Scripting News: “Facebook uses RSS for Instant Articles”

Late yesterday Facebook released docs explaining how Instant Articles works for publishers. It's good news. They have, as I speculated earlier, built their system around RSS. This means there can be interop between all the big companies --Twitter, Google, Apple, Facebook -- now building new news systems.

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To publishers and bloggers -- this is a big deal because it means that the same feeds you generate to post stories to Facebook can be used for other sites. It's a very strong statement. No publishing silos. Let news flow where it wants to. And let competitors arise who may do more interesting and useful things with news than the big companies can.

Dave Winer

Ironic how two of the companies infamous for their ‘walled gardens’ – Facebook and Apple – are using open standards for their news products, while the ‘open’ Google couldn’t figure out a practical use for RSS and simply abandoned it for the past few years.

Tad Williams – Happy Hour in Hell

Cu iubita captivă în ghearele unuia dintre cei mai puternici demoni ai Iadului și partenerul său Sam retras într‑o lume nouă departe de supravegherea Cerului, nu se poate spune că viața lui Bobby Dollar merge prea strălucit. Deși a scăpat pe moment de interogatoriul aspru al consiliului Eforilor, se află încă în posesia penei de înger care a pecetluit complotul secret între un înger misterios și demonul Eligor, ceea ce face din Bobby o țintă pentru toți oportuniștii din lumea de aici și de dincolo. Pe urmele lui apare imediat un asasin violent pe care îl credea mort, și hărțuirea continuă de care tocmai scăpase revine în prim plan. Între amenințarea aceasta constantă și dorința nebună de a o salva pe contesa Casimira din Iad, Bobby începe să planifice o incursiune într‑un loc care în mod normal e ultimul pe lista oricărei persoane întregi la minte: puțul Iadului!

Love. Tired old jokes aside, a real, powerful love does have one thing in common with Hell itself: it burns everything else out of you.

După cum dezvăluie primul capitol, nu durează mult până când Bobby reușește să se strecoare în locul pedepsei eterne într‑un corp de împrumut pe un drum abandonat, cu ajutor considerabil din partea șefului său, Arhanghelul Temuel. Povestea în sine este destul de liniară de aici înainte, urmărindu‑l pe îngerul încăpățânat de‑a lungul unei călătorii pline de peripeții către capitala iadului, Pandaemonium, și apoi înapoi către punctul lui de intrare, de unde se poate întoarce în lumea umană. Ceea ce menține nivelul de interes este discursul lui presărat de remarci ironice, capacitatea lui aproape infinită de a intra în bucluc – și din fericire de a ieși la timp din el – și imaginația bogată a autorului, care populează fiecare nivel al Iadului cu numeroase detalii și personaje, grotești, paranoice și periculoase. Peisajul Infernului e de o variație fascinantă, în mare parte structurat ca o societate medievală, cu demonii puternici în rolul lorzilor și sufletele condamnate drept servitori, sclavi, subiecte de distracție și tortură. Pericolele răsar la fiecare pas, oricine poate să te păcălească (în cel mai fericit caz), dacă nu să te jefuiască sau omoare, totul e murdar și urât mirositor, încât nici măcar cei mai sus‑puși demoni nu‑și doresc să trăiască aici, preferând identități umane pe Pământ, sau în cel mai rău caz o casă luxurioasă în capitală, departe de hăul din care răzbat continuu gemetele chinului fără sfârșit. O temă recurentă a pedepselor este reluarea greșelilor din cursul vieții, care capturează sufletele într‑un cerc vicios al suferinței. Unele din figurile de seamă sunt inspirate din cazuri reale (sau cel puțin legende), de la împăratul Nero la o criminală în serie din România interbelică.

Viget: “The @font-face dilemma”

While this section of the specification was not actually present until 2011, it’s useful in framing the current font loading landscape. Some time in 2009, Firefox and Opera began shipping @font-face support with the former behavior: text would render with fallback fonts until downloadable font resources became available. But this choice frustrated many users (see the Firefox bug report) and was quickly dubbed FOUT, the Flash of Unstyled Text. Articles were written about fighting the @font-face FOUT. It wasn’t long before most browsers were hiding text while fonts downloaded.

Unfortunately, the main issue with @font-face now is what many wanted to avoid years ago: the FOIT, or Flash of Invisible Text.

Fallback fonts have been specified, but many browsers dictate that text should remain transparent until Open Sans has been downloaded or fetched from browser cache. Many Webkit browsers will wait 3 seconds before timing out and showing the fallback. Some browser may wait as long as 30 seconds, turning the flash of invisible text into an eternity for users on extremely slow network connections.

Chris Manning

It always perplexed me how web developers and standards went from a less than ideal, but acceptable experience (fonts changing during page load) to the current broken, user-unfriendly experience (text not rendering at all until custom web fonts are downloaded). Custom fonts are nice elements of design, but if this interferes with content – especially all-important titles – site owners should prioritize content over design; after all, most people browse the web for content, not to admire the typographic skills of designers. The problem may soon become more pressing, as the recently-launched ad-blockers for iOS offer the option of blocking custom fonts as well, forcing designers to work with built-in fonts for proper fallbacks in case webfonts are disabled.

Ad-blocking on iOS – a storm in a teacup

So iOS 9 launched with support for content blockers and it seems like everybody on the Internet went crazy. In typical tech news fashion, an issue practically doesn’t exist until Apple does something about it. There are an incredible number of articles and opinions flying around, from apocalyptic visions predicting the collapse of the web, to diatribes against Apple for allowing people to steal the work of innocent journalists, to wake-up-calls for publishers to adapt to the new situation or die. There’s even developers who jumped at the opportunity to make a quick buck, only to back down days later, because of supposed moral concerns – returning the money in the process (one has to wonder why he hasn’t offered the app for free in the first place). And unfortunately, most of these aspects have some grain of truth.

It’s certainly true that the web experience has slowly degraded under the load of more ads, trackers, banners, full-page overlays, auto-playing videos and so on. Equally true that advertising is, for the moment, the most reliable source of income for publishers and removing ads threatens their already meager revenues. On the other hand… many publications add so little value for readers, simply repeating what other sites said or spewing out click-bait titles, that I can’t help but think few people will miss if they go out of business. This is constantly happening in the tech press, with sites rewriting press releases or shamelessly copying articles behind paywalls. I have long given up on reading individual sites and I am mainly keeping up by reading Techmeme (and Twitter), which does a very good job of presenting top stories, important reviews and rumors. When one site shuts down, others take its place, and so the overall landscape changes little.

Tech.pinions: “Apple Watch Satisfaction”

As I listened to 14 different people tell me about their Apple Watch, I observed a pattern. Those whose job it was to think about the Apple Watch or who were early adopters who thought deeply about tech and the tech products they buy, were all much more critical of the watch. You could tell they evaluated it and thought about it deeply from every angle by their responses. Then I talked with teachers, firefighters, insurance agents, and those not in the tech industry and not hard-core techies. These groups of people couldn’t stop raving about the Apple Watch and how much they loved the product. It was almost as if the farther away people were from tech or the tech industry, the more they liked the Apple Watch.

Ben Bajarin

Interesting results, but they should be taken with a (big) grain of salt, because the survey is inherently skewed. First of all, the respondents were all Apple Watch owners, meaning the survey doesn’t capture dissatisfied buyers who already returned or resold the gadget. And some of the responses (not mentioned in the article, but available in the full study) contradict the conclusion of near-perfect customer satisfaction, for example: when asked about the perceived value of the Watch, 12% consider that the Watch was a poor value relative to cost – much higher than the 3% dissatisfaction rate; when asked if they were likely to purchase the device for someone else, a full 34% replied with a ‘No’, again not an indication of satisfaction. This could mean that either the control questions were incorrectly formulated, or people in the survey are not that happy with the Watch as implied. The survey also fails to mention which model people own – that should have been one of the top questions.

Daring Fireball: “More on Apple TV and the Web”

In theory, sure, I agree. But in practice I don’t see how a good user experience could be crafted from that. I’ve never once seen a TV set-top box web browser experience that was anything other than terrible. I don’t think there are any politics at all in Apple’s decision not to expose WebKit to Apple TV apps in this SDK. I think it’s entirely about what makes for a good user experience. A good web browsing experience on Apple TV would be great. But better none at all than a crappy one. I know that’s not entirely Manton’s argument — his parenthetical quoted above makes that clear. But I don’t know what “some part of the open web” is without a browser.

John Gruber

I certainly agree that the browsing experience on a Smart TV is very poor. It all comes down to the input device: it’s next to impossible to type URLs on a remote control, and very slow to even follow links on a page. Most of my ‘smart’ activity on my TV consists of streaming videos on YouTube, controlled from the iPhone app. The current situation looks remarkably similar to how phones worked before Apple introduced the iPhone. That means there’s an opportunity here for innovation, for a company to come up with a better experience on large screens. But that company is not Apple, who is content to milk the oversized iPhone profits year after year.

Fortune: “Apple will ask Supreme Court to hear its ebooks price-fixing case”

Judge Cote’s ruling against Apple was upheld this past June, 2-1, by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

At the time of the appellate loss, Apple’s press statement hinted that it might take this step: “While we want to put this behind us,” the company asserted at the time, “the case is about principles and values. We know we did nothing wrong back in 2010 and are assessing next steps.”

Roger Parloff

It’s commendable to stand by your principles, but principles can still be misguided and against the law. In this case the market has shown both Apple and the publishers were wrong to artificially raise eBook prices; US regulators also condemned the practice. A mature person generally has the decency to admit they’re wrong and change course. Apple’s lack of flexibility on this matter makes me seriously question their judgment. Unless Apple’s ‘values’ include ripping off their customers in order to drive competitors out of business.

The future of TV is content, not apps

Last week Apple held its major annual event during which it launched a new round of hardware. As usual, the tech press gushed all over the announcements, ignoring the blatant lack of innovation, more evident this time around. There seems to be an increasing amount of shortsightedness at Apple, and being praised for everything they launch isn’t going to help the company. Take the new ‘features’ of the iPhone: a new camera sensor with more megapixel, 4K video capture and a new photo file format, with no increase in either the local storage or the iCloud back-up; the new models are heavier and thicker, but not for housing better batteries (their capacity in fact was reduced!), but to accommodate the latest Apple gimmick, 3D Touch.

A comic from Joel Watson called ‘Surface Tension’ accurately predicted the crowd’s reaction to the iPad Pro’s Smart Keyboard cover — in 2012.

MacRumors: “Apple’s Live Photos take up about 2x Space of Normal Images”

Live Photos will be viewable on existing iPhones, iPads, Macs and Apple Watch devices with the latest operating systems. Apple is also opening up the API for developers to support the new format in their own apps. Facebook has already committed to supporting Live Photos in their iOS app later this year.

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Meanwhile, @DanMatte reveals that the new Live Photos format is a bundle of images based on the JPEG file format, allowing them to be easily sent as a still image to devices that don’t support Live Photo. Apple’s developer documents indicate that you can share the image as a regular JPEG if desired.

Arnold Kim

I’ve been wondering about this since a couple of days ago, and there’s my answer. Disappointing, but hardly surprising: Apple’s approach to software has always been to support its hardware ecosystem, another incentive to keep users locked in. Who cares that the majority of iPhone users run Windows on their PCs and will not be able to benefit from Apple’s so-called innovation? I can’t imagine it’s a good user experience to share emotional Live Photos, only to find out that other people can only see a still image. It’s an awkward solution for the desire to capture the best shot: a regular video would work better for capturing action – especially since you can control the length of the clip and edit it later – and for still shots Apple already offered burst mode, where you take several photos in quick succession and pick the best afterwards.

Ken Liu - The Paper Menagerie

Nu am fost până acum impresionat de povestirile lui Ken Liu, dar The Paper Menagerie a fost o excepție neașteptată. Se găsea de multă vreme pe Kindle, ascunsă într‑o colecție, și am scos‑o la iveală într‑un moment în care rămăsesem fără altceva de citit. O poveste emoționantă despre relația dintre mame și fii, despre discriminare și tensiunile culturale între Orient și Occident, despre cinstirea părinților și strămoșilor – și cu un strop de magie care subliniază în mod surprinzător mesajul. Textul lasă impresia că s‑a inspirat cel puțin parțial din experiențele proprii ale autorului și probabil asta îl face atât de pregnant în ciuda dimensiunii reduse și a conciziei cu care trece peste scenele cruciale. Se simte însă, în atitudinea fiului față de mamă, aceeași răceală care m‑a deranjat în alte povestiri ale lui Ken Liu, dar cel puțin acum fiul reușește în ultimul ceas să regăsească căldura din copilărie, când mama îi împăturea jucării însuflețite din ambalaje vechi de cadouri.

Zhe jiao zhèzhi, Mom said. This is called origami. I didn’t know this at the time, but Mom’s kind was special. She breathed into them so that they shared her breath, and thus moved with her life. This was her magic.

Nota mea: 4.5

disponibilă online pe site‑ul io9 și în format PDF

BuzzFeed News: “The New American Slavery”

A BuzzFeed News investigation — based on government databases and investigative files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, thousands of court documents, as well as more than 80 interviews with workers and employers — shows that the program condemns thousands of employees each year to exploitation and mistreatment, often in plain view of government officials charged with protecting them. All across America, H-2 guest workers complain that they have been cheated out of their wages, threatened with guns, beaten, raped, starved, and imprisoned. Some have even died on the job. Yet employers rarely face any significant consequences.

Many of those employers have since been approved to bring in more guest workers. Some have even been rewarded with lucrative government contracts. Almost none have ever been charged with a crime.

In interview after interview, current and former guest workers — often on the verge of tears — used the same word to describe their experiences: slavery.

We live where we work, and we can’t leave, said Olivia Guzman Garfias, who has been coming to Louisiana as a guest worker from her small town in Mexico since 1997. We are tied to the company. Our visas are in the company’s name. If the pay and working conditions aren’t as we wish, who can we complain to? We are like modern-day slaves.

Jessica Garrison, Ken Bensinger, Jeremy Singer-Vine

The American Dream is no longer what it used to be…

The Guardian: “The man who was caged in a zoo”

In anticipation of larger crowds after the publicity in the New York Times, Benga was moved from a smaller chimpanzee cage to one far larger, to make him more visible to spectators. He was also joined by an orangutan called Dohang. While crowds massed to leer at him, the boyish Benga, who was said to be 23 but appeared far younger, sat silently on a stool, staring – sometimes glaring – through the bars.

The exhibition of a visibly shaken African with apes in the New York Zoological Gardens, four decades after the end of slavery in America, would highlight the precarious status of black people in the nation’s imperial city. It pitted the “coloured” ministers, and a few elite allies, against a wall of white indifference, as New York’s newspapers, scientists, public officials, and ordinary citizens revelled in the spectacle. By the end of September, more than 220,000 people had visited the zoo – twice as many as the same month one year earlier. Nearly all of them headed directly to the primate house to see Ota Benga.

Pamela Newkirk

When people get outraged about the treatment of women and minorities in the third world, it would help to remember that similar abuses were common in the West just a century ago. Or, in the case of the United States, are still happening today.

Visual Wilderness: “To Swap or Not to Swap…”

Some photographers are all for it, some are diametrically opposed to it, and a few couldn’t care less one way or the other. In any case, a common conclusion from these discussions is that “art is art” and how one photographer chooses to create an image is solely that individual’s business. But in my view, such a laissez-faire approach isn’t sufficient because, while art may be art, all art is not photography. Meaning that do whatever you want doesn’t apply here. After all, brushing a bunch of acrylic paint onto a metal sculpture and calling it pottery doesn’t make it pottery. I believe that, as photographers, we have an obligation to stand on one side of the issue or the other and decide… is this photography?

I’ll start. I’m one of the curmudgeons who staunchly believes that sky replacement has absolutely no place in landscape photography. I’m not saying it doesn’t take skill to pull off seamlessly or even that it doesn’t make an image look better. But it does take an image from the realm of photography and plops squarely it into that of graphic design or digital art. Semantics and definitions aside, I am actually far more interested in the concepts represented by landscape photography. And from that standpoint, I believe that swapping skies weakens the art as a whole and, more importantly, cheats you out of one of the most magical parts of photography: the profound experience.

Joshua Cripps

I’m of a similar opinion. For me it’s also an issue of trust: when I browse a photographers’ portfolio, I assume the photos presented there are genuine, not Photoshop collages. I’m more interested in his or her sense of composition, light and location than their Photoshop skills. I remember the first time someone mentioned using the technique, I was surprised and disappointed, because I immediately thought of the other beautiful images on his site and wondered how many were the result of the same digital manipulation. Ultimately it’s the personal choice of the photographer, but I think they are limiting their potential by relying on these sort of techniques, instead of working harder to capture that ‘perfect moment’.

The Telegraph: “Amazon’s Jeff Bezos: With Jeremy Clarkson, we’re entering a new golden age of television”

I think we’re in a golden age of television, so if you go back in time even just five years, you couldn’t get A-list talent to do TV serials, or, if you could, it was a rare thing. But that’s flipped completely.

Bezos points to Amazon’s investment in series such as comedy drama Transparent, for which lead actor Jeffrey Tambor won a Golden Globe, as the main reason for the transformation.

The investment is very high now in serialised TV, and the amount of time you have to tell a story is much greater. That format change opens up a lot of storytelling possibilities, which, when mixed with the movie-like production standards, and the A-list talent, is why we’re seeing amazing television.

James Quinn

Not one to miss an opportunity, Amazon’s CEO is also investing in original television content, taking advantage of the shift from passive watching to more active on-demand shows. If the rumored replacement for Top Gear will be available exclusively on Amazon Video, I’m quite sure it will drive many new customers to sign up.

Recently visited pages highlighted in Google search results

Apparently, sometime in the first half of the year, Google removed some search filters, including the filter for visited pages – I say ‘apparently’ because I’ve never used the feature and was barely aware it existed. But in the mean time Google found a better, more transparent way to integrate this information into search results. For links visited through past search results (and logged-in users), Google now shows a small grey label underneath, including the date and number of times you visited the page. It’s a powerful indicator of relevancy, especially if you’ve visited the same site multiple times, meaning you found important information there. The feature is most likely powered by Google Search History – recently I’ve been browsing mostly in Edge, so the integration with Google Chrome browsing history can’t play a significant role.

Skynet & Ebert: “When do we stop keeping up with popular music?”

For this study, I started with individual listening data from U.S. Spotify users and combined that with Echo Nest artist popularity data, to generate a metric for the average popularity of the artists a listener streamed in 2014. With that score per user, we can compute a median across all users of a specific age and demographic profile.

What I found was that, on average…

• … while teens’ music taste is dominated by incredibly popular music, this proportion drops steadily through peoples’ 20s, before their tastes “mature” in their early 30s.
• … men and women listen similarly in their their teens, but after that, men’s mainstream music listening decreases much faster than it does for women.
• … at any age, people with children (inferred from listening habits) listen to a smaller amounts of currently-popular music than the average listener of that age.

Ajay Kalia

Interesting study, both looking at the results, and because it demonstrates how powerful insights can be gained by properly analyzing the data online services routinely gather on their users. I’m over 33, so this could partially explain my lackluster reaction to Apple Music, where I haven’t bothered with curation, discovery and playlists. But it also signals a problem for the music industry: new artists and hits appeal mostly to the demographic under 30, who have less disposable income to spend on purchasing music, concerts and streaming. And the more mature demographic with more varied tastes is probably inclined to purchase their favorite albums (or have already done so), rather than spend on streaming services.

Greg Egan - Diaspora

La un mileniu în viitor, Pământul și umanitatea s‑au schimbat radical: devastată de poluare și încălzirea globală, pe suprafața planetei nu mai trăiesc decât grupuri răzlețe de oameni, majoritatea exuberanți modificați genetic în diverse grade, dar și câțiva statici care se agață cu încăpățânare de sanctitatea moștenirii lor genetice. Alții au ales transferul în corpuri androide, formând comunitățile gleisner care populează sistemul solar și fac planuri pentru lansarea de nave către alte sisteme solare. Grosul populației însă trăiește acum virtual în polisuri adăpostite pe toată planeta, fiecare cu specificul lui cultural. În primul capitol urmărim în detaliu nașterea lui Yatima, un orfan – adică un cetățean creat după un model complet nou, parțial aleatoriu, de sistemul de operare al polisului Konishi, în timp ce majoritatea se nasc din amalgamul trăsăturilor digitale ale progenitorilor. Cu un dar pentru matematică, dar și o înclinație ascunsă către explorare întreținută de prietenii ei, Yatima se va afla în centrul evenimentelor romanului.

Orlando said contemptuously, Give them another thousand years, and they’ll be pissing up and down the Milky Way, marking their territory like dogs.

Yatima protested, That’s not fair! They might have bizarre priorities… but they’re still civilised. More or less.

Liana said, Better gleisners out there than fleshers. Can you imagine statics in space? They’d probably have terraformed Mars by now. The gleisners have barely touched the planet; mostly they’ve just surveyed it from orbit. They’re not vandals. They’re not colonists.

O descoperire bruscă făcută de observatorul gravitațional de pe Lună răstoarnă complet echilibrul fragil dintre facțiuni, care de sute de ani preferă să se evite. La sute de ani lumină de Pământ, orbita unei perechi de stele neutronice, Lacerta G‑1, începe să decadă accelerat, un fenomen complet de neexplicat prin fizica timpului. Calculele arată că în mai puțin de patru zile stelele vor fuziona într‑o explozie monumentală, iar Pământul va fi măturat de raze gama care vor devasta complet atmosfera și ecosistemul. Prea puține se mai pot face pentru oamenii neajutorați de la suprafață, în special în climatul de suspiciune față de virtuali și gleisneri. Dar care e explicația fundamentală pentru această scăpare majoră din teorie? Și cum se poate evita catastrofa în viitor, dacă supraviețuitorii vor reuși vreodată să reclădească viața de suprafață?

The New York Times: “The Singular Mind of Terry Tao”

That spring day in his office, reflecting on his career so far, Tao told me that his view of mathematics has utterly changed since childhood. When I was growing up, I knew I wanted to be a mathematician, but I had no idea what that entailed, he said in a lilting Australian accent. I sort of imagined a committee would hand me problems to solve or something. But it turned out that the work of real mathematicians bears little resemblance to the manipulations and memorization of the math student. Even those who experience great success through their college years may turn out not to have what it takes. The ancient art of mathematics, Tao has discovered, does not reward speed so much as patience, cunning and, perhaps most surprising of all, the sort of gift for collaboration and improvisation that characterizes the best jazz musicians. Tao now believes that his younger self, the prodigy who wowed the math world, wasn’t truly doing math at all. It’s as if your only experience with music were practicing scales or learning music theory, he said, looking into light pouring from his window. I didn’t learn the deeper meaning of the subject until much later.

Gareth Cook

I would say this applies to many other fields beside mathematics as well, especially where creative thinking is involved: the theory learned as a student is just the tip of the iceberg; only after you start practicing you get a real sense of the work involved and it’s often very different than previous expectations.

Text stroke issues in Microsoft Edge

After Windows 10 became available as a free update a month ago, I already moved two devices to Microsoft’s new OS, first my Windows 8 tablet, then this past weekend a new laptop from Acer. My old laptop running Windows 7 will probably get the same treatment soon, but it’s not a high priority, since I was planning on replacing it for at least a year. Both upgrades went smoothly, I had some issues with Bluetooth support on the laptop, but I’ll write about that later. First I wanted to share a small bug I discovered in Microsoft’s new browser, Edge, in the hope that it will get fixed.

Since I settled on the current design for my blog, probably more than three years ago, I used a WebKit-only CSS property to decorate the header with a text stroke. It worked fine until now: WebKit-based browsers like Chrome and Safari showed the fancier stroked title, while the rest displayed a simple, bolded text in a custom font. But now, when I opened my homepage in Edge I was surprised to see that the header was gone!