Some remarks on the recent Apple event

Last week there was another Apple launch event, shorter than usual and considered by many ‘boring’ (and, if current rumors are to be taken seriously, we are in for another whole year of boring incremental releases). I gathered a couple of thoughts since and instead of doing small posts with links for each announcement I will share them together:

‘Green Apple’: one of the first announcements was that 93 percent of Apple’s global operations now run on sustainable energy. Certainly a good step for the environment, but I have to wonder how far does it actually go. From what I understand, this refers primarily to Apple’s data centers around the globe. What about the manufacturing operations handled by third parties in China and elsewhere? If that’s powered by ‘dirty’ coal energy the percentage would be much lower.

The forgettable Watch: people who were expecting a new Apple Watch model had to settle for a couple of new bands and hope for more in the fall (or maybe next year?). Also, apparently the gold-plated Edition is being slowly phased out in stores; I guess celebrities are used to receive such trinkets for free in exchange for promotion, not actually buying them.

Henrik Joreteg’s Blog: “Why I switched to Android after 7 years of iOS”

So, all this said, these things led me to finally exercising the only voting power I have as a consumer… I took my money and left.

I don’t see this as switching to Android, I’m simply switching to the best mobile web app platform available today.

The web is the only truly open platform we’ve got. It’s the closest thing we have to a level playing field.

This is why I’m focusing all my efforts on building Progressive Web Apps… I hope you’ll do the same.

Henrik Joreteg

Hmm, the best mobile web app platform… I’m not so sure about that. It’s pretty clear at this point that Safari is lagging behind other browsers, stalling web-based development partly because Apple won’t allow competing browsers on iOS devices, but Android has its share of problems as well. The author mentions he bought a Nexus device, making him the proud member of a minuscule group of people using ‘pure’ Android and receiving fast updates directly from Google. The rest of the Android world experiences a rather different reality, with high fragmentation, both at the OS and at browser level. Adding to this the fact that average users don’t particularly care about web vs. apps, that Android users spend less money through mobile purchases, you will probably find development for Android still more cumbersome and less lucrative than iOS.

P.D. James – Unnatural Causes

Extenuat după un caz deosebit de solicitant în capitală, inspectorul Adam Dalgliesh se îndreaptă cu nerăbdare către casa din Monksmere a mătușii sale Jane, unde are de gând să petreacă o mult-meritată vacanță. Dar marea cenușie aduce în același timp la țărm o mică barcă cu vâsle purtând un cadavru fără urme de violență – cu excepția mâinilor, ciopârțite violent de la încheieturi. Mica comunitate de scriitori și critici literari din Monksmere este pusă imediat pe jar și vacanța liniștită a lui Dalgliesh amânată până la soluționarea cazului. Deși investigația este condusă oficial de inspectorul local Reckless, Dalgliesh nu poate să‑și ignore flerul de detectiv și se lansează discret în cercetări paralele, folosindu‑se de încrederea celor din comunitate și de relațiile de la Londra cultivate de‑a lungul anilor.

There wasn’t even any proof that Maurice had been murdered. Reckless didn’t believe it, the Chief Constable didn’t believe it and probably no one else did except Adam Dalgliesh, stupidly persistent, blindly following his hunch in the teeth of the evidence.

Un nume destul de cunoscut pentru împătimiții romanului polițist, P.D. James realizează și aici, unul dintre primele ei romane, o poveste tensionată și încâlcită cu destule întorsături de situație. Victima fusese un autor mediocru de romane polițiste, care se credea însă genial, un defect de altfel comun printre artiști. Plasarea misterului într‑un cerc de scriitori îi permite să încerce ceva mai diferit, poate chiar să ironizeze puțin branșa din care face parte. Un exemplu de inovație e scena impresionantă de debut, descriind cadavrul plutind pe barcă spre mal. Scenă care e apoi repetată aproape cuvânt cu cuvânt în carte, mărindu‑i deodată impactul, deoarece apare într‑un manuscris al defunctului Maurice Seton, inspirat de o idee a vecinei sale, Cynthia Calthrop, autoare de romane de dragoste.

IEEE Spectrum: “Google Self-Driving Car Will Be Ready Soon for Some, in Decades for Others”

But last week in a speech at Austin’s South-by-Southwest, Urmson for the first time told a different story about both the delivery date and capabilities of its first self-driving cars.

Not only might it take much longer to arrive than the company has ever indicated—as long as 30 years, said Urmson—but the early commercial versions might well be limited to certain geographies and weather conditions. Self-driving cars are much easier to engineer for sunny weather and wide-open roads, and Urmson suggested the cars might be sold for those markets first.

Urmson put it this way in his speech. How quickly can we get this into people’s hands? If you read the papers, you see maybe it’s three years, maybe it’s thirty years. And I am here to tell you that honestly, it’s a bit of both.

Lee Gomes

A rather curious statement from the project’s director Chris Urmson. There are certainly a lot of complicated challenges in building an autonomous car, but a gradual release to market doesn’t make much sense to me, especially segmented by such random factors as regional weather patterns. How would this work while it’s raining; should people have a regular car as backup for bad weather? What happens if you start on a trip and get caught in a storm; does the car stop driving “for your own safety” and lets you stranded in the middle of nowhere? And more to the point, who would buy a self-driving model with such obvious flaws? The only solution I see is a vehicle that receives constant updates for the driver AI and is heavily subsidized by Google in the first stages, allowing people to use them as secondary car without much financial commitment, while Google collects more data to improve reliability.

Signal v. Noise: “Is group chat making you sweat?”

What we’ve learned is that group chat used sparingly in a few very specific situations makes a lot of sense. What makes a lot less sense is chat as the primary, default method of communication inside an organization. A slice, yes. The whole pie, no. All sorts of eventual bad happens when a company begins thinking one-line-at-a-time most of the time.

We’ve also seen strong evidence that the method and manner in which you choose to communicate has a major influence on how people feel at work. Frazzled, exhausted, and anxious? Or calm, cool, and collected? These aren’t just states of mind, they are conditions caused by the kinds of tools we use, and the kinds of behaviors those tools encourage.

Based on these discoveries, I’ve put together a list of the positive and negative impacts of group chat on an organization.

Jason Fried

The list contains 4 positives and 17(!) negatives – that should tell you all you need to know about the conclusion. I read another similar article just a couple of days apart that highlights similar problems with office chat tools by focusing on a single one: Slack, a favorite of Silicon Valley, the magic solution that should eventually replace everything from email to Microsoft Office to Twitter. I haven’t used it and, given how technologies come and fade so fast these days, it’s very likely I’ll never use it, but I can certainly see how being always-on for every trivial question from colleagues can be distracting and ultimately reduce your productivity instead of improving it.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch – Embedded

Corespondent independent de război, Khalil a văzut multe în lunga lui carieră, conflicte care i‑au tocit empatia și ascuțit la maxim cinismul. Pe lângă luptele violente din alte sisteme, campania LaDucci pare o floare la ureche, în care armata pământeană s‑a implicat ca suport pentru un aliat obscur, și Khalil ajunge să deplângă plictiseala constantă, monotonia zilelor petrecute departe de front, într‑o bază stingheră înconjurată de tundră. Apoi însă, într‑o misiune de recunoaștere de rutină, întâlnește un soldat misterios care schimbă brusc și radical rolul lui Khalil în conflict.

Cynical doesn’t begin to cut it. Cynical is where we start. We end up somewhere long past bitter, beyond hopeless, in a place as bleak as LaDucci on a cold winter night.

Deși scrisă dintr‑o perspectivă presupusă neutră, povestirea relativ scurtă redă perfect atmosfera apăsătoare a conflictului, amintind imediat de tonul mușcător al altor romane SF de război ca The Forever War și Starship Troopers. De asemenea, ideea că fiecare rasă extraterestră are o slăbiciune diferită, în funcție de care sunt trimiși în luptă alte tipuri de soldați, este surprinzător de originală și folosită cu efect mai târziu în povestire. Din păcate partea a doua și finalul, când Khalil descoperă mizele reale ale conflictului și motivul pentru care soldații de pe LaDucci sunt exclusiv bărbați, nu este realizat la fel de bine; mi s‑a părut că autoarea s‑a grăbit și a forțat mesajul pe care voia să‑l transmită. O temă demnă de reflecție de altfel, legată de rolul jurnalismului într‑o lume suprasaturată de conflicte, în care relatarea faptelor de la fața locului este editată subtil și afectată de interesele în joc, și de care spectatorilor de acasă le pasă de multe ori prea puțin ca să se schimbe ceva – cum s‑a întâmplat cel mai recent în Siria.

Nota mea: 3.5

Google Posts: a new publishing platform for verified individuals and organizations

Lost in the rattle of the current US presidential campaign, Google launched a little-known initiative that could turn its most used product, the search results, into an instant publishing platform: Google Posts. The project homepage is sparse at the moment; presented as an experimental new podium on Google, it’s currently restricted to public figures and organizations. Apparently only (some) presidential candidates got early access, as you can see in the search results for Hilary Clinton: her statements on important issues in the political debate are highlighted in the sidebar under her profile and accompanied by a small ‘verified’ badge. Results on other candidates, like Marco Rubio or Donald Trump, show similar boxes about political issues, but they are compiled from their statements via Google’s Knowledge Graph. It’s not very clear however how people can share these snippets, as mentioned below, since there’s no apparent link – maybe it’s something only available to publishers?

Verified individuals and organizations can now communicate with text, images and videos directly on Google. Creating content is fast and simple, and once published, posts will appear instantly in search results related to the publisher. Each post can also be shared on popular social networks.