Linked List: August 27, 2016

Saturday, 27 August 2016

The Talk Show: ‘I Do Feel the Pea’ 

New episode of my podcast, The Talk Show, with special guest Guy English. Topics include Tim Cook’s five year anniversary as Apple CEO, Steven Levy’s behind-the-scenes look at Apple’s AI and machine learning efforts, Apple’s decision to change the pistol emoji from a realistic revolver to a toy squirt gun, and the demise of Vesper. Also: our favorite Looney Tunes characters.

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On Beta Testing 

Brent Simmons:

This style of beta testing isn’t something I just accidentally fell into. It came from the mid-’90s. UserLand had just released Frontier’s free “Aretha” version, and there was a mailing list for people using Aretha.

I’d never been a part of anything like that. There were all these people talking about everything about the app. It was collegial and interesting and fun — and Dave Winer, the developer, was so open about everything, and he listened. It seemed like a miracle to me that such a thing could exist. I loved it. I’d been waiting all my life for such a thing, for a community like this.

I threw myself into it, then ended up working with Dave informally on some small projects, and later took a job at UserLand (which was my dream job, for sure). […]

It might seem funny to think of beta lists as having children and grandchildren, but the NetNewsWire list was very much the child of the Frontier list, and the Glassboard and Vesper lists were the grandchildren.

The best beta group I’ve ever been a part of is BBEdit’s. I got invited in the late 90’s after having sent a series of bug reports and feature requests. I’ve been on it ever since. If Frontier’s beta testing mailing list is one of Vesper’s grandparents, BBEdit’s is another. Even better, it’s one that’s still thriving.

University of Chicago Strikes Back Against Campus Political Correctness 

Richard Pérez-Peña, Mitch Smith, and Stephanie Saul, reporting for the NYT:

The anodyne welcome letter to incoming freshmen is a college staple, but this week the University of Chicago took a different approach: It sent new students a blunt statement opposing some hallmarks of campus political correctness, drawing thousands of impassioned responses, for and against, as it caromed around cyberspace.

“Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called trigger warnings, we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own,” John Ellison, dean of students, wrote to members of the class of 2020, who will arrive next month.

Good for them.