Jacob Harris takes a stand against the increasing flow of “bullshit data:”
Nobody can say exactly when the trend first started, but in 2014 we saw the first major outbreaks of bogus data distributed by private companies just so it would go viral online.
Read the whole thing (it’s short): A Wave of P.R. Data
[I]t seems to me that Twitter’s slowing growth corresponds pretty closely to its complexity increasing over the past few years.... Twitter seems run by people who just don’t get Twitter.
What’s more harmful to consumers: invading their privacy, bombarding them with push-notification ads, or Today widgets that can launch their app to complete a task?
– Marco Arment on Apple and the App Store review process
People want to have read “longform” (whatever that means), but if presented with either attentively reading a 10,000-word article or checking social networks and munching on some listicles, longform usually loses. If there’s a paywall in front of it, it gets even worse. You can monetize people’s good intentions even if they’re not backed up by consistent actions, but not for long.
– Marco Arment on Longform Overload
Information may “want to be free,” but there’s still no free lunch.
BTW How many people have spent more time thinking about what people aspire to read and what they actually do read than Marco Arment?
It is one of the great ironies of modern politics that the U.S. bailout has been so politically toxic. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee in 2008, has quipped that the bailout “will go down in history as the most successful wildly unpopular thing the federal government has ever done.”
– Pepper Culpepper, America’s bank bailouts worked
When Obama first got elected, he should have let it all just drop.... Just let the country flatline. Let the auto industry die. Don’t bail anybody out. In sports, that’s what any new GM does. They make sure that the catastrophe is on the old management and then they clean up. They don’t try to save old management’s mistakes.... Let it all go to hell knowing good and well this is on them.
There are many roads to the future—many innovative roads to the future—and the best of them don’t involve Uber.
– Tom Slee
A Watch app complements your iOS app; it does not replace it. If you measure interactions with your iOS app in minutes, you can expect interactions with your Watch app to be measured in seconds. So interactions need to be brief and interfaces need to be simple.
– Apple Watch Human Interface Guidelines, Designing for Apple Watch (via Allen Pike).
Indeed, when [Economist Jonathan] Gruber discusses the ignorance of American voters in the video clips, no political scientist who knows even smidgen about American public opinion would have raised an eyebrow. This isn’t because political scientists look down on voters; it’s because they have surveyed voters repeatedly and discovered that rational ignorance is this is just the way it is.
But stating that most voters are uninformed about most things is one of those rude utterances that one just does not say in polite political company. People can say it behind closed doors, or at academic settings, but never on camera.
Gruber, unknowingly, said it on camera. That’s his sin. And I suspect it’s a sin that countless social scientists have committed at myriad conferences over the years.
– Dan Drezner on The Low-Down, Dirty Truth About Grubergate
Yup. We’ve all done this.
Khoi Vinh is right, The New York Times midterm election maps are beautiful.