ozmbie

It's not just YouTube, but mobile gaming too.

One reason why putting those video ads in mobile games has proven so successful, is that kids will watch them non-stop in order to farm small amounts of in-game currency. After all, they can't make in app purchases without an adult's permission.

There's a lot of money to be made in having children watch hundreds of ads for that fraction-of-a-cent per view revenue.

I think you're right. Alexa and Google home do well at...home. But Apple want everyone using a phone/watch/Airpods to interact with their AI assistant wherever they are.

We can argue about the quality of Siri, but I think Apple have the best chance of dominating the wearables market.

The irony is that "Agile" methods were developed in part to protect developers by poor management. Yet it's the same poor management that relies on off-the-shelf processes.

I've been in so many meeting where a manager tried to espouse the benefits of "being agile": Faster releases, tracking work more accurately, ability for constant review.

But I've never been in a meeting where somebody tries to talk about the benefits to developers: Your goals can't change day to day, your boss doesn't get to strictly tell you what to do or how to do it, and no more arbitrary deadlines!

You really have to listen to how somebody is selling a process to understand their interpretation of it.

Your story reminds me of this Alan Kay quote:

>Computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were.

Thad almost certainly Apple's long term plan.

Rumours earlier this year said that they dropped plans to add a cellular radio into this year's watch due to battery concerns. Give it another year or two and they may solve it.

Then you could leave the house with nothing but a watch and wireless headphones and do various tasks from working out, listening to music, calling and messaging people, getting directions or booking an uber. No phone required.

Seems like they are following the ever so popular "lean startup" approach.

They're announcing a small, separate product to validate if there is demand. Then they'll get early users and burn money while they figure out how to make it into a profitable business.

The point isn't about audio quality. It's about having a free and open way to do it at all!

Who cares what uses it has? It's a whole new area of capability. Somebody could find a new use for it. If we limit our choices based what's currently possible, we get nowhere.

It's easy to complain about free to play games and the tactics they use. But it's just a response to the consumer base.

Developers tried the paid game model and, other than a small number of niche games, the mobile market just doesn't want to pay for them.

I agree that sprint lengths can be arbitrary and counter-productive to developing good software.

I think it's important to understand that the sprint "membrane" is not designed to help developers. It's designed as a compromise between developers and their managers.

Developers want to work uninterrupted and perfect their work before releasing it, and managers want working software quickly and like to interrupt developers and change courses frequently. Sprints are an attempt to find a middle ground, but it's not always ideal.

I mentioned UI because of the parent comment (about hooking UI up to a sub-component).

The core idea I was trying to get across is that until a feature is working and in front of a customer (or stakeholder), it's essentially in limbo because you don't know if you've built what they wanted. Maybe there was a miscommunication, maybe they find the feature confusing, maybe they've changed their mind. The goal is to get feedback as soon as reasonably possible.

eg: A stakeholder (or customer) requests feature X, and everyone agrees it's a good idea and we should to work on it right away. The dev team could spend 2-4 weeks writing excellent behind-the-scenes code that's not hooked up to anything, or you could spend 2-4 weeks on holiday. Either way, you've given stakeholder the same thing: No new feature.

If you're confident that you know exactly what it is you want to build then you don't need Agile, scrum or sprints. Scrum isn't supposed to be waterfall with arbitrary reviews every 2 weeks.

Because that two weeks you spent writing excellent code is mostly useless unless you have a way to get feedback on it. As a customer, you've given me no value.

What if you finally hook up UI to the sub-component and the customer/stakeholder decides they don't like any of it? You could have known about it earlier.

iOS push notifications require permissions, but I believe that apps can schedule "local notifications" without requiring permission.

eg: A timer app can schedule a notification at a specific time in the future.

I agree that the word "different" isn't the best word.

These are a physical equivalent of Dark Patterns (user interfaces designed to trick people).

What happens when we create fishing robots that do the work for all of men?

I don't get it either. Maybe the whole thing is a bubble.

http://idlewords.com/2015/11/the_advertising_bubble.htm

Honest question: what's in the cards for after 2022? That's only 8 years away. How can the trend continue for another 50 years?

>But this is not the case with google maps. You can zoom in, out, and anywhere in between.

The problem I have Google maps lately, is that i have to zoom so far in to see the names of some roads. To the point where nothing but the road is on screen before the name appears. It's a major UX issue.

I missed the sunrise when I was in Cambodia, so I went to Angkor Wat during sunset instead. It was amazing.

The place was almost empty. I walked around for over an hour while the remaining tourists left and then sat at the entrance and shared a beer with my driver. It was such a great experience. I don't think I took any photos either..

Slack is to group chat like Dropbox is to file sharing.

There are plenty of old school ways to share/synchronise files among a group of people. You could run an FTP server and a bunch of automated scripts etc. Or you can just install Dropbox for your non-technically minded users and it just works. The interface is nice and mobile app support is great. Slack is similar in that regard.

You can still be a horrible driver obeying the law.

That's circular logic thogh. If you built a data center capable of staging a 51% attack, you haven't made the network harder overall. You've already gained enough power to do an attack.

It might encourage others to compete, and the arms race continues. But if too much of the network is controlled by a minority, then it's not automatically more secure.

If you remove proof-of-work, then the question then becomes: what else do you measure consensus by? A few other crypto currencies have tried other metrics but they all aim to for the same thing: removing the need for human trust.

>What's holding Twitter back?

Their desire for advertising revenue perhaps.

It doesn't really matter, because most of the top search results you click on will probably include 1MB of ad tracking javascript anyway.

It's the idea that the content available on our devices is shaped by the economic framework that supports it.

When the economic model is advertising and data tracking, the types of apps/services that are available are the ones that work best with advertising and data tracking. And it turns out that consumer-oriented social sharing services fit that model pretty well. So that's mostly what we have.

Those services do have value. But I think it's limited. When I walk into a cafe with a beautiful view and everyone is on their phones, or when people awkwardly scroll through Twitter at a group event instead of enjoying the world around them or interacting with strangers....I dont see people gaining value. Especially when it's children doing it. I see compulsive addictive behaviour that erodes human value for the benefit of advertising companies.

I really do wish that safari had a quick toggle for JS. Browsing the web on iOS is so much faster and less annoying with JS disabled, but I don't like digging through system settings to toggle it.

Singapore's public restrooms are clean because they can afford to hire armies of 60 year old cleaners with no minimum wage.

I'd argue they are actually TOO clean. Because half the time I want to use them, they are being cleaned! It's a bunch of busywork to employee the otherwise unemployable. They clean bathrooms and sweep up leaves over and over again.

It's the same criticism people had for Dropbox or the first iPhone: there's nothing new. The key is that it's very well packaged with a focus on UX (especially on mobile) and it requires extremely little setup effort.

I used to use Skype for persistent, cross-platform group chat with my close group of friends. But we recently switched to using Slack, and it's far better.

The only thing that's missing, is end-to-end encryption.

The author of that study (Bruce Alexander) wrote an incredibly in-depth book about the relationship between environment and addiction. It covers not just drug addictions, but also other addictions such as overeating and excessive consumerism.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Globalization-Addiction-Poverty-Sp...