Terence Eden opened a new private browsing window and started typing “https…” and received the results of lots of different sites.
He uses this to surmise, and I think he’s probably correct, that users conflate search bars and address bars. Why shouldn’t they? They’ve been one and the same thing in browsers for years now.
Perhaps more worrying is that there’s a whole generation of students who don’t know what a file system structure is…
There are a few lessons to take away from this.
Users don’t really understand interfaces
Computers don’t really understand users
Big Data assumes that users are behaving in semi-rational manner
The world doesn’t particularly need my opinions on NFTs (‘non-fungible tokens’) as there’s plenty of opinions to go round in other newsletters, podcasts, and blog posts.
After doing a bunch of reading, though, I think that the main use case for NFTs will be ticket sales. That is to say, when there is a limited supply of something with intrinsic value, and both the original buyer and seller want to ensure authenticity.
The rest is speculation and gambling, as far as I’m concerned, with a side serving of ecological destruction. I’m also a bit concerned about the enforcement of copyright everywhere on the web it might lead to…
Twitter’s Dorsey auctions first ever tweet as digital memorabilia — “The post, sent from Dorsey’s account in March of 2006, received offers on Friday that went as high as $88,888.88 within minutes of the Twitter co-founder tweeting a link to the listing on ‘Valuables by Cent’ – a tweets marketplace.”
NFTs, explained — “Non-fungible” more or less means that it’s unique and can’t be replaced with something else. For example, a bitcoin is fungible — trade one for another bitcoin, and you’ll have exactly the same thing. A one-of-a-kind trading card, however, is non-fungible. If you traded it for a different card, you’d have something completely different. You gave up a Squirtle, and got a 1909 T206 Honus Wagner, which StadiumTalk calls “the Mona Lisa of baseball cards.” (I’ll take their word for it.)”
NFTs are a dangerous trap — “The more time and passion that creators devote to chasing the NFT, the more time they’ll spend trying to create the appearance of scarcity and hustling people to believe that the tokens will go up in value. They’ll become promoters of digital tokens more than they are creators. Because that’s the only reason that someone is likely to buy one–like a stock, they hope it will go up in value. Unlike some stocks, it doesn’t pay dividends or come with any other rights. And unlike actual works of art, NFTs aren’t usually aesthetically beautiful on their own, they simply represent something that is.”
Cryptodamages: Monetary value estimates of the air pollution and human health impacts of cryptocurrency mining — “Results indicate that in 2018, each $1 of Bitcoin value created was responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in the US and $0.37 in China. The similar value in China relative to the US occurs despite the extremely large disparity between the value of a statistical life estimate for the US relative to that of China. Further, with each cryptocurrency, the rising electricity requirements to produce a single coin can lead to an almost inevitable cliff of negative net social benefits, absent perpetual price increases.”
🙏 Blogging as a forgiving medium — “The ability to “move it around for a long time” is what I’m looking for in a writing medium — I want words and images to be movable, I want to switch them out, copy and cut and paste them, let them mutate. “
I love the few minutes after I press publish on a post, which feels like a race against time between me and the first readers of it. Who will spot the typos and grammatical errors first?
📝 Open working blog and weeknotes templates — “We wrote a guide on how to write weeknotes for Catalyst projects. It is based on Sam Villis’ guide and the templates here are based on Sam’s guide too.”
This is useful, especially if you’re not blogging yet (or haven’t for a while!)
⌚ How to be more productive without forcing yourself — “Basically, if you’re addicted to any of the high-dopamine, low-effort activity, please quit it. At least temporarily so you can reestablish a healthy relationship to work. The more experienced we’re about the topic, the more obvious this is. There is no other way than to temporarily quit the addiction.”
I like the practical advice in this article. Too many people do stuff that’s too low-value, thus squandering their talent and ability to take on more important stuff.
🤔 Objective or Biased — “This type of analysis software is not widely used in recruiting in Germany and Europe right now. However, large companies are definitely interested in the technology, as we learn during off-the-record conversations. What seems to be attractive: A shorter application process which can save a lot of resources and money.”
This is kind of laughable and serious at the same time. I’ve felt the pain of hiring but, as this research shows, automating the hard parts doesn’t lead to awesome results.
📱 Contact-tracing apps were the biggest tech failure of the COVID-19 pandemic — “The system itself, on a technical level, is the root of the problem. In an effort to provide something that could be used universally, while also protecting users’ privacy, Google and Apple came up with a system that was doomed to be useless.”
My concern here is that the fault for the failure will be placed at the door of privacy activists.
Quotation-as-title by Baltasar Gracián. Images by Vera Shimunia, Russian textile artist via #WOMENSART
