178 Posts under Mango Linked
∞ It’s time to publicly shame United Airlines’ so-called online security
So, just to summarize, United has:
- Compromised its users’ security by adopting a terminally stupid threat model (keystroke loggers), and …
- in response to that threat model, implemented infuriatingly counterintuitive, hard-to-use security questions, rather than…
- something which actually would address that threat; two-factor authentication! Instead they…
- …doubled down on their stupid security questions and called that two-factor authentication.
United has always been very bad at software systems. Now they just reached their lowest point.
∞ May Seymour Papert Rest in Peace
Seymour Papert, whose ideas and inventions transformed how millions of children around the world create and learn, died Sunday, July 31, 2016 at his home in East Blue Hill, Maine. He was 88.
In the late 1960s, at a time when computers still cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, Papert came up with the idea for Logo, the first programming language for children.
Logo was my first programming language I ever used. Although I didn't know what I was doing back then, it had certainly influenced me as a person. May Seymour Papert rest in peace.
∞ The Must-See Documentaries for Designers & Artists
Shut up and take my time.
∞ I fly 747s for a living. Here are the amazing things I see every day.
I decided to write Skyfaring, a book about flying, in order to set down for myself some of the remarkable details of the job I'd dreamed of since childhood. I guess I hoped, too, that these details would be of interest to readers who travel so often that flight has become an uninteresting experience for them. Here are six of the more amazing things I've learned, or relearned, in the 15 years that I've been flying.
Fancinating.
∞ Bots won't replace apps. Better apps will replace apps.
Another great piece by Dan Grover:
As I’ll explain, messenger apps’ apparent success in fulfilling such a surprising array of tasks does not owe to the triumph of “conversational UI.” What they’ve achieved can be much more instructively framed as an adept exploitation of Silicon Valley phone OS makers’ growing failure to fully serve users’ needs, particularly in other parts of the world. Chat apps have responded by evolving into “meta-platforms.” Many of the platform-like aspects they’ve taken on to plaster over gaps in the OS actually have little to do with the core chat functionality. Not only is “conversational UI” a red herring, but as we look more closely, we’ll even see places where conversational UI has breached its limits and broken down.
The reason why bots is a thing now is, the companies, who don't own a platform, want it to be. And they missed the point.
∞ Writing Great App Store Release Notes
Not as many people read these since Apple made automatic updates a thing, but some people still do, is my answer. The thing is, it doesn’t matter whether four, 40 or 40,000 people read your release notes. The people that do are the people that judge you on your attention to detail, after all, they’re interested in the fine details of your point update.
I'm one of the people who read release notes. I do not have automatic update on. Instead, I will take a look at every app's release notes before manually tap the Update All button.
However, I do not quite agree with @helloimfreddie about the good and average release notes.
I was a fan of the Medium's style. They are fun and delightful to read. Then after many experiences of reading the release notes from the Updates tab, just like reading my twitter's timeline, I actually only remembered the apps that actually listed what the update is about with simple and precise bullet points. This style also saves me a lot of time, so I'm also more likely to read them carefully next time.
∞ 10000 UPDATE() CALLS
Instead, the first time a MonoBehaviour of a given type is accessed the underlying script is inspected through scripting runtime (either Mono or IL2CPP) whether it has any magic methods defined and this information is cached. If a MonoBehaviour has a specific method it is added to a proper list, for example if a script has Update method defined it is added to a list of scripts which need to be updated every frame.
During the game Unity just iterates through these lists and executes methods from it — that simple. Also, this is why it doesn’t matter if your Update method is public or private.
Great in-depth technical post about how Unity's messaging system works.
∞ Twitter Needs New Leadership
A very good read on what Twitter should do instead:
Specifically, Twitter should dramatically increase the number of applications — and thus the number of potential reasons — a potential user might create and maintain an active user account. For example, Twitter could follow the Facebook strategy and build out a family of apps — one for messaging, another for news, others for specific events — and enhance the ways one could interact with Twitter content, whether that be through comments, private communities, etc. It’s ok that this is aping Facebook; what differentiates social networks is not their feature set but rather their organizing principle. Facebook is about people you know, and Twitter about those that share your interests. Everything else — including all the quixotic features that Twitter holds dear — are implementation details.3
Alternatively, Twitter could empower third-party developers to build these sorts of applications that feed back information into the Twitter interest graph. An application like Nuzzel, for example, which uses your Twitter graph to create a news app, has much more of a one-way relationship with the social network: Nuzzel is getting all the benefit, and not sending much information back to Twitter. Twitter would be better off retooling their API and developer agreements to ensure they are learning from every application they interact with, and in return sharing their graph along with advertising in the form of their MoPub or Namo Media-derived offerings. The advantage of this approach is that the imagination and ingenuity of a massive developer ecosystem will always be far faster and more innovative than anything any one company can do on its own — just ask Apple.
As an aside, something that has hurt Twitter on the public markets has been the expectation/hope that the social network would follow Facebook’s path with regards to user numbers and monetization. Clearly the company as presently constructed isn’t anything close to that; however, the open approach that I’m advocating could in fact become something exponentially larger. Last week I wrote about Facebook’s AOL-like dominance and concluded, “What might be the broadband to Facebook’s dial-up?” The answer, I think, is this open Twitter: an identity system for the rest of the web that connects people and apps according to interests, not just superficial relationships, and monetizes accordingly.
∞ Instapaper on Apple Watch
I’m finally sold on a watch after seeing this. This is exactly what I wanted after using Instapaper’s text-to-speech feature during my commute. It is so inconvenient to operate Instapaper on my phone while I am standing in a terrible terrible Path train.
Another thing I wanted is to use the watch to control Overcast, although I don’t quite need it since I usually don’t need to do anything while I’m listening my podcasts.
∞ Marco's Definition of Success
After the self-employment penalties in taxes and benefits, I’m probably coming in under what I could get at a good full-time job in the city, but I don’t have to actually work for someone else on something I don’t care about. I can work in my nice home office, drink my fussy coffee, take a nap after lunch if I want to, and be present for my family as my kid grows up. That’s my definition of success.
Probably lots of indies share this same definition of success, though some started from an overnight multi-million dollar dream.