I'm amazed 'set a reminder for x when I leave this location' still doesn't get the 'when I leave this location'. It's clear user expectation created internally (by siri marketing) and externally (by ai tools) has far outpaced capability.
6,927 karma · joined May 15, 2013
Currently: enjoying a nice relaxing break
Previously: design @ Margins.app, cofounder @ Daylight Computer co, cofounder @ EdSurge (edtech news co), VP Product @ OneSignal (YC S11), and an assortment of others.
Always: creative metacognition, making a better world, computing history & alternative futures, and creating sublime experiences that get us in touch with our humanity.
Never: writing posts with LLMs
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As an app developer I (generally) like liquid glass, it injects some much needed fun and freshness into our devices. It's still rough around the edges and some of these points are very valid, especially around not overdoing it to show off and some text-on-text issues.
However I do think some of the issues raised are based on a different goals around legibility.
I think NNgroup wants all interfaces to be optimally legible at any given moment. I think Apple wants all interfaces to have access to legibility at any given moment, typically by moving the screen a bit.
These are legitimate differences of opinion. A physical metaphor might be that you have a paper with a glass paperweight atop it. If one were to judge a photo of your perspective looking at it as though it were a UI, they might comment that the paper is hard to read in places because of the paperweight.
But in reality, it takes half a second to move that paperweight aside to read the paper, and the paperweight serves another valuable purpose keeping the paper from moving. This is akin to other purposes UI elements serve. It's a balance and a tradeoff.
Just like Steve Jobs pointed out to Round Rects Are Everywhere! [0], the physical world is full of content that obscures other content. What do we do? We turn our head a bit, or move a thing aside. We don't expect the physical world to have optimal legibility at all possible perspectives. While we can (and should) do better in the digital realm, there is a spectrum and the optimal point may not be where NNgroup wants it, especially as the capability of mobile devices reaches and exceeds that of the physical realm.
To address another point this article makes about touch targets:
Prior iOS versions made decisions about spacing between icons that were based on smaller devices (4.7-5.5", or 9.5-13 sq in). iPhones are larger these days (6.1-6.9", or 14-18 sq in), so the physical area of a touch target isn't actually that different, if at all. A big UI refresh is the time to update these kinds of assumptions.
[0] https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html
We really need a term that sits between correlation and causation in situations where data is difficult to come by. There's such a huge rift of meaning between these terms, and too often 'correlation is not causation' gets wheeled out in a room of people that already know that and are trying to figure out the nuances.
How about plausal? Aka it's rather plausible that there is a causal relationship between two things but causality is hard to prove.
"Air quality and dementia have a plausal relationship".
The bar for plausation is much lower, yet many correlates still won't meet it. "Bad air quality causes dementia" is a categorically different statement than "ice cream sales cause shark attacks", if we establish the category of plausal relationships.
(Probability of not getting away with it) 0.01 * (Cost if caught) 1000 = 10x (Expected Cost) = not worth it
[1] https://margins.app/america-and-americans-and-select/w/f395d...
Theory A: fits 7 known predictions but also makes a not-yet-verified prediction
Theory B: fits 8 known predictions and offers no new ones
In this example wouldn't Theory A be better, because all else equal it is less likely the product of overfitting and required more insight and effort to discover? In other words, Theory A used a different process that we know has a higher likelihood of novel discovery.
(Maybe this is a restatement of the simplicity argument, in that Theory A requires fewer predictions to discover it, ergo it is simpler)
However this is relevant because this is an investor report helping people forecast, and this stat helps calibrate readers expectations of just how fast a product can scale in this day & age, using a relevant comparison of products in the same category that when launched offered the same step change in value.
Also, quantity has a quality of its own.
We're now very much living in the time when this kind of thing is likely to happen, it's no longer theory or paranoia anymore. Why would powers that be stop at snooping on 20k when we can now basically do it to everyone? I mean, look at the present news cycle and think for a second.
Basically, Synology drives are not only more expensive, they're also statistically speaking less reliable when building a RAID with them, negating the very purpose of the product. What a dumb move.
One thing I wonder about with various regs is whether the optics are ever fully factored into the analysis. This seems to be a blind spot in a lot of regulatory behavior that affects consumers, GDPR being another obvious example. To consumers, these laws are examples of regulatory cluelessness, being so broadly applied as to be meaningless, and ultimately undermining the moral authority of the act of regulation. Who doesn't look at a Prop 65 warning and ultimately conclude 'well I guess everything causes cancer'?
Based on your description, Prop 65 did some nice jiu jitsu to navigate real-world constraints and create incentives to get some positive change in, and I imagine the author is proud of having figured out that kind of complex move. But man did it whiff on the optics.
As a whole the piece is amazing, but when zooming in on the details, the digital version kinda feels lifeless with too-straight lines and identical clipart. I think what gets lost in this kind of digital recreation are some of the stuff I love most from old maps: the subtle variations introduced from printing, the hand-carved lines in the hatching not being perfectly straight, the moments of bespoke difference that no standardized font or clipart captures.
The restored version is not quite the same, and that's fine especially since those details are hard to see at a glance. It's beautiful overall. I wonder though if we can use some of our newer image generation techniques to re-introduce the wonderful subtleties of the print version.
Focusing on rollout, municipal light rail almost never gets deployed in US-style cities due to huge capex, not opex. Smaller vehicles allow incremental roll-out and can use preexisting road infrastructure. Ergo, that's the form of public transit you're most likely to see grow over the next decades.
Drone here doesn't imply flying, it's about scaling down wheeled vehicles and the coexistence of a wider variety of vehicle sizes on roads that is unlocked by the automated movement of mass. Delivery to higher up floors can be done through small in-building elevators. If you think that's unrealistic, consider that it was once extremely popular to use pneumatic tubes to send mail in buildings. Built infrastructure changes based on what is possible, and mass needs to move.
Technology famously has a linear adoption curve, and convenience is famously not something that drives adoption /s
> We already have that. It's called public transport, walkability, bikeability.
Do we have that though? In the US, mostly not. So what's the path? Hoping that sprawled out cities somehow magically get the political will to build $billions in light rail? What do you think is the path of least resistance to these goal states?
> Even in your dream scenario, 50 or so years from now, cars would still have a lot of the same downsides they have today of using way too much space and causing way too much pollution per person for the utility they provide.
Read other comments, don't get stuck on the notion of 'cars' as-is.
Yes, past underinvestment is bad. And yes, initially they are a band-aid, until yes they do become critical.
My excitement for self-driving tech isn't about the short term changes, but just how powerful a technology this is in the longer term. Ultimately this tech is not about cars, it's about the ability to automate the movement of mass. This is novel and meaningful.
An obvious medium-term implication of self-driving is that cities will ban human drivers, because that way cities can ditch a bunch of high-cost infrastructure required because of human fallibility. Up until that point, self-driving would be a band-aid. After that point, the dominoes start to fall.
1. Form factors change: cars become 1-4 person pods, stripped of the unnecessary bulk of excessive safety systems and unused capacity.
2. Ownership changes: municipalities will buy fleets of cheap mass-produced pods to replace extremely capex intensive public transport.
3. What is transported changes: now you have shipping drones dropping off standardized (reusable) packages into standardized intakes. Think The Box [1] but smaller.
4. Infrastructure changes: Roads narrow, parking becomes drop-off spots, larger cafes, actual parks. Cut and cover roads multiply, leaving more space above ground for people. Cities grow 20% without getting bigger, just by obviating the need for half their roads. The blight of various parking signs and warnings to drivers disappear. People can walk about freely or ride their bikes. It's quieter. The air quality improves.
5. Housing changes: Garages transform into rooms. People ditch bulky refrigerators in favor of ordering drone-delivered fresh produce in minutes. Drones deliver upstairs not just at street level. Pods become elevators. We've seen all this in science fiction... guess what the enabling technology is?
If you extend the implications of the automated movement of mass, the logical conclusion is the physical infrastructure of the city will transform to take advantage of every gain that creates. Cities dedicate 25-40%+ of their land mass to roads. In dense urban cores, 20% of their land mass is just parking spots. We can't route people-driven cars underground unless we really really mean it and build a highway. We waste a huge amount of space on transportation. We also shape all of our buildings around the constraints imposed by car-shaped objects and all their various externalities, including noise and air pollution.
My belief is that self-driving is easily the most transformative tech to hit cities since the car, and may exceed the impact that cars have had on the built world.
Ideally this would be a municipal fleet and transportation just another utility like water, electrical, and broadband. Admittedly this would require strong political power and vision, as anything that remakes physical infrastructure does.
Agree small cars are a cultural/identity issue tho usually a rather rational one as well, given safety vis-a-vis 7000lb SUVs. However, I don't think people's aversions to spend $20k+ on a city-only vehicle has any bearing on whether they would be willing to be being taken places in one when its the most convenient/safest/fastest way to get places. A city-wide transportation utility obviates most of the need/desire for individual car ownership.
To put it in tech biz terms, everything in tech is bundling or unbundling. Ownership of cars is the unbundled version of transport, and took over due to convenience and creature comforts. Now a new tech has come out that swings the pendulum toward bundled being more convenient & optimal.
Cars are also the least utilized asset class, being parked 95% of the time [2].
AVs, by virtue of being able to coordinate fleet-wide and ability to park anywhere rather than only one's home or destination, would be able to gain incredible efficiencies relative to status quo.
Atop those efficiencies, removing both the constraint of having a driver and the constraint of excessive safety systems to make up for human inattentiveness means AVs can get drastically smaller as vehicles, further improving road utilization (imagine lots of 1- and 2-seaters zipping by). And roads themselves can become narrower because there is less room for error with AVs instead of humans.
Finally, traffic lights coordinating with fleets would further reduce time to destination (hurry up and finish).
Self-driving vehicles give us the opportunity to rethink almost all of our physical infrastructure and create way more human-friendly cities.
[1] http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/PrefaceHighCostFreeParking.pdf
We're probably well past the point where removing all human-driven vehicles (besides bikes) from city streets and replacing them with self-driving vehicles would be a net benefit for safety, congestion, vehicle utilization, road space, and hours saved commuting, such that we could probably rip up a bunch of streets and turn them into parks or housing and still have everyone get to their destinations faster and safer.
The future's here, even if it still has room for improvement.
If a lot of 16 users are in places the 16e doesn't go, that skews the 16's bottom 10%tile's mbps lower, but also means more users are served and therefore it has a better modem.
Given this data is from Ookla's Speedtest, I wonder if a lot of people in super super low reception areas wind up running Speedtest to see why their connection is slow, and are thus overrepresented in the data. If that were the case, the conclusion is even more statistically off.