Cabel Sasser at the 2024 XOXO Festival
I have always enjoyed Cabel's dedication to his interest, and how he always finds himself in a very deep rabbit hole. The story telling is really good, you have to watch it.
Google’s Alphabet Rebranding Didn’t Actually Fail
In ATP 607, the hosts discussed about Meta's Orion glasses. During the discussion, Marco mentioned that Meta has a pretty overall successful rebranding. John responded with Meta's "renaming is going better than Alphabet for sure". No one will disagree with John here, but it's actually comparing apples and oranges.
Meta is now the company, with Facebook being just one of its products.
On the other hand, Alphabet is a holding company, and Google is both a product and a company under its umbrella. Other companies like Waymo also fall under Alphabet. When Alphabet was formed, it was intentionally designed to not have any products associated with it.
How do I know about this? I worked on Abseil Common Libraries. It's an open-source collection of common C++ and Python libraries widely used by Google internally. The project was funded nine years ago as a result of Alphabet's formation, with the goal of sharing common infrastructures between Google and other Alphabet companies. Because of this mission, the project was initially named Alphabet Common Libraries. C++ used abcl:: as the namespace and Python used abcl as the package name. However during the launch review, the branding team rejected the name as it went against the policy. We had to change the name before the launch. We decided to change one letter to the C++ namespace and Python package so the code refactoring we had to do was easier. The new name is spelled as absl and we walked backwards from the pronunciation of absl to the word abseil.
All I'm trying to say is, Alphabet wasn't a rebranding effort because Alphabet isn't supposed to be a brand. The rebranding didn't actually fail because there is no rebranding in the first place.
Now you might think I'm just defending Google. No. Even though there was no rebranding, everyone thinks this was a failed rebranding attempt. This is what matters. This is actually very on brand of Google that it doesn't do well in PR, marketing, and branding. Meta, on the other hand, is better at this.
∞ End of the Road for Google Drive in Transmit
From Panic's blog:
Well, Google has a new set of policies that require apps that connect to Google Drive to go through expensive, time-consuming annual reviews, and this has made it extremely difficult for us to reasonably maintain Google Drive access. You may have seen iA Writer’s announcement that they are stopping development of their Android version for similar reasons. Our experience was different, but our circumstances are similar. While Google Drive may not be the most popular connection option in Transmit, we know many users rely on it, and we often use it here at Panic to send and receive files from the game developers we work with.
This is not a decision we took lightly, and was the result of much debate and anguish in the office. But rest assured we looked at every angle. Hopefully that explains everything.
Google's leadership continues to drive away developers who made their platforms successful. Why am I not surprised?
∞ How to Transfer Apple Music Playlists to YouTube
From the support page,
From Apple's Data and Privacy page, you can request to transfer the playlists that you’ve made in Apple Music to YouTube Music.
What a welcoming change. Companies that provide photos and musics are supporting data exchanges.
∞ Cities need more trees
On top of that it just looks better. I'm certain humans have genetic biophilia, which is why we love being in nature or taking walks in the forest. Having trees around us, teeming with birds and other life just feels good. Speaking of birds, trees increase the biodiversity of insects and other small critters in urban environments. It also gives birds a safe-haven from the deadliest hunter of all: the humble house cat.
I very much agree that cities just look better with trees. That's why I fell in love with Menlo Park the place I have been living for 9 years. It's a much greener city than most of other places in Bay Area.
∞ Screen Apnea: What Happens to Our Breath When We Type, Tap, Scroll
Manoush Zomorodi, Katie Monteleone, and Sanaz Meshkinpour from NPR's Body Electric podcast:
In 2007, former Microsoft executive Linda Stone noticed something strange happening every time she'd sit down to answer emails. She was holding her breath.
"I would inhale in anticipation, but I wouldn't exhale because so many emails would be streaming in," Stone told Manoush Zomorodi in an interview for NPR's Body Electric. "And this would go on for hours."
Stone wondered how common this was and set out to investigate using "kitchen table science," as she called it. She recruited dozens of friends and colleagues to sit at her computer answering emails while she monitored their pulse and heart rate variability. Of those participants, 80% had what Stone coined "email or screen apnea" — shallow or suspended breathing while working on a screen.
80% of people has screen apnea. That's a lot.
∞ PIN Analysis
Nick Berry had a terrific analysis on 3.4 million leaked PIN numbers:
Obviously, I don’t have access to a credit card PIN number database. Instead I’m going to use a proxy. I’m going to use data condensed from released/exposed/discovered password tables and security breaches.
I was able to find almost 3.4 million four digit passwords. Every single one of the of the 10,000 combinations of digits from 0000 through to 9999 were represented in the dataset.
Fascinating observation from the following heatmap:
... many people encapsulate dates in the format MMDD (such as birthdays …) for their PIN codes.
This clearly explains the lower left corner where, if you look at the heatmap, there is a huge contrast change at the height of around 30-31 (the number of days in a month), extending to 12 on the x-axis. (Thanks to zero79 for first pointing this out).
∞ Highlighting Journalism on Mastodon
From Eugen Rothko,
To reinforce and encourage Mastodon as the go-to place for journalism, we’re launching a new feature today. You will notice that underneath some links shared on Mastodon, the author byline can be clicked to open the author’s associated fediverse account, right in the app. This highlights writers and journalists that are active on the fediverse, and makes it easier than ever to follow them and keep up with their future work—potentially across different publications. Writers often work with different publishers over the span of their careers, but Mastodon is the perfect platform to amass a loyal audience that you, as the author, truly own, and can take with you across the fediverse.
This is such great news. I love blogs and journalism, and I hope this can help authors to reach more audiences.
Technically it's simple to enable for your website:
We’ve decided to create a new kind of OpenGraph tag—the same kind of tags you have on your website to determine which thumbnail image will appear on the preview for the page when shared on Discord, iMessage, or Mastodon. It looks like this:
<meta name="fediverse:creator" content="@Gargron@mastodon.social" />.
Of course I just added my fediverse:creator tag to mangoumbrella.com adopting this feature. It's allowlist only though. Let's find out when it's rolled out to Mango Umbrella or everywhere else.
∞ Jeremy on Trust
Jeremy Keith writes,
In their rush to cram in “AI” “features”, it seems to me that many companies don’t actually understand why people use their products.
Google is acting as though its greatest asset is its search engine. Same with Bing.
But their greatest asset is actually trust.
This is spot on.
When I need to search for good Asian restaurants in Bay Area, I don't trust Google nor Yelp. I open 小红书 (RED)'s search box by default. I trust it to have the results I need.
If I use a search engine I need to be able to trust that the filtering is good.
Small difference: it's not about the filtering. It's simply about the results. Not all results nowadays are indexed or even indexable by Google.
∞ Amazon Takes On Chinese Rivals Temu and Shein With Plans for New Discount Service
Tracy Qu and Sherry Qin write for WSJ:
Amazon.com plans to launch a service focused on shipping cheap fashion wear, household goods and other products directly from warehouses in China, as it faces growing competition from low-cost e-commerce platforms Temu and Shein.
In other words, Amazon to launch a Temu clone.
I have bought many things on Temu: cable organizers, painter's pyramids, craft papers, cute stickers, sanding blocks, shelf pins, a watering can, and many more. They are all expected quality for the price and I have no complaints.