- 9hour workdays are a byproduct of the industrial age. Personal productivity takes a deep fall after grinding on work for 5hours. Office hours kill personal time and productivity (@lpuchii)
- Going on a run in the middle of the workday (@envarli)
- Use pen and paper for scribbling notes (@uneeb123)
- No one else has my job nor are they me, so I can’t simply follow the prescriptions of others. To be more productive, I need to look for new ideas and test. What works for someone else may be antithetical to my work. (@bguenther)
- Great ideas rarely come from brainstorming sessions. It comes from pondering over a problem for a significant amount of time and coupling it with lots of experiments (@rajathkedi)
Hong Kong shutter art
After never having visited Barcelona before November 2017, in the subsequent 12 months following, I went there five times. One of the things that struck me was the art in the city; some municipal, some architectural, and some more vernacular (i.e. graffiti-based).
When I was in Denver a few months ago, Noah Geisel was kind enough to give me a walking tour of some of the (partly commissioned) street art there. It was incredible.
I’ve never been to Hong Kong, and am unlike to go there any time soon, but this Twitter thread of Hong Kong shutter art makes me want to!
Source: Hong Kong Hermit
Location data in old tweets
What use are old tweets? Do you look back through them? If not, then they’re only useful to others, who are able to data mine you using a new toold:
The tool, called LPAuditor (short for Location Privacy Auditor), exploits what the researchers call an "invasive policy" Twitter deployed after it introduced the ability to tag tweets with a location in 2009. For years, users who chose to geotag tweets with any location, even something as geographically broad as “New York City,” also automatically gave their precise GPS coordinates. Users wouldn’t see the coordinates displayed on Twitter. Nor would their followers. But the GPS information would still be included in the tweet’s metadata and accessible through Twitter’s API.I deleted around 77,500 tweets in 2017 for exactly this kind of reason.
Source: WIRED
Unpopular opinions on personal productivity
Before Christmas, I stumbled upon an interesting Twitter thread. It was started by Andrew Chen, General Partner at a16z, who asked:
What is your least popular but deeply held opinion on personal productivity?He replied to his own tweet to get things started, commenting:
Being super organized is a bad thing. Means there's no room for serendipity, deep thought, can make you overly passive on other peoples' use of your time, as opposed to being focused on outbound. (Sorry to all my super Type A friends)I'd definitely agree with that. Some of the others in the thread that I agree with are:
Source: Andrew Chen (Twitter)
Internalising the logic of social media
A few days ago, Twitter posted a photo of an early sketch that founder Jack Dorsey made for the initial user interface. It included settings to inform a user’s followers that they might not respond immediately because they were in the part or busy reading.
A day later, an article in The New Yorker about social media used a stark caption for its header image:
Social-media platforms know what you’re seeing, and they know how you acted in the immediate aftermath of seeing it, and they can decide what you will see next.There's no doubt in my mind that we're like slow-boiled frogs when it comes to creeping dystopia. It's not happening through the totalitarian lens of the 20th century, but instead in a much more problematic way.
One of the more insidious aspects of [social media's business] model is the extent to which we, as social-media users, replicate its logic at the level of our own activity: we perform market analysis of our own utterances, calculating the reaction a particular post will generate and adjusting our output accordingly. Negative emotions like outrage and contempt and anxiety tend to drive significantly more engagement than positive ones.No wonder Twitter's such an angry place these days.
The article quotes James Bridle’s book New Dark Age, a book which is sitting waiting for me on my shelf when I get back home from this work trip.
We find ourselves today connected to vast repositories of knowledge and yet we have not learned to think. In fact, the opposite is true: that which was intended to enlighten the world in practice darkens it. The abundance of information and the plurality of worldviews now accessible to us through the internet are not producing a coherent consensus reality, but one riven by fundamentalist insistence on simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and post-factual politics. It is on this contradiction that the idea of a new dark age turns: an age in which the value we have placed upon knowledge is destroyed by the abundance of that profitable commodity, and in which we look about ourselves in search of new ways to understand the world.This resonates with a quotation I posted to Thought Shrapnel this week from Jon Ronson's So You've Been Publicly Shamed about how we're actually creating a more conservative environment, despite thinking we're all 'non-conformist'.
To be alive and online in our time is to feel at once incensed and stultified by the onrush of information, helpless against the rising tide of bad news and worse opinions. Nobody understands anything: not the global economy governed by the unknowable whims of algorithms, not our increasingly volatile and fragile political systems, not the implications of the impending climate catastrophe that forms the backdrop of it all. We have created a world that defies our capacity to understand it—though not, of course, the capacity of a small number of people to profit from it. Deleting your social-media accounts might be a means of making it more bearable, and even of maintaining your sanity. But one way or another, the world being what it is, we are going to have to learn to live in it.Last week, at the ALT conference, those in the audience were asked by the speaker to 'stand up' if they felt imposter syndrome. I didn't get to my feet, but it wasn't an act of arrogance or hubris. I may have no idea what I'm doing, but I'm pretty sure no-one else does either.
Source: The New Yorker
Data transfer as a 'hedge'?
This is an interesting development:
This, of course, would probably not have happened without GDPR. So how does it work?Today, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter joined to announce a new standards initiative called the Data Transfer Project, designed as a new way to move data between platforms. In a blog post, Google described the project as letting users “transfer data directly from one service to another, without needing to download and re-upload it.”
I may be being cynical, but just because something is open source doesn't mean that it's a level playing field for everyone. In fact, I'd wager that this is large companies hedging against new entrants to the market.The existing code for the project is available open-source on GitHub, along with a white paper describing its scope. Much of the codebase consists of “adapters” that can translate proprietary APIs into an interoperable transfer, making Instagram data workable for Flickr and vice versa. Between those adapters, engineers have also built a system to encrypt the data in transit, issuing forward-secret keys for each transaction. Notably, that system is focused on one-time transfers rather than the continuous interoperability enabled by many APIs.
This would be great if it pans out in the way it's presented in the article. My 20+ years experience on the web, however, would suggest otherwise.The project was envisioned as an open-source standard, and many of the engineers involved say a broader shift in governance will be necessary if the standard is successful. “In the long term, we want there to be a consortium of industry leaders, consumer groups, government groups,” says Fair. “But until we have a reasonable critical mass, it’s not an interesting conversation.”
Source: The Verge
Twitter isn't going to ban Trump, no matter what
Twitter have confirmed what everyone knew all along: they’re not going to ban Donald Trump, no matter what he says or does. It’s too good for business.
Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial Tweets would hide important information people should be able to see and debate. It would also not silence that leader, but it would certainly hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.
It’s a weak, cowardly argument to infer that if Twitter doesn’t provide a platform for Trump, then someone else will. This is absolutely about their growth, absolutely about the fact they make software with shareholders.
Source: Twitter blog
Image via CNN