Linked List: July 3, 2014

Thursday, 3 July 2014

‘Maybe Smartness Isn’t Enough’ 

Avery Pennarun:

But I think Impostor Syndrome is valuable. The people with Impostor Syndrome are the people who aren’t sure that a logical proof of their smartness is sufficient. They’re looking around them and finding something wrong, an intuitive sense that around here, logic does not always agree with reality, and the obviously right solution does not lead to obviously happy customers, and it’s unsettling because maybe smartness isn’t enough, and maybe if we don’t feel like we know what we’re doing, it’s because we don’t.

Impostor Syndrome is that voice inside you saying that not everything is as it seems, and it could all be lost in a moment. The people with the problem are the people who can’t hear that voice.

I think this piece explains a lot.

xScope 4.0 

Ton of new features in this major update to The Iconfactory’s excellent Mac utility for “measuring, inspecting, and testing on-screen graphics and layouts”. Indispensable.

The Dark Side of .io 

David Meyer, writing for GigaOm:

The .io country code top-level domain is pretty popular right now, particularly among tech startups that want to take advantage of the snappy input/output reference and the relative availability of names — Fusion.io, Wise.io and Import.io are just a few examples. But who benefits from the sale of .io domains? Sadly, not the people who ultimately should.

While .tv brings in millions of dollars each year for the tiny South Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, and .me benefits Montenegro, the people of the British Indian Ocean Territory, or the Chagos Islands, have no such luck. Indeed, profits from the sale of each .io domain flow to the very force that expelled the Chagossian or Ilois people from their equatorial land just a generation or two ago: the British government.

‘Lionel Messi Is Impossible’ 

That’s the actual headline for this piece by Benjamin Morris for FiveThirtyEight. I saw it yesterday on Twitter, and skipped it, because of the hyperbolic absurdity. Lionel Messi is not impossible; he exists. I’d have clicked if the headline had even been something like “Lionel Messi Is Seemingly Impossible”.

I read it today, though, after Kottke linked it. Kottke I trust. But if he hadn’t linked it, I wouldn’t have read it, because when I saw it yesterday, I figured it was a bullshit article because of its headline. And I’m glad I read it, because it’s a fascinating and extraordinarily well-researched piece on the man who is very clearly the best soccer player in the world today.

There’s a boy-who-cried-wolf aspect to the modern art of click-bait headline writing. There are certain patterns that emerge, which I’m sure are statistically shown to work. For example, listicles typically no longer use round numbers like 5, 10, 15, 20 — instead, you see things like “17 Gay Celebs Who Pretend to Be Straight on TV” and “17 Facts That Will Forever Change the Way You Look at These Famous People”. (I didn’t make those up, I saw both of those today in the scammy Taboola links beneath an article on TPM.) I’m sure these tricks work, that there’s all sorts of analytics data that shows it — but no trick works forever. People inevitably catch on.

Apple Patent Application for Intelligent Location-Based Security 

I typically don’t pay much attention to patent applications, and my advice has long been that we should not assume that everything Apple tries to patent will eventually come to market as shipping features. Apple, like most major tech companies, patents anything patentable. Apple decidedly does not ship everything shippable.

But this one is worthy of an exception. Location-based security for iOS has long been a hobby horse of mine. This patent describes a system that sounds exactly like what I’ve longed for: the ability to have my iOS devices turn on without a passcode while inside my home, but require a passcode or TouchID anywhere else.

Update: “Personal Unlocking”, a new feature coming in Android L, enables this same sort of thing.