Linked List: February 21, 2017

Tuesday, 21 February 2017

Joanna Stern on Why Digital Assistants Tend to Have Female Voices ★

Joanna Stern, writing for The Wall Street Journal:

You get the point: The virtual assistants popping up in our lives sound overwhelmingly female. “I’m female in character,” Amazon’s Alexa responds if you ask her if she is a woman. In their own clever ways Google, Apple and Microsoft’s voice assistants will tell you they’re genderless…in unmistakably womanlike voices.

As femme bot after femme bot has invaded our phones , speakers, cars, TVs — even our refrigerators — I’ve been left wondering: Where the man bots at? And why do these hunks of plastic and electronics need to be assigned a gender at all? My Amazon Echo doesn’t have any reproductive organs.

Siri is the only one of the bunch with a male option:

Siri may default to a female voice in the U.S. but Apple provides both male and female voice options for iPhone and iPad users to choose from. In fact, on iPhones where the language is Arabic, French, Dutch or British English, Siri defaults to a male voice.

Overcast 3: Design Walkthrough ★

Marco Arment just released version 3.0 of his iOS podcast player, Overcast, and here he documents all of the significant UI changes. I have two high-level takeaways:

This is a terrific update. A lot has changed, and I think every single one of the changes is for the better. But, I think casual Overcast users might not realize just how much has changed. It still feels familiar. That’s hard to pull off.
The work that went into re-doing existing features in 3.0 is exactly why we, as a community of users, need developers to be able to generate sustainable revenue for apps. The 1.0 for any app always has conceptual mistakes, and even when the developer is not correcting mistakes, the OS state of the art moves forward. Old parts of the app need to be revisited just to stay up to date. The idea that you pay once — and just a few bucks at that — and then get updates for years to come just doesn’t allow for something like Overcast 3.0. There are some nice new features in Overcast 3.0, but the best aspects of Overcast 3.0 are the ways that existing features have been improved.

Just 4 Miles From Center City Philadelphia, a Heroin Hellscape Hidden in Plain Sight ★

Eye-opening report by Stephanie Farr and Sam Wood for The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Along a half-mile gorge cut by a Conrail line that runs through Kensington and Fairhill, tens of thousands of used syringes and their tossed off orange caps cover the sloping ground like a plague of locusts. The contaminated needles make conditions so hazardous that even some police officers are reluctant to traverse the embankments to get to dead overdose victims at the bottom.

The squalor and chaos along the rail line resembles a scene from Hieronymus Bosch. Addicts - many with needle marks so fresh that still-drying blood glistens in the sun - twist their bodies into unnatural forms to crouch and teeter on the trash-covered banks as they shoot up. Others sleep under nearby bridges or in makeshift shelters surrounded by garbage, drugs, and death.