As Jeremy Keith wrote in one of his posts:

Basically, it’s an equivalent to pingback. Let’s say I write something here on adactio.com. Suppose that prompts you to write something in response on your own site. A web mention is a way for you to let me know that your response exists.

Even better, and simpler to follow explanation is put out by Drew Mclellan detailing what’s involved in implementing webmentions.

The flow goes something like this.

  • Frankie posts a blog entry.
  • Alex has thoughts in response, so also posts a blog entry linking to
  • Alex’s publishing software finds the link and fetches Frankie’s post, finding the URL of Frankie’s Webmention endpoint in the document.
  • Alex’s software sends a notification to the endpoint.
  • Frankie’s software then fetches Alex’s post to verify that it really does link back, and then chooses how to display the reaction alongside Frankie’s post.

The end result is that by being notified of the external reaction, the publisher is able to aggregate those reactions and collect them together with the original content.

I have got the webmentions (and pingbacks) enabled here — over to testing now. So there you have it. This post is also an attempt at sending a webmention.

Today has really been extremely productive. I have got many of the things sorted out. Posting from a workable CMS (thanks Netlify CMS), crossposting to twitter and of course to micro.blog. Delighted!

Exploring the option to enable an editorial process in CMS. So that a draft can be saved first before it is published. This will be a nice option to have for longer post.

Interest behavior. Understood how it works. It satisfies my needs. A post passes through multiple stages. For me, only important stages are save and publish. Trying Ready anyway.

Managed to solve the problem with avoiding issue with including title for microblog in crossposting. Solution? Of course, involved fixing the RSS feed — relevant even today.

It’s been about 6 months now that I got my static site up with Hugo. Pretty satisfied with what I’ve got running. However, though I am digging posting on mobile as git commits, I’ve been in need of a lite, static CMS. Exploring Netlify CMS.

Problem I am currently facing with Netlify CMS is it defaults to the title as filename for a new post. I do not want to use any for the journal entries, especially to keep crossposting simple.

I am since long fascinated by IndieWeb and multiple projects the guys are working on. One project that recently got me hooked is micro.blog. I have since been working on different feeds to get a custom microblogging of my own. The concept is great. And so looks the implementation. Time for some experiment.

How Dark Patterns are employed by health insurers

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.